The thing is, do the politicians, well connected people, the tech millionaires, and any other people who truly have a say in how things are ran live in the areas that need poop patrol, or in gated communities where such a thing is unthinkable?
The Great Reset and The Man Behind the Curtain
- Thread starter LifeisTiresome
- Start date
CarlManvers2019
Writers Blocked Douchebag
I only went to San Francisco once and that was for a shitty period of shitty tourism wherein more-or-less none of my family was happy
And we didn't see much shit, in part because I think we never went and saw the shitty places that wouldn't exactly be good for tourism and shopping
The Chinese Restaurant was shitty though, then again you Americans may have comparatively shitty taste when it comes to foreign foods, my family members barely believed afterwards that the restaurant was really that highly recommended....yeah no one really enjoyed that whole trip to San Francisco, course it really was my dad who didn't enjoy it, stubbornly sticking to a dumb AF plan that involved spending hours on the road just to see their university which we barely did anything in other than look at the book store
Bassoe
Well-known member
Reminds me of Resilient Accelerationism over on Nationstates, who's been playing essentially the society the Schwabs of the world want and been getting loads of controversy over whether this is great roleplaying or an unrealistic cliché villain.I debated people about this constantly on SB. I proposed a technocratic system almost exactly like the one Schwab and the World Economic Forum are advancing. Eliminate cash, take people out of the countryside, stuff them in the cities, turn the cities into tightly-controlled green arcologies, provide for everyone’s basic material needs while automating away much of labor, and use cybernetics and genetic engineering to make people more docile, more entertained and distracted (with highly immersive VR replacing real experiences) and less inclined towards crime and social unrest.
Every single time I advanced these ideas, people reacted with a deep sense of revulsion and anger. Many called me insane.
I suppose none of them realized that this was exactly what the Elites were aiming for.
...only somehow, the actual sociopathic corporatists manage to be even less practical than the deliberate parody of themselves. The RAs at least acknowledge that their plan won't be popular and try to bribe their way around its unpopularity by making it so compliance yields a higher quality of life than noncompliance, their real-world counterparts are stuck with just propagandizing that it'll be great, 'you will be happy' and thinking that alone will be enough. As though decades of highly public lying hadn't burned all the credibility their propagandists had.Resilient Accelerationist Manifesto said:
Well, it's a bit hard to sell "we will be fine, once you all are gone" to the people they're planning to get rid of.
Not to necro too hard, but... oh my god. It's EXACTLY like that. I keep revisiting that bit of satire and comparing it to what we're actually seeing. Look at the push for "walkable cities" and "mixed-use development".
It's almost like BreadTube-adjacent people are literally championing shit straight out of utopian, pie-in-the-sky TEDTalks and sustainability/degrowth pap straight out of the mouths of Davos technocrat turds and their billionaire buddies.
The whole RA thing about mankind splitting into Homo deus (115+ IQ technocrats and experts capable of thriving in an information economy with lots of automated/zero marginal cost industries) and Homo inutilis (sub-90-IQ menial laborers left sucking fentanyl in the rust belt after their employers were liquidated) is pretty much, word-for-word, what Yuval Noah Harari is all about.
RA is not even satire. It's a documentary.
PsihoKekec
Swashbuckling Accountant
Homo deus would be more like homo midwitus.
It’s actually based on the title of a book, written by, yep, you guessed it, Yuval Noah Harari. He’s a transhumanist and believes that people will soon be made immortal through technology, et cetera.
The greek work huberus covers such thought processes very well.
Times hour glass comes for all of us and I firmly belive all of these transhumanists will die, of course so will the rest of us but that's just the fate of living things we are born, we live and we die and hopefully we have made things less shit for the future.
Homo souless-robot-wearing-the-remains-of-a-human-body-as-a-skinsuit-us.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
Even if through technology, humanity manages to defeat age, we will never be able to make ourselves truly immortal.
Even if we defeat cancer, heart disease, various brain disorders, etc, we will not be able to make ourselves truly immortal.
Because no matter how long your 'natural' lifespan becomes, that just ultimately increases how long you have for some unfortunate accident to kill you. Hit by a car, fall off of a building, a meteor literally falling out of the sky onto your head, sooner or later something will get you.
Actually thinking the subject through will eventually lead you there. Just like it did for me, as a sci-fi/fantasy writer.
Even if we defeat cancer, heart disease, various brain disorders, etc, we will not be able to make ourselves truly immortal.
Because no matter how long your 'natural' lifespan becomes, that just ultimately increases how long you have for some unfortunate accident to kill you. Hit by a car, fall off of a building, a meteor literally falling out of the sky onto your head, sooner or later something will get you.
Actually thinking the subject through will eventually lead you there. Just like it did for me, as a sci-fi/fantasy writer.
It would still have humongous effects on human society, with effective fantasy elf like lifespans and all the implications of it. Sure, people performing dangerous jobs, dangerous hobbies, or just with a habit of doing stupid shit for no reason at all may not get to benefit much from it, but in grand scheme of things it would have society changing effects on the scale of industrial revolution.
>believes
Good point, it's more religion or ideology than rational analysis by the technocrats who pride themselves on their supposed rationality.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
Oh, sure, there'd be massive effects on society. Killing retirement programs dead would be one, the efficiency of 'how long does it take to educate someone, vs how long do they work using that eduaction?' would be much higher, etc, etc.
From a philosophical point of view though, the significant thing here, is that no, this will not make you immortal.
Everybody has at least some impulse to seek eternal life. If they think they can get it through transhumanism, that can have profound impacts on their worldview and behavior. Recognizing it won't work, and in fact cannot work, has a big impact on that.
From a philosophical point of view though, the significant thing here, is that no, this will not make you immortal.
Everybody has at least some impulse to seek eternal life. If they think they can get it through transhumanism, that can have profound impacts on their worldview and behavior. Recognizing it won't work, and in fact cannot work, has a big impact on that.
KilroywasNOTHere
"BEEP!"
On one hand I take comfort knowing that these people have proven they are neither as smart nor as clever as they think they are and they will most likely not succeed in their goals... on the other hand I tremble at the thought of how much damage they will cause trying to implement thier ideas before ultimately failing and falling.
Last edited:
millions of people will be murdered in the name of an impossible utopia, and then humanity rebuilds its culture and values on something less retarded.
Think, for a moment, about how eerily similar the crap we're seeing today is to what I was saying back in 2012 to 2014 on SB (which attracted so much controversy and had Gamesguy up my ass along with half of the moderator team).
I'll go ahead and paraphrase what I said back then in block quotes:
No. Central banks are trying to create programmable and possibly blockchain-based CBDCs that achieve basically the same thing, but only for the poor plebs. The rich want to have giant corporations that hold pretty much all property in trust and force you use your CBDC UBI to pay them rent for it, establishing a neofeudalistic system with aristocrats and serfs. They want to put the genie of the industrial revolution back in the bottle, abolish the middle class, and force most people to live a threadbare existence eating bugs and living in pod hotels.
This is basically something that I considered a nightmare scenario back then, and still do. In fact, this bullshit is exactly what I wanted to prevent.
Yes. They're pushing very hard for servitization for everything. Not just cars, but refrigerators, washing machines, everything.
Yes. Klaus Schwab and the WEF rather openly promote this sort of thing, but they don't give Kate Raworth, Herman Daly, or any of the other people promoting degrowth any credit for the idea.
Yes. Jeremy Rifkin was pushing this back in the day, and he has bent the ear of world leaders.
You could also call this the "Fanfiction.net Economy", in the sense that writers slave away for hours for literally no compensation and write millions of words that people can read for free, forcing traditional book publishers to compete with amateur writers for reader attention. This is also essentially what Klaus Schwab means by the "Fourth Industrial Revolution".
I have to split this post because there are too many vids. Continued in Part 2:
I'll go ahead and paraphrase what I said back then in block quotes:
No. Central banks are trying to create programmable and possibly blockchain-based CBDCs that achieve basically the same thing, but only for the poor plebs. The rich want to have giant corporations that hold pretty much all property in trust and force you use your CBDC UBI to pay them rent for it, establishing a neofeudalistic system with aristocrats and serfs. They want to put the genie of the industrial revolution back in the bottle, abolish the middle class, and force most people to live a threadbare existence eating bugs and living in pod hotels.
This is basically something that I considered a nightmare scenario back then, and still do. In fact, this bullshit is exactly what I wanted to prevent.
Yes. They're pushing very hard for servitization for everything. Not just cars, but refrigerators, washing machines, everything.
Yes. Klaus Schwab and the WEF rather openly promote this sort of thing, but they don't give Kate Raworth, Herman Daly, or any of the other people promoting degrowth any credit for the idea.
Yes. Jeremy Rifkin was pushing this back in the day, and he has bent the ear of world leaders.
You could also call this the "Fanfiction.net Economy", in the sense that writers slave away for hours for literally no compensation and write millions of words that people can read for free, forcing traditional book publishers to compete with amateur writers for reader attention. This is also essentially what Klaus Schwab means by the "Fourth Industrial Revolution".
I have to split this post because there are too many vids. Continued in Part 2:
Part 2:
Yes and No. We are seeing the beginnings of this, with GPT-3 and Stable Diffusion starting to encroach on the territory of writers and artists, even in their primitive, nascent state. People on Twitter are wigging out, complaining about having their art styles and their livelihoods ripped off by AI.
However, in spite of all of this automated productivity, the ruling class still expect people to do drudgery, just without any genuine compensation or upward class mobility. They want a fixed class system.
The key takeaway here is that it's harder to automate trades like being a lineman or a plumber than it is to automate art. You thought you were going to quit your job and be an artist? Hell no. Skynet has you beat.
Yes and No. They're trying to push people towards this with a pandemic virus and massively inflated fuel costs. They let some people work from home, but obviously not all, since plenty of jobs still require your physical presence. The way I pictured this, the VRification of white collar work would make all the services between home and work superfluous, which would mean more on-demand at-home services, like having drones bring you stuff, like the vacuum tubes from the Jetsons.
There's a Metaverse, but Zuckerberg of all people is behind it and everyone hates it.
They are literally trying to buy up farmland (or, in the Netherlands, force farmers off their land) and build factories making goddamn crickets.
Neuralink and DARPA N3, anyone?
They're quite explicit about pacifying people with video games and drugs to prevent mass unrest. Wireheading people Ringworld-style isn't a very big leap from that.
Everyone on SB used to constantly kick my shit in, telling me I was wrong about everything. Well, what the fuck? I got it mostly right. Now where's my fucking cookie?
Kidding aside, I think people mainly just didn't want any of this shit to be true, even though I saw the writing on the wall well in advance.
Offsite backups in the Altered Carbon style are one way around this, but that, of course, gives you the whole Soma problem of a copy walking around that thinks it's you, after you're stone dead.
Another way to avoid death is to put your immortal brain pod in a vault deep underground and spend most of your time remote-piloting an artificial body, but that has its drawbacks, too.
Yes and No. We are seeing the beginnings of this, with GPT-3 and Stable Diffusion starting to encroach on the territory of writers and artists, even in their primitive, nascent state. People on Twitter are wigging out, complaining about having their art styles and their livelihoods ripped off by AI.
However, in spite of all of this automated productivity, the ruling class still expect people to do drudgery, just without any genuine compensation or upward class mobility. They want a fixed class system.
The key takeaway here is that it's harder to automate trades like being a lineman or a plumber than it is to automate art. You thought you were going to quit your job and be an artist? Hell no. Skynet has you beat.
Yes and No. They're trying to push people towards this with a pandemic virus and massively inflated fuel costs. They let some people work from home, but obviously not all, since plenty of jobs still require your physical presence. The way I pictured this, the VRification of white collar work would make all the services between home and work superfluous, which would mean more on-demand at-home services, like having drones bring you stuff, like the vacuum tubes from the Jetsons.
There's a Metaverse, but Zuckerberg of all people is behind it and everyone hates it.
They are literally trying to buy up farmland (or, in the Netherlands, force farmers off their land) and build factories making goddamn crickets.
Neuralink and DARPA N3, anyone?
They're quite explicit about pacifying people with video games and drugs to prevent mass unrest. Wireheading people Ringworld-style isn't a very big leap from that.
Everyone on SB used to constantly kick my shit in, telling me I was wrong about everything. Well, what the fuck? I got it mostly right. Now where's my fucking cookie?
Kidding aside, I think people mainly just didn't want any of this shit to be true, even though I saw the writing on the wall well in advance.
Offsite backups in the Altered Carbon style are one way around this, but that, of course, gives you the whole Soma problem of a copy walking around that thinks it's you, after you're stone dead.
Another way to avoid death is to put your immortal brain pod in a vault deep underground and spend most of your time remote-piloting an artificial body, but that has its drawbacks, too.
Last edited:
I honestly think that all falls apart the whole grand plan when they sit down and realize only one of them gets to be the ceasar of the new global empire they want to build.
That's also when the bodies of people who once thought themselves untouchable hit the floor enmass.
That's also when the bodies of people who once thought themselves untouchable hit the floor enmass.
Terthna
Professional Lurker
A lot of good can still come from the pursuit though. At the very least, I'd rather die instantly at the age of 155,473 from getting crushed by a falling meteor, than slowly over the course of months from cancer within the next forty or so years.
One way to look at it is if one believes in the existence of a soul, something that exists beyond our physical forms, then the copy is you; in the same way that the original is you, from the perspective of your soul. Essentially, the copy is your soul's alt account in the MMO of life.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
I'm a sci-fi guy. I'm all for technology continuously improving our material quality of life.
I just also recognize it cannot solve our non-material quality of life issues.
Terthna
Professional Lurker
Not until science advances well beyond what we're currently capable of conceiving. Who knows what will be possible in, say, 100,000 years.