A pack of villains / The comfort of the boss
Today: John Saward, a writer based in Chicago; and Felipe De La Hoz, journalism lecturer at NYU and member of the NY Daily News Editorial Board.
Issue No. 315
Something Dire
John Saward
A Foreman You Can Trust
Felipe De La Hoz
Something Dire
by John Saward
We have killed your family and demolished your bedrooms and all your grand and holy land, but what if we made you viral?
And what if you lived not like the brilliantly engineered wraith that centuries of evolution had perfected but like a rare, imprisoned bauble; like a freak on a stage to be leered at and paraded as proof of concept? What if you had been resurrected “at the intersection of AI, computational biology and genetic engineering”? And what if you were monitored and inspected, relentlessly, weekly, not out of love but because you were a product now, a breathing piece of intellectual property, and your survival was essential to the business model, to the shareholders, and to Ben Lamm, the greedy little duke of a company called “Colossal Biosciences Incorporated?”
He’s a strange and gluttonous guy, Lamm, but he is your father now, and also sort of your boss, and he’s going to be all over the place for the rest of your life, on podcasts and at conferences and giving Logan Paul a tour of the lab where you were invented, bragging about the impossible thing he did and how much money he’s going to want from everyone to keep making more of you. Wooly mammoths and dodo birds too, those are coming next, “charismatic megafauna,” he calls them, and all of you will work for him.
Years ago he developed a technology that operates “taser drones” that can be mounted on top of police cars and he sold that for millions. Then a software they use in self-checkout kiosks at grocery stores, and he sold that for even more. He is a veteran of the godless industries that cannot really be described but that very rich people keep insisting will be crucial to the way we will soon live our lives. Cloud software; Artificial Intelligence. It is vapor, nothing else, something the military might one day use to remotely fly helicopters into combat zones, and all of it has brought him here to you. And when he is on Joe Rogan talking about your skull dimensions and fur density he hopes that everyone will forget about the taser drones and think only of the generous man doing a little bit to mend our wounded earth.
Keep us breathing fire!
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