Life functions at a premium

We receive apocalyptic reports about the collapse of marine ecosystems. The fishing industry's industrial capacity and wartime technology can track and intercept large fish stocks as they migrate, when they spawn, and where they hide. It's an amazing multimillion dollar industry. I tend to agree that it will soon collapse. But out of that collapse a phoenix will rise, and it will serve as a bellwether for a possible future.

The Japanese love their fish. They hate liberals, tree huggers, whale savers, and green peace meddling in their affairs. In an act of sovereignty they flout all marine laws and take whatever they want from the ocean. So be it. Enterprising Japanese, I suspect, have frozen the embryos of their most beloved fish so that when their stocks do collapse they will have a premium on the fish when they raise and farm the last remaining ones.

It's a matter of patenting life. If the Japanese can patent some element of the process and purport to have restocked the ocean of a given variety of marine life, then they will charge a premium every time it is harvested. The Japanese in this sense are a metaphor for any legitimate, legal entity with the technological prowess and diplomatic pull to push its agenda globally. One possible future has the majority of our staple foods being the property of some commercial entity by proxy. Gone is an abundance of life for all to take. In its stead is the enterprise, which ensures a specific quantity of food and collects a premium anytime that food is harvested. The world becomes its livestock pen. Land-based and marine-based sovereignty becomes a thing of the past.

Will the people rise up? Not if entertainment is free, utterly and unabashedly available and free. We're already championing many methods of simulating the many functions of human enjoyment, from hunter gatherer simulations in a neo-medieval fantasy game environment to sex robots and three-dimensional immersions--we're already developing what might become the givens for human needs attainment.

One possible future has us with all the entertainment options we want and well within reason while life functions--food, reproduction, and health care--at a premium. This reversal of the once taken for granted bounties of life's nutrition and the occupations that harness them will give way to a bee-hive bureaucracy of entertainment. If we lose our tie to the land altogether then we've stepped closer to the simulation of life and experience that is the focus of some many dystopian futures.

I cooked all this up while I stared at what I now considered to be my last two cans of tuna.