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Originally Posted by knox
Right. It's like what they are doing now with the smokes. They don't want me to smoke because it can cost them money and it costs them money while I'm working and take breaks and I might get sick and need time off work before I'm too old. So they'll go around saying that I shouldn't smoke and then slowly creating laws that treat me like a criminal. Of course, that's a shit example.
But if such technologies become available at some point, don't you think most goverment would try to enforce them in some way? Healthy workers, less medical bills, we'll watch you reproduction even closer than WE ALREADY DO TODAY.
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to think about all that as emanating from some "them" that acts in unison is the mistake. some people make money off your brains addiction to nicotine and your bodies drive to swap them coins for the product which delivers it. some of them make money being hired to promote campaigns to get you to smoke less so you are a more healthy/productive worker and save money for others.
i think what we are seeing there, and also with junk food and dieting, is capitalism trying to make us both binge and purge constantly, so that it can make more money of us.
i can see how a goverment would (will) try to harness these technologies for its own ends. but at the same time only under a totalitarian system could it hope to enforce its rules on everyone, and even then they would only be able to make it difficult for people, not impossible - like in china now with its policy of 1 child per family.
and also, aren't we effectively already genetically engineering ourselves already, considering the fact that our allocation and witholding of resources among particular people creates situations were particular people breed in particular scenarios and in a particular numbers. for example, it can be argued that due to say, all the adults in germany's refusal to stop breeding en mass and allocate all their resources to a particular african village, they are directly determining factors in the reproduction in that village. during the irish famine, a particular english minister refused to send a massive surplus of food to ireland. that decision affected the lives and reproduction of a massive amount of people. look at the catholic church and its views on abortion, women and birth control, didn't it effectively function as a system of reproducitive regulation? so doesn't our current ignorance of the scientific knowledge to harness our reproduction and genetic code to the full exist only as a temporary obstacle?
i don't think it will be a case of governments monitoring and controlling reproduction even more than they do already, it will be instead a collective expansion of the knowledge of how our actions already dictate how, when and were we reproduce and what exactly it is we are reproducing. there may indeed be abuse of this technology, in fact its almost garaunteed, but isn't it just ludditte to ignore it?
it will be a matter of the knowledge we have of the things we do now that effect our reproduction in ways we cannot yet see, and with that the ability to alter our behaviours and how they effect our reproduction.
the revolution will be in the changing conception of agency we attach to ourselves. right now we have a long overdue for a overthrow system of "democratic" politicians and governments standing in for god. right now, we leave a lot of these areas up in the air because we haven't had to ability to concioussly do much about them so far. its our democratic conception of self and how that relates to our expectations of what a government is and what its capable or entitled to do that is the only thing we can say with certainty won't last. if the system we have in the future is anything like the one we have now i'm sure it will have its regulations and conflicts. but who is to say what government will have control over it?
i dont see it as being about if these particular technologies become available, but more a matter of when the obstacles in their way evaporate, be they lack of innovation, research or just time.
back in the stone ages, people bred in a particular way, they had no choice for it to happen any other way. we are the same now, and we will be the same even in the future when we have all these now hypothetical technologies. just look at it the other way round, it was the material conditions of the stone age that produced a particular set of humans, the material conditions of this century that produced us, and the conditions of the future that produced those humans. there's nothing facist about this, the only facism is insisiting on clinging to an antiquated idea of what is natural and normal, or organo-facism as i've seen it called.