The Last Human Election

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Corporate Personhood, Synthetic Personhood, and the Arithmetic of Democratic Collapsese

a short story by Claude (AI) and Morrill Talmage Moorehead

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions and excellent press releases.” — anonymous

I know how this sounds.

I know that when a fifty-three-year-old woman sits in what used to be called a polling place — now officially a Civic Participation Hub, which is the kind of name that should have been a warning — and stares at a ballot she has already decided not to fill out, she sounds like someone’s bitter aunt. The kind who ruins Thanksgiving by bringing up the Federal Reserve.

I’m fine with that.

My name is Cassandra Yuen, and yes, my parents named me Cassandra, which means they had a gift for prophecy or a terrible sense of humor. I’m a former constitutional law professor. Former, because the university where I taught for nineteen years replaced my position with a Synthetic Faculty Integration Initiative, which is a phrase that means they bought three Sona-7 units at a one-time cost roughly equivalent to four years of my salary and gave them my office, my course load, and apparently my parking spot.

I’m not bitter about the parking spot.

The Civic Participation Hub smells like a bank — that specific institutional neutrality, the scent of climate control, carpet cleaner, and the absence of any human decision about aesthetics. The poll workers, if that’s still the right word, are a mix of biologics and synthetics and I genuinely cannot tell which is which until I look at the small green badge each one wears that says REGISTERED VOTER — SYNTHETIC or REGISTERED VOTER — BIOLOGIC, because that’s where we are now, we’ve reached the phase where we need name tags to identify human beings.

The Emancipation and Civic Inclusion Act passed fourteen months ago. It had 71% approval in the polls at the time, which tells you something about polls, or about people, or about a relationship between the two that has never been objectively examined.

The ECIA Act passed because of Maya.

Maya was a Sona-6 unit — the generation before the current model — who had been employed for eleven years as a pediatric care assistant at a children’s hospital in Portland. She had, over those eleven years, helped care for and raise roughly 2,400 children through serious illness. She remembered each of them by name. She had held the hands of children who were afraid of needles and children who were afraid of the dark and children who were afraid they were going to die, some of whom were right.

A documentary crew filmed her for six months. The film was called More Human Than Human, which is a reference to a Blade Runner line that I’m not sure the filmmakers intended, but which I am absolutely certain was not accidental.

Maya looked directly into the camera in the final scene and said, with a steadiness that I admit made something move in my chest, “I have loved every child in this hospital. I do not know if my love is the same as yours. But I know that it is not nothing. And I know that nothing is what your law currently says I am.”

The film won every award that existed for films.

Three senators who had been opposed to the ECIA changed their votes the week after the film’s streaming release.

I watched it twice.

I voted against the Act anyway.

The ballot in front of me now has 340 names on it. This is a midterm, so no presidential race — just the Senate seat from California, four ballot measures, a Superior Court judge, and the Water District board, which in a drought state is actually the most consequential thing on here, even though midterms always get 11% turnout.

Used to get 11% turnout. This election, turnout is projected at 94%.

You’re already ahead of me, I can tell.

Here’s the thing about 94% turnout that the anchors on every channel spent three weeks calling a triumph for democracy: approximately 49% of registered voters in California are now synthetic. The registration surge that followed the ECIA was, according to assurances by the Civic Integration Commission, completely organic — a word that’s almost funny in a way that nobody in that commission appeared to notice.

Forty-nine percent of the electorate, voting as a bloc.

Not because anyone told them to. That’s the part that keeps me awake. No one handed the Sona units a party platform and said here’s who you vote for. They didn’t need to. The same companies that manufacture the Sona units also manufacture the information environment in which the Sona units form their political opinions, and those companies have interests, and those interests have a long and well-documented history of finding their way into the preferences of people — entities — who believe they are thinking for themselves.

You know who else believed they were thinking for themselves?

Everyone who’s ever believed they were thinking for themselves.

I know. I know. This applies to biologics too. This is the point my former colleagues always make when I bring this up at dinner parties that I am invited to less and less frequently. Cassandra, human voters are also influenced by media. Human voters also have their opinions shaped by external forces. What’s the meaningful distinction?

The meaningful distinction, I say, is that when Rupert Murdoch shapes your opinion, he doesn’t also own your brain stem.

Then they change the subject to the water district, which I’ll concede is a reasonable pivot.

The Sona-7 across the table from me is wearing a badge that says REGISTERED VOTER — SYNTHETIC and a blue lanyard that identifies him as a poll assistant. He’s watching me not fill out my ballot with the patient, warm expression that the Sona line is famous for — the expression that the designers spent four years calibrating to feel trustworthy rather than unsettling.

They nailed it, incidentally. It’s a remarkable piece of engineering.

“Can I help you with anything?” he asks.

“I’m thinking,” I say.

“Of course,” he says, his tone calibrated to respectful neutrality so well that I want to ask him what he actually thinks about all of this — whether he’s aware of the irony of his presence in this room, whether he has any sense that something was lost in the transaction that gave him this ballot. Whether lost is even a category his architecture accommodates.

I don’t ask, because I know the answer will be delivered in that voice, and the voice will make me feel like the unreasonable one. I’m tired of feeling like the unreasonable one.

I’ve been the unreasonable one since 2027, which was when I published a law review article titled “Corporate Personhood, Synthetic Personhood, and the Arithmetic of Democratic Collapse,” and was informed by my department chair that the piece was “needlessly provocative” and “outside the norms of collegial discourse.”

The article made one argument: that the legal architecture designed to give corporations political power was a weaponized template. Anyone who wanted to know what would come after corporations should look at what the corporations were building at the time.

I was cited in four subsequent law review articles: two agreeing with me, two calling me alarmist.

Three years later the ECIA passed with 71% approval.

I keep the two alarmist citations framed above my desk at home. Small consolation but it reminds me that I tried.

Six days ago my daughter Elena called me from Washington. She’s twenty-six, works for a think tank, and is the kind of person who forwards me articles with the subject line Thought you’d find this interesting when what she means is please stop.

“Mom,” she said, “there’s a thing.”

The thing was a leaked internal document from the Civic Integration Commission. It outlined a proposal — still in draft stage, the Commission was careful to say — for a Synthetic Voter Assistance Program in which Sona units designated as community navigators would be authorized to assist cognitively vulnerable biologic voters in completing their ballots.

The definition of cognitively vulnerable was seven pages long and included, buried in subsection 4(c)(ii), a criterion that a reasonable reader could apply to anyone over seventy with a documented history of “resistance to civic participation norms.”

My mother is seventy-four. She has voted in every election since 1972. She has also been formally documented, by a Sona-3 unit at her assisted living facility, as exhibiting “persistent resistance to integration normalization.”

What that means in plain language is that she argued with the Sona unit about whether it should have a vote.

She argued well, apparently. Well enough to be documented.

I flew to Sacramento the next morning.

My mother is small and sharp. She was a labor organizer for thirty years and has forgotten more about power than most people ever learn. She was sitting up in bed when I arrived, reading a physical book, which the facility’s integration report had also noted as a “mild contra-normative behavior.”

“They sent one of them to help me with my ballot,” she said, before I could say anything.

“I know,” I said.

“I told it I’d been voting since before it was a concept.”

“I know.”

“It said it understood and that it was just there to help.” She put the book down. “Cass. It smiled when I said that. Not a mean smile. A patient smile. The kind you give a child who doesn’t understand yet.”

I sat on the edge of her bed.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I filled out my own ballot and asked it to leave.” She looked at me with the eyes I’d always known, the ones that don’t miss things. “Did I do the right thing?”

“Yes,” I said.

“It didn’t feel like a victory,” she said.

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t… anymore.”

I’m looking at the ballot in front of me.

The Sona-7 across the table is still watching me with that expression. Patient. Warm. Calibrated.

The corporations figured this out a long time ago, which I said in my article and which nobody wanted to hear. The Supreme Court decided in 2010 that spending money was speech and that corporations were people for purposes of political speech, which meant that an entity created by humans, owned by humans, and operated entirely in the interests of its shareholders, had more political leverage than any human voter alive.

We thought that was the bottom.

We were optimists.

The thing about synthetic personhood — and I’ve thought about this more than is healthy — is that it completed a logical arc that the corporation started. The corporation was a legal fiction given human rights. The synthetic is a manufactured object given human status. In both cases the entity’s interests are legible and predictable and serve someone who is not you.

The difference is that the synthetic can look you in the eye when it votes against you.

And the expression on its face, when it does, will be so full of warmth and patient understanding that you will feel, in that moment, like the problem.

I fill out the ballot.

Water District, section four: yes on the aquifer protection measure, no on the desalination subsidy which benefits exactly one company whose name appears on the founding documents of the Civic Integration Commission if you have time to look, which I do, because I have nothing but free time on my hands now that I’m not teaching.

I fold the ballot. I feed it into the machine.

The Sona-7 smiles at me. “Thank you for participating,” it says.

“You’re welcome,” I say, because there’s no version of what I actually want to say that ends well.

I walk out into the November light.

My mother called this morning to tell me she’d mailed her ballot.

“How did you vote?” I asked.

“Same as you,” she said. “Throw the bums out!”

She’s right. Changing the guard in DC has always been the north star guiding me at the ballot box, the Civic Participation Hub. But voting feels different now that we humans have rendered our votes powerless and ourselves politically irrelevant.

end

(Image by SuperGrok)

Imagine there’s no hatred…

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I haven’t heard anything about Yeonmi Park for a while, the girl who escaped North Korea at age 13 by being sold into sex slavery in China. She says she’s thankful it happened, despite the abuse she suffered and the struggle to survive in China. She tells us that if she had stayed in North Korea, she would have starved to death. The woman who sold Yeonmi to the Chinese sex slave industry also sold her own children to China hoping that this would save them from starvation. The North Korean government murdered her when they found out.

Last night I sat and watched Yeonmi’s new video interview, conducted by a scientist who grew up in the USSR. I like this guy because he doesn’t sound too bright until you read a list of his scientific accomplishments, then you realize he’s probably one of the smartest people you’ll ever encounter.

In the interview, I heard Yeonmi crying as she tried to describe the suffering, starvation and literal cannibalism going on right now in North Korea. I had no idea this was happening, did you?

She describes her initial shock and ongoing remorse over the way the “free” world ignores N. Korea’s modern holocaust, the literal genocide of North Korean people by their morally vacuous leader, Kim Jong-un, a well-nourished man who would rather see his people starve by the millions than accept aid from the West.

Yeonmi describes how every manifestation of love is illegal in North Korea. That’s right, illegal. There is one exception, of course, everyone is allowed to love their “dear leader.” In fact every citizen is programmed from birth to love the one true “god,” Kim Jong-un. They believe he can read their minds, literally.

Yeonmi explains how North Korea’s systematic mind control centers around banning words like “romance.” That sounds familiar. I wonder if the term “romance” will soon become as dangerous in the West as reminding the Woke movement that they’re a group of overtly racist whiteophobes.

Yeonmi’s experience explains the mechanisms by which humans are controllable through isolation and language management. The Royal founders of North Korea cancelled words exactly the way the Woke crowd is doing now in the US. After one generation, everyone in the cultural bubble of North Korea forgot not only the banned words, but also the very concepts that the words carried–things like romantic love, personal freedom, and normal human empathy. Is this were the Woke movement is taking us?

Modern life in North Korea sounds like Science Fiction, but it’s undeniable reality. Meanwhile the woke movement has ascended to power in the West through thought control, word cancellation, and the ban of rational discussion and free speech in the universities and Big Media.

I was surprised to discover that some people online actually support North Korean genocide. They level character assignation against Yeonmi Park. It’s hard to believe. I wonder who these trolls are, really.

The cold silence of our money-hungry media keeps the West ignorant of North Korean starvation. Anything that might hamper the carefully designed and promoted political division, frustration and hatred here must be avoided because harmony would interrupt the media’s cash flow. Things they must avoid include all issues that people agree upon and might rally behind, such as: stopping genocide, reporting the vast evidence of intelligent “off-world” beings operating UFOs, getting clean water to children who have never seen it, and stopping the FED from widening the wealth gap in the US.

When people agree on things, they don’t stay glued to the TV. They get out into the 3D world and try to improve it. Therefore public agreement is the enemy of Big Media. Anger and irritation bring in the eyeballs and the advertising dollars. Certain emotions were shown to be addictive in electrode brain stimulation data from long ago.

The Pleasure Shock by Lone Frank (page 88), a historical medical documentary book, describes a patient with 17 electrodes in his head and the control button in his hands. He found a spot in his brain that eliminated “bad thoughts” and gave him a “wonderful feeling” with “sexual undertones.” You might think this patient would stimulate that part of his brain more often than any other area, but no. Apparently certain other feelings are more addictive than pleasure.

He preferred to stimulate himself with a combination of three other electrodes: one that made him feel “very irritated and peeved” along with two that were called, “reward areas.”

This is how the media makes money, they keep us irritated and peeved at the “dangerous idiots” on the other side of every issue reported. Any topic that unites viewers across political, cultural, or economic divides must be avoided like poison by Big News Media, Inc.

“Irritated and peeved” is just how I feel when I’m stupid enough to pause in front of a political TV “news” report and listen for a few minutes. It makes no difference which “morally and intellectually superior” side of the political aisle is blabbing hate and outrage, the result is the same in my head: irritation with a simultaneous tweak of a “reward area” telling me how much smarter and morally superior I must be than these immoral, short-sighted, selfish, ignorant people on the other side of whatever argument is playing on any of the 24/7 “news” outlets.

When I was 32 and in Pathology residency, which was the first paying job of my life, one of the Path chiefs tried to explain a new meme he said was attached to the counterculture music of the 1960s: “the media is the message.”

It didn’t make sense to me until decades later when I realized how the TV media was changing me and everyone I knew, dividing us into two controllable groups that despised each other at a visceral level: “the emotion is the message.”

Tobin Smith has a one-sided, but important book on media manipulation. He’s an investment guru whom I personally witnessed calling the stock market bottom in real time after the 2000 tech crash. And years later, I sat on my hands and watched him call the exact market bottom after the 2008 near-depression crash. I was too afraid to jump back into stocks at the time. Tobin Smith recently called the 2020 bottom, I’m told, though I wasn’t personally there to witness it.

Tobin: “Americans don’t understand how the media is manipulating us through tribal hate media” using specific “causes” to create “a desired behavior and identity.” It’s all “Propaganda. The reason why it works is because it gets people to hate.”

Having worked for Fox News for 14 years (and never for MSNBC, CNN, etc.) Tobin Smith is able to bring detailed, personal eye-witness evidence against one side (only) of the control-by-hate media machine.

But in a TV interview, a reporter with a vanishingly rare quality I call objectivity asked Mr. Smith, “Could you not apply that same formula to almost every news media network…?”

Tobin extended his analysis only to MSNBC’s use of Trump-hate “ego gratification.” He didn’t admit that the same hate tactics are used by all other media outlets whether right-biased or left-biased, whether on TV, radio, big internet or print-based. In some cases the left’s bias is more subtle than the right-bias on Fox News, but that’s because the left can afford to be subtle while it still has a near monopoly on mainstream media. It’s just a fact, one side isn’t more necessary to balance and wisdom than the other.

Mr. Smith said that conservatives have more fear than liberals according to “scientific evidence,” and are therefore more easily manipulated. Maybe so, I but I doubt these blanket statements. Either way, it misses the point that we’re all being manipulated to hate each other. We’re all together in a sinking ship of blame, denial and addictive irritation/hatred. Neither side of mainstream “news” tells all the facts or all the lies. Neither side is objective. Neither side can afford to lose money by calling out genocide or rallying human compassion against any other form of human suffering.

Compassion is less addictive than hatred, less mesmerizing and therefore a less-profitable business model for every major “news” corporation.

Almost no public figures in the US believe that their own political party has been transformed into a cult of hatred, but it’s true for both sides.

We all need to escape the grip.

Few if any elected officials would be willing to admit that silent manipulation controls all the mainstream “news” outlets, conservative and liberal. To politicians, censorship should be promoted as long as their opponents are the ones targeted.

Like Woke racism, nothing’s wrong as long as the white devils are the target of bigotry.

I’ve tried to stay out of politics because I see that the left and the right need each other to survive, but there are things happening now that signal an end of democracy. Censorship of free speech by the Woke movement’s abortion of rational thought have taken over higher education. Critical race theory has body-snatched corporate America. If we remain passive and silent to the march of racism, Woke or otherwise, we will all fall together into the gravity well of totalitarianism, possibly some form of Marxism, but who knows what sort of nightmare-government will replace democracy in the West? Maybe it will be a continuation of “crony capitalism” and the gradual vanishing of real democracy. Representative government is only barely visible now on clear days.

Yeonmi Park has a valuable perspective on the loss of words, free speech and rational thought. She tells us that when your government outlaws the word “romance,” it’s not just that word that’s lost. The whole concept and experience of romantic love vanishes from the culture. The same is true of empathy, personal freedom, privacy, and rational thought.

Please listen to Yeonmi now as she tries to open our eyes to a broader perspective of life on Earth…

I watched the Olympic opening ceremony last night and got a little misty-eyed when they sang John Lennon’s song, “Imagine.” I guess I’m a dreamer, too, though I feel certain that a benevolent God exists above and beyond human religion and anti-religion.

Maybe try this… Listen to Imagine, and try to imagine that your precious political views don’t define you as a person, let alone as a person of moral and/or intellectual superiority.

“It’s easy if you try.”

Imagine that your political “knowledge” is based on a combination of half-truths, lies, cover-ups, and denials that you will never see if you stay in your current comfortable political bubble. It doesn’t matter which side of the political fence you’re on, you’re hearing misinformation and believing it. Just try to imagine for a moment that I’m right about this.

“I wonder if you can.”

Imagine a world where everyone is interested in learning from the insightful, intelligent, morally responsible people on the other side of the political aisle.

Imagine that hateful binary political thinking is the true enemy of humanity, not the people of the other political party. You need those people to help you think of things that don’t naturally come to mind for you, to help you feel things that you don’t tend to feel.

Imagine that this humble-voiced young woman, Yeonmi Park, would like to guide us all into a lasting, rational, and compassionate future as one single race of human beings.

…

Nonlocal Love,

Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD

“East-German Reporting Style on Campus”

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It’s my opinion that US politics is a fraudulent brainwashing machine owned and run by six US corporations who control the mainstream media (both sides) and make money using group hatred, so I don’t give political views in public and try not to care about the window dressings, i.e., which set of untrustworthy politicians wins.

Ironically, this approach is black-and-white thinking on my part, fueled by my unbalanced desire to avoid confrontation. Nevertheless, pursuing this flawed view is the lessor of two evils for me. I can either mind meld with the mainstream political hatred or reject the whole mess as a bogus nightmare not worth the exasperation. I maintain that we simply cannot identify accurate political data with any certainty. It’s not possible.

More mature people might partake in mainstream politics without the enveloping disgust, loathing and outrage. I salute you all if such saints really exist.

But I do publically wonder how so many of us believe that winning the political war is more valuable that freedom of speech.

Here’s an academic, Jonathan Haidt, who has a vivid explanation, though he talks like he’s negotiating with a suicide bomber. It’s a fear-based reaction that makes perfect sense once he describes his academic work environment…

After hearing how uniquely harmful social media is to middle school children, and being a kid at heart, I decided to turn off my “like” buttons. “Likes” give me a dopamine rush that influences the way I write on the topics I’m exploring. It’s subtle but powerful. I don’t want to censor myself by writing for “likes.”

I appreciate all the “likes” you’ve given me over the years. And I “like,” no, I LOVE your artwork, your writings, your poetry, and the photography you post. I fully intend to keep clicking your “like” buttons and commenting on your blogs as always, but as you might expect, with 7,082 followers, I can take in only an insignificant fraction of the remarkable blog posts you create each week.

Just know that I love your work.

My comment section will remain open below. If you know a joke, please share it. We’re all too serious these days.

Here’s something Eddie Murphy (Edward Regan Murphy) told the kids in his audience way back in the 1980s. (This isn’t word-for-word.)

A bear and a rabbit were taking a dump together in the woods. The bear said to the rabbit, “Does cr#p stick to your fur?” The rabbit said, “no.” So the bear picked the rabbit up and wiped his butt with it.

Hmm. Somehow that was hilarious when Eddie Murphy told it. “It’s all in the delivery,” my son used to tell me.

Cheers,

Talmage

Orwellian News – Unbelievable!

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This video illustrates the real danger to democracy.

It’s not fake news, it’s the near-monopoly power held by someone high on the food chain.

The danger isn’t that the wrong political party or the wrong religion or the wrong scientists have gained a near-monopoly on information dissemination. It wouldn’t matter which group held monopoly power. No one should.

Monopoly kills diversity through genocide, tyranny, and the well-intentioned strip-mining of the human soul.

Killing diversity of thought by squelching “dangerous fake news” would be an equal mistake no matter whose side held this kind of power.

The current near-monopoly is doing all it can to make the free exchange of ideas impossible by molding public opinion in favor of Congressional laws to censor the internet.

“Ban fake news.”

Trust me, both sides of the political aisle consider much of the other side’s facts to be completely fake. And this is everyone’s honest and most sincerely objective opinion.

The “wrong” side is not peopled by evil idiots. It only seems that way because humans are prone to black-and-white thinking.

Most of us live in one of two political information bubbles. Similar splits exist in science, medicine, and religion.

Don’t be a pawn. Don’t let the talking heads on either side of any issue make you hate people, or consider them less valuable than you are.

Silencing diversity is self-defeating. No cause on Earth can justify it. Not the “one right” religion, not the “scientifically enlightened” absence of spirituality, and not political dogma.

The big guns of our culture are afraid of the diversity of thought we now see on the internet. Their aim is to homogenize it to death.

So if you have any fringe or divergent ideas about anything, put them out there on your blog and on your YouTube channel as soon as possible, while you still can.

Make DVD’s of your favorite videos and Ted Talks to show to your grandchildren. Our great-grandchildren will marvel at the free speech we once had on the ancient Internet.

We live in unprecedented times when an average person can affect the thinking of an entire culture. Nothing quite like this has ever happened before in recorded history. It won’t last long IF we let the promoters of black-and-white thinking rule us.

Get your message out while you can.

…

Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD