The Fantasy and the Cyberpunk Futurism of Singapore • Hacker News Board

Re: The Fantasy and the Cyberpunk Futurism of Singapore

#41

Post by api » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 8:57 PM UTC

serf wrote: post #30

api wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Singapore is in my opinion the world's scariest dystopia. There are many dystopias, but few of them are anything but. Nobody moves to North Korea, and the dystopian aspects of other less thoroughly awful places are things everyone complains about and few want to copy. Singapore is scary because it's a dystopia with many desirable characteristics. It's a dystopia with curb appeal, one that could be sold to people. The…

>Singapore is scary because it's a dystopia with many desirable characteristics. It's a dystopia with curb appeal, one that could be sold to people. that's exactly my impression, too. My friends tell me how great the food is, and how clean the area is; meanwhile i'm thinking about caning laws and drug executions -- this tells me that Singapore has enough appeal that some folks can sort of breeze past the really grim…

There are a lot of people from SF on here. I think that's part of what powers HN's wing of totalitarian utopians. SF is itself a dystopia, an open air psychiatric hospital that is simultaneously unaffordable and smells like piss. People need to realize though that SF is a bubble and that its problems are as strange as its virtues. SF is not only dysfunctional but peculiarly so, and its disease is not common elsewhere. I call it "the world's only six figure slum."

I find utopias scary in general. Not only do they always have a mass grave or a gas chamber hidden away somewhere, but even without considering the underbelly they sort of by definition represent a local maximum.

Studying evolution and AI/ML made me fear the local maximum as an existential danger. It's one of my Fermi paradox speculations. Maybe it's easier to create a utopia than to build a starship. Find a local maximum, get stuck, and wait for a black swan. A utopia is a luxury lounge waiting room for extinction.

I can't see a society like Singapore settling Mars or sending the first probe to Proxima Centauri. I'll take my junkies, batshit crazy politics, and litter on the streets. Just give me good music and spaceships plz. God (and who knows what else... Cthulhu f'tagn!) bless the USA.

I wonder if the local maximum evolutionary dynamics of a utopia isn't the reason they always have a mass grave or two. Evolution has natural mechanisms to escape local maxima (search phrase: evolution of evolvability). The local maximum must therefore be enforced. Life has to be actively held there. "Smile or die."

Re: The Fantasy and the Cyberpunk Futurism of Singapore

#42

Post by Barrin92 » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 8:58 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #35

Mizza wrote: post #6

Singapore is a weird place. During the flight, the stewardesses walked around and handed everybody something - I was expecting a wet towel, but in fact it was a card in multiple languages which says "If you are about to bring any amount of drugs into the country, you are going to be executed." Lovely first impression to set the tone. Other than the omnipresent paranoia, the thing that struck me as the most bizarre is…

"Disneyland with the Death Penalty" (1993): https://www.wired.com/1993/04/gibson-2/ Thinking about the area, haven't the majority of Far East countries since independence been effectively one-party states? Some have been "democratic", but with the same party winning the elections every time. Singapore and South Korea could be seen as examples of successful "planned economies", but from a rightwing-authoritarian point…

it's also quite funny how Singapore generally avoids language such as "planned" or "state owned", and rather refers to its many state owned businesses as "government-linked", it reminds me a little bit of Palantir's "forward deployed engineers". It's no wonder that Gibson has come up a lot in this thread because that kind of Blue Ant-esque language is all over Singapore and this strange fusion of government and private power that you see in places like Singapore.

Re: The Fantasy and the Cyberpunk Futurism of Singapore

#43

Post by JimDabell » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 9:05 PM UTC

Mizza wrote: post #6

Singapore is a weird place. During the flight, the stewardesses walked around and handed everybody something - I was expecting a wet towel, but in fact it was a card in multiple languages which says "If you are about to bring any amount of drugs into the country, you are going to be executed." Lovely first impression to set the tone. Other than the omnipresent paranoia, the thing that struck me as the most bizarre is…

> Other than the omnipresent paranoia, the thing that struck me as the most bizarre is that almost nothing in the country is oriented around children.

I’ve been living in Singapore for a year and don’t really understand what you are talking about with either of these things.

Singapore is one of the safest places in the world – people go running alone at night without a second thought, you see young kids wandering around unaccompanied, violent crime is low, etc. Just last night I saw three kids who weren’t even teenagers cycling past me from the beach with fishing gear after dark. I don’t see any "omnipresent paranoia", if anything it’s the complete opposite. What paranoia did you see?

As far as being oriented around children, there’s playground equipment in all the parks and condos, kids pools in the condos, there’s a bunch of family-friendly things all over the country to see and do, the government has all kinds of incentives for people to start families, etc. What do you think is missing?

Re: The Fantasy and the Cyberpunk Futurism of Singapore

#44

Post by lordnacho » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 9:26 PM UTC

dehrmann wrote: post #29

rashkov wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder, would there be an opportunity to flush any substances down the toilet, at that point? Sounds like a potentially terrifying situation, considering the number of stories I’ve heard from friends and family about accidentally flying with marijuana that they were unaware of was left over in a backpack or whatnot.

I know someone who accidentally brought a joint into Singapore but wasn't caught. The thresholds seem high enough that there aren't random tourists getting hung over it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misuse_of_Drugs_Act_(Singapore... I also wonder what would happen if you declare the drugs. Would they assume good intent (because you declared the drugs), and let you surrender them without penalty?

A friend of a friend wasn't so lucky. Went to Thailand, had some drugs left over, forgot to dump it.

Executed.

Re: The Fantasy and the Cyberpunk Futurism of Singapore

#45

Post by Mizza » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 9:35 PM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #44

dehrmann wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know someone who accidentally brought a joint into Singapore but wasn't caught. The thresholds seem high enough that there aren't random tourists getting hung over it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misuse_of_Drugs_Act_(Singapore... I also wonder what would happen if you declare the drugs. Would they assume good intent (because you declared the drugs), and let you surrender them without penalty?

A friend of a friend wasn't so lucky. Went to Thailand, had some drugs left over, forgot to dump it. Executed.

Woah. Can you elaborate a bit on that? What drugs? How did he get caught? Did his nation try to intervene on his behalf?

Re: The Fantasy and the Cyberpunk Futurism of Singapore

#46

Post by macando » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 9:55 PM UTC

bitwize wrote: post #34

ordinaryradical wrote: post #23

And for those of you that want the greatest novelist of cyberpunk, William Gibson, and his take on Singapore, "Disney Land with the Death Penalty."[1] [1] https://www.wired.com/1993/04/gibson-2/

I love how Gibson compared it to Stephenson's burbclaves, which to me is like the literary equivalent of a famous musical artist singing the "Weird Al" Yankovic version of their own song (which has also been known to happen).

Which artist did that?

Re: The Fantasy and the Cyberpunk Futurism of Singapore

#47

Post by tuatoru » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 9:59 PM UTC

serf wrote: post #32

noobermin wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You actually need to see where people live, hdbs to see schools, playgrounds and such. The low fertility rate is common amongst developed countries. On the other hand, the government has explicit policies to encourage marrying, like not offering hdbs to single people under 35. You certainly won't see families if you don't leave the downtown area. I'm implying two weeks isn't representative of the city as a whole. The…

>The low fertility rate is common amongst developed countries. The point of the parent comment is that Singapore's fertility rate is markedly lower than other developed countries.[0] It's beyond the common average. In any other data set, the extreme outliers would be considered abnormal -- a fertility rate that low is not common among developed countries. [0]: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbo…

The gap in reproduction rate, number of daughters per woman, is probably even larger, now that sex selection is routine in Asian countries.

Re: The Fantasy and the Cyberpunk Futurism of Singapore

#48

Post by dehrmann » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 10:07 PM UTC

Mizza wrote: post #45

lordnacho wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of a friend wasn't so lucky. Went to Thailand, had some drugs left over, forgot to dump it. Executed.

Woah. Can you elaborate a bit on that? What drugs? How did he get caught? Did his nation try to intervene on his behalf?

Yeah, I'm going to call BS.

Thailand has executed 3 people since 2004[1]. One was a robbery gone bad. The two in 2009 were drug traffickers with $1M in meth from arrests in 2001[2]. I couldn't find a source, but their names look Thai.

Apparently a bunch are waiting to be executed, though.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Thailand

2: http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Bangkok,-drug-traffickers-exe...

Re: The Fantasy and the Cyberpunk Futurism of Singapore

#49

Post by sfifs » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 10:39 PM UTC

Mizza wrote: post #6

Singapore is a weird place. During the flight, the stewardesses walked around and handed everybody something - I was expecting a wet towel, but in fact it was a card in multiple languages which says "If you are about to bring any amount of drugs into the country, you are going to be executed." Lovely first impression to set the tone. Other than the omnipresent paranoia, the thing that struck me as the most bizarre is…

> that almost nothing in the country is oriented around children

As I'm actually living in Singapore for several years with a small child, i find this comment quite strange. I've lived in and visited many cities in the world and would be hard pressed to find any place more child friendly or with a variety of experiences oriented for Children - lots of it for free. Walks and Trails, Parks, Arts and crafts, Libraries, free concerts and performances almost every other day, beaches. Every residential locality as several parks and playgrounds, even the commercial districts has play areas for kids (often free) if you research a bit.... Kids ride free till age 7 on public transport and i see 10 year old kids go to school by public transport by themselves. There's no way I'd feel safe doing that in any other city in the world I've lived in or visited.

On your other comment, that's actually how many Asian cities have evolved. In Mumbai and Chennai where I've lived before, there will be an area you go to buy electronics (still true for components), another area with marble shops, yet another for flowers etc etc

Re: The Fantasy and the Cyberpunk Futurism of Singapore

#50

Post by mnky9800n » Sat, Aug 01, 2020, 10:45 PM UTC

Mizza wrote: post #19

rashkov wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder, would there be an opportunity to flush any substances down the toilet, at that point? Sounds like a potentially terrifying situation, considering the number of stories I’ve heard from friends and family about accidentally flying with marijuana that they were unaware of was left over in a backpack or whatnot.

You would have to use the airplane toilet. Immediately after stepping off the plane, you are scanned by some kind of scanning IR(?) camera, which I assumed was looking for drugs. I actually had some vitamins in a baggie which I was shitting bricks about, but the actually immigration point was very polite and chill, much moreso than, say, JFK.

I travel internationally a lot for work, well I used to anyways, lol. Going to America is always the worst experience. It's longer from point a to b, there's more security theater, and I always get some snide remark from the border crossing person about being an American not living in America.