Please use foodgrade coconut oil when inserting this update!

TL;DR of course sci-fi couldn’t have imagined how cool juggalos are, scifi is mostly written (and MORE importantly gate-kept) by man-babies with incredibly narrow views of reality, fuck sci-fi let’s go hang out with the juggalos…

Honestly other than just extrapolating out what technologies will facilitate the rise of dystopias (while being weirdly obsessed with the aesthetics of dystopias to the point of it being dysfunctional to the objectives of the narrative and fiction) what have sci-fi writers actually meaningfully imagined about the future in the western canon?

For all the mountains and mountains of sci-fi books and tv shows written I am not sure there is actually much to show for it except endless descriptions of how colonization, war and authoritarian power will be facilitated by future technologies (in a way that superficially claims to be subversive but is really just technology porn, politics be damned).

The only western/European sci-fi series of any significant popularity that I think grapples with anything meaningfully human about positive potentials of the future is Star Trek. Other scifis of course accomplish this in parts of their stories, or in peripheral stories and side series, but almost without fail they all circle back to the same 5 things a boomer dude can imagine a society of boring boomer dudes doing who worship technology and talk over women.

Murderbot is dope tho, I don’t say this critique to attack the wave of sci-fi that is written by diverse new authors that subverts the genre, just to say that the old guard of the genre should be trashed and thrown out the window in favor of these new authors who actually treat envisioning the human condition realistically as important…. to writing books about humans in the future…….

….sigh sorry I really think the classic sci-fi genre gets wayyyyyyyy too much of a pass for being a serious genre of art when it is written by a bunch of clowns who mainly used representations of human beings like action figures and G.I. Joe figurines, bending them in brutal and inhuman ways so that they carry out cool action sequences on the living room floor and reference cool technologies that will make their dad notice them and give them a hug for being smart. None of which is wrong unless you are claiming to write literature that illuminates deep things about the human condition with respect to the breadth of future possibilities.

says Pussy riot in the mirror 3 times as the clock strikes midnight

nervously waits (or excitedly? how big exactly is a riot of pussy? Big enough? How many hectares does the average Pussy Riot engulf?)

sigh meanwhile the cop has still probably got a cushy job and probably goes home every night to get drunk and hit their spouse because that is statistically as far as we can tell what 25-45% of cops do based on difficult to predict statistics that rely on cops snitching on their own illegal behavior (so logically it is probably much higher as hard as that is to wrap your head around).

Unfortuantely, I think just about every fan base these days has to deal with its share of racist Trump supporters who steal scrap metal from construction sites for meth money…

If you live in the US (or UK) you live in a collapsing society being suffocated and held in place by neoliberal austerity politics that purposefully shuts down the possibility of any genuine systematic reform that isn’t in the direction of fascism. The US is run by centrists who will spit in your face (while their Republican drinking buddies cheer them on) for daring to suggest populist leftism reforms that would actually improve the quality of life of the working class and poor of the US.

In that environment people are going to resort to taking meth and stealing scrap to survive, as society is literally trying to kill them off and there is no rational hope to be found for things to change. Are these people druggies, are they sketchy? Are some of them maga heads who turn to pathetic and hateful views? Yes, but I think it is important to always recognize the conditions that lead desperate people to act in desperate ways when we discuss the repulsiveness of said desperate acts of non-violent crime.

Maybe the whole point of Monty Python was to sketch out ways that humans could behave that would confuse and hugely throw off machine learning algorithms.

Talk about “poisoning the well” with AI training, all you have to do is 65% of the time make completely normal and rational intelligent choices and the other 35% be completely illogical and inscrutable. Any algorithm trained on you then, no matter how smart you are or how valuable your knowledge is, will inconsistently and abruptly resort to batshit crazy and unreliable choices and information. :)

The thousands and thousands of years we have nurtured sarcasm and absurdism in the garden of human culture has all been for this one true purpose…

I would say maybe John Cleese is an alien trying to save us, but Cleese is a dick no matter how funny the stuff he was involved in was and I would hope Aliens were much more open minded than he is.

Oh thanks! I didn’t even realize factorio wasn’t real!

facepalm silly me

Thank you for the thoughtful response

It’s also kind of interesting to consider the impacts of the biters themselves, they aren’t really a life form, they’re more akin to a bacteria, just on a macro, insect scale. They literally only do something productive for themselves once you get in their way. Their entire evolutionary lifeform is predicated on you being a negative influence on their environment. They consume your pollution, and use it to grow and become stronger. However, left to their own devices they seem to spread across the entire planet, almost like a cancer, just without the consumption of life that is typical, because biters seem to be magic?

I mean I would accept magic, but anything less of an explanation of the biters behavior seems like a problematically reductive view of life.

Even the behavior of bacteria is complex and more nuanced than a cancerous process.

I get that it is a game, but I think these things do matter, especially for computer minded people who want to understand everything as a computer programs and recklessly ignore the reality of the environment around them. Media like this severs the salience of the surrounding landscape to people, and contextualizes it simply as a resource to exploit.

Idk, I mean factorio is amazing, I totally get why people love it, and I know the focus of the game isn’t on this but still…

The Sea Will Claim Everything

https://store.steampowered.com/app/337720/The_Sea_Will_Claim_Everything/

I like factorio but the game never even asks the question of whether destroying an entire planets ecosystem just so you, one person, can get home is ethical or right.

I don’t know, it is a small thing, I totally get why people get addicted to factorio’s gameplay loop not disputing how amazing that is it is just the basic premise of the game makes me uncomfortable in it’s disinterest in the planet you are on being anything but a resource to conquered and consumed or in thinking about how you are actually the villain in this situation from the planet’s perspective.

Please refrain from low effort derisive responses like this when people are having an adult conversation you don’t like, it is childish and makes you look like a fool.

Then how do we most effectively fight wealth inequality along the axis of software, fediverse software in particular?

You can’t drop a mean comment like that and not expand on what you specifically mean by it.

What makes my post brain dead then specifically ?

Yeah I should have been very clear to say that I don’t hinge everything I am saying on the fedidb numbers being literally accurate to any metric, of course they won’t be this is a very complex question and fedidb is a volunteer organization tracking a dizzying constellation of volunteer projects.

Like you said, that doesn’t mean the numbers don’t point to something very real and worth talking about however.

I am glad there are far more Portuguese speakers and Brazilians on the fediverse than the numbers appear to show at first glance! Good to hear even if the numbers are still small.

Keep at it, we can work together and find a solution

I would say with -30 votes and 50 comments that I am clearly not part of this “we”

I think I am done participating here

Oh true you could probably get some sick domains for smaller countries not well represented on the internet (not me I mean someone from that country).

Honestly I think cities are cooler though they feel more local and human than country names to me.

I think that is a fair criticism, I appreciate your honesty and straightforwardness!

Nice mix of mental stimulation and high risk hijinks

Lastly the whole us vs them (colonial powers, oppressors etc etc) might be applicable to a lot of the world, however, garnering support for a cause by making accusations against the fediverse and the current generation of hosts and users does not help. I would advise a more constructive stance in general. If you see people actually being as you describe call them out and tell it like it is by all means, but this was not the way to get the ball rolling.

I am a random fool with an internet connection, I have no power to define anything, and on the contrary I think the only way to get us on the same page is to just came out and say it how it is.

Maybe…? As many have reminded me on this thread, be wary of your kneejerk assumptions.