Thread by @leashless

God, I'm tired of trying to persuade people not to destroy their world, and to take care of the victims of prior attempts to destroy it.

People want to stay asleep at the wheel, in their comfy little ruts, even though they are two wheels off the cliff already.

It's Panic Time!

What does it take to move people's attention off their wallets or petty political rivalries on to the core question of the day: how do we regulate technology so that it doesn't destroy all of our lives?

That's the core issue: global warming, mass surveillance, combat robots.

I ploughed this territory 10 years ago, and published Mother of Hydrogen, an SF novel about how the human race survives nanotech and biotech wars, and manages a rogue AI problem.

hexayurt.com/novel

The solution proposed in that book is the only one I believe will work.

But god *fucking* damn it, all of you lazy fucks are minding your own business IN THE GLOVE BOX rather than paying any attention to WHERE THE CAR IS GOING.

Get your attention OUT OF THE GLOVE BOX AND BACK ON THE ROAD TO THE FUTURE.

You, yes, you. The one asleep at the wheel.

This hardcore process of destruction (that we are all embedded in) runs on distraction and misinformation.

Thou shalt not express your shock at the fact that
Sharon got off with Brad at a club last night by saying "Is it".

That stuff used to matter.

Humans are shaped by two millions years of evolution to function at the scale of a small tribe. 10000 years of ever-bigger groups, until everybody is effected by everybody.

Literally: they turn on their hot shower, and your climate warms.

Air is a single shared global commons.

So we don't have the wiring for this. We have the wiring for Sharon, Brad, and "is it?"

But not all of us. Those fucking engineers went from delivering clean drinking water to delivering nukes and climate change.

Why? Because by the time we saw problems with coal, it was money.

And money, liquid "what you want" is a thing even little monkeys understand. It taps into all the primate instincts on one end and the full massive technical complexity of the global engineering economy on the other

Money connects the primal to technology
zmescience.com/research/how-s…

So we have all these little monkeys pulling pulling pulling on the money cord, because their base little instincts tell them that pulling on the money cord will get them what they want (which is to get laid and then have happy little kids)

But the money cord pulls Cthulhu closer

Our primal little brains keep pulling on that money cord, and Dread Cthulhu - who's holding the other end of all those little ropes - inches closer every goddamn fucking day. And we're gonna have "regenerative economy?"

Has anybody explained that to the teenagers who want cars?

So let's look at responses.

1) The Moralists
"let's persuade the monkeys to stop pulling on the cord"

2) The Utopians
"let's disconnect the money cord from Cthulhu"

3) Marvel Heroes
"let's go stab Cthulhu in the neck"

But everybody's just trying to impress mates and feed kids

But the whole thing is miswired badly enough that the little toxicities generated by each family - multiplied by 8 billion people - poison the climate.

We had to get *super clean* as our numbers boomed, and we did not. We boomed in numbers, and learned to live on steak and coal.

How did we wind up where the plural of "love" turned out to be "destruction of the earth"?

Nobody wants to think that the things they do for their loved ones are actually harming the entire species too.

Nobody wants to be ungrateful, or ungiving. We do what is short-run good.

And so slowly Cthulhu lumbers forwards, because the ways that we show love to each-other all too often have an external cost.

Children given Christmas presents made by other children, made in coal powered factories which ensure that both of those children have bleaker futures.

The problem is so deeply embedded it's almost impossible to see. It's the proverbial "mote in the eye" from the Bible.

What we do in love is killing the world because we do not count the costs of our actions carefully enough.

The tree of desire is poisoned by externalities.

How do you fix it?

Firstly: everything technical is toxic until proven otherwise. @antonsh has an excellent take on this.

Secondly: we must transform how we show love to each-other to not use material things that destroy the earth as a carrier.

Dematerialize love, save earth.

@antonsh It sounds dumb, but love (well, and sex) are humanity's strongest drives, and they are both pretty close to endless. When you get even a thread of "material consumption" tied into those drives, you get consumption without end, consumption as endless (and substituted for) Lust.

@antonsh If you want to think about future humans who live in a sustainable way, those are future humans whose emotional expressions almost never require a physical prop to carry the emotional message to their chosen recipient.

It's a clean separation: STUFF for survival, emotions of Air

Dancers have a lower environmental footprint - less toxic side-effects than painters or sculptors. Worst of all, the architects, who render their feelings and viewpoints in thousand ton piles of stone or concrete.

The emotions, the spirit, is of the infinite. Matter is used up.

And that's the crux of this whole thing. We're taking the infinities inside of us, and each yard of that infinity emits a little bit of carbon when we push it out into the world, into physical form.

This is abstract and almost kabbalistic, but it sort of makes sense as poetry.

A human being who does not use physical matter to convey emotions - words, music, dance - can live minimally without taking emotional damage from that minimalism

It's basically teaching people to un-learn the "love language" of gifts. Emotional decoupling
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_…

Consider, if you will:

https://twitter.com/POPSUGARUK/status/1436073689385250824?s=20

Can you imagine where *all* of the emotional impact is carried without tying up very much physical matter at all?

Try this: silent crowds and people sing their way up the red carpet. The song *is* the event costume. A living moment

Or consider this as a Gala costume. On TV, on AR gear, everybody's costume is made of CPUs and light.

In the real world, it's one matt jumpsuit. Wear it every time there's a big event: everybody's wearing AR glasses all the time anyway.

Material consumption drops to near zero.

So this is the sort of thing that a post-climate-change society, living within its ecological limits, starts to look like.

Social display behavior is almost entirely virtualized - hello NFT kids, your time is now!

Use of the material world for purposes other than survival? Bad.

The Material World is for sustaining life.

The world of performance, art and music is for carrying emotion.

Use of Material Resources to carry emotions becomes seen as crass and materialistic, *LIKE GIVING MONEY AS A GIFT USED TO BE*.

That changed once everyone was poor/broke.

A society based on those values would have a shot at success in a world this limited. 8 billion people get $8000 per year to spend sustainably. That is, if each $ of GDP emits 250 grams of carbon on average, which is our current number.

Don't show emotions using physical things.

Emotions are too big and too complex to be represented by the material world

Attempting to do so simply exhausts the material world.

It is not our *survival* needs which are destroying the world, it is our emotional needs expressed through physical things.

Matter can't stretch

So there's a template for thinking about a future society which does not destroy the world. A society which does not use physical things to meet emotional needs could be sustainable.

That's a discipline which could be taught. Simpler than brahmacharya.

Emotional/Material purity