Generation Wishful
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Q: Why do dogs lick their bollocks?
A: Because they can.
Alexei Sayle quote about laughing at fascists
The bullshit detector defeat device
We can deploy technology to tell the world want it wants to believe
— diesel defeat devices
— fake news
— premium mediocre
— statistical misuse
— metaverse: a world that isn’t a world (Facebook) and a universe that isn't the universe (cosmology)
— “Content” that has no content. It harvests our lazy attention.
— Currency that isn't a currency
— Commodities that aren’t commodities
— meat that isn’t meat
— genders that aren’t genders
— Women who aren't women
This is all notwithstanding the fact that no-one of us really mean what we say, or do what we say we will. No-one actually prefers impossible meat. We may want to, in wishful concept,If you have ethical concerns about animals be a vegetarian. If you’d kill for bacon, exercise some restraint. Suffer some hardship for your principles.
We are like the third generation of hard-working grandparents, petulantly pissing all their hard-earned wealth away. In our way that is exactly what we are. Our grandparents fought in wars, lived on rations, won the freedom and built the wealth that we of the western elite enjoy.
We have diffused our outrage upon trifles. Ours is a culture of ongoing indignance: indignance at cultural appropriation, and fantasy grievances.
Delusional teen-agers are nothing new.
Techno-modernists and post-modernists
What happened to the courage of our convictions? The courage to have convictions?
Postmodernists
“This is my truth tell me yours ” — Manic Street Preachers
You see the argument mounted, a lot, that successive waves of postmodernism have broken our spirit; that the verities we once banked upon, the big ideas of truth and righteousness that gave fibre to the old world order — for good and ill — have gone.
Now anything goes, so anything does. If there is no universal truth, we can all have our own ones — we must — and no-one can gainsay them.
I don’t think that’s it. I like postmodernism, but I don't recognise in it the freedom to believe at random. We are anchored by our social responsibility.
Techno-modernists
There is a cross-cutting view that everything there is to know is there: it is all discoverable, analysable, reducible to its fundamental parts, and extrapolatable to its ultimate conclusion. This one tells us there absolutely is a truth, it lies there in the data, it is what it is and there is nothing to be done. This is the primacy of of the algorithm. For all of creation, till now, the human mind has been the highest expression of the algorithm — Darwin’s Dangerous Idea — but that algorithm has reached its local maximum while the new wave of neural networks are just getting started.
Extremes of left and right?
On one hand each of us builds our own personal world to suit our own preference and, in an ironic way, we form a part of a dissociative organic multiverse.
On the other, we rebuild the single world to suit the machine; we bend to it. Even if this means fighting each other. We categorise ourselves according to its taxonomy. We carve our natures at its joints. We homogenise our tastes to suit the demands of its scale, an economy wholly from what has already gone before. What is already known. Data already gathered. (There is no data from the future.).
The machines play a finite game. They are zero sum.
The postmodernists refuse to play a game at all
In neither case do we collaborate. The social instict
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