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> You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something ab
by flobosg 4y ago
> You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, “Look at that, you son of a bitch.”
―Edgar D. Mitchell
- Kiboneu 4y agoI experienced this playing freeorion while listening to Carbon Based Lifeforms as a kid. A few ambient tracks from CBL made me tear up: they used field recordings of the world (birds, children, trees, cities), woven through low frequency drones and rifts. It would sort of create a distance between the recording samples, and then, through sound, you zoom out, glide, become ephemeral in the face of the planet, like a cloud. Freeorion primed my mind to think in some detail about a reduced form of state-level strategy (as 4x games tend to do). I realized that the first 10 rounds were highly predictive of success for the next 100 rounds, and so forth, so I understood that my actions could have the same non-linearity and influence (and the predictive power of that influence was based on my model of the world, which is easy in a 4x game but difficult in meatspace). Combined, I saw in detail the cybernetic flows around the world… i was a world systems thinker. it’s taken some work not to pop my head out of frustration. Now that part of me is applied to more localized systems and small things: seeds around me that grow via the world into things i may never witness directly, and putting out small fires around me that I hope to never witness as big fires. Memes, basically (or anti-memetic memes? Not so sure).
- sva_ 4y agoSounds like the effects of LSD.
- rufus_foreman 4y ago>> a people orientation Nope. >> an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world No. >> and a compulsion to do something about it Lawl, no not all. >> You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, Look at that, you son of a bitch No, didn't have that effect on me. You're thinking about meth maybe?
- colanderman 4y ago> [Zaphod] had seen the whole universe stretching to infinity around him—everything. And with it had come the clear and extraordinary knowledge that he was the most important thing in it. —Douglas Adams
- sp332 4y agoMissing some important context on that one lol. The "real" version of that device drives people crazy with their insignificance. The one Zaphod goes into is in a simulation designed for him, where he really is the most important thing.
- colanderman 4y agoFair enough!
- bhaak 4y agoEven then I never got the nagging feeling out of my head that Zaphod would have had the same reaction in the real device. That's why it was even remotely believable at all.
- krapp 4y agoIronically, this seems to mostly describe reality as I see it, with Blue Origin being part of a manufactured reality designed to appease the ego and manchild personality of Jeff Bezos. Shatner is also rich and famous (and known for his arrogance) but not to the degree that he can make governments fight for his amusement the way Bezos can. Shatner is still grounded enough to be capable of seeing reality, and being transformed by it, whereas Jeff Bezos can only see the hall of mirrors he's constructed around himself.