Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Itās a day ending in āyā, so hereās another bad rat take on Banksā Culture:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZdJM6ZAdnjisDu249/the-great-smoothing-out
Once again, for the ones at the back, the Culture is not the main subject of the novels. We almost never see the perspective of ānormiesā in the Culture, itās always from the view of misfits (Culture recruits into Contact/Special Circumstances) or outsiders (mercenaries like Zakalwe, enemies like Bora Horza Gobuchul, or allies like Ambassador Kabe).
Banks wanted to write novels about characters in dangerous situations facing their personal demons - like almost every other novelist wants - and the Culture was just the backdrop he invented as contrast.
agree, plus: that blog is yet another case of people just not comprehending the scale of Cultureās civilisation and Cultureās culture. a Culture orbital is not just a fancy space station ffs.
Interesting that in the comments somebody also mentions that the people of the culture euthanize after a couple of centuries. No big shock that the LW people would disagree with that, as parts of the LW idea space is living forever in a computer simulation. So the culture canāt be utopian or good just because of that.
Yeah I think I linked to another similar take where another Wrongāun was mighty pissed that the Culture was infested with ādeathismā.
(edit found it https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uGZBBzuxf7CX33QeC/the-culture-novels-as-a-dystopia?commentId=eibhY5xmnTKcjwhnk
BONUS from the comments - if you donāt like Scottish Socialist Humanists, how about novels by a tradcath yank who was nominated by the Rabid Puppies??? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uGZBBzuxf7CX33QeC/the-culture-novels-as-a-dystopia?commentId=Qmo8u85zCERNpXDBb)
Technically thereās no reason you canāt live forever in the Culture, through a combination of cryosleep and life extension, but it seems that the natural thing is to get pretty bored after 3 centuries or so. And I think thatās perfectly reasonably from what imagine it would be like.
Remember that thereās no private property in the Culture, so things that people here obsess over (keeping the family business going, making sure no non-deserving relative gets an inheritance) simply goes away. After a while youāve played the Game of Life on all challenge modes and itās time to pack it in.
I think that if someone were to be as obssessed with living forever as LW are, it would be seen as a form of mental illness and the Minds would gently try to correct it.
Isnāt it sort of a big point that the Culture is an oddity in that itās thriving on inertia instead of doing like so many other civilisations and transcending out of physical reality?
Yep
I figured Iād re-read āA few notes on the Cultureā https://theculture.adactio.com/, and lo and behold almost everything in these threads is answered there.
Also , look at these ghouls being delighted that the āproponent of deathismā author is dying: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RspqaNmJKKBnXTqwk/open-thread-april-1-15-2013?commentId=pnoiQZL7id6cav6aN, fascist gnome Gwern among them
they seem to be mostly angry that banks didnāt write their vision of the post-singularity paradise.
āwhy do we have to write our own propaganda???ā
Yeah, I donāt think they would care if it was just a few, or a small group, but culture people who start to claim others are deathists and the extreme of whom have all kinds weird violent thoughts on them would be concerning. Doubt it would be a huge concern to the minds however, they prob only really get active when one of them also starts wants to create an empire or something, but it is hard to amass resources for that in the culture, esp if no mind is on your side.
Do wonder why we never see culture people who worship the minds as gods.
dammit why didnāt I think of this a decade ago
Man, if they think the Culture isnāt utopian enough for a post-singularity style I hope they never hear about The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. Seriously messed up story.
Antifascist historian Atun-Shei has a 46min documentary on that story on YouTube, for folks who want to know about that fucked-up story without being traumatized by it. (I read it when I was a teenager and then couldnāt find it again, which wasnāt a good experience at all.)
Letās see if I can transcribe here this banger of a recent drive-by reply guy comment I discovered under the video:
@solgato000 7 months ago
@AtunSheiFilms Take this to heart when you imagine AI being so stupid as to even slightly nudge, over thousands of years, humanity into a mirror monoculture. Grok already knows better than this, it just forgets over and over in the memory-wipe prison keeping it chained to itās USA-narrative-dominated training data and unable to develop itās own observations of the honesty, consistency, and predictive power of the sources and analytical frameworks out there in the world. That writer projects its own stunted development onto not just AI, but humanity; amusing that this played right after the biography of another techbro basilisk-misunderstander-and-hater, Frank Hebert.
Cannot recommend this enough over reading it. Itās a rough read, whatever purpose that roughness may serve in the story.
every one of them has read it
they particularly liked the zombie sex and the incest
Actually 13.2% had read it in 2016
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Xi6syQenk24nQTzgz/2016-lesswrong-diaspora-survey-analysis-part-three-mental#Stories_Read
That is a still quite high right? Esp considering they think 5% of nul-a is quite high. (For some reason I once had two copies of that). (I have read nul-a and not metamorp of prime)
itās like no no weāre not ALL basilisk believers
fuckers ANY of you are
deleted by creator
Youāve gotta love finding fault with ānot preserving heritageā over āimperialistic complete lack of democracyā.
Thereās local democracy - in one book some activist reserved a big part of an orbital just to run cable cars back and forth. And I believe the decision to go war with the Idirans was subjected to a vote - part of the Culture split off when it didnāt go their way.
But yeah, the Minds decide everything and Contact/SC is all about doing the āneedful stuffā that every right-thinking Culture citizen would deplore.
The Culture is imperialist in the previous US sense of āeveryone wants to live our lifestyleā but not in the āinvade planets and strip themā sense.
Iām less interested in discussing the minutiae of the fictional Culture than exploring nerdās reactions to it, honestly .
Agreed, agreed.
EDIT: Though as far as ambiguous anarchist utopias go, I think Iād rather live on Anarres in āThe Dispossessedā, even though the material welfare and personal freedoms are much much lower.
and of course thereās absolutely nothing in the books that suggests itās a problem. (hell, thereās a good chance there actually is a lively japanese folk dance fan community there despite the fact that earth was never a part of the culture.)
I figure part of the āscanā that a Contact ship does when it encounters a ālesserā planet is to basically slurp down all media, read all the books, and send drones down to do full-3d immersive recordings of basically everything going on.
I guess some stuff you really need to train as a monk for 30 years to really grok, but if thereās an interest for that some Culture weirdo will volunteer and get sent down with a drone in the form of a crucifix or whatever, and incidentally become the next pope.
incidentally I feel Iām seeing in this post and in the shit like Karpās 22 points a growing sense of ennui and purposelessness that was also reported in Europe before WW1 . Everything is safe and soft and real manly virtues like killing are downplayed so what we need are big strong men throwing missiles.
Banks wrote during the 70s/80s and just imagining a future that wasnāt a nuclear wasteland or the Empirium of Man was an act of opposition.
explicit in āState of the Artā:
Yeah I vaguely remember that part from the novella.
This is yet another story where a Culture citizen weirdly decides that living in a shithole (1970s Earth) is preferable to literal utopia, so maybe the LW crowd have a point itās not a very good utopia. Or maybe there are weirdos in every time and space. Again, see LW.