Nowa Fantastyka Sep 2015
Blog Oct 29 2015
Pick something you hate.
A government, maybe, or a church. Some multinational that treats its customers like shit. Any institution powerful enough to keep people under its thumb, to crush its competition (or at least fix prices with them) so you have nowhere else to go. Something you’d really like to see burned to the ground, although you know that’s never going to happen.
A good example, here in Toronto, would be a telecommunications giant called Bell Canada. (Rogers would also be a good candidate—they suck almost as hard—but I think Bell owns more media.) If you’ve ever dealt with these guys—and you probably have, if you’ve ever watched Canadian TV—the following scenario might warm you up at night:
Gustav runs a cellphone kiosk for Bell. Walking home from work one night, a passing stranger notices the perky corporate logo on his employee polo shirt—and punches Gustav in the face.
Gustav goes down. “Fucking Bell,” his assailant growls, kicking him in the ribs.
Gustav’s no dummy. He knows everyone hates Bell. He knows all about the bandwidth throttling, the extortionate overpriced contracts, the abusive telemarketing and contemptuous customer service, the routine surveillance of customers for the benefit of any government snoop with her hand out. But—“That’s not me!” he cries around a mouthful of broken teeth. “I don’t make those decisions—I just sell phones!”
“It . . . doesn’t . . . matter!” the attacker spits out, emphasizing each word with another vicious kick. “You . . . knew. You . . . chose . . . to . . . work . . . for . . . them . . . .” Eventually he tires himself out and wanders away, leaving Gustav to bleed out on the pavement.
Just a psycho with anger-management issues, you might think if you’re a Bell CEO reading about it the next day. Nothing for you to worry about, even if you did just cut Tech Support’s budget by another 10% because you want a fatter year-end bonus. The peasants will never get to you; you’re safe up here on the 50th floor. Shame about poor ol’ Gustav, though.
But then it happens to Shirley. And then Piotr. And Mahmoud, and George. All those underpaid drones hawking your wares at the local malls are suddenly getting the shit kicked out them by random strangers. It’s the weirdest thing. None of the attackers even have criminal records.
Now no one wants to work for you. Drones quit in droves for fear of being kicked to death like dogs in the street, and not even the unprecedented promise of a decent wage can lure in replacements. Management’s safe—they don’t deal with the public—but how can the top of a pyramid stay standing when the base just up and leaves? Bell has but two choices: go broke, or stop pissing off their customers. For the rest of us, it’s win-win.
Isn’t that a wonderful little scenario? I call it “The Justice Plague,” and I fully intend to write it as soon as I can come up with an actual storyline. So far it’s all premise and no plot.
It’s a terrific premise, though. It hinges on yogurt—more precisely, on the ways gut microbes affect your behavior.
Of course, we’ve always known that your gut affects your mood. But the extent and complexity of those effects is only now coming to light—and it goes way beyond the cramps you get from salmonella, or the tryptophan drowsiness that lays you low after a turkey dinner. It’s not much of an overstatement to say that your gut bacteria are a large part of what makes you you, psychologically. Transfer gut biota from one animal to another, and you transfer personality traits as well.
Think about that. You can literally transplant personality traits via feces. To that extent, we all have shitty personalities.
How does it work? For starters, your gut has a mind of its own: a standalone neural net with the computational complexity of a cat brain (no surprise there—cats are basically stomachs sheathed in fur anyway). Your gut microbes pull its strings by feeding it a complex cocktail of hormones and neurotransmitters; gutnet, in turn, tugs at the brain along the Vagus nerve. (Gut bacteria also have a more direct pipe into the brain via the endocrine system. Most of your brain’s neurotransmitters—half the dopamine, most of the serotonin—are actually produced in the gut.) Via such avenues, your gut bacteria influence the formation of memories, especially those with strong emotional components. They affect aggression and anxiety responses by influencing neuroinhibitors in the prefrontal cortex and amygdala (which is responsible for fear, aggression, and the intensity of one’s response to personal-space violations). You can make rats more or less aggressive by tweaking their gut biota.
You see where I’m going with this. Engineered gut bacteria—spread through shipments of spiked yogurt, perhaps—tweaked to promote violent, uncontrollable rage in their hosts. It’s barely even speculation; rabies does that much, and it’s not even engineered.
The big problem is targeting, of course—how to trigger reflexive aggression at the sight of a specific corporate logo. Corporations actually give us a lot of help here; they spend millions designing logos that are simple, striking, and immediately recognizable. So you could tweak responses in the V1 and V2 areas of the visual cortex—those pattern-matching parts of the brain that identify specific shapes and edges. If you could bend such circuits to your will, you could provoke a response in anyone who saw a given shape.
But it would be a lot simpler to let the brain do all that heavy lifting on its own, targeting instead those circuits that connect a general sense of “recognition” to the emotional response one feels at the sight of a given brand. You’d have to be familiar with that brand for this trigger to work—it keys on feelings of recognition, not the specific geometry of the stimulus—but who doesn’t recognize the logos of major corporations these days? The best part is that all those recognition/response macros are located in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and in the—wait for it—
The amygdala. Back down in the limbic system, where gut bugs already affect aggression.
Why, we might be able to pull this whole thing off without ever leaving the basement. We don’t even have to create the response; just magnify pre-existing resentment and let it off the leash. A thousand, a million disgruntled customers: turned into weapons of mass corporate destruction with a little help from the yogurt industry.
Hey, all you basement biologists. All you DIY Lifehackers.
Looking for a project?
[Postscript 2019: And it took a while, but I finally wrote the damn story. “Gut Feelings” appeared in the Toronto 2033 anthology edited by Jim Munroe, for Spacing Media. Good luck finding it, though.
