@cstross

@cstross 0 days since something that got the torment nexus treatment in 1975’s “the shockwave rider” by John Brunner had an advertising campaign

@cstross don't kink shame the leopard-sexuals. Of course this is purely jest. 🐆😂 🍆

@cstross Bahh nonsense. this techbro boot i'm licking sure tastes like freedom to me!

@cstross You would think the point of automation would be to shore up whatever doesn't work under communism, but noooooo

@cstross They want USSR Five Year Plan style central planning of big projects (Azovstal was based on a steel mill from Gary, Indiana, the "data center" of its day) They really don't like markets or political systems with any bottom-up influence

Stalin took his name from steel, maybe near-future dictators will go for "AI" themed names?

@cstross fully automated luxury space communism implies that everyone is equal. Fully automated leopard-face-chomping neo-feudalism implies that one could be the Lord doing the face chomping. These shitheads want a hierarchy.

@cstross
America is just a goyim cattle farm to bleed like cash cows. Why are they even making profound observations, someone get them angry at immigrants

@cstross
It is rather curious

@cstross Probably because the techbros who aren't weird money-perverts drop out and become bar owners or goat farmers before amassing that kind of power.

@cstross I think it's simply that from a position of power the two look indistinguishable.

@cstross it’s pretty impressive how happy they don’t want other people to be.

@cstross As I always says WRT the neo-feudalists; they assume they’ll be the aristocrats, not the serfs.

@cstross The only parts of Star Trek they like are the parts where everything has gone wrong and people shoot at oneanother, things that happen as the last resort.

@cstross

I think it's a lot of selection bias. Those who don't want neo feudalism are also those who retired once they hit a reasonable financial goal and everyone left at the top is a weird money hoarder

@cstross yeah, my antidote currently, Ian M. Banks Culture Series....

@cstross it may be the cynic in me, and it may be influenced by my recent three-week binge of all of Game of Thrones, it having worked in SV for a quarter of a century my rear view impression is that it’s always been feudalistic at the top.

SV has low-key selected for openness to self-abasement as a career path for decades, and it’s hard not to look at photos of the most elite mingling with politicos over the past few years and not see a hierarchy of courtiers finally relieved of the constraints of performative conscience.

@cstross

Less face eating, more ass eating.

@cstross Musk thinks he cosplays the Federation, when in fact he’s a conservative Ferengi

@cstross they want a cyberpunk dystopia like in the movies, or consider it an inevitability

might be a better sell if you go with Yanis Varoufakis name for the alternative; Digital Libertarian Communism

these people are very triggered by words like Gay

the working class are probably burned out on Automated too, until they see any checks from robot tax or whatever

@cstross Hooray for fully automated gay space communism.

@cstross They did not do the reading

@cstross they all have the disease of not being able to appreciate something unless they know somebody else isn’t.

Feels like yet another thing that traces back to Tatcher and Reagan.

@cstross our economic/political systems generally select for terrible people, right? Us gay communism folks have no interest in being a tech bro, that's my read.

@cstross
You don't get filthy rich by not being filthy.

@cstross Some people are arseholes. The chimpanzee hindbrain dominance thing rather than the bonobo hippy free love thing.

@cstross must be a protestant offshoot of Sir Pterrys Yen Buddhists. "It is morally wrong for other people to enjoy their lives"