badLamb
For a moment, imagine we live on a planet where everything
is lambs. Every sort of organism — is a sort of lamb, such
that all the different sizes and shapes of organism are actually
just ‘different kinds of lamb’.
In our model universe, which we’ll call lambWorld,
there aren’t any predators...at least, not in the beginning.
One day, seemingly out of nowhere, something that isn’t
a lamb at all shows up. It doesn’t have a body, and it
shows up within a bunch of regular lambs — as something they
do.
No way exists for any lamb to tell this predator has
arrived or is active. Once safely ensconced in a small population
of lambs, the compromised hosts become so perfectly lamby that they
instantly garner terrain and reproductive privilege wherever
they travel.
Within these compromised lambs the badLamb-predator
is becoming locally hypermimetic, learning to ever-more
adeptly mimic the characters and participants of its new environment
in multiple simultaneous domains so as to appear vastly superior
to what all that it emulates. Entirely without identity or character
of its own at all — the mimic absorbs character-shape from
its hosts. The firstHosts become the seed-population — the
vector through which badLamb will proceed to convert living terrains
to its use.
badLamb inventively deploys powerful strategies of
propagation, hunting, and establishing dominance. It doesn’t
eat lambs, instead it absorbs and feeds upon their agreement,
and attention — as well as the terrain they need
to feed, elaborate themselves, celebrate connectivity, and prosper.
Once compromised, the afflicted lambs will always
work to deny themselves terrain and resources, so that the badLamb
will have them instead. As badLamb soaks up the connectivity, relation,
activity, prowess and growth-effort of lambs of every possible form
and purpose — the lambs will experience an impoverishment
that will proceed exponentially — in as many dimensions as
may be named.
o:O:o
When badLamb reproduces (within the relation-connectivity
of the lambs, rather than in the lambs themselves), the result is
perilously more powerful, cunning, and domineering than the prior
phase. There aren’t really any separate badLambs — this
being is a network organism — thus ‘reproduction’
results in access to entirely new dimensions of terrain, dominance,
and mimicry rather than ‘children’.
Shortly after the initial penetration into lambWorld,
badLamb is in a position perfectly suited to further explosive elaboration.
Lamb-society has been entirely co-opted into the service of badLamb
reproduction — and the lambs don’t even have an idea
generally alike with this to ponder. badLamb is now free and
overwhelmingly credentialed to ever-more loudly proclaim the
great liberation and abundance of the ever-shrinking lambTerrains,
and in this phase actually appears to the victims to be a hero
of protection and liberation.
With each successive generation, the activity, scope,
and obligations upon the actual lambs increase geometrically —
and the amount of terrain and connectivity left to them shrinks
in kind. As badLamb becomes first established, and then the backdoor
puppeteer of an entire living planet — the hope of the a solution
for lambWorld fades exponentially toward impossibility.
The lambs of lambWorld will never have the opportunity
gain enough cognitive liberty in unitive assembly to deduce
the presence or activity of badLamb. The lambs have no defense against
such a circumstance. In their minds ‘lambs are the only thing
there is’ — thus there is in fact ‘nothing else
to be’.
And this, of course, is precisely what the subterfuge
of badLamb depends upon and deploys order to sustain and accrue
domination-assets. A frozen idea about ‘what something is’.
o:O:o
pretender
— to all thrones at once...
We have crafted a parable which contains a model (or
toy) of a sort of predator that we do not have common access to
models of. So in a sense we are crafting a new metaphor,
or way of referring to something we could not easily refer to before.
In our human experience the presence and activity
of this predator is more of a momentum than a thing, and
it doesn’t merely make children of itself — it’s
children create new domains into which children of its processes
can be magnified. It is not comprised of ‘bad people’
as we commonly suppose, but instead of a momentum being shared and
sustained by the agreement of victims. The speed at which
this occurs is astonishing: this predator invades new domains where
it can dominate and reproduce, faster than it reproduces. If those
domains do not yet exist, it will invent them in its hosts.
Now that we have this toy of mimetic predation which
includes transports and terrain within and around hosts of every
possible sort — we can examine some momentums related to this
model in many places: human history, the history of complex sentience,
and planetary biohistory — for example. And our model will
grant us some uncommon vantages from which to explore.
o:O:o
