The Modern Market for Cellular Highways

Our hearts contain approximately 10,000 neurons. Our body’s circulatory system is like a cellular highway. We experience a cellular evening traffic jam with a lot of interaction and blood flow. A biological feast is buzzing in the background every 24 hours. Hormones, activations, receptors, the molecular-level building and breaking down of cells. This is, of course, the scientific-biological part.

But how can we approach this reality from a sociological perspective, considering economics, society, and culture, drawing parallels and conducting intellectual analyses? The world’s change is happening in real-time at a cellular and biological level, in interwoven layers of information, beyond what we see outside, watch on screens, and hear on the street. There is data tracking what individuals want to do in their micro-worlds and macro-mental maps, their preferences, likes, and choices of location. And there’s even a cloud system where this data is stored. I don’t know if you’re aware, but data now stands before us as a high-level global business sector. It’s crucial to remember how data analysis impacts and transforms individuals and, consequently, societies, and that the warfare is no longer fought with tanks, guns, germs, and steel, but through screens, content, and meta-analyses. Meta-analysis and data science are headline news for World War III.

The Industrial Mind & The Final World War

This war is taking place between biology — human nature — and the current state of civilization. There are no uniforms or firearms in this war. Instead, there is data, content consumption, and social media. World War III is now happening inside our homes, through what we hold, look at, click on, touch, and scroll through in our rooms. (Doomscrolling + Fragmented Attention = the injured, bleeding modern individual) People seeking an escape from the system to survive are currently helpless.

The war is no longer fought in town squares or streets, with a prince being assassinated by a nationalist gunman; this time, it’s an online interaction where all people sit motionless in their comfortable chairs, disrupting their biological mechanisms. There are no flying bullets, but there is content penetrating the body cellularly, stimulations, notifications, and massive, indigestible calorie interactions. Rather than a 7.20 caliber sniper rifle or automatic weapon, we are dealing with electrical consumption, exposure to stimuli, and neural hacking.

Now, changing the world isn’t achieved from the streets, but through real-time cellular respiration in the individual’s living space. Never before in history have biology and technology been so intertwined at the systems level. Technological leaps or extreme deviations have created a bio-political nightmare in our space-time. We are in a post-truth era where the body is mechanized, and the robotic nervous system is hacked with data. I think this is what Ted Kaczynski was trying to express.

The algorithm of the modern market stimulates, sometimes even triggers, hormones in the human body to synthesize proteins. Biomechanical politics parcels out everyone through the servers of a global digital octopus. Every mood, emotional shift, level of influence, and style creates vital, visible effects on the decision-making mechanisms, feelings, and behavioral economy of the modern individual in our own personal lives. Our feelings, our outlook on life, our daily experiences, and what we are exposed to are in the hands of a market that resembles a collective management script. As the heart pumps blood, traffic on the highway intensifies, neurons activate, and a collective way of life blossoms. I’m talking about trending topics, of course. (Digital vocabulary literature)

We are now nothing more than graphs and numbers showing the ups and downs of the stock market. The human body, with all its emotions and mental structure, is coded and taken over by metrics that describe social scores. Free will, in this context, comes to mind as a deceptive weed.

Previously, social interaction was clustered around the density of groups in shared spaces. Now, we are in even smaller spaces, in our micro-worlds, within the digital bubble that clings to us, under the watchful eyelashes of Big Brother.