The World of LEAP (134|D)

Technology: Chips

The most revolutionary technology of the new age is networked cybernetics.

• Everyone in the Western world is equipped with a Chip. The chips are computers with incredible computing power hooked directly into the mind. The chip is biologically integrated and draws its power from the body itself. It is upgradable and integrated with other bionic peripherals such as cameras (which would allow a blind or myopic person to see with perfect digital vision).
  
• The computing power of the chips allows average human beings to accomplish incredibly complicated tasks that would normally require years of training with the aid of increasingly sophisticated Life and Work Applications.
• For example, the task of a lawyer could be simplified to the essentially simple procedural elements by a good legal software application that would take anybody through the basic steps.
• This should change society as a great equalizer, allowing anyone who can afford the software application to install it and gain that skill set.
• Can't afford the application? No problem. As long as you are willing to accept its sponsors into your reality.
• Most of the essential software applications are ad sponsored. Like Google Adwords taken to a much further extreme, an application user will be subjected to a new form of advertising.
• Because Chips (or more specifically a Chip's display output) feeds directly into the human brain, it can completely alter the user's sensory perception of reality.
• E.g. If you are watching your favourite program (now a fully immersive experience instead of on a screen) instead of being shown an image of Coca Cola you could even get a teasing taste of it on your tongue.
• Advertising is so effective that weak willed people who are willing to accept all of the advertising that supports the perks (i.e. free software and life applications) into their lives are essentially fed the majority of their thoughts.
• The image of a person "tuned in" to a program - (similar to someone glued to their computer screen) --> They sit staring blankly oblivious to the world around them as they are entertained by programming that is literally mind-numbing.
• This is where the rich have an advantage again (as they have had in all times) they can afford to use software that is essentially ad-free. Are far more free to make their own choices.
• How is the advertising so pointedly effective? Again to gain the perks that come with it, people are willing to give access to their Chip activity to marketers. The integration of Chips with their human hosts as well as with each other over the new internet (Develop ideas for the future of the Web 2.0, etc.) allows anyone to potentially follow every movement that another person makes.
• This allows marketers to follow all of the daily habits of an individual and put extremely personally significant and effective advertisements in their heads. e.g. Horny teenagers are innundated with pornography websites (now sexual simulation programs). If a person watches certain movies, shows, etc - then carefully researched targetted ads appear in their reality.
• People can technically distinguish between reality and Chip images but most people who have gotten used to it and completely reliant on it don't bother to make that distinction anymore. Become more and more drone-like.
• Despite the challenges they face to rapidly integrate into this world, the timigrants are the best equipped to separate the reality from the Chip.
• This causes a unique sense of angst that Snails (the people who have become gradually integrated as the technology developed because they did not leap ahead) have become immune to this angst. They are so distracted by the applications that they don't have room for such feelings.
• Negative feelings are quickly stifled by distractions, amusements and pharmaceuticals that are specifically marketed to the people whose thoughts and behavior can be modified by those products.
• Entire chains of thought/feeling that are linked to a line of products to cater to those thoughts and feelings can be created to direct people down a specific conscious (and consumerist) path.
  
• Software can be likened to a drug.
• It allows people to hallucinate by seeing the world completely differently and experience things that are not there.
• So addictive that people can't unplug themselves.
  

• Creativity exists where the Chip network ends - artists deliberately unplug themselves to gain inspiration.

• Suffering for art has a new meaning when people essentially slice out a part of their brain (the part that makes life easy, blissful and escapist) to face the world as it really is and have the time-out required for them to actually have thoughts with some semblance of independence or reality.
• Most "art" or entertainment is made (or at least funded )by the marketers as new opportunities for perceptional product placement. Customized to each individual who experiences it.
• E.g. A blockbuster movie is funded by marketers. People pay the ticket price AND are subjected to subliminal ads. The fact that someone sees the movie is added to their marketing profile for future use. E.g. If someone just saw a movie with a lot of cool cars they would be inundated with car advertisements after leaving the theatre.
• There is a counter-culture that exists in the world of open-sourcing:
• People can design and customize their own programs in order to take back some independence.
• Of course when anyone comes up with something original and worthwhile that others would enjoy it eventually gets bought up, polished and integrated into the corporate ad-driven applications that most will prefer.
• Traditional societies reject the Chip to different degrees:
• Orthodox Jews unplug on shabbos.
  
• Fundamentalist religions ban its use altogether.
• e.g. Muslims call it an abomination before Allah. Criticize the peoples who have adopted as part of their reality as less than human, greedy, willing to sell their souls for convenience and luxury.
• Given the fact that most people who are chipped follow their basest urges, e.g. spending the majority of their time indulging sex fantasies in stim-sims... the Muslims' point is actually made a lot stronger.
• Of course the applications of the Chip reality are readily adaptable to the sort of fundamentalist indoctrination favoured by Islamist societies.
• MAJOR THEME - No matter where you come from or how you choose to live your life, it is virtually impossible to have truly independent thought in this world.