Crimes
Against
Neurology


Evading the 6th extinction
requires re-configuring
how we think.

tl;dr


Denial of moral agency, implied by animal usage in labs and as food, threatens not just animals and ecosystems, but human rights and ecosystem survival. Brain-machine-implantation research that relies on primates is neurologic neo-colonialism. Factory farms are implicated in the creation of pandemic viruses, climate change, and famine.


Retroactive Prelude


I had originally intended to write an essay about interaction design.

Theoretically, it would follow a trajectory through Heidegger, the GOMS Model, Lucy Suchman, Donna Haraway, Paul Dourish, Rosalind Picard, Pelle Ehn, and Shaowen Bardzell.

Practically, it would cover a spectrum from HCI’s orgins with Douglas Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos, to Ivan Sutherland, Myron Krueger, Muriel Cooper, Natalie Jeremijenko, David Rokeby, and Char Davies; review many contemporary practitioners (like Micha Cárdenas, Suzanne Kite, and Sougwen Chung); and finish with an ethical consideration of future brain machine interface-implantations through an autopsy of NeuraLink seen as neo-colonialist occupation of unceded neurological primate tissue during material testing phases.

Then COVID came.

What is this about?


It is about ethical failure. The futility of activism. An ongoing catastrophe. And the absurd circular complicity of appetite.


Climate Change

Our own deaths entangled with those of other species. The energy we use toxic to the earth.

Factory Farms

Bred, born, fed, and killed in a concentration camp. You never see sky. You never know family.

Nuclear War

Low weight, low yield, tactical weapons. Firing controlled by Ai. Sporadic errors.

Pandemics

Lockdown borders, patriotism, insular communities, and inequitable suffering.

Racism

“Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.”


James Baldwin. Letters from a Region in my Mind (1962)

9,000,000 PEOPLE Die Every Year of Malnutrition.


Hunger is a racist issue.

We need an Ethics of Unified Relational Systems.

+ a WEHO: World Equal Health Organization. And a liquid democracy where every economic, gendered, aged, and neurological layer of society is proportionally represented by someone from their community.

60,000,000,000 ANIMALS Die Every Year For Food.


Their crowded cages, atrophied minds, and battered bodies are one birthplace of zootopic viruses.


Vertebrates all have skin, sensory nerve receptors, a central nervous system, a sympathetic and parasympathetic system, neurotransmitters, pain perception, myelination, and a modularized brain.


Eat. Breath. Shit. Roam. Breed. Grow. Nurture. Play. Fight. Explore. Sleep. Die.


Structurally embodied sentience
Encaged in crowded barns
Mutating coronaviruses.

Speciesism

is a prejudice or bias
towards the interests of members of one's own species
and against those of members
of other species.

Peter Singer. Animal Liberation (1974)


Animals
Undeniably
Suffer


60 billion vertebrate land animals
killed annually for food.



Our Perception
of the
Other


Smeared blind enemy-empathy constraints adjusted for survival over eons of tribal warfare may be ill-adapted for a world of networked Ai.

Humanipulated



Humanipulated organisms compromise a growing product category for industry research. Genetic ownership considers lifeforms as lacking in moral agency.


A Cancer Rainbow Mouse

"— We have developed the Cancer rainbow (Crainbow) mouse platform to generate user-defined, reliable, and multiplexed models of tumorigenesis in a single genetically tractable system." & "The Crainbow platform will decentralize mouse engineering thereby transforming mouse model development into a user-defined commodity"

RatHat

"— Here we present a new stereotaxic method that improves on traditional approaches by reducing costs, training, surgical time, and aiding repeatability. The RatHat brain implantation system is a 3D printable stereotaxic device for rats that is fabricated prior to surgery and fits to the shape of the skull. "

Moral Agency Denied Sets Dangerous Precedents


Interfaces of authoritarian control.

Brain-machine-plantations.

The New
Normal
Is Old


Factory farms,
sweatshops,
and war.

The Old
Abnormal
Is New


Vegan,
communal,
pacifists.

Emotional Neuroscience

"The intrinsic nature of basic emotional systems has been remarkably well conserved during the course of mamalian evolution."

Jaak Pansepp. Affective Neuroscience (2004)

Infrastructural
Instinctual
Violence
Must
End,
But
Will
It?



A brutal blind animal is in us.
Homo Sapiens cause extinctions.

There
Are Few
Options



Time is not a feature film.


Species-ism
Species-cide
Species-suicide



Recursive
Population
Collapse



Before migrating out of Africa, in the late Pleistocene, the fossil record reveals that Sapiens drove to extinction over 80% of large-bodied mammals. On every island or continental landmass they arrived at, the pattern repeats.



Before abandoning Earth, in a gleaming flock of spaceships, Sapiens will probably have repeated the pattern again, eradicating over 80% of all terrestrial life.




Milk Production is a Feminist Issue

"All my life I've had this childlike capacity to dream. I not only saw what was, but how life could be." -- Alexandra Kollontai (1945)


If radical feminist Alexandra Kollontai was alive now, she would be vegan.

Cheese, yogurt, and ice cream are all feminist issues.
Factory farm dairy cows are caged, forcibly impregated, female slaves.



Do no harm. Consume less complicity.


Contemporary consumers buy a chain that begins with biological slaves and ends with ruthless rationalizations.