Twas’ a purposely opaque statement. Pythonesque in intent.
So we can have robots, ie people just like us--which is socially and culturally..a dead thing. No differences = death, dead things.
Or suffer from the barbs and intrusion of individuals. Suffer the differences and be alive. So one cannot recognize the shape of even one thing ...or even ’be’... without the existence of fundamental differences. Differential is the fundamental of reality.
Between the goalposts of identical vs chaos, humans meander in their lost little ways, seeking perfections in unity if they are fools, and happy mediums of not quite manageable difference..if they understand some of the issues at hand. Being comfortable is loosely equatable to being dead. Too much chaos disallows coherence, so that’s the same as dead. Dead in -and as- a sea of noise.
Somewhere in the middle is the road of life.
Oh yes, critically, exploitation requires, on mass levels..it requires commodification of the target. Commodities are dead things, unchanging things. Manageable things. Or it can be achieved via injection of Chaos. Tie humanity to one goalpost or the other. In each motion they become commoditized and manageable. Keeping people out of the middle and out of reasoning- is key.