Brazil's Naturalist Bloc Turns the Augmentation Question Into a Campaign Slogan

SÃO PAULO — The slogan fit on a placard, which was the point. At a rally that filled a São Paulo avenue Thursday night, the resurgent Naturalist bloc reduced the most delicate question of the century to four words a crowd could chant, and chant it did. Their platform — enhancement caps, separate schooling, a registry of the augmented — was for years the concern of clinics and ethics panels. This campaign has hauled it into the open air and given it a beat. Roughly one in twenty humans is now augmented; in Brazil the share is higher and rising, and the bloc has discovered that a fault line which once ran quietly through the labor market runs far more loudly through identity. Enhanced citizens describe the shift in temperature: résumés set aside, landlords suddenly "reconsidering," a coolness in rooms that used to be warm. "They found a word for me and put it on a sign," said an augmented engineer who asked to be named only as Lúcia. Incumbents are trying to hold a middle that thins by the week. A slogan, it turns out, is harder to argue with than a policy. It is not meant to be argued with. It is meant to be shouted.