Dude, You Broke the Future [video]

There is some light but it's from obscure political ideologies.

Nakamoto's Bitcoin, Yarvin's Urbit, Friedman's Seasteading.*

These seem concerned with the technical debt we have, used loosely.

As the famous Ycombinator talk by Balaji Srinivasan pointed out these kinds of projects have a common theme of starting from first principals.

I blame the stagnation on the rejection of nuclear energy and biotechnology by our society. We built a fine collection of mythological fog stories around each of them, nuclear might produce mutant children and kill us all, biotechnology might produce race/class war (more mutants). Where have all of these misanthropic ideas been cultivated? Hollywood and the Universities. Actually I blame people like Mr Stross for this, the breed of people who decided we had a moral imperative not to support the use of these technologies.

The piles of fissile material, petri dishes and computer circuits don't contain any urge to murder us all. The existential funk started proper I think like yourself, with the failure of Communism, and then a loss of faith in democracy (increasing numbers of non-voters), lots of apathy.

This is why I feel like we should revitalize the old Victorian spirit of exploration, get the body moving, work together in gentleperson clubs (hacker spaces) and that shall produce more optimistic individuals. Then when we toy with new ideas we shall be less so inclined to view them darkly. I'm open to suggestions.

* To Charlie (who will be reading this thread and can tell me exactly what he thinks) I suspect these sorts of possibilities have a whiff of sulfur about them? I'm also curious to know if you've read Nick Land's essays. Context: Yarvin/Land are accusing Mr Stross of the thing he was flaking the transhumanists with, namely that his socio-political (socialist-democrat?) beliefs are a thinly veiled form of Christianity, where original sin is discrimination and paradise is multicultural utopia.

I suppose after a thousand or so years it kind of seeps in everywhere even when it becomes assumed it is on its last legs.

The story of slow moving AI is compelling, but since The Election there has been 24 hour news/outrage coverage of how we're all going to hell ever since - so at least one paperclip maximizer has influenced the motivation to make the talk.

The trouble I think is that nearly everything I can imagine Mr Stross supporting as progress basically backfires because at least half the public will have you for lunch over infringements to liberties. Once you're being tossed between the bulls horns of the left and right it's hard to imagine positive outcomes. At the start of the talk microtransactions were mentioned. That seems like a much better route because it is not partisan in nature.

I think you meant to s/detrimental/fundamental/

There is something in what you say.

I have to say I think this conflation of altright and neonazi is lazy in the extreme. By the media and most posters here.

Democratic socialism has overlapping territory with communism but we wouldn't say Sweden == Soviet Union.

> those ideologies have at their core the idea of resisting cultural and civilizational decline. I personally think their scapegoats, theories, and solutions are all BS but they're getting somewhere because they are talking about the problem.

I find the most incisive statements are to be found among the neoreactionaries and technocommericalists, with Thiel's loosely associated Stagnation Hypothesis being compelling to me.

> The angst comes from the secondary implication that the future is not set and magic will not happen and that we are actually going to have to deal with our problems.

He says "we can't sit and wait for the movie of the future to unfold", it's the same idea.

The ray of light there is that it is put forward that our funk is to do with social changes in how we think or past civilizational technical debt. A good example of that thought from Hollywood is Interstellar.

I feel like it used to be the case that "change how we think can change who we are/what happens" used to come from the left but now it's coming from the right. The right looks at past glories and says we must change to get to something better, the left says it is all terrible and we must prevent anything from going wrong which means everything must stay the same.

There's been a weird role reversal of some sort.

> This will continue and will get worse until people get their heads out of the 20th century and start articulating new visions of the future.

I've yet to hear of an example of that from the left, the utopians have lost faith. I've listed some examples in my other post but like I said to people like Stross they likely smell of sulfur.

> It is an old argument because communism can mean different things.

Actually, it has a very concrete definition. The only thing that's flexible is where will communists move the goalpost when another downside or systemic problem is pointed out.

I'd disagree the political left was interested in dialectical materialism or anything to do with communism. Most of them are interested in a society with elements of socialism (education, healthcare) and capitalism. The reason many of us find doom is that the current administration in the US is blatantly corrupt and enabled by Congress.