Thoughts on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

The other day I finished Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, by Phillip K. Dick. I had been reading at a very quick pace, around two chapters/day with a book which is only 168 pages long, and nonetheless even the very small moments still affect me now.

Having been precognitive, Phillip K. Dick had a tremendous ability with producing social critiques of social issues which would arise for decades after. As he described it, Dick would experience events from the Future as if they had already happened, with no real relation to Cause and Effect or linear time. Linear time does follow both ways, following a Thousand Plateaus, meaning that inasmuch as the future influences the present, or the present influences the past, such psychedelic experiences do have metaphysical precedent.

As for ideas in it, the following resonated with me.
1: Technological advancement isn't necessarily a progressive force. Why are new technologies developed? To more easily satisfy human will and desires. What those desires and wills are, however, varies. In our own day, we can see this with NFTs producing new forms of racism, with AI producing new forms of misogyny, with facial recognition technology reintroducing Physiognomy, etc. In DADoES, new advances in space travel and robotics have resurrected material conditions similar to those in the Antebellum South, that being a heavily sentimental, moralistic society with no scruples about the sale and use as machines of fully individuated human persons, and with no scruples about deaths, murders, or collective violence.
2: Also the society in the book's constant fixation on Empathy is uniquely infuriating.

There's a scene where Deckard is administering the Voigt-Kampf Test, that being the official test used to determine whether someone is an android or no; the questions of the test are all charting how closely someone adheres to the setting's arbitrary moral systems (how revolting they find the sight of a boiled lobster, how revolting they find animal furs in clothes, how revolting they find pornography, etc.), and not involuntarily reacting in the correct ways designates someone as an android, which usually results in them being killed. I would fail the Voigt-Kampf test, and probably be shot in this setting, since I find all of the questions in it silly. P. K. Dick perfectly succeeded in making a setting which is passively infuriating and criminogenic.

And all of this fretting about animal rights, Morality, etc., is used to further the subjugation of 1: fully sentient androids, and 2: the disabled. Moral sensibilities are a weapon, and this book perfectly embodies why I avoid them.

Did I mention the books pertinence to Disability Rights?
The main character, other than Rick Deckard, is a truck-driver named John Isadore. Isadore is bound to Earth because he got below an unspecified bracket on a single IQ test, and thereby was designated a 'chickenhead', meaning that he can't legally marry, can't leave Earth, etc.
Throughout the book his whole sense of self is built around being considered vapid or slow by other people, and Isadore has completely internalized this. When you go into the sections where he's thinking to himself, however, Isadore demonstrates a fair ability to analyze data, compare propositions, conduct arguments in his head, etc. Put simply, a number on a test is more important for the people in this setting than the actual person in front of them.
3: This book predicted Retrofuturism.
There's a plot point about how, since the actual reality of living on Mars is completely desolate and tedious, people on Mars will pirate "pre-colonial fiction", that being SF writers like Ray Bradbury and Edgar Rice Burroughs, so that they can continually relive the lost potential which was exploration of different planets.
4: The final chapters were about Rick Deckard, after having killed six androids in a day (killing androids is his job), wandering through the Oregon desert aimlessly, completely directionless and experiencing active religious delusions.
This long hysteriac wandering continues until he finds an artificial toad in the dirt, and happily picks it off the ground, to bring home to San Francisco. I can't help but think of a psychoanalytic example of Fetishism, that being a man who buys a hamster after his wife dies.
He cares for the hamster, and that fixation on the hamster prevents him from mourning, until the hamster dies, and the man experiences a sudden extreme, crushing sadness. So Deckard is doubting his job, his position in the Universe, at a point he says "in fact everything about me has become unnatural. I've become an unnatural self", and then that profound hopelessness is immediately pacified by him finding a toad.
5: About the book's proper heroes, the Nexus 6 Androids:
I like the sense of the Uncanny Valley with the Nexus 6 Androids. They're built to be exactly human in every single way, except that they don't have a self-defense instinct. I wouldn't say they 'don't experience empathy', since plenty of androids care about eachother, it just takes them a while to adjust to being around organic life. I recall a scene in the book where Pris Stratton and Roy Baty, two androids, become curious about how many legs a spider needs to walk, and so Pris cuts the limbs off of a spider until there are only four. It takes them a short while to realize how completely appalled the one human in the room is, and in his case only out of sympathy for the spider.
I also like the parts about Buster Friendly, an in-universe TV comic.
Most humans find his style to be abrasively in-your-face and referential, but Androids will flock around a television or radio playing the Buster Friendly show like pigeons around a slice of bread. Why? Because Buster Friendly is secretly an android, having an android's view of the World, an android's sense of humor, etc. Put simply, their relationship to consumer media provides more earnest connexion than what humans receive through Religion or Empathy Boxes.
6: Lastly, about how it compares to I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream:
I found DADoES a much more profound work of horror and hopelessness than I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, mainly because of how mundane it is.
IHNMaIMS is a glimpse of Hell; the fantastical toybox of an AI incapable of anything other than cruelty. As for DADoES, it's a world where people have jobs, watch television, take care of pets, etc. The horror is in how real the setting is.