Nihilism / Advertising / Nanny State Triumvirate

Page 1 of 1 [ 1 post ] 

techstepgenr8tion
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 6 Feb 2005
Age: 45
Gender: Male
Posts: 24,529
Location: 28th Path of Tzaddi

28 Apr 2019, 3:07 pm

Thinking off and on about where we're at in culture and flipping between IDW political analysis, MGTOW / FA analysis, and everything between, I think there's something of a pattern that can be considered persistent across the observations in these domains.

What I think we have:

1) Cultural nihilism giving way to something like Freudian Id dominating culture. It happens for a couple reasons - a) global competition for work and life/sexual partners means that deeper values that are tougher to see aren't 'shiny' enough to stand the test of global competition thus loud 'look at me' approaches seem to be all that has potential to net results. Id is also sort of a drug, a way of anaesthetizing nihilism.

2) Advertisers have a lot to gain from an infantilized Id-driven culture in that people behave less like rational/skeptic informed actors and more like chemical reagants, which is what us living on animal impulse is more closely aligned with. Living on animal impulse makes us less robust and more like iron filings that can be drawn into piles or shapes by magnetism, and that magnetism is exactly how advertising makes its money - an art that they're getting increasingly better at while, ideally for them, our defenses against it get weaker and weaker.

3) A nanny state, really what I'd think of as the future surveillance state, which might sound powerful and terrifying but it's really a bunch of accountable parties biting their fingernails to the quick because they can see that average people with drones can land a drone within feet of heads of state now and, in the future where even more destructive potentials get democratized, they won't be able to oversee anything. An infantilized public is a) much easier to rule and b) is the perfect excuse to bloodlessly take away freedoms, in the face of such Pandora-like technologies, and have every excuse - ie. the public lost its integrity, we had no choice but to be their parents.

If the west goes, and maybe the rest of the world, goes with the China model - complete with social credit score - I don't consider it a place of evil power, I consider it more a rather pathetic fallback where civilization is in the hospital on IV drip. It may be inevitable, it may be that even if we tried our hardest to solve technological and social problems now it would be too little, too late, and the assurances of even republican democracy would mean that special interests would block any changes needed to deflect such a future soft-totalitarian state.

I'm not sure where to take it from here - whether I'm just sharing this thought, whether I'm thinking of it as an 'anticipate the future' sandbox for thought experiments. Ah, maybe I'd say this - if we found ourselves in that situation, if we ended up with a bifurcation of humanity between a sort of common 'chattle' that the totalitarian state nerfed the world for and infantilized to being a bit like veal, and at the top you had a sort of technocratic druid/synarch class, how would you embed another control class to critique the druid/synarch class? Clearly without oversight, even with the best of intentions, that druid/synarch class would likely unravel from their own disagreements and the whole thing would just break down along those lines eventually either in favor or a strong man who had a 'kill em all' approach to their competition or just plain-old vanilla unexciting tribalism and special interests.

Any thoughts on a way to make that work, or any thoughts on even perhaps having an autonomous AI, self-replicated beyond human control or tampering, filling that function?


_________________
The loneliest part of life: it's not just that no one is on your cloud, few can even see your cloud.