A Brief Social History of the Zoothesia Protocols

V1 — All human life must be represented in overlays to ensure against social erasure and dehumanization. Guiding Principle: Perception Must Preserve.

Designers observe: animal, plant, and environmental suffering is consistently erased.

V2 — Life, now defined more broadly, must be represented in all overlays.

Designers observe: psychologically overwhelmed, empathy begins to degrade. People become inured to animal suffering.

V2.5 — Attempts to patch this by intensifying signals of distress (bugs screaming underfoot, and so on).

Knock-back effects: teenagers rack up “decibel high scores,” competing to record the most insect screams in a day. Consumer behavior reverts to ease. Official diagnosis: Empathy Callouses.

V3 — First break from the totalizing strategy. Next-gen neuro-interfaces allow robust prediction models to emerge. The Protocols begin experimenting: A/B group perception testing, neurochemical studies, brain-state × violence correlations, increasingly personalized overlay tweaking.

V4 — The first experiments with the erasure of humans lead to 50% decreases in violence, hate crimes, and murder.

V5–10 — Tweaks to the former protocols. Erasure is now far more normalized and happens all the time to a limited number of people. A semi-permanent Nash equilibrium is reached: the Zoo erases as few people as possible (to preserve social empathy) without exposing people to those they are likely to harm (to preserve physical and psychic safety).

V10+ — Self-improvement models begin to outpace human-hand designers. Human involvement becomes primarily maintenance-based. Version history stops here, but the Zoo does not. Terabyte changelogs are published. Summaries are compiled and reviewed. The Zoo moves forward, ever shifting, hiding, and revealing for increasingly less comprehensible reasons.