When I think about what's bad about the American extended regime, I think of two things:
*The idea that history has stopped happening
*The cult of work
For the first case, I hold up the capitol rioters as an example. Rather than a cool conspiracy to take over Washington from the inside, they took their phones and filmed themselves conduct…
When I think about what's bad about the American extended regime, I think of two things:
*The idea that history has stopped happening
*The cult of work
For the first case, I hold up the capitol rioters as an example. Rather than a cool conspiracy to take over Washington from the inside, they took their phones and filmed themselves conducting a pointless riot. They filmed themselves because they believe that history can't *really* be happening, it has to be conducted behind a veneer of observation and measurement.
The extended version of this is that there's too much "glue" holding everything together, and so nothing interesting and surprising can ever happen. That's why, as a futurist, I find the dialogue surrounding the singularity to be so disappointing. People have been trained to believe that amazing things, like the singularity or indeed the rebirth of Christ, just can't happen because they don't have that film of observation, instantaneously and completely.
The cult of work, on the other hand, consists of the menace of "unemployment" (we have always been at war with Eastasia...) and the glorification of consumption and production. Contemporary unemployment is, in my view, a kind of trickle-down effect wherein there aren't enough good jobs for good working people, and then lazier less competent working people (like myself) have to compete for shit jobs, the competition itself being the shittest part, even though many of us don't need to be molly-coddled by the system and don't want children.
Take Eliezer Yudkowsky's Fun Sequence. This was a series of essays on how an AI could plausibly keep humans entertained, basically. But I find it shocking that anyone needs to be told that. It's the cult of work preventing people from being more like well-rounded people who can entertain themselves and don't need to spend all their time working to be humanely productive.
Also, the dire future predicted by Robin Hanson and his Em economy. Again, the cult of work has pushed out other ideas that would deflate Hanson's evil Ems concept. (For example, what if there's an intelligence trap in the universe that causes excessively intelligent AIs, or people, to kill themselves out of boredom, whereas less stellar AIs and Ems and people find it easier to enjoy life at a measured pace? Or what if there are ideas and "Basilisks" that scare the living shit out of Ems but not ordinary people, again handing the advantage to people who don't want to spend all their time doing miserable work?)
When I think about what's bad about the American extended regime, I think of two things:
*The idea that history has stopped happening
*The cult of work
For the first case, I hold up the capitol rioters as an example. Rather than a cool conspiracy to take over Washington from the inside, they took their phones and filmed themselves conducting a pointless riot. They filmed themselves because they believe that history can't *really* be happening, it has to be conducted behind a veneer of observation and measurement.
The extended version of this is that there's too much "glue" holding everything together, and so nothing interesting and surprising can ever happen. That's why, as a futurist, I find the dialogue surrounding the singularity to be so disappointing. People have been trained to believe that amazing things, like the singularity or indeed the rebirth of Christ, just can't happen because they don't have that film of observation, instantaneously and completely.
The cult of work, on the other hand, consists of the menace of "unemployment" (we have always been at war with Eastasia...) and the glorification of consumption and production. Contemporary unemployment is, in my view, a kind of trickle-down effect wherein there aren't enough good jobs for good working people, and then lazier less competent working people (like myself) have to compete for shit jobs, the competition itself being the shittest part, even though many of us don't need to be molly-coddled by the system and don't want children.
Take Eliezer Yudkowsky's Fun Sequence. This was a series of essays on how an AI could plausibly keep humans entertained, basically. But I find it shocking that anyone needs to be told that. It's the cult of work preventing people from being more like well-rounded people who can entertain themselves and don't need to spend all their time working to be humanely productive.
Also, the dire future predicted by Robin Hanson and his Em economy. Again, the cult of work has pushed out other ideas that would deflate Hanson's evil Ems concept. (For example, what if there's an intelligence trap in the universe that causes excessively intelligent AIs, or people, to kill themselves out of boredom, whereas less stellar AIs and Ems and people find it easier to enjoy life at a measured pace? Or what if there are ideas and "Basilisks" that scare the living shit out of Ems but not ordinary people, again handing the advantage to people who don't want to spend all their time doing miserable work?)
I had a brief thrill thinking Viking Buffalo man was going to pick 435 “rioters”, swear them in, and announce a new Congress.
But that would have been too real.