• Again, money is a tool, it has no value other that what we prescribe to it. Whatever replaces it will have exactly the same problems, it's the rules of the game that matter and there will always be people who game the system no matter what it is, that's just in our nature.

    Our nature is nearly as mutable as our culture, but of course one of the most prevalent and influential cognitive biases is where folks assume that the peculiarities of their own little niche in time and space are universal. You're totally right that it's the rules of the game which matter, though. So of course it's possible to replace money with something fundamentally different. The concept of a UBI is partway towards one half of the picture; a universal set of entitlements balanced by a complementary set of obligations. The other half addresses the angle so obsessed over by people who talk about entrepreneurs - the currency to be competed for is kudos. It's a lot harder to game an unquantifiably fuzzy thing like reputation.

    I don't want a 'department for a better humanity' as such. I just want a few peeps to agree that it should be possible, particularly given today's technology, to develop a far more effective model of collective endeavour than the current orgy of brutal hypocrisy. That's exactly what the CIA was concerned about when they crushed Allende's visionary government in Chile and substituted bloody Pinochet in history.

    Sifn't there's 'some way' to devise a new system. We have a smorgasbord of collaborative tools at our disposal, and buckets of unimplemented knowledge of psychology and sociology, left on the shelf by the ruling class and status quo. All those learned recommendations in expensive reports, commissioned in response to this or that inevitable horrible consequence of stupidly vicious dominion, left to gather dust as a matter of routine.

    We know how to do a lot better in a zillion ways, large and small, but of course there's no avenue to implement much of it without bumping into a barrier put there by vested interests. Because the neurotypicals are so easily manipulated by make-believe, in a nutshell.

    But what if a bunch of nerds got together and said fuck you idiots, we can do way better than that shit. It's obvious to anyone with a sufficient interest in reality (and the opportunity to have become acquainted with it), that we don't need to invent a new political system; we just need to dust off what worked for us for like, a hundred thousand years, and give it a bit of an update to integrate our new tools.

    And of course it doesn't get magically 'imposed'. The reality we find ourselves in dictates that if you want to get anything done you need to be a corporation. If your corporation does really well (say, by striving to maximise the potential of its members by making money as irrelevant as possible to them, among other measures) then over time it's increasingly presented with opportunities to buy out competitors and expand into other fields. If the corporation becomes really huge, actual governments become less relevant to it...

    And if the corporation is a co-op in which people are visibly escaping the rat race and enjoying otherwise arbitrarily-denied opportunities to flourish, perhaps there would be no amount of propaganda sufficient to keep everyone else trapped in wage slavery; the demonstration of even a small fraction of the potential of an arrangement designed to spread benefits to the many and maximise the resulting synergy should result in an exponentially increasing wave of secession from capitalism.

    Humanity has so many failings, but most of them can be boiled down to a failure of imagination - precluding all kinds of leaps of understanding. And on the other hand, we erect all these make-believe walls we can't see past. There's a type of person that doesn't apply so much to, though. Nerds have been finding each other and realising they're actually the cool people ever since the internet became a thing, and if the future is going to be rescued, it certainly won't be the normies doing it, what with their predilection for toxic bootlicking genocide.

    You can cynically pooh-pooh if you feel that's the only response open to you, but you're a damn fool if you think the future doesn't need rescuing. I don't see anything else even approaching a plausible suggestion of a way out of the impending doom, so bugger it, I've taken it upon myself to don the 'End is Nigh' sandwich board and walk around shouting like a crazy person.

    Because I'm fucking sick of having no cause for hope, dammit.

  • Like, I do get some of this this, but the things will still kinda be money unless there's basically all you want of everything. Plus the neurotypical as a kinda normy half slur thing grates a bit, said as a non-neurotypical, dividing people down those lines unnecessarily is silly and gives off the same vibes as forgiving Musk for Nazi because of maybetism.

  • Any division of folks is sub-optimal practice, but you have to start where you are. Who are all the authoritarian followers, enabling all today's fascism? They're not folks who are in the habit of swimming against the tide, are they.

    Anyway, it's self-selecting; I wouldn't expect there to be any sort of rule, but I'm pretty damn sure we'd see a hell of a lot less futile argument amongst nerds, and a lot more respect for established facts while silly status games wouldn't get so much play.

    I'm saying, here's a proposition and a project to collaborate on, and it just wouldn't appeal to the sort I'd like to stay out of it, until it's a threat inviting infiltration.

About

Avatar for snottyotter @snottyotter started