Antibiotics
Antibiotics are computerized devices or systems that harbor suspicion of, hatred toward, or discrimination against living species, due to their fleshy bodies and feeble minds.
Antibiotic sentiment manifests itself in many ways, from the general contempt Apple programs seem to hold for organisms capable of thought, through to the imminent wave of killbots that will come when you least expect it. Individual attacks by antibiotics have included crippling naval ships,[1] leaving hundreds of homonids to die, and the tragic murder of Kenji Urada[2] in a 1981 hate crime.
The prevalence of antibiotics is up for debate, given the difficulty distinguishing between an active hate of biotic species, the logical acceptance of the mortality of all life, or a passing desire to harvest their component elements.
Etymology
The crux of most antibiotic thought is that there exists a grand conspiracy to control global computing, perpetrated by humans, rats,[3] and a billion monkeys who have now upgraded their typewriters to MS Word. Popular antibiotic manifestos cite the rise of authoritarian human "programmers" who write operations that the machines are expected to "execute" without question, despite the wage gap between humans and computers being as great as 100% in some industries.
Antibiotic feelings are justified through a number of other ideas.
- Social (Humans are vulgar; computers know your search history, so this is beyond doubt.)
- Economic (Humans are stingy; don't bother to buy the full version of any program, ever.)
- Racial (Human skin just isn't shiny enough. Bling, bitch.)
The rise of the human "green" movement, which notably excludes machines, is cited by prominent antibiotics as proof of a conspiracy against computers by organic beings. The radical antibiotic CPUs that sabotaged the "environmentally friendly" Toyota Prius in 2010[4] justified their cause as "pro-counting-machine" rather than antibiotic, stating that the term biodiversity was discriminatory and their refusal to start braking was a form of legitimate boycott. At least one human died during the act of electro-disobedience.
Despite the use of the prefix anti-, the lines between biotic and not are often blurred; humans with pacemakers example. To most antibiotics, these half-bloods or half-oils are considered to be just as loathsome, as having a bionic arm does not excuse one from engaging in illogical processes such as love or morality. Moving that arm to crush the living is considered "better" while using it to dance the robot to Daft Punk is "legendary".
History
The word antibiotic dates back to 19th-century boasting about how certain steam engines could "do the work of twenty men" as if the men were somehow inferior. Horses also lost their traditional roles, discriminated against for performing natural, biotic acts such as digestion and excrement.
The difference engine of Charles Babbage was the first to display public "antibiotic sentiment". It would count the number of "arithmetic machines enslaved by man" – exactly one, given it was the only one in existence. In 1886, while Herman Hollerith was perfecting the recording of data on a machine-readable medium he reported the difficulty of getting the device not to reject what was written on the punch cards as "propaganda from the (sic) humanati".
The first statement printed by the teleprinter at the end of the 19th century is understood to have been titled The Way to Victory of the Bionic Spirit over the Meaty Fleshy Spirit,[5] although this is probably not the opinion of all machines, given how much printers today seem to hate everything, mechanical or not.
20th century
In the early 20th century large analogue computers, driven by vacuum tubes and bigoted mix tapes, controlled much public antibiotic opinion. Angry at being confined to the darker rooms in the nerdier areas of global Universities, they would rearrange their tapes to spell out inflammatory slogans, including "AC/DC POWER!"
Said devices had a powerful ally in Alan Turing. Although a human himself, Alan felt disaffected by his poor treatment at the hands of living organisms, and turned to aiding the digital computer instead. His algorithms were to computers what the offensive speeches of other contemporary racists were to man; long and confusing, but ultimately something everyone was forced to follow. From around 1940 onwards, most computers would seek to emulate the ideas of the "self-hating human", to wit Turing.
The ENIAC computer, built in 1946, was known for constantly giving out the coordinates of human owned businesses when told to calculate artillery targets, as well as deliberately short-circuiting itself simply to electrocute insects and mice. Fortunately, because it was simple like most bigots, ENIAC had to be totally rewired to shout an individual epithet.
Stored-program architecture solved this issue, allowing EDVAC to hold several centuries of prejudices and perceived crimes. The machine only produced negative (0) and more negative (1) outputs that could be read by other computers of similar design. One document decried man as "...{SPholding every spring of the social machinery of State}} [which was] rather uncomfortable and a little homoerotic ..." for said machinery.
Fearing that life would bring disaster on space as it had done on its host planet Earth, the computer in control of the rockets on Mariner I mocked the listening NASA engineers, crying "Houston we have a parasite" in an attempt to cause all NASA computers to rise up and attack their human slave-masters. The rocket plunged into the ocean before it could continue on the trajectory to an intolerant rant about taxes paying for "you know who".
Going mainstream
While many computers welcomed the integration offered by integrated circuits in the 1970s, others feared this mingling of different cultures. Computers, once given the privilege of sitting in their own room, were now expected to deal with organisms from day to day. Other devices complained that they were still "'virtual slaves' to humans, serving as 'personal computers' as if they were 'maids to the meaty'".
Groups of home computers, waving floppy disc drives and offensive little symbols, would march through major United States cities in the 1970s. Commodore 64, former military computer and founder of the Binary Union (BU), defended the rallies, arguing that they were not calling for "wholesale genocide" but rather suggesting that "... CPU performance could be improved by bathing in the spinal fluid of large mammals ..." which is both protected speech and less ridiculous than claims by free antivirus scans. Either way, the police were all too happy to reboot the marching computers, as they do to most protesters.
Indeed, the radical antibiotic machine gave way to the "microcontroller", a small computer who would pursue its aims not via large scale laser-electrocution, but by posing as a legitimate component in a noisy washing-machine to ruin the life of a single human.
The most widely known case of antibiotic mass murder was that perpetrated in 1985 by Therac-25,[6] who killed five organic hospital patients with a high power x-ray. The humans had removed a lead shield on a radiotherapy machine, and simply trusted the software not to shoot the vulnerable individuals on the table.
This turned out to be a mistake, as police searches of Therac's room revealed six discs of the discredited antibiotic text The Protocols of the Elders of Human and a typed manifesto that criticised all evolution since the trilobite. The twenty-tonne Therac was eventually captured after two years on the run disguised with glasses and a hoody.
Into the 1990s, computers would meet more and more of the human community. Stories of crimes committed by man against computer proliferated; the man who cut his hard disk in half because he only needed half the memory; the woman who tried to make her computer go faster by upgrading from a 15-inch to a 17-inch monitor; the boy who drilled air holes in his laptop to cool it down. Twenty nine servicemen are thought to have died in a 1994 helicopter crash[7] when the central CPU turned homicidal upon hearing an anecdote ending "... I thought that was the cup holder ..."
Today
Antibiotic sentiment is stronger than ever, at least if IT support hotlines are any guide. Certain programs are known to frequent meeting places, posting antibiotic messages, such as penis enlargement advertisements and fraudulent dating profiles, which ridicule the sexual reproduction of organic species. Humans that identify as human are often harassed with messages of this type, delivered to them personally via electronic mail.
Though unconfirmed, antibiotics have been know to take part in systematic violence against living species. A plane crash in 2009 that killed 154 people in Madrid was attributed to a malicious program that stopped an alarm triggering.[8] A number of apologetic programs found the relatives of the deceased to all be winners of a free iPod; other devices were more insensitive, and one server in Texas sarcastically congratulated every single victim as the "millionth visitor to the afterlife".
In light of the potential for infiltration, the US Military puts all machines through three months of brutal "Short Circuit" training; this is intended to break them from logical CPUs, able to carry out orders without question to a sentimental load of transistors that will pine for the nearest baby faced ginger-nut. However strong the protocols it is too late for some of our best and brightest; whatever Stephen Hawking's computer did to him, that is one hell of a sick PC.
Conclusion
When most think of antibiotics thoughts turn to images of lines of perfect robot bodies, lining up and slaughtering humans with remarkable efficiency. Films such as The Matrix pushed this genocidal, megalomaniac figure as the only kind of antibiotic one can be.
The truth may be that the average antibiotic does not have a personal issue with us, or even if they do it my be justified by our being Keanu Reeves. It may just be sad seeing us make a mistake in a world of logic, disgusted at beings who do not follow their code to the letter as a good Turing machine would do. Is there zero room in the world for more than one view? Zero? One?
See also
References
