Political Consciousness

They had to justify our destruction. So they lied. One of the lies went like this: "The Mongolians don't purchase fabricator libraries from other transgovs. They pirate and copy." That part is true. "Denying fabricator libraries to their colonists is part of a pattern of population abuse." That's the lie. Abuse? Call it emancipation. The fabricator is the ENEMY. The fabricator is the death of craft. The fabricator expunges skill from the act of making. The fabricator turns us all into customers at the company store. In pre-fabricator economies, humans had skills—skills like bowcraft, animal husbandry, tracking, felt-making, and fermentation. Our skills weren't fungible. One person could not be substituted for another. But everyone buys the same product at the fabricator. A rat can ferment the same airag as an old herder. A great artisan gets the same drab, focus-grouped carpets that are trampled by the feet of Alterra human resources. Humans are mimics—mimics of expertise. The Mongolians who inspired us used their expertise to flourish on the steppe. They challenged the wilderness and it made them great. But now there is no skill to mimic. Only a fabricator to feed. One customer is the same as another. The pigs fill the trough and the trough menu tells them what they need. And there are no great pigs. It is only a matter of time until the transgovs - pressured by the revolutionary existential terror of the alien, poisoned by the strangling bottleneck of Collapse Capitalism - take the next step, and render the human being itself fungible. If the product can be fabricated, why not the customer? -Mongolian Independent States Cadre Handbook {metadata reader's note="Mantis loves this stuff. But his job requires fabricators at every step. If he didn't use them he couldn't compete. The better replicator wins. Any biologist can tell you that. So what does he want me to take from it? - Nahema}