Diabolical-dialectical - A's Blog Thingy

I low-key love the fact that sci-fi has so conditioned us to expect to be hanging out with a bunch of cool space aliens, that legitimate, actual scientists keep proposing the most bizarre, three-blunts-into-the-rotation "theories" to explain the fact we're not.

Some of my favourites include:

Zoo Theory: What if there are loads of aliens out there, but they're not talking to us because of the Prime Directive from Star Trek? (Or because they're doing experiments on us???)

Dark Forest Theory: What if there are loads of aliens out there, but they all hate us and each other so they're all just waiting with a shotgun pointed at the door, ready to open fire on anything that moves?

Planetarium Theory: What if there's at least one alien with mastery over light and matter that's just making it seem to us that the universe is empty to us as, like, a joke?

Berserker Theory: What if there were loads of aliens, but one of them made infinite killer robots that murdered everyone and are coming for us next?!!

Like, the universe is at least 13,700,000,000 years old and 46,000,000,000 light years big. We have had the ability to transmit and receive signals for, what, 100 years, and our signals have so far travelled 200 light years?

The fact is biological life almost certainly has, does, or will develop elsewhere in the universe, and it's not impossible that a tiny amount of it has, does, or will develop in a way that we would understand as "intelligent". But, like, we're realistically never going to know because of the scale of the things involved.

So I'm proposing my own hypothesis. I call it the "Fool in a Field" hypothesis. It goes like this:

Humanity is a guy standing in the middle of a field at midnight. It's pitch black, he can't move, and he's been standing there for ages. He's just had the thought to swing his arms. He swings one of his arms, once, and does not hit another person. "Oh no!" He says. "Robots have killed them all!"

new favorite reddit user

im sorry i literally cannot get this out of my head since last night

Mcdonalds drive-thru: do you want the meal or just the sandwich?

Data: uuuuuh hold on

*fishes something out of his pocket*

Data: Tasha what do i do?

Data's Tasha Yar posthumous hologram: get the fries. youll need the energy in the coming days

*stuffs it back in his pocket*

Data: yes please, the meal would be great

One of the absolute biggest failures of the US/Western "left" is the fact that most people are only capable of being anti-imperialist in the abstract and/or in hindsight. "Of course invading Iraq was bad!" people will say. "Of course invading Vietnam was bad! Of course the US lied about Iraq in the 90s to initiate the Gulf War!" (and Vietnam in the 60s, and Iraq again in the 2000s). But when it comes to what the empire is doing now people get fucking goldfish brains and are incapable of critically analyzing any new information. You see, we just have to stay in Syria to save the Kurds and defeat Assad. We just have to go to war with China if they try to reunify Taiwan to protect democracy. We should have stayed in Afghanistan to protect women and girls. Or people will try to both-sides it and say "well of course US imperialism is bad, but [insert Official Enemy State here] is just as bad if not worse!". Then when the empire makes its move and inevitably it kills thousands of people and makes the world objectively worse, then people will say "oh I guess it was bad after all", and the "anti-imperialists" of 20 years from now will pat themselves on the back for remembering that bad thing the empire did and knowing it definitely was bad.

All of this is supremely useless. If anti-imperialism means anything it means stopping the empire before it ever even starts, and if it does start, doing any and everything possible to sabotage and defeat it.

Rudolf Bauer Space, 1932

It’s a little bit silly, but I have this little Hippocratic oath for data designers in the book. There are two basic questions I encourage them to ask themselves. One is, does it increase self-determination of poor people? And two, if it was aimed at anyone but poor and working people, would you be able to do it? And if you answer “no” to either of those, don’t do it. You’re on the wrong side of history.

The High-Tech Poorhouse

That chapter is really saying, “If you do everything right, and you’re still living in a society that is deeply impacted by its hatred of the poor and its fear of precarity, you’re still going to create systems that punish, police, and profile.” And that’s the most frustrating place that people get to. Because then they’re like, “Well then, what do we do?” And they want me to give them a ten-point plan for creating better technologies. And I’m like, “Well, what we do is, join in social movements, and end poverty everywhere, and forever.” And I’m sorry that that’s a frustrating answer. But it’s the real answer.

The High-Tech Poorhouse