so many! sometimes the first tell that you’re reading techfash bullshit is when they lead in with the worst take you’ve ever heard about a work of sci-fi you’ve enjoyed. I firmly blame these fuckers for making cyberpunk boring as fuck, turning singularity fiction into a religion, and ruining post-scarcity sci-fi, all by way of stubbornly refusing to understand any of the work they’ll never stop trying to claim as their own
Musk, the boy, loved video games and computers and Dungeons & Dragons and “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” and he still does. “I took from the book that we need to extend the scope of consciousness so that we are better able to ask the questions about the answer, which is the universe,” Musk tells Isaacson. Isaacson doesn’t raise an eyebrow, and you can wonder whether he has read “Hitchhiker’s Guide,” or listened to the BBC 4 radio play on which it is based, first broadcast in 1978. It sounds like this:
Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former galactic empire, life was wild, rich, and, on the whole, tax free. . . . Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural because no one was really poor, at least, no one worth speaking of.
“The Hitchhiker’s Guide” is not a book about how “we need to extend the scope of consciousness so that we are better able to ask the questions about the answer, which is the universe.” It is, among other things, a razor-sharp satiric indictment of imperialism:
And for these extremely rich merchants life eventually became rather dull, and it seemed that none of the worlds they settled on was entirely satisfactory. Either the climate wasn’t quite right in the later part of the afternoon or the day was half an hour too long or the sea was just the wrong shade of pink. And thus were created the conditions for a staggering new form of industry: custom-made, luxury planet-building.
Completely aside, “Torment Nexus” would be an awesome name for a thrash metal band.
Having revealed my taste in music, I’m not in a position to claim high-brow cultural credentials - but even I can see that our would-be tech overlords are a bunch of culturally illiterate goons. Sam Altman complaining that Oppenheimer “missed the mark” on being inspirational to a generation of would-be scientists in the way the Social Network was to a generation of would-be startup founders was perhaps the tech take to end all tech takes.
Confession time: I have to this day not seen the entirety of The Social Network. As a friend of mine said back when it was new, “The only question is which asshole will end up with all the money. If I cared about that, I’d read the business section.”
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Yarvin seriously watched the matrix and thought cypher had a good point
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so many! sometimes the first tell that you’re reading techfash bullshit is when they lead in with the worst take you’ve ever heard about a work of sci-fi you’ve enjoyed. I firmly blame these fuckers for making cyberpunk boring as fuck, turning singularity fiction into a religion, and ruining post-scarcity sci-fi, all by way of stubbornly refusing to understand any of the work they’ll never stop trying to claim as their own
Apropos:
And so he went on to make one of the worst Sega CD games. Bad show.
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neoreactionaries and lesswrongers are animu nerds to a man, and the answer to “what the arsing fuck??” is always anime
50% of things Yudkowsky believes about AI amount to Culture fanfic.
Completely aside, “Torment Nexus” would be an awesome name for a thrash metal band.
Having revealed my taste in music, I’m not in a position to claim high-brow cultural credentials - but even I can see that our would-be tech overlords are a bunch of culturally illiterate goons. Sam Altman complaining that Oppenheimer “missed the mark” on being inspirational to a generation of would-be scientists in the way the Social Network was to a generation of would-be startup founders was perhaps the tech take to end all tech takes.
Confession time: I have to this day not seen the entirety of The Social Network. As a friend of mine said back when it was new, “The only question is which asshole will end up with all the money. If I cared about that, I’d read the business section.”
Trent Reznor soundtrack though.
I was a teenager in the '90s; I don’t need to watch a movie for that. :-P
@Evinceo @blakestacey
Buy the CD so you aren’t afflicted by Aaron Sorkin
btw, here’s a Culture x Matrix fanfic I enjoyed. (I think it’s the only one in that cross.) i would definitely blame yarvin.
oh I can already tell this is going to be a ride