In a not-so-distant future, there had come to exist a machine with the power of perfect phenomenological mapping. For every experience a man could have, a map could be drawn with direct correlation. No matter how one wanted the experience mapped, the map could be made. Some sought semantic maps – for every dump of the mind’s mass of experiences, a set of official terms could be drawn. These were limited not merely to psychiatrists’ handbooks, though such professionals had the most wonderful use of the machine. No – one could map his experiences to the characters Mercutio and Fortunado, to the mythos of Ovid, to the motifs in Marx’s oeuvre. All experiences could be perfectly mapped to vocabulary man had so far engineered.
The psychiatrists, for their part, at first became Luddites. No longer were they needed to canvass the mass of human experience and map it to their handbooks. Now, instead, men could speak for hours on end and receive a guaranteed mapping – though really only 15 minutes of any speech was sufficient. This mapping, which was hitherto called “diagnosis” of a mental disorder, was only a relation of the semantic content of the spoken word to established weights and biases calculated of a given corpus. These, mapped with a standard error of less than .1%, were produced by the machine so completely that the psychiatrists’ role in doing the same was entirely excluded. No guessing for the right kinds of drugs based on guesses about the right details of experience. All was exactly as the machine designed.
In time the handbooks were themselves thrown out. Men no longer needed their experiences mapped to handbooks built on the old method of diagnosis. Instead, semantic differentials were quantized for statistical homologies at the level of neurology. Years of data collected from a combination of radiation and neurochemical research had produced a corpus of standard brain-functioning across several personal archetypes, themselves produced from a linear regression of employment statuses. With these, a best fit neural architecture was produced for any given employment. Here the psychiatrists again entered the scene. No longer matchmakers of men to drugs, they now matched men to the correct neurology requisite for a job. They themselves had to be the first line of defense for the use of the machine to such ends – for, they were the living proof of the machine’s success.
In the end, however, this use of the machine was quite stupid and gave way to more failure than success. Although many wondered and marveled at the prospect of so well-ordered a workforce, the lack of neuronal spontaneity produced such homogeneity that within 3 years of the machine’s mass implementation markets had come to a standstill. Indeed, the standardization of investment decisions had produced a market in which most institutional behavior was predictable ex ante. This diminished profits too much for the social machines’ magnates, who themselves had never dared give their precious neural data over (hereby they maintained an artificial scarcity on their positions). And so, profits decreasing, the machine fell out of favor.
It instead returned to the psychiatrists as a novelty, deemed needed only for those less-researched experiences that still retained the name “disorder.” For, now, with the correct mapping, everything was a kind of order. “Disorder” was retained now only as a statistical aberration, something found only in minority relative to the system of interlocking orders that hitherto prevailed. Such minoritized men had only to speak their scruples into the device and become homogenized. Often, however, knowing this fate, they instead spoke of how they wished to feel or used to feel, and this too was mapped. In time, with the wealth of neural data, secondary machines were enlisted to produce drugs designed specifically for these lucky few. They had come to feel exactly as they wished (insofar as what they wished was semantically communicable). Most men, however, fearing such exactitude in the fulfillment of desire, preferred the spontaneous touch of another.
So much for the experience mapping machine.
misteramazing 