The Technocrats

One morning the police headquarters receives an anonymous call reporting a fire over an army base in the forest. When they try to reach the army base, they receive no response. When they dispatch teams to the area, they lose contact with them one after the other as soon as they arrive, even though all seems normal up till then. Suspecting a hostage situation, the police contacts SWAT, which sends its squads. But they, too, lose contact with one squad after the other. Suspecting a terrorist attack, they contact the army, which sends its troops. Again, the same thing happens. Suspecting a revolution, they contact the president, which mobilizes the entire army. And again, the same thing happens…

The president’s cell phone rings.

“Your entire army is under our control. Do I have your attention?”

The government was unable to come up with a better explanation of what was happening than that the enemy was very strong. In order not to risk any more men, they made sure their own force was certain to be far stronger. They never realized that they were only delivering them right into their hands.

“What do you want?”

“I’ll state my demands later. First of all, I think I may need to convince you that you have no choice but to accept them. We are a group of hackers from all nations. Through teamwork, we were able to hack into your networks.”

“Impossible! The security protocols were designed by our best informaticists over the course of several years. It’s as foolproof as a nuclear bunker.”

“They did what they had to do to keep their jobs, but we do what we do because of what we want to achieve our goals. Their best cannot live up to our worst. They have a duty. But we have a purpose. There is nothing that can stop us.”

“It was a mistake to install remote control on the armies’ vehicles. No doubt you were warned about the risks, yet it seems you were more afraid of your own army than of us. You seniors never knew enough about technology to have the rights to any authority over it, and that’s always been the problem with you. Your army vehicles are now ours, and the people who were in them our hostages. The open trucks were crashed into the bushes, and all we had to do with the soldiers that were inside was to pick them up from the ground.”

“So what do you want?”

“I want you to stand down as president and hand the nation to ourselves and, ultimately, to the people of the nation.”

After a long silence, the president begins to chuckle, and turns off his cell phone. A meeting is called for. As soon as his ministers are together, he gets right to his point:

“We still have our missiles, and we have no choice but to use them. They are soldiers. They would give their lives for their nation. The last thing they would want is that the nation would be given up for them.”

That night, for the first time since Nagasaki, a nuclear bomb is dropped onto the invaded army base. The woods are turned into an inferno, and the entire army is vaporized.

Again the president’s cell phone rings.

“You’re an anachronism”, it says simply. The familiar voice drips with hatred.

“What!?”

“You still see the world in terms of centralized groups. But did you forget? We are hackers. We are a decentralized whole. We are the future. We had already moved the vehicles as soon as we hacked them and brought their personnel to the base. By the time the nuke hit the base, only the hostages remained. The only thing you succeeded in doing was to show the world what you really are. You killed the husbands, sons, and friends of millions. All we need to do now is march upon your capital, and the people will all follow us to see your heads roll.”

That next day, the rebels publish their manifesto online, on the main page of every major website. They call for the people to take the power for themselves. They state that their purpose in taking over power is to pass it on to them, and that as soon as they would have done so they would renounce their position. To do so, they would use technology to empower every citizen equally. They decry the genocide committed by the government, denying that they had foreseen this might happen, and call for the people to take up arms and march with them upon the capital to avenge them on the morrow.

The next day, not a single shot has to be fired. The police has their hands full with the riots, and they form a living shield against the unmanned tanks rolling through the streets. They form a symbol more than anything else, showing the people that whatever they would do, the government would fall no matter what. Before the tanks reached the capital, the people have already dispatched with its government themselves.

Before the main government building, the rebels, who have mixed in with the rioters, throw off their citizen clothing, revealing a black-and-blue uniform underneath. No one around knows the symbol, but it is the flag of anarcho-transhumanism. No doubt, aside from them, almost no one among the crowd agrees with their beliefs, and yet their cheer them on. Weren’t it for the nuclear attack, this would never have been so easy. But they have already been planning to enforce their beliefs.

“These people have no idea what freedom means,” he thinks. “They have no idea that it is the last thing they want. But no matter. They will get their freedom whether they like it or not. It will be forced upon them.” Their leader smiles upon the cheering crowd from beneath frowning eyebrows. “Oh how you will suffer yet. And you will deserve it, for you will only do it to yourself. It will be my revenge for casting me aside. You will change, or die.”

The rebels are efficient. It takes only a few days for them to take over all power in the country. Before the people even had time to get over their disbelief and process what has happened, every sector of the nation is in their hands. The rebels know they have to be fast now, and have preparing for every step of the plan for many years. The sooner this is dealt with the better. The part where all the power in the nation is still theirs is the most dangerous part, and they don’t have the resources to defend themselves against another uprising. They have to take down the power structures as quickly as possible, before this whole state starts to look like a communism, or worse, before someone else takes over and turns it into one. To do it safely would take time they just don’t have. It would take many years. They will just have to leave the people with all the power and let them learn the hard way how to use it. It will be a hard lesson. No doubt millions will die. But their leader just smiles at the thought.

A voting website the rebels have put online years before in an attempt to organize a peaceful revolution is now declared as the one authority. But that is only the beginning. The website will be linked to machines that will run everything that happens in society, allowing the people to use them for whatever public works they want. The power circuit of the machines will have an emergency kill switch in a separate system that is activated by a certain frequency. Without waiting for the people to make up their minds, they carry out their plans. They pay all the corporations of the nation a visit, and put their choice very simply: do as we say, or move aside.

The transhumanists, most of whom were informaticists, at once bring in systems of automation that they had created years before, and dismiss all the employees. First come the farms, then the utilities, then construction, then the factories, and at last the office jobs, though most of those are no longer even needed at all, automated or not. For some time, some employees are kept to take care of the robots, but soon they, too, are replaced.

Because every corporation is in their hands, the rebels don’t need taxes for welfare, instead giving all the revenues from the corporations back to the people. Almost overnight, the rebels have turned the nation into what seems like an utopia.

Everyone has everything they ever wanted, and for a time are quite busy doing everything they could never do before. Most of them begin to travel around the world, spreading the seeds of revolution in other nations. For a very long time, it seems as if their happiness will never end.

And then, something they never knew before begins to find their way into their minds. They begin to feel an emptiness about their lives. The whole world lies before them as clearly as if they saw it from outer space, and none of them are used to being astronauts. They turn to excesses. It begins to look like a re-enactment of the sixties on an even greater scale. But the emptiness keeps widening. All the different experiences that once fulfilled them now only add to the feeling that calls for something more. Without work, they start to feel unfulfilled. And without fulfillment, all the pleasures in the world cannot give them happiness, and with nothing seeming to bring happiness, it seems as if happiness does not exist. People become nihilistic, panicking in the face of their own existence. In the collective existential crisis, many people begin to commit suicide, and once the suicides begin, they cause an epidemic of depression, causing further suicides. In the mass hysteria, people come to fear the world is about to end. More and more people are protesting in demand for jobs, and the protests turn into riots.

“Weaklings,” the rebel leader sneers. “I’ll talk to them.”

As the crowd sees him, their shouts grow louder. He sees the hatred in their eyes. But as he lifts his arms, he returns their looks with a hatred far greater, and the crowd fall silent.

He does not equivocate. “As I understand it, you are here because you want to do the work of robots?”

The crowd remains silent. The rebel leader returns their stares in silence.

“Well, as long as you get the work done when it’s due, be my guest. Go to the companies. We can write a program that will turn off one of the machines while you are doing its work. But you will not be paid for it, as you’ll be more of a hindrance than anything else - just as you’ve always been.”

Again there is a long silence, and some people look at each other. Some lower their signs.

“Give us new jobs,” someone calls out.

“Don’t you see?” the rebel leader shouts angrily. “The time of jobs is over, once and for all. If you want a purpose in life, you will have to find it yourself. There is no one left to tell you what to do. You have your own responsibility now. THAT is the freedom you always wanted!” The rebel leader casts a last stare over the people, then moves back. Before going inside, he turns back to the crowd.

“There’s only one last thing that we need to do as a government. We’ve been discussing it amongst ourselves for some time and came to the same conclusions every time. We are standing down. Now. From now on we will have no more involvement in the government as the rest of you.”

The other rebels came from inside. They and their leader put off their uniforms and walk off through the crowd. On the top of the stairs the rebel leader still says,

“Our task is done. We are like you now, responsible only for our own actions. If there is ever someone who tries to take back power, we will be back, but it won’t happen. The power has become yours now, and it can never be taken away again. Even if people destroyed all the robots doing your work, we have other robots to remake them just as rapidly. What happens now is up to you. But you have to ask yourself, who are you rioting for? God?… Or perhaps yourself?”

“We should have given them more time,” another rebel says to him, as they are walking in the street, for the first time just citizens again. “They would have come to terms with freedom in their own time, whether they had to take it for themselves or it was given to them. I don’t feel like we’ve made a difference.”

“I know,” the rebel leader says. “Kurzweil already found out that you can’t really speed up or slow down evolution. It’s been accelerating at a more or less constant rate for billions of years.”

“Then what was the point of all this?”

“The point, my friend, is that we have made a place of ourselves. And we deserve it more than them.”

“We could have done that on a smaller scale. We could have built automation systems just for ourselves.”

The rebel leader is silent, and merely smiles.

The rebel sighs. “Was this really all about revenge?”

The rebel leader just keeps walking, staring ahead of him. The rebel stops dead in his tracks, watching him go, and shook his head. He looked around them at the people wandering as if in a trance, like dead souls. With the news that from now on they will be without a government, the protest has disbanded. They had lost the last purpose in their life.

“What have we done?” Who knows what will happen to them in this state? Their leader thinks they will learn in time. But what if they so give themselves up to decadence that they never have the chance?

Further down the street, the rebel leader looks around him at the people still walking ahead without going anywhere, as if catatonic. He smiles, remembering how he once wandered the streets like that, lost and alone.

Welcome to hell. Let the fire forge your souls.