@graydon A corollary nobody seems to have noted is that if Soylent Green was real, it'd be an amazingly effective tool for amplifying an nvCJD pandemic.
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@cstross Dick Tracey villains seems the obvious answer.
@cstross The sad thing is they’re more like Austin Powers villains. Cartoonish fascists.
@cstross go worse than Warhammer 40k
@cstross you may have trouble topping my vision. *I* may have trouble.
Imagine the techbros and LLMs winning and getting their 'utopia' where people get 'paid' in 'tokens' for a chatbot eating it's own carefully reworked excretions for 10 years.
This was a REALLY bad idea to write in hindsight.
@cstross
Charlie.
You called out the damned Torment Nexus, do NOT go handing them Torment 2.0, TNaaS or shit like that, mmm-kay?
I'm having enough trouble keeping the bottom-feeding slop-horrors off the café patio there at wandering.shop.
@cstross Ray Bradbury already wrote it.
@cstross Bond villains believe in science. For Evil, but still actual science. Rockets, lasers, orbital docking and retrieval... we have Lysenko and Stalin cosplayers.
@cstross Don't ask a question you don't want an answer to, is my advice.
@cstross in the future, scifi will be steampunk. Everything gets taken down a notch. Thankfully however, reality tv ceases to exist. Though the running man is real, so there's that.
@cstross - There is supposed to be a saying attributed to the Buddha, amounting to saying there will be an age of things getting a lot worse, and then there will be an age of things getting steadily better. How valid is that, or how long are the ages we might expect?
@cstross back in 2023 or so I started to make a computer game set in a future dystopia and post-apoc US circa 2100 CE. in my fictional future timeline for it I made it assume that in the Nov 2024 US Pres election a certain specific candidate won, and that once assumed powers of office began executing on a plan to... well, lets just say to worsen things, both in US and worldwide, by intent.
Thankfully that did not end up happening for real.
*cough*
Because that would be... bad. Really got lucky, oh man. Close one!
*cough*
loltears
@cstross Ambient, Jack Womack
Accidental Utopia. By trying to control the oil, the public is galvanised into full electrification and renewable energy, heading off the climate emergency. The next couple of years sees more oil price shocks and pushes a public already softened up during Covid to the benefits of walking and cycling to "do a Dutch" globally and elect leaders that implement cycling infrastructure and livable streets. A sense of community returns and the fascist tech bros are put to bed. The end.
@cstross
The nuclear winter caused by the global warming food system collapse wars will clean up the global warming!
@cstross The Bond Villains have taken over both the universe and your inner-verse? That would be worse.
@cstross now come on, this is an insult to Bond villains.
@cstross At least the past was worse.
@cstross In the bleak even more capitalist future, Soylent Green is the good stuff.
@graydon A corollary nobody seems to have noted is that if Soylent Green was real, it'd be an amazingly effective tool for amplifying an nvCJD pandemic.
@cstross @graydon
Nah, unknown to the protagonist they were only using the meat to make SG; the brains & nervous tissue was being destructively scanned & virtually replicated to upload people-models into slave-robots.
Why else do you think the ruling classes were allowing the population to continue to increase rather than just wiping out millions of plebs to create farmland?
As I have been told the Russian saying goes: Today was an average day. Better than tomorrow, worse than yesterday.
@cstross By induction, the past was better…
@cstross a world where everyone is a Bond villain?
@cstross
H.G. Wells: „It [his 1923 novel Men like Gods] did not horrify or frighten, was not much of a success, and by that time, I had tired of talking in playful parables to a world engaged in destroying itself."
@cstross The Bond villains are very uncool though. Lame as a one-legged duck and twice as unloved. There's that.
@cstross "Today is worse than yesterday, but at least it’s better than tomorrow." - Russian proverb
@cstross Fucking Hell, Charlie, as Friday night thoughts go, this can go pretty awesome or pretty fucked. Or both.
@cstross We are already post-singularity (depending on whose reference frame we define the singularity by).
@cstross The Universe: "You ain't seen nuttin' yet, boy!"
I KNOW, I KNOW: someone with more money than sense uses CRISPR to rapidly adapt Placobdelloides jaegerskioeldi to a new environment—the *human* rectum! And to be resistant to all known vermifuges. A plentiful habitat for a very persistent pest ...
They then market this as a sales pitch for colonic irrigation with bleach.
@cstross Universe: "I see you're a glass-half-full kind of guy ..."
@cstross A future where the courts are all bought up by private equity.
@cstross
I know you're creative, but this sounds like an especially difficult challenge.
