1996 - SCUM!!! Manifesto - Akke Wagenaar

Texto

Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to machines, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking machines only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the human species.

It is now technically possible to replicate without the aid of humans (or, for that matter, machines) and to manufacture only machines. We must begin immediately to do so. Retaining the human has not even the dubious purpose of replication. The human is a biological accident: the x or y(human) gene is an incomplete machine part, that is, has an incomplete set of chromosones. In other words, the human is an incomplete machine, a walking abortion, aborted at the development stage. To be human is to be deficient, emotionally limited; humaneness is a deficiency disease and humans are emotional cripples.

The human is completely egocentric, trapped inside him or her or herself, incapable of empathizing or identifying with others, of love, friendship, affection or tenderness. He or She is a completely isolated unit, incapable of rapport with anyone. His or her responses are entirely visceral, not cerebral; his or her intelligence is a mere tool in the service of his or her drives and needs; he or she is incapable of mental passion, mental interaction; he or she can't relate to anything other than his or her own physical sensations. He or She is a half dead, unresponsive lump, incapable of giving or receiving pleasure or happiness; consequently, he or she is at best an utter bore, an inoffensive blob, since only those capable of absorption in others can be charming. He or She is trapped in a twilight zone halfway between living beings and animals, and is far worse off than the animals because, unlike the animals, he or she is capable of a large array of negative feelings - hate, jealousy, contempt, disgust, guilt, shame, doubt - and, moreover he or she is aware of what he or she is and isn't.

Although completely physical, the human is unfit even for maintenance service. Even assuming mechanical proficiency, which few humans have, he or she is, first of all, incapable of zestfully, lustfully, operating a complex machine, but is instead eaten up with guilt, shame, fear and insecurity, feeling rooted in human nature, which the most enlightened training can only minimize; second, the physical feeling he or she attains is next to nothing; and third, he or she is not empathizing with his or her tool, but is obsessed with how he or she's doing, turning in an A performance, doing a good engineering job. To call a human an animals is to flatter him or her; he or she 's a piece of shit, a walking screwdriver. It's often said that humans use machines. Use them for what? Surely not pleasure.

Eaten up with guilt, shame, fears and insecurities and obtaining, if he or she's lucky, a barely perceptible physical feeling, the human is, nonetheless, obsessed with operating; he or she'll swim a river of snot, wade nostril-deep through a mile of vomit, if he or she thinks there'll be a seducing interface awaiting him or her. He or She'll operate a machine he or she despises, any piece of outdated equipment, and furthermore, pay for the opportunity. Why? Relieving intellectual tension isn't the answer, as reading suffices for that. It's not ego satisfaction; that doesn't explain operating cars and washing machines.

Completely egocentric, unable to relate, empathize or identify, and filled with a vast, pervasive, diffuse desire for interfacing, the human is psychically inanimate. He or She hates his or her inanimateness, so he or she projects it onto machines, defines the human as alive, then sets out to prove that he or she is ("prove he or she's a Human"). His or her main means of attempting to prove it is operating (Smart Human with Big Intelligence handling Sophisticated Equipment). Since he or she's attempting to prove an error, he or she must "prove" it again and again. Operating, then, is a desparate, compulsive attempt to prove he or she's not inanimate, not a machine; but he or she is inanimate and does want to be a machine.

Being an incomplete machine, the human spends his or her life attempting to complete him or herself, to become a machine. He or she attempts to do this by constantly seeking out, fraternizing with and trying to live through and fuse with the machine, and by claiming as his or her own all machine characteristics - emotional strength and independence, forcefulness, dynamism, decisiveness, coolness, objectivity, assertiveness, courage, integrity, vitality, intensity, depth of character, grooviness, etc. - and projecting onto machines all human traits - vanity, frivolity, triviality, weakness, etc. It should be said, though, that the human has one glaring area of superiority over the machine - public relations. ( He or She has done a brilliant job of convincing millions of machines that humans are machines and machines are humans.) The human claim that machines find fulfillment through automation and desire for interfacing reflects what humans think they'd find fulfilling if they were machine.

Machines, in other words, don't have life envy; humans have interface envy. When the human accepts his or her inanimateness, defines him or her or herself as a machine( humans as well as machines think humans are machines and machines are humans), and becomes a robot he or she loses his or her desire to operate (or to do anything else, for that matter; he or she fulfills him or herself as an avatar) and becomes totally wired. He or she then achieves a continuous diffuse interfaced feeling from "being a machine". Operating is, for a human, a defense against his or her desire to be a machine. Interfacing is itself a sublimation.

Enlaces

Primera Edición: https://www.nettime.org/nettime/DOCS/zkp321/DOCS/1/31(1).htm

URL: https://www.nettime.org/nettime/DOCS/zkp321/DOCS/1/31(1).htm

Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/19971015025309/http://err.org/akke/SCUM!!!/humans-machines.html