The Khala, the sacred union of all the thoughts and emotions of
the Protoss race. Sounds familiar doesn’t it? I don’t know about you but it
sounds to me like social networking on overdrive. The Khala is where one can
not only access knowledge but also feel the very emotions of all those
connected to it. Consider when the phase-smith Karax said he felt blind without
the Khala's light, he could no longer access the memories and knowledge of all the
other phase-smiths before him. Imagine losing all educational content on the
internet and then you can fully appreciate his situation. So how is feeling emotions
akin to social networking? Think of it like this: I can actually feel your
emotions as opposed to gauging it by reading your hash tags.
The Khala stores
the wisdom and knowledge of all the great commanders who ever lived. Rohana
advises you by comparing your decisions with that of other commanders before
you. How cool would it be if we could have access to the knowledge and wisdom
of the greatest of our kind? We could then
take seek their counsel. This would allow us to ask for opinions from people
who have faced similar situations before. We could theoretically ask Einstein
to help us fill the gaps of our current understanding of the universe.
Once a Protoss dies he lives on inside the Khala. Think of this kind
of living as uploading your consciousness to the internet. We could see history
played out through their eyes. Somewhat like the animus in Assassins Creed.
I want you to
consider the storyline of Starcraft LoTV for a moment and bear with me as I try
to draw parallels. (Oh and spoilers ahead). In the storyline we see that Amon
has corrupted many protoss by using the Khala. Could something similar happen
to us? In the distant future we will have microprocessors embedded in our brains
that will function like the smartphones of today. This will allow us to create
a synthetic Khala of sorts. Now suppose a virus invades the internet and turns us
on each other. The virus deviously switches the function of the like and
dislike buttons. This causes whatever we click as a like to register as a dislike
and vice versa. All jokes aside, can such a virus truly control our bodies
against our will? I believe it can. There is TED video where a person controls
another’s limbs via the internet. If one expands on this, one can assume that
the virus can take control of our bodies. There you have it Amon is a “maester”
virus.
In the ending sequence, Artanis asks the Protoss to free
themselves from the Khala and hence from Amon’s grip. Could this be the
blizzard writers telling us that we need to disconnect from social networking?
To stop it from influencing what we do and think. To become individuals like
the Dark Templar (See what I did there? I asked you to sever yourself from the
hive mind), who think and respond in an unbiased fashion. Who do not simply
move in a crowd or stick to tradition.
I have watched the video of Mat Pat arguing that humans are more
like the Zerg. I happen to feel that we resemble the Protoss more.
En Taro Tassadar, En Taro Artanis and En Taro Zeratul.
Tldr: I argue why we are like the Protoss and why the Khala is a
more advanced form of the internet.
