"PREMISE:
1. Neuroplasticity & the social circuitry of the Network are analagous phenomena.
2. The Network has become in a real sense the societal brain.
3. The science of neuroplasticity holds that the individual can change his/her own behavior & thus consciously reshape the cellular function of his/her brain for the better. This however is not easy once deleterious behavior has become ingrained (foreshortened attention spans, etc.).
4. Changing ingrained societal behaviors -- as in working to shape the societal brain as it manifests through the Network -- is magnitudinally harder than the already hard task of changing individual behavior.
5. This is the moral of much dystopian literature.
6. If one is concerned about the ways the Network & related digital technologies are changing individual & societal brain function; if one feels, intuitively, the value in questioning such qualitative change; if one sees the benefits of skepticism & caution when confronted with the utopian claims of the technocracy, then one may try -- as an individual wholly capable of modifying his/her own behavior -- to resist.
PROPOSAL:
7. I, a single neuron in the societal brain, refuse to be rewired.
8. I dread & resist the digital 'renaissance,' the effects of which are: disempowerment of the individual, fragmentation, reductivism, algorithmical & statistical hegemony, total corporate conquest, the annihilation of privacy, the supremacy of advertising, the wholesale dependency on seductive machines, the furtherance of the new despotism & of tyrannical organizations, etc. etc."
--Private Papers
