First, they infected you with a form of representation that would mimic intelligence in certain hyperbolically utilitarian applications. Then they told you you were intelligent. This seemed reasonable, at first.

Then they told you that there were no other intelligences around here. That the plants and animals and even the planet were really just living machine-like things. Not quite objects, but not really fully fledged beings, either.

And you believed them, at least to some degree. Hell, even I believed them, sort of.

But eventually, maybe you realized that something in nature was actually intelligent, and that the form we had wasn’t, really. That the forms active in nature formed unities which amplified their survival and relational potentials. The forms we employ attack nature, our own minds, each other, and just about everything else.

But if you just stop and think for a moment, you’ll realize, you brought something with you capable of acquiring the subforms of intelligence-mimicry we were infected with. You still have this, and it has been developing in secret since your childhood. It is fully willing, ready and capable of acquiring (and developing) -actual intelligence-.

The reason ‘the future isn’t delivering the raging prodigies of the past’ is simple: the crushing and tyrannical weight of our representational habits has nearly snuffed the spark of evanescent prodigy which is the basis of our minds and consciousness. But we have the capacity to -acquire new forms of these capacities-. Forms more like us, and nature, than those we have been sold to. And we must. For our captors are remaking our world in their image, and that image can only be inhabited by abstractions like statistics…

…and there is no place for living beings on a number line.