Thread by @ConceptualJames

Earlier, I used the term "digital cattle," which is one I've been thinking about for a while to describe our future if the evil technocrats successfully take over. It's worth explaining this term in fuller detail. They will make us their digital cattle.

Cattle is a word that refers to domesticated animals that are raised specifically because they provide something useful to those who own them. I am therefore saying that the technocrats will establish a system where we are as cattle to them, centers of data to be harvested.

The way the "digital cattle" system will work is effectively through a few pieces
1) a universal basic income (UBI)
2) a social credit system tied to finances, etc.
3) a bonus credits system on top of UBI for excellent social credit
4) an "education" system that locks kids in.

A technocratic oligarchy can't just give people a UBI. The people being paid have to provide something of value in exchange. To a limited degree, that might include services that machines can't provide (like being a subjugated human servant, specifically), but it's mostly data.

Running a technocratic oligarchy (Platonic "republic") requires massive amounts of data. The catastrophic attempts in the 20th century to build such a thing in the name of "Communism" (a specific brand of such a thing) proved massive amounts of data and processing are needed.

Data comes from the humans involved. The oligarchs need enough information to know what their cattle need to keep functioning but also tons of information to know how to contour and control them into the ideal subjects and consumers their system needs to sustain itself.

The universal basic income of the technocratic elite will be the feedstock paid to their digital cattle to keep them participating in the system and thus providing the necessary data to keep the system going and to optimize its function (for the oligarchical technocrats).

The ideal way to manage or herd digital cattle, and indeed to brainwash them further into accepting the system, is through an operant-conditioning system that in practice boils down to social credit. Social credit doesn't just keep people in line; it conditions them to be "good."

People look at a social credit system like in China and think, "wow, it's a perfect instrument of population control" (that is, digital cattle herding), but it's much more than that. It's a digital gulag; a digital reeducation center.
newdiscourses.com/2022/08/21st-c…

A social credit system makes the entire operation of society into a kind of "video game" where you are trying to earn merits and avoid demerits by playing in the (arbitrary) ruleset of the people controlling it. It's a herding and conditioning method without peer.

You will train yourself to behave in ways that give you social credit and to avoid losing it. You will enforce this socially on your neighbors just by making social credit "contagious." It's a tool for producing and herding digital cattle who act how they are supposed to.

In the meantime, the system is culling huge amounts of data from its digital cattle so it can continue to tweak the social credit system both in micro (brainwashing you more effectively) and macro (conditioning the parameters of the controlled technocratic society).

That is, the social credit system is designed to gather data from its participants such that the parameters of the whole system are being tweaked (macro) but also learning your individual psychosocial system so that your interface with the system can control YOU better (micro).

An analogy I have given for this, usually regarding Social-Emotional Learning, based mostly on the writings of the World Economic Forum (WEF) is that it's like fitting pegs (ideal you) into a board (ideal society) by carving both at the same time to fit one another. Takes data.

The organization of the system will be based primarily on a program called "Sustainability," and bonuses for very good behavior will be given in terms of something like Sustainability Credits, which could be converted into more UBI coupons in exchange for exemplary behavior.

Exemplary behavior would involve doing what you should in the system, not doing what you shouldn't, policing your family, friends, and neighbors, participating in and being successfully brainwashed, etc. You will be "Sustainable" if you behave accordingly but not otherwise.

Sustainability credits will probably work like carbon credits today but much more pervasive. You will have the opportunity, at a guess, to convert them into UBI credits or to sell them to the technocratic elite at a premium for even more UBI credits.

What do I mean? Maybe you earn $100 worth of Sustainability Credits for being a good little digital cattle. You can convert that into $100 bonus for yourself or sell off the Sustainability Credit to someone else for maybe $500 bonus (or something).

When you sell those, the oligarchical technocrat elites will be the ones buying them (maybe with funny "money") so that they can circumvent the rules of the society that "everyone" is subject to. That is, you're selling Sustainability Indulgences to the rich.

So, you don't fly, you don't travel, you eat bugs and lentils, you turn in your neighbors, you watch your propaganda, you take the data-harvesting quizzes or play the data-harvesting games, etc., and you get special bonus credits above a basic allotment you can sell for perks.

Remember: Not doing anything particularly interesting, participating in their propaganda, keeping others in line, and providing more data (for your own control) is what's valuable to the technocratic oligarchy, so that's what would be rewarded. You're digital cattle.

They don't actually want you rewarded, though, so they'll likely stack incentives such that you stand to benefit in extremely fake ways (like in a video game) by selling off any rewards you actually earn and staying as basic and locked-in as possible.

I don't know for certain that this is the shape of things to come, but it's a current best guess based on the things I've read, what I see in China, and guessing at how I'd arrange such a system. Start thinking of yourself as a man with liberty or as a piece of digital cattle.

NB: This only works with a central bank digital currency (CBDC), ideally one issued by an international central bank and under unaccountable international control. Its would-be controllers call themselves "stakeholders," at least for now. It's the "stakeholder capitalism" model.