New Testingstan

i remembor ryan thundorbs posting something about hypotheticel constipitution for hypotheticel randome altarnate realty world nation

i was talking to my friend many tiems about things not directly relating to that but still, somewhat related (mostly involving the feelipeens and how manila's attempts at homogenizing the nation by creating a one "filipino" identity is clumsy and full of fail and miserable because they project their manila identity as the definition of "filipino" ignoring that other groups in the feelipeens have their own identities distinctly unlike the "manila" identity. if they want to turn the entire nation into catholic manilaspeak-speaking poops, they'll fail cause the rest of us are definitely NOT like that at all and the manila identity is quite alien to the vast majority of filipinos because we are a fucking diverse archipelago)

this discussion eventually resulted in thoughts of federalization and potential secession

in that my island cebu is pretty decent economically and we could potentially secede or federalize into our own quasi- or even fully-independent entity and still maintain decent living standards perhaps and still be sane and shit

and, idk, this identity discussion ended up touching on those movements in barcelona, wales, scottland, etc.

i am thinking....

in the future, with technological increases, increasing information dissemination, and shit... what if instead of the world congealing into a homogenous super-entity nation, the opposite happens?

high-technology will actually allow large cumbersome nations to super-federalize and mitosis-ize into more numerous but smaller sub-states. information superhighways and tech can allow them to be sort of self-sufficient while maintaining their diversity and identities and social order and decent standards of life and laws and shit

we assume that the changing mindsets of the future would result in people willingly (or forcibly) forming one world-nation because of "enlightenment"

but what if this "enlightenment" (by techno-singularitarian means or whatever) actually results in a massive dissolving of old-fashioned large nations into smaller states, but because of the enlightened mindsets, these people are able to maintain their diversity without going crazy and murdering each other over tribalism/etc.

its the anti-thesis of the homogenous world-state. and at least it won't deal with having to force all these groups into one mega-body wherein marginalized groups will be stepped on.

think of it as part-European Union part... agglomeration of Hong Kongs and Singapores and New Yorks and shits


if mankind is supposed to advance and develop and "grow" into a utopian ideal, why should it result in mankind being overseen and overwatched by a overbearing parental figure in the form of the super-nation?

shouldn't social and techno-advancement result in humanity actually capable of idependent action without an overbearing centralized authority, because each small facet will be self-actualized into enlightened not-so-violent entities?


my central thrust is that techno-social advancement will actually enable mankind and societies and nations to further de-centralize into thousands of chill coolio enlightened laid back sufficient societies/hippie communes rather than centraloid/coagulate into overbearing super-authority figure screaming "follow me fuck you i'm right you're wrong"

its also the exact opposite of the typical sci-fi fair of United States of Earthica/etc.

I think it will less be more tiny states, and more that people won't (have to) care about any of that shit
definitely a nice way of thinking about things, though, I think I like this idea a bit more than a global super-state (if we;re talking utopian future-tech stuff)

but anarchy is bad

the state told me so

exactly what sort of technology is going to erase the value of collaboration and planetary-scale projects, hmm? oh, that's right, it can't.

People seem to think anarchy means everyone being all equal and no gubmint or religious folks in the way of progress and society.

When really all it would mean is that the rich/corporations/churches/pseudo-govts would just be able to do as they fucking wished and good luck getting enough coordination to actually fight back.

Yeah, right on the money. Most punters think anarchy is short for 'just leave us alone', often thrown around by people who benefit the best from societal order. An anti-regulation platform, if you will. Apparently none of them have ever read any Dickens.

I should probably say this in the closed forum but every time my boss says something about hoping for laws that do away with penalty rates and public holiday loadings I want to scream at him.

I think anarchism aims to do away with the rich and corporations or any organisation for that very reason. But admittedly it's been a long time since I studied political ideologies.

All societies have some level of organisation to them, and anarchy just stresses that the current organisation is deeply flawed and serves a select few entrenched interests. Getting rid of these interests would make everyone equal. The problem comes from 'how do you do this' effectively. So far nobody's come up with a great way to do so.

Yeah, the problem is that if we reach societal anarchy, then people think that communes and peace are the natural outcome, not warlords and pillage.

There will always be ambitious people unless they put something in the water/air processing plants and throw away the key.

I'm onto the fifth Honor Harrington book and the guy that just couped the shit out of The People's Republic of Haven(Robert S. Pierre, get it get it) is currently despairing about the fact that having taken over, he realised there was no hope of shifting the status quo, that the machine was too big to stop. The welfare state was too culturally ingrained to attempt sweeping reforms.

Sounds a bit like middle Australia

did you guys notice me mention "federalize" in my OP rite?

i am not talking about a lawless bunch of broken down pocket societies. i'm talking about how super-technologies will allow human societies to, well, in evilsoup's response, make people not really care about the traditional form of nationhood, because in the futor "nationhood" will totally not look like anything like modern nation states today.

idk, i'm proposing some kind of liquid state technology

and its about as possible as the federation from starship troopers. why have a fascist one world new order when you can have a biodigital jazz cyberpunk bohemian rhapsody? it LOOKS like chaos, but with the technologies of the future... who knows?

the peoples of this future might be festooned with fucking post-organs. like, they're all individualistic, but with their wetware iBrain programmings they can actually symbionize with people half a world away and interact and share feelings and thoughts.

so on one hand, they'll be extremely decentralized and might seem "chaotic" because their techno-technos will allow them to do whatever the fuck they want and congeal into super-indulgent micro-societies with secessionist identities that erase modern conceptions of nationhood because the nietzsche ubermensch is like a child and thus a spoiled brat with emerald boogers snivelling from his nostrils whilst he licks the sweet candy of solidified, vitrified ambrosia - but their augmented super-realities would interlink and unify entire populations of them in ways we cannot imagine today thus providing a medium of unorthodox governance, like a super-individualistic rock star trashing his trailer while OD'ing crystal meth injections into his cock superimposed with the social cohesion and order of a pod of pansexual dolphins that can even lust after creatures of other species


perhaps a more pressing question instead of "nationhood/anarchy/governance/blah" would be... would these people even still be individuals? are they still people? how individual can a mind be when it can biodigitally symbionize with other minds hooked up to the datasphere, when their brainwaves are all in harmony, with more rhythm than Bleeding Gums Murphy playing the blues on his sax during the full moon

after we determine this, then we find out the boundaries and composition of their states and their world-spanning semiaquaeous-state society

Shroom Man 777 wrote:think of it as part-European Union part... agglomeration of Hong Kongs and Singapores and New Yorks and shits

RyanThunder wrote:exactly what sort of technology is going to erase the value of collaboration and planetary-scale projects, hmm? oh, that's right, it can't.

the kind of technological development in the futor that will make the 20th century development from telegraph/telephone to internets look like two treehouses communicating via a pair of tin cans with string connecting them together. the kind that will occur over the next century or two, making the social changes of the 20th-early 21st century look insignificant in comparison, which will require imagination to envision and will still defy imagination. i'm sorry, this imagination doesn't involve counting how many missiles are in your mecha (in that it requires actual imagining, like what siege did when he wrote the USS. ironically he mentioned schizophrenia in his description of solarian society).

ironically this same super-communication technology that will uplink the entire world and make them super-aware and thus not a bunch of bigoted ultra-nationalist hatefuckers while maintaining the preservation of individual society identities and diversities would also be one that would make a one-world-society feasible


i'm basing it on the observation that while there is super-progress in my area of the feelipeens, our people are actually becoming more independent from the central government and its clumsy attempts at enforcing a homogeneous national identity - yet at the same time it feels more... globalized, internationalized. like, i was told by some filipino from another province that when she/they came to cebu, it was like being in another entirely different nation.

weemadando wrote:People seem to think anarchy

its not anarchy i'm talking about. jesus christ man i'm like a hairsbreadth away from being a fucking communoid.

weemadando wrote:Yeah, the problem is that if we reach societal anarchy, then people think that communes and peace are the natural outcome, not warlords and pillage.

i'm talking about mankind reaching a certain level of development where national identities won't even matter anymore.

like... the point where, socially, they won't give a fuck about whether they're American or Canadian or whatever because super-communications = super-awareness = super-education and so the nationalistic boundaries are broken down because people know that we're all fukken human beings

so on one hand it is a globalized conscience or something... some crystalization of some world-spanning zeitgeist. the logical extension of the information age.

yet at the same time, this somehow allows people to freely identify with their own sub-group. like while catalans or cebuanos are increasingly becoming globalized Citizens of the World, at the same time they really don't give a fuck about Madrid or Manila or something.

its a paradoxical change in identity

i'm talking (rambling) about a potential society that will look nothing like anything today.

like, the ultimate result of the whole world becoming so much smaller because of communications, yet somehow becoming so much larger

weemadando wrote: When really all it would mean is that the rich/corporations/churches/pseudo-govts would just be able to do as they fucking wished and good luck getting enough coordination to actually fight back.

what if marx had it wrong. what if it wasn't only just the means of production that the working-class proletariats had to control, but also the means of information? then those oligarchical organizations would have to face...

the dictatorship of the proletariat

da comrades

what would world society be like if, when your relative half a world away is mourning a tragedy or celebrating festivities, your biotechnological organoids can allow you to literally interlink with them on a psycho-emotional level so that you can viscerally feel what they feel at that very second? and if people, populations, can do this? biodigital empathy, not sympathy. can their brainware preserve individuality? will they all congeal into one super-persona? can we imagine what this world will be like?


[for the record i think it is more likely that as the corporations and the rich get richer, they will achieve effective immortality and spoiled rich brats will be replacing their organic eyeballs with 20000 metapixel oculoid implants that allow them to take 4D hologram captures of the things they see, while the poor continue to starve and dwell in sidewalks that reek of piss.

I think the rich can even have perception filters so in the rare occasions that they walk around at street level, they can block out the sight and sound and smell of people who are poorer than them, replacing them with blurs or whatever image they choose to superimpose over them

so when a rich affluent well-to-do piece of shit does this, he won't be able to see the mob of poor street children heading towards him, because he's censored the very sight of the poor because it is offensive to his tastes. then the mob of street children stick switchblades into his guts and rip out his super-expensive post-organs before running into the sewers, to put the stolen augmented human flesh into iceboxes before peddling them in the black organ market

nobody will mind that the rich guy has died anyway. because most of the organoids he's made out of are available in the market and his family can buy and reconstitute a new and improved affluent shitpiece anyway]

I should say something, but I am currently unable to formulate any coherent line of thought regarding the subject being discussed here.

I'll just say this :

Humanity has been, is, and will remain, at its most basic level, a species made of individuals. The individuals' consciousness of their own individuality will be subject to variations depending on the circumstances, but as long as everyone will be born with their own brain, then they will remain so at least to some minimal degree.

As human society's is made of individuals, with different perspective on things, trying to impose ONE Society, resting on ONE set of values, seems like a Sisyphean endeavour.

Even in today's world, we can see that micro-societies form themselves between individuals who think alike, like bubbles or impurities stuck into the greater whole (depending on your point of view).

Thus, to me, it seems that Shroom's vision naturally evolve from the premise of a world where the flow of information between people is qualitatively and quantitatively even better and freer and more important in magnitude than what it is today.

As an example, me, today, I live in France. But most of my social life, currently, is spent interacting through the web with people who at least live a few countries apart on the same continent as me, or in most cases lives in a completely different continent as me.

People's social spheres would tend to become more and more disconnected from the place(s) they live in. And -this- will directly influence their vision of the world, and the idea of nationalism itself will be directly affected.

OK I think I might have a useful metaphor here
you all know about dyson spheres right? The classical conception is a giant solid ball around the sun, BUT a more realistic dyson sphere would be millions and millions of satellites clustered around in a big sphere, each independent but also linked together
the classical dyson sphere is the standard socialist utopia one-world-government, while what shroom is describing is a much more decentralised vision - but with a similar end-state. If it helps, maybe think of it as a one-world-government run via direct democracy

so on one hand it is a globalized conscience or something... some crystalization of some world-spanning zeitgeist. the logical extension of the information age.
...
what would world society be like if, when your relative half a world away is mourning a tragedy or celebrating festivities, your biotechnological organoids can allow you to literally interlink with them on a psycho-emotional level so that you can viscerally feel what they feel at that very second? and if people, populations, can do this? biodigital empathy, not sympathy. can their brainware preserve individuality? will they all congeal into one super-persona? can we imagine what this world will be like?

mang I'm actually in the middle (well, at the start really PROCRASTINATION SUPERPOWERS ACTIVATE) of writing a story with pretty much that premise
humanity ends up merging with a bunch of alien races who have undergone the same process to form a galactic extelligence, and they are able to be on any place in the extelligence at any time, regardless of where their real body is
of course there's feedback loops with people taking into account what other people think of them on a psychic level, which in turn affects who they are (since you are who you are perceived to be; IRL everyone has different perceptions i.e. the shroom in my mind is different to the shroom in rabid's mind etc etc; but with this new perception-altering psychic awareness technology stuff, there's a blurring of the boundaries of who I think I am and who you think I am, and this is an organic and chaotic process that is constantly shaping everyone)

I pretty much wrote it as a response to Evangelion (god I love that show) - it's essentially an ongoing benign form of Instrumentality - and to Asimov's Foundation stuff (he has the final clinching argument over whether humanity should merge into a psychic hive-mind be 'what if there are aliens out there THEY MIGHT KILL US', whereas IN MY FANFICTION the whole thing is partly catalysed by aliens, and aliens join in & add fresh unexpected [unexpectable] perceptions of the world).

it also involves excessive time travel, but that's not relevant here

Then fucking say that instead of couching everything in a babbling cacophony of buzzwords.

also that one-liner is a bit of a simplification of what we're talking about

Look when you're destined for the path of ruling the stupid plebs with your superior understanding of how the world works, you don't have time to actually understand what people say and need everything in one-liner format.

Shroom Man 777 wrote:i am not talking about a lawless bunch of broken down pocket societies.

neither are anarchists. rules/laws would actually be important to maintain anarchism cuz when a certain clique starts to arise it would help a lot to have some formalized processes and procedures to reset the proper balance


but anywho what's really important is that the thing with technology is it can help do a lot of things, but it doesn't determine what is done.

so let's imagine the ibrain. it would most likely serve existing prejudices, from the individual like your hypothetical rich guy who ignores the poor but also all kinds of existing powers, conscious and not

another example is i spend a lot more time at star trek rocks dot yes than i do at star trek sucks dot no. even with a super ibrain if i'm a racist i prolly won't seek out empathize with other people dot yes... and forcing me to brings up another problem

if it is developed by a profit seeker most the time would be spent on things that make the most profit, which shapes the featureset and the advertising which changes how it is used. it prolly ain't gonna be profitable to literally feel other ppl's pain, who really wants to pay for that right? so this feature might be technically possible but prolly underdeveloped, underadvertised, and therefore not frequently used

then you have monopolies and governments wanting to use it to their advantage directly, just like the internet today has helped the rich get richer and put out their astroturfing as much as the grassroots stuff and erodes privacy as much as it enables anonymonismy

get facebook on your ibrain with frictionless sharing

and the algorithms impress more stuff upon you that sells shit than cultural enlightenment and the government's national security letters can get them whatever they want to know about you so better hope you're not a closet commie cuz that's a thought crime



so while the tech could usher in a new era of loving internationalism it could just as well be used to terrify ppl into conformity and selectively feed stuff into them that they don't even notice their chains. and which do you think is more likely from our current starting place?



god i feel like i'm rambling but i guess my point is just that technology can help change people's minds but it ultimately serves people. if people want to use it to help their decentralization it can do that, but if people want to use it to help entrenched interests, it can do that too.

so ultimately when it comes to form of government and such, that's more of a political question than a technological one. i can imagine a world like you describe with today's tech or tomorrow's tech with maybe differences on specifics but the core isn't dependent on ibrains etc

holy shit that ended up being a much longer post than i intended. oh well i hope i made sense

Shroom Man 777 wrote:i remembor ryan thundorbs posting something about hypotheticel constipitution for hypotheticel randome altarnate realty world nation

i was talking to my friend many tiems about things not directly relating to that but still, somewhat related (mostly involving the feelipeens and how manila's attempts at homogenizing the nation by creating a one "filipino" identity is clumsy and full of fail and miserable because they project their manila identity as the definition of "filipino" ignoring that other groups in the feelipeens have their own identities distinctly unlike the "manila" identity. if they want to turn the entire nation into catholic manilaspeak-speaking poops, they'll fail cause the rest of us are definitely NOT like that at all and the manila identity is quite alien to the vast majority of filipinos because we are a fucking diverse archipelago)

this discussion eventually resulted in thoughts of federalization and potential secession

in that my island cebu is pretty decent economically and we could potentially secede or federalize into our own quasi- or even fully-independent entity and still maintain decent living standards perhaps and still be sane and shit

and, idk, this identity discussion ended up touching on those movements in barcelona, wales, scottland, etc.

i am thinking....

in the future, with technological increases, increasing information dissemination, and shit... what if instead of the world congealing into a homogenous super-entity nation, the opposite happens?

high-technology will actually allow large cumbersome nations to super-federalize and mitosis-ize into more numerous but smaller sub-states. information superhighways and tech can allow them to be sort of self-sufficient while maintaining their diversity and identities and social order and decent standards of life and laws and shit

we assume that the changing mindsets of the future would result in people willingly (or forcibly) forming one world-nation because of "enlightenment"

but what if this "enlightenment" (by techno-singularitarian means or whatever) actually results in a massive dissolving of old-fashioned large nations into smaller states, but because of the enlightened mindsets, these people are able to maintain their diversity without going crazy and murdering each other over tribalism/etc.

its the anti-thesis of the homogenous world-state. and at least it won't deal with having to force all these groups into one mega-body wherein marginalized groups will be stepped on.

think of it as part-European Union part... agglomeration of Hong Kongs and Singapores and New Yorks and shits


if mankind is supposed to advance and develop and "grow" into a utopian ideal, why should it result in mankind being overseen and overwatched by a overbearing parental figure in the form of the super-nation?

shouldn't social and techno-advancement result in humanity actually capable of idependent action without an overbearing centralized authority, because each small facet will be self-actualized into enlightened not-so-violent entities?


my central thrust is that techno-social advancement will actually enable mankind and societies and nations to further de-centralize into thousands of chill coolio enlightened laid back sufficient societies/hippie communes rather than centraloid/coagulate into overbearing super-authority figure screaming "follow me fuck you i'm right you're wrong"

its also the exact opposite of the typical sci-fi fair of United States of Earthica/etc.

If your island cebu has enough rifles and artillery and missiles to tell the rest of the Philippines to duck off, and can protect your Algore interwebs from predacious destruction by the Moros and trilateral CIA saboteurs, you have a chance. If you can't cover the infrastructure, good fucking luck.

Count Chocula wrote:If your island cebu has enough rifles and artillery and missiles to tell the rest of the Philippines to duck off, and can protect your Algore interwebs from predacious destruction by the Moros and trilateral CIA saboteurs, you have a chance. If you can't cover the infrastructure, good fucking luck.

Secession doesn't have to be bloody or even violent.

Just look at the partition of Czechoslovakia into Slovakia and the Czech Republic.

It was a pretty cordial divorce, all things considered.

Is that the norm though?

for most of human history the norm has been to kill each other over petty disputes
so, no

RyanThunder wrote:Then fucking say that instead of couching everything in a babbling cacophony of buzzwords.

the idea was percolating in mein brain whilst i was tyepieing it so making a simplistifistic analgy would be hard since i was still thinking it through

besides evilsoup and rabid seemed to have gotten the gist of it quite well so they get a cookie whilst you get your canadian citizenship transmogrified into a Thick Chinny Almost Sovereignest Citizen Medal of Spartafreedomericanityness

srsly tho i'm glad you two were able to understrand cause i think if i re-read my shit i'd find it a horribel incoherent mess

adr wrote:holy shit that ended up being a much longer post than i intended. oh well i hope i made sense

it made super-sense and it is probably the more likely outcome because it is also the more depressing outcome. the corporate designer labelled post-organoids and prefabricated embryonics with planned obsolesences and corporate logos marking every cell in the tissues.

anyway its pretty much what i say to FROD to piss in his cereal of futuristic optimisms and he haets me for it lols

evilsoup wrote:

Count Chocula wrote:If your island cebu has enough rifles and artillery and missiles to tell the rest of the Philippines to duck off, and can protect your Algore interwebs from predacious destruction by the Moros and trilateral CIA saboteurs, you have a chance. If you can't cover the infrastructure, good fucking luck.

we have money though

MONEY

MOOOONEEEEYYY!!!!!!11

evilsoup wrote:for most of human history the norm has been to kill each other over petty disputes
so, no

we must attempt to transcend the human condition

adr wrote: so while the tech could usher in a new era of loving internationalism it could just as well be used to terrify ppl into conformity and selectively feed stuff into them that they don't even notice their chains. and which do you think is more likely from our current starting place?

god i feel like i'm rambling but i guess my point is just that technology can help change people's minds but it ultimately serves people. if people want to use it to help their decentralization it can do that, but if people want to use it to help entrenched interests, it can do that too.

it would make for a good yarn then, the protagonists trying to make the former happen, while stopping the latter from taking place

johnny mnemonic! dolph lundgren versus dolphin... and they're BOTH CYBORGS! ten thousand dollar a night hookers! CYBERPUUUUUUUUNK!!!!!!

so ultimately when it comes to form of government and such, that's more of a political question than a technological one. i can imagine a world like you describe with today's tech or tomorrow's tech with maybe differences on specifics but the core isn't dependent on ibrains etc

yes i agree. but i think the technological changes that facilitate the improving flow of information will be crucial in the evolutionary developmental growth of human societies

like how increasing literacy, printing and shit was crucial for creating the conditions leading to the erosion of monarchies and feudalisms and shits and the development of democracy

the proliferation of mobile phones has done more to bring people in Africa out of poverty than the combined humanitarian aid efforts of the 20th and 21st century