I take exception with the mixing of the stone cold fact that we’re all stardust with all that other crap.
It is good to be able to vape some weed and watch beautiful videos about amazing mind-blowing shit that actually exists, and not automatically entertain whatever magical/religious/supernatural idea is making the rounds in your neck of the woods.
Post scarcity is kind of an odd man out here. The idea predates tech broism by a solid half century, and informs a lot of contemporary leftist theory. There is nothing inherently wrong with using utopian thinking as a guiding principle for iterative policy. I’d argue that anything which doesn’t do that is cynicism.
It occurs to me that I’d argue we’re heading towards a forced scarcity society rather than post scarcity. That’s the only way they can make sure we don’t get a Star Trek type future if/when we figure out fusion power. Hell, we’ve already basically been able to feed everyone for ages.
We aren’t heading towards that. We’re already in a forced scarcity society, and have been for at least 25, if not 30 years. That’s why all these “economic bubbles” keep happening. The ultra rich worldwide have hoarded $350,000,000,000,000 at the expense of the other 8,000,000,000 people. Maybe 5000 people have more than $50,000,000 in personal wealth. Not only do they have nothing to spend it on, they keep throwing trillions of dollars into the latest dumpster fire of an “investment,” so they don’t have to pay $0.01 to anyone that isn’t them.
If we killed the obstructions to progress and innovation, who are nothing but leeches, then we may have to kill 5000 people, but everyone in the world would be able to have a $400,000 stake in The Sovereign Fund for Humanity’s Poor, paying out an average of $20,000 a year per person while reinvesting 95% of the ROI. When you’re dealing with 100’s of Trillions of dollars, I have no idea what ROI % you could reasonably maintain, but 13.5% would mean that everyone on earth doubles their fund, and therefore their yearly payout every 7.8 years.
It would take around 500 years to finally give the richest people in the world their trust fund, but that’s far faster than our ancestors thought that utopia and UBI could happen, and none of them could have more than $50,000,000 in personal wealth. The poorest get their funds first so that the economy can grow quickly enough to hit an economic singularity.
Artificial scarcity is definitely nothing new. Look at the diamond industry, for example. Diamonds are common as hell, but they regulate the supply so severely in order to sell these cheap chunks of carbon for thousands of dollars.
If there’s no competition in a market willing to race others to the bottom in terms of price, there’s no incentive to actually produce a reasonable amount of something people want. You can just withold supply and charge way more.
Or just the fact that grocery stores throw away thousands of tons of perfectly edible food every day while there are people dying of malnutrition. They aren’t starving, they are being starved.
Diamonds
So we need cultured post-scarcity, the lab-grown stuff
forced vs post scarcity
tbh i’m happy whenever someone at least acknowledges the tension between these two facets.
anyway my actual point, imo the “too many humans” propaganda is part of the forced scarcity lobby. there’s perhaps too many humans to live as wastefully as we are, so why wouldn’t reducing waste be our #1-3 top priorities?
but waste is more ‘profitable’ (in short term), so we go all in - while pretending Us Living & Others Not-Living is a moral obligation on our part wtflol
There is also nothing inherently wrong with “optimization” and “automation”. It’s just that they are buzzwords and how the tech bros approach these topics.
While post scarcity is excellent and I do believe it is possible in theory, it’s used as a buzzword to handwave away all the dystopian things being pushed.
I choose death
Depending on how serious you are:
Choose weed instead
Or the crisis line. You probably already know where to find it. Help is available. You do not have to suffer alone. I love you homie.
He’s an assassassin. He never said the death was his own…
The asses are never safe
They be assin’
Or the crisis line.
What happens is that they “triage” you, where depending on how you answer their script you get cops at your door and a trip to hell on earth, or you are on hold for 20 minutes to speak with someone who also is reading a script and doesn’t give a rats ass about you.
Maybe states that aren’t Oklahoma have mental hospitals which are preferable to drinking yourself to sleep, but who knows.
Just kidding, unless given that exact choice lol. Weed has been a great help this year. Love you too fam, appreciate the thoughtful comment.
“Everyone and everything will end in my lifetime. I’ll be here to see it all crumble just before I am incinerated in the blast.”
is another popular escapist fantasy.
No one wants to believe they’ll just have to hobble through a slow and painful decline.
im not even joking i will sooner become a shaman that lives in the middle of the woods than a techbro im so done with tech i swear
Option 3:
Weed Wizard
Option 4: “The revolution is coming and my chosen ideology will rise from the ashes.”
Option 4:
Autistic Neo-Pagan
We are all stardust though. Billion-year-old carbon.
yes but do you consider that important in any way? if you do you are closer to the person on the left
I would say it is a neutral fact.
Imo there is no meaning to life, everyone decides for themselves what to live for.
If someone likes the fact that we are made from starstuff, why yuck that yum specifically? It is kind of a nice perspective to take sometimes when life gets stressful.
It is also a part of a nice song by Joni Mitchell and a nice speech by Carl Sagan, both people I admire, but not something I think about a lot…
I have met the guy on the right irl. He was unbearable
Stellaris players: How it feels to have a Spiritualist empire on one side of your border and a Materialist empire on the other.
This is so overwhelmingly hyperbolic I’m not sure what to take from it
we will make global anarchy by tomorrow. no more money, capitalism and suffering, trust
The thing about Anarchy is that, for many people, the cashless society where you own nothing and are fully removed from the machine of industry is already here. Its just called “poverty”.
The problem is that this kind of poverty isn’t equally distributed. You’ve still got this large, heavily armed occupying force that preserves money, capital, and the painful prodding of induced productivity for everyone else.
I choose neither, and instead day dream about fully automated luxury gay space communism, knowing I’m gonna die before such a thing could ever come to fruition.
We scoff at them both, but seriously pick one and get comfortable, looking reality right in the butt-cheeks is bad for the soul.
Legitimately why I picked up tarot reading though. I needed an introspective mindfulness activity. I used to do cognitive behavioral therapy with spreadsheets. It was informative but exhausting. I think it gave me a good set of foundational concepts, but realistically humans are just fundamentally meant to surround themselves with pretty rocks while talking about how much they personally relate to shared culturally inherited stories. And I just love explaining Gnosticism to people in the most chaotic way possible.
Stop looking at the cheeks, grit those teeth, and give that anus a good gander.
(Full disclosure: I am not a therapist, but it’s good advice.)
Basically the dark shadows of the Hippy Age Of Aquarius and sandal-wearing tech Utopianism corrupted Into evil by the baby boomers ageing into the dominant political class in the West.
At this point they basically have all the money and all the votes that they need, not to mention the cognitive dissonance they are capable of withstanding is absolutely INSANE
