JPEG Humanity… 60% Compression, 40% Smoothing

Let’s face it, probably the largest threat to humanity at the moment is population pressure.  Even more than the demands for physical resources is the challenge of living with the stress generated by so very, very many personalities attempting to cohabitate on one rather overstuffed planet. 

The physical options for fixing this look rather grim, they involve things like “random population reduction” (read war or plague) or perhaps “compulsory population attrition” (read mandatory sterility), you know, those good old Orwellian desperation generated double think euphemisms for “we need to get rid of about half of us.”  Hmmmm… all very biblical when you get right down to it.  Maybe the mark of the beast will turn out to be a USDA stamp of some sort like in the movie “Soylent Green.”  I don’t know, I don’t really want to know.

But that’s just the physical side of the coin.  Maybe the brains that be have decided to approach the problem from the other side of the issue, decided that if enough personalities can be structured as functionally identical then the stress levels can be held manageable for long enough to not need such drastic measures.  After all, the stress is being generated by so many different personalities, so many unique personalities putting unique loading's on the social systems.  Perhaps they’re thinking that if ten or a hundred or a thousand physical bodies share one unique personality then the stress levels will fall by the same order of magnitude and genocide of one form or another can be avoided.

If that’s the case then the Machiavellian maneuverings of mass technology take on an entirely different perspective.  From that perspective the digi-drone gestalt resolves out as the saving grace of the human race, their essential suicide of self a noble sacrifice to save the race. 

What a thought: AT&T saved the world with a smart phone.  What a thought.  Think that one deserves a full double shot of good whiskey.