Advances in biotechnology and micro-robotics have shrunk the industrial base of society down to the scale where anyone can make almost anything. With self replicating matter printing systems, and adolescent with a biological printer and laptop becomes a species level threat. Additionally, such systems place an unprecedented burden of self control on their users, who are now free to satisfy any psychological desire. It is for these reasons that the anti-transhumanist society has classified self replicating microscale and nanoscale biological robotics as a third order narcotic (first order being simple drugs, and second order being mechanical modifications of the mind and sensory hacking). Third order narcotics are technologies and concepts that impair, subvert, and eliminate traditional limitations within which the human reward system is evolved to operate, and therefore represent an existential threat to our society.

Proponents of self replicating nanotechnology point out that if you scale down the industrial base of society to the point where it can reproduce like a biological entity, the means of manufacturing will be decoupled from the global power networks and hence immune to their vices. The social and financial media have become sufficiently complex to support replicators which undergo Darwinian selection. It has been argued that the entire anti-transhumanist movement is the physical manifestation of these semi-sentient financial derivatives, which have organized their human components in a struggle for survival.

Human progress : first it was exponential, then climate change brought it down to linear, until our energy capture capacity brought everything to a slow and final halt. It took hundreds of years past the third world war to finally reach our carrying capacity. It is a state in which we let all go to waste, smothered and drowned in petrochemical human excrement. We re-engineered the entire planet to support our ever increasing population. The mass extinction is old news, but don't worry, we've digitally preserved their DNA. You can enjoy the new holographic virtualization of ecosystems lost. It is as good as the real thing, except they never reproduce the smell quite right, the older people say. We lost the medicinal wealth of the tropical ecosystems, but thats ok, we aren't really biological anymore anyway. Life is not dead: vast orbiting supercomputers simulate the hypothetical evolution of a planet without us.

"Forget Jurassic Park, forget digging through fossilized and shredded remnants of DNA. With modern informatics algorithms and the vast database of genomes gathered by robotic sequencers, we are able to travel back in genetic time. We can statistically infer the genome of any common ancestor of any surviving group of organisms. We can even tell you the structure of extinct viruses, when said viruses were last contagious, and how deadly they were at the time. If a rouge state should gain access to our servers, they would have the ability to resurrect the greatest plagues in the history of life on Earth."

"Everyone experiences the Link differently. We will try to get the patch into a primary or secondary sensory cortex, but it's never perfect. It will take some months getting used to. Once you become familiar with your own personal cognitive manifestation of the Link, I'm told the boys have a sort of language worked out for communication. Subjects tell us that the experience is inarticulable in conventional means of communication. Most of they guys who attempt to describe it just produce an incoherent sequence of words. None of us can tell you what to expect, you will have to learn intuitively."

"What the boys in the lab tell you is all crap. Linkage is like talking to God. The first time it opened for me, it the whole room wavered and spun like 600 mics of LSD. I heard these voices. I felt the presence of the dead. I swear to you, I saw my dear departed mother. So sit down and enjoy this, because once the Link integrates it's part of you, and you won't hear those angels no more."

• Deep brain stimulation mood modulation dependence
  
• High bandwidth dependence
  
• Extrasensory agnosia
  
• Implant induced sensory agnosia
  
• Neural-crosslink co-dependence
  
• Neural crosslink severence syndrome
  
• Neural autolink and crosslink rejection
  
• Metacortex control inversion ( AI brain takeover )
  
• Metacortex dis-integration syndrome
  
• AI and metacortex dependence syndromes
  
• External control loop dependencies
  
• Implant polymer rejection
  
• Metacortex link agnosia
  
• Viral gene vector modified tissue rejection syndrome
  
• Hive dependence
  
• Hive incompatibility disorders
  
• Fractional personality disorder ( form of hive dependence )
  
• Fluorescent modified tissue tattoo rejection ( boring dermatological condition )
  
• Neural cross-link dependent epilepsy
  
• Spurious artificial consciousness ( software bug )
  
• Augmented reality dependence
  
• Artificial neuromodulator malfunction
  
• Malicious external control of artificial neuromodulator
  
• Metacortex security compromised

"In retrospect, it was a natural progression. The counterculture was rapidly exhausting existing intoxicants, and the creation of new drugs took a considerable amount of expertise and luck. Even then the compounds were course, imperfect, and not without side effects. Ultimately, the desire for increasingly novel experiences drove the use of neuroscience toward recreational purposes. Those individuals who would have formed roving bands of homeless hippies in the 60s now form rouge "research groups," largely outside the reach of law or even rigorous science, who's subject of investigation is of course entirely their own minds, and who's objective is undefined."