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We've seen down that road. We know where it leads. Look at the imagined futures of games such as Shadowrun and Cyberpunk. This way lies an extreme dystopia for

We've seen down that road. We know where it leads. Look at the imagined futures of games such as Shadowrun and Cyberpunk. This way lies an extreme dystopia for everyone except the ultra-rich.

drhaGfayC 2y ago
A valid strategy against the monarchist oligarchs is to politely tell the MAGA part of the Republicans that they are being sold out and deceived. But it has to be really gentle and honest. Many people on YouTube already have gotten the message. If on the other hand there is a true uniparty, then we are doomed. People have to select more honest candidates in the primaries on both sides to have any chance.
- xg15 2y ago
  > If on the other hand there is a true uniparty, then we are doomed. People have to select more honest candidates in the primaries on both sides to have any chance. I know it sounds trite, but I fully believe that a big cause of the current situation is the broken election system in the US, which has made it practically impossible for any new party or independent candidate to establish themself. Yes, there are the die-hard MAGAists, but I think a lot of the votes that brought the win for Trump were really protest votes against Biden. The reasons were varied, but I think anger about the continuing inflation and the Biden admin's Middle East policy were two big issues. With a different system, this could have empowered a third party candidate, maybe Jill Stein or (a hypothetically independent) Bernie Sanders. But here, the election was presented like Discworld's "you always have a choice": Vote Harris, i.e. "ignore all problems and continue as before" or jump into a pit full of spikes. The populace chose the pit full of spikes.
  - tbrownaw 2y ago
    > broken election system in the US, which has made it practically impossible for any new party or independent candidate to establish themself. As in ballot access restrictions and how the two big parties collude to keep other candidates out of the presidential debates? Or the low turnout for primaries? Or how voters don't pay enough attention to local races?
    - PessimalDecimal 2y ago
      Isn't it more structural than that? The first-past-the-post system can only support two parties in the long run. It's an extremely old and simple way of structuring elections, but the US government has a system that has remained mostly intact for centuries now. We're stuck with it for now. If we wanted this system to be peacefully replaced with something more modern, the parties who benefit from this arrangement would have to be the ones to champion its replacement. That doesn't seem likely.
      - tbrownaw 2y ago
        > The first-past-the-post system can only support two parties in the long run. And yet the two main parties here do feel the need to collude to exclude third other parties. Which demonstrates that they see third parties as a legitimate threat. And third parties can get enough vote share to tip the outcome ("if only all those people hadn't thrown their votes away, my side would have won!"). Which means they're not the non-entities that theory suggests they are. And parties aren't static, but have to adjust to match the electorate. There isn't a static steady-state to eventually reach. And if you've seen discussions about the Democrat party in the US being a "big tent" party that's hamstrung by needing to appease moderates or the Republican party needing to kick out various extremists to gain legitimacy (why yes, most of the discussions I see do come from people on what we call the "left" here, how could you tell?), they sound like there's something similar going on to what I see in discussions about countries with proportional / parliamentary systems having to form coalitions post-election. Ie there's the same sort of coalition-building going on, it just happens before rather than after and isn't explicitly made legible in the labels candidates use for themselves.
        JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > the two main parties here do feel the need to collude to exclude third other parties The spoiler effect means you don’t need collusion to explain the results. Both parties are enormously incentivised to stamp out and subsume ideologically-near competitors. If they don’t, the other party wins.
      - 2y ago
  - rat87 2y ago
    Biden supported our allies while also pressing for a path to peace. Jill Stein had a terrible foreign policy especially with regards to russia. Anyone who thought Trump would do better ... Inflation had largely been contained, and top including conservative ones economists agreed that Trump's plans were terrible for inflation Biden was a competent president who brought real positive change. Harris like Biden actually had a plan for non revolutionary but real gradual change to improve things. Trump promised to destroy stuff(if you actually listed to the meaning of his words) and promised unicorns if you didn't
    - parineum 2y ago
      You can stop campaigning, it's over. Also, the period where Biden was President may have been competently run (subjective) but Biden himself was not competent when running for re-election so running on his record didn't really work. Harris wasn't Biden but, despite what VPs say, they don't get much credit (from voters) for their administrations accomplishments. In fact, VPs tend to get the worst assignments (Border Czar) to take the heat off if the President which they usually fail at (because they were set up to). People saw Harris as the worst part of the previous administration who was selected by committee to be their candidate.
      - bamboozled 2y ago
        I don’t think you’re invalidating much of what they’ve said and much of what happened. People bought into far right populism, what’s new ?
        parineum 2y ago
        I think I (or attempted to) invalidate everything up to the final paragraph because everything before that was about the Biden presidency which was not positively relevant to the Harris campaign. Joe Biden's record is Biden's and Harris' responsibilities under the Biden administration was not positive. Let alone questions about her emphatic statements attesting to his mental capacity right up until the emperor had no clothes on national TV. Unsurprisingly, people were not enthusiastic about being given a candidate who struggled nationally and was widely considered a bad candidate, right up until she was the candidate. Harris is and was a horrible candidate. Everyone knew it, even Democrats. Democrats spiked the football on fourth down when they were losing with 30 seconds left. Whatever people want to say about Trump, apparently Democrats didn't find him enough of a threat to democracy to put up a candidate that had a chance to win.
  - resize2996 2y ago
    I don't think it's trite at all. The US electoral system is insane. President is chosen by the same few states every time. I haven't had a vote for president that has mattered ever, and I'm kinda old and have voted in several states.
  - talldrinkofwhat 2y ago
    A wishlist as short as it is improbable: 1. Overturn citizens united. (get money out of politics) 2. Rank-choice voting. (get extremists out of politics) 3. Remove cap on House of Representatives (washington only wanted 1 rep per 30,000 people... we're currently at 1 per 750,000...) (get lack of representation out of politics) 4. Mandatory voting / national holiday. e.g. at its core, people are not being heard (or even worse, feel like their voice doesn't matter) and vested interests have fully taken the wheel.
- kmeisthax 2y ago
  The uniparty is absolutely real, but it can be defeated through the exercise of democratic power. To be clear, I don't mean voting. Voting is the thing you do at the end of the democratic process once your power is asserted and coordinated decision-making needs to be done. What you need is political action: organization, protests, strikes, infiltration, and targeted exercises of power. And, most importantly, discussion and coordination, especially among people outside your ideological bubble[0]. This is how you assert your democratic power. Get off social media and make friends[1]. The uniparty thrives on an antisocial politics where the majority of people don't vote, most of each party's voting support is gimmies[2], and elections are decided by inches. That is, when people show up to vote and then just disappear from political life for the next 2 to 4 years. Ironically, the MAGA hats are better at democratic exercises of power, even though the end goal of their thought leaders is to dissolve democracy. You have to keep in mind that if there's two people in the room, Trump is telling them three different contradictory things. The MAGA coalition is stronger than, say, the "everything's fine" DNC one, but it's still full of contradictions that can't be reconciled. Actually listen to what the MAGA hats are saying - instead of getting into apoplectic fits over the dog whistles they spout - and you can start to spot the cleavages. Here's some examples of how that could work: - Do you have a neighbor that works for the government who got that weird Elon Musk fork offer e-mail? Maybe slip them a copy of the Simple Sabotage Field Manual. - Are you in a terrible workplace? Get to know your co-workers. Find time to talk with them when the boss isn't watching. Plan shit. - Take any opportunity you can to get to know people who work in service. Economic stratification and the lack of third spaces mean there are precious few opportunities for the "middle class[3]" and the rest of the working class to socialize and co-mingle. - If you have family members who have their head in the gaping maw of the MAGA cult, point out the contradictions between what they want and what Trump is doing. Don't try to disprove Trump with facts and logic. Just plant the seed in their minds. What you want is to build multiple overlapping coalitions of people who are willing to fight for their democratic rights in whatever way they can. [0] This means hold off on the purity tests. Those are for you, not your friends. [1] To be clear, I am not ruling out all computer-mediated communication; merely the kind of communication that is designed as a substitute for socialization. This means less political Twitter, Mastodon, or Facebook; and more IRC, SMS, or Discord. [2] In game design, gimmies are the portion of your score, tokens, or performance, that must be played for, but can safely be assumed to be taken by one player at the start of the game. This would be the person who's voted D or R all their life no matter who or what is running. [3] "Working class but in denial about it"
jonstewart 2y ago
Small wonder that the ultra rich who grew up playing these games want to… play these games.
wwweston 2y ago
But they think cyberpunk is really cool! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGhsEADnbOU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGhsEADnbOU
- forgotTheLast 2y ago
  If I had a dollar for every time I've seen someone embrace cyberpunk aesthetics while misunderstanding its ethos, I'd have enough money to buy my favorite social network and run it into the ground.
  - wwweston 2y ago
    But would you have enough to buy your favorite society and run it into the ground? Re: embracing aesthetics while misunderstanding ethos - I've noticed this about religion too. There is frequently a divide between subscription to deep ethos and social aesthetics and the latter often seems more popular. This is especially puzzling to me with Christianity considering that a fair bit of the New Testament (and some of the Old) appears to be a criticism of exactly this problem and attempts to transcend it. It might be that style over substance is a long-running human problem.
    - tbrownaw 2y ago
      > It might be that style over substance is a long-running human problem. Standardization is useful for scaling.
      - CMCDragonkai 2y ago
        Understanding the ethos isn't necessary for reproducing behaviour. Someone has already worked out the why, just do what they tell you do.
    - Philpax 2y ago
      > But would you have enough to buy your favorite society and run it into the ground? If you pull it off right, you can get a 2-for-1 deal on the social network and parlay the result of your ketamine bender into a role as Shadow President.
aranelsurion 2y ago
Funny that the future Cyberpunk 2077 envisions is IMHO optimistic about AI. Unlike ours, in that world AI has already presented itself as a threat, and worst of them were somewhat successfully contained behind Blackwall. Perhaps because of that and NetWatch, there isn't a strong positive outlook on AI as we have, neither from corporations nor from most people. There are some AI and robots, but they are more specialized and many jobs still require humans, so those who aren't already rich are still to a degree needed. It's a dystopia in many ways, but AI isn't one of them. None of that has been tested yet in the real world of course. Perhaps we'll manage to build a world that makes Cyberpunk look better. :)
- dartos 2y ago
  Uhh… cyberpunk 2077 literally had AI Wars and made a big wall around most of the internet to prevent AI from affecting anyone, except for one taxi company. Does that sound optimistic?
  - aranelsurion 2y ago
    Optimistic part is that they’ve made it to the other side.
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    I think parent poster's point is that those AI were independent equal-opportunity menaces, as opposed to tools of powerfulb humans to seize more power.
belter 2y ago
"I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible” - Peter Thiel - The Atlantic 2023
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  This guy is such an obstinate dumbass. I’ve never seen a quote from him that didn’t look like a caricature from Silicon Valley.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - klabb3 2y ago
    I don’t think he’s a dumbass. He’s selling pseudo-philosophical guilt-washing to the neo-oligarchs and their temporarily embarrassed billionaire posse, which is a product worth its weight in gold. He hosted the post-election party for all of the trumps, bezoses and Zuckerberg at his estate, so no small player. It’s reminiscent of the growth of the neocon movement – I mean the ideology doesn’t have to be comprehensive or consistent. It just has to be convincing long enough for short sound bites and hot takes, so they can legitimize the rapid transformation of society faster than people have time to refute it.
- mbeex 2y ago
  Much older: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/ https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...
  - pragmatic 2y ago
    "extension of the franchise to women" Yeah he's been out there in plain sight for a decade plus.
parineum 2y ago
We've not seen down that road. Fiction isn't reality. Fiction's problems are imagined and exaggerated to give the hero something to overcome. Dystopian fiction doesn't have a great track record for prediction.
- quadhome 2y ago
  Moreover, the vast majority of the callbacks to cyberpunk-- both aspirational and critical-- somehow miss that the entire aesthetic was a response to Reaganomics! Moreover, and somewhat ironically, Reagan was the last US president that used the Heritage Foundation's publications as his policy template. I wonder what great aesthetic and fiction we'll get from Trumpism?

We've seen down that road. We know where it leads. Look at the imagined futures of games such as Shadowrun and Cyberpunk. This way lies an extreme dystopia for everyone except the ultra-rich.

drhaGfayC 2y ago

A valid strategy against the monarchist oligarchs is to politely tell the MAGA part of the Republicans that they are being sold out and deceived. But it has to be really gentle and honest. Many people on YouTube already have gotten the message. If on the other hand there is a true uniparty, then we are doomed. People have to select more honest candidates in the primaries on both sides to have any chance.

xg15 2y ago
> If on the other hand there is a true uniparty, then we are doomed. People have to select more honest candidates in the primaries on both sides to have any chance. I know it sounds trite, but I fully believe that a big cause of the current situation is the broken election system in the US, which has made it practically impossible for any new party or independent candidate to establish themself. Yes, there are the die-hard MAGAists, but I think a lot of the votes that brought the win for Trump were really protest votes against Biden. The reasons were varied, but I think anger about the continuing inflation and the Biden admin's Middle East policy were two big issues. With a different system, this could have empowered a third party candidate, maybe Jill Stein or (a hypothetically independent) Bernie Sanders. But here, the election was presented like Discworld's "you always have a choice": Vote Harris, i.e. "ignore all problems and continue as before" or jump into a pit full of spikes. The populace chose the pit full of spikes.
- tbrownaw 2y ago
  > broken election system in the US, which has made it practically impossible for any new party or independent candidate to establish themself. As in ballot access restrictions and how the two big parties collude to keep other candidates out of the presidential debates? Or the low turnout for primaries? Or how voters don't pay enough attention to local races?
  - PessimalDecimal 2y ago
    Isn't it more structural than that? The first-past-the-post system can only support two parties in the long run. It's an extremely old and simple way of structuring elections, but the US government has a system that has remained mostly intact for centuries now. We're stuck with it for now. If we wanted this system to be peacefully replaced with something more modern, the parties who benefit from this arrangement would have to be the ones to champion its replacement. That doesn't seem likely.
    - tbrownaw 2y ago
      > The first-past-the-post system can only support two parties in the long run. And yet the two main parties here do feel the need to collude to exclude third other parties. Which demonstrates that they see third parties as a legitimate threat. And third parties can get enough vote share to tip the outcome ("if only all those people hadn't thrown their votes away, my side would have won!"). Which means they're not the non-entities that theory suggests they are. And parties aren't static, but have to adjust to match the electorate. There isn't a static steady-state to eventually reach. And if you've seen discussions about the Democrat party in the US being a "big tent" party that's hamstrung by needing to appease moderates or the Republican party needing to kick out various extremists to gain legitimacy (why yes, most of the discussions I see do come from people on what we call the "left" here, how could you tell?), they sound like there's something similar going on to what I see in discussions about countries with proportional / parliamentary systems having to form coalitions post-election. Ie there's the same sort of coalition-building going on, it just happens before rather than after and isn't explicitly made legible in the labels candidates use for themselves.
      - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > the two main parties here do feel the need to collude to exclude third other parties The spoiler effect means you don’t need collusion to explain the results. Both parties are enormously incentivised to stamp out and subsume ideologically-near competitors. If they don’t, the other party wins.
    - 2y ago
- rat87 2y ago
  Biden supported our allies while also pressing for a path to peace. Jill Stein had a terrible foreign policy especially with regards to russia. Anyone who thought Trump would do better ... Inflation had largely been contained, and top including conservative ones economists agreed that Trump's plans were terrible for inflation Biden was a competent president who brought real positive change. Harris like Biden actually had a plan for non revolutionary but real gradual change to improve things. Trump promised to destroy stuff(if you actually listed to the meaning of his words) and promised unicorns if you didn't
  - parineum 2y ago
    You can stop campaigning, it's over. Also, the period where Biden was President may have been competently run (subjective) but Biden himself was not competent when running for re-election so running on his record didn't really work. Harris wasn't Biden but, despite what VPs say, they don't get much credit (from voters) for their administrations accomplishments. In fact, VPs tend to get the worst assignments (Border Czar) to take the heat off if the President which they usually fail at (because they were set up to). People saw Harris as the worst part of the previous administration who was selected by committee to be their candidate.
    - bamboozled 2y ago
      I don’t think you’re invalidating much of what they’ve said and much of what happened. People bought into far right populism, what’s new ?
      - parineum 2y ago
        I think I (or attempted to) invalidate everything up to the final paragraph because everything before that was about the Biden presidency which was not positively relevant to the Harris campaign. Joe Biden's record is Biden's and Harris' responsibilities under the Biden administration was not positive. Let alone questions about her emphatic statements attesting to his mental capacity right up until the emperor had no clothes on national TV. Unsurprisingly, people were not enthusiastic about being given a candidate who struggled nationally and was widely considered a bad candidate, right up until she was the candidate. Harris is and was a horrible candidate. Everyone knew it, even Democrats. Democrats spiked the football on fourth down when they were losing with 30 seconds left. Whatever people want to say about Trump, apparently Democrats didn't find him enough of a threat to democracy to put up a candidate that had a chance to win.
- resize2996 2y ago
  I don't think it's trite at all. The US electoral system is insane. President is chosen by the same few states every time. I haven't had a vote for president that has mattered ever, and I'm kinda old and have voted in several states.
- talldrinkofwhat 2y ago
  A wishlist as short as it is improbable: 1. Overturn citizens united. (get money out of politics) 2. Rank-choice voting. (get extremists out of politics) 3. Remove cap on House of Representatives (washington only wanted 1 rep per 30,000 people... we're currently at 1 per 750,000...) (get lack of representation out of politics) 4. Mandatory voting / national holiday. e.g. at its core, people are not being heard (or even worse, feel like their voice doesn't matter) and vested interests have fully taken the wheel.
kmeisthax 2y ago
The uniparty is absolutely real, but it can be defeated through the exercise of democratic power. To be clear, I don't mean voting. Voting is the thing you do at the end of the democratic process once your power is asserted and coordinated decision-making needs to be done. What you need is political action: organization, protests, strikes, infiltration, and targeted exercises of power. And, most importantly, discussion and coordination, especially among people outside your ideological bubble[0]. This is how you assert your democratic power. Get off social media and make friends[1]. The uniparty thrives on an antisocial politics where the majority of people don't vote, most of each party's voting support is gimmies[2], and elections are decided by inches. That is, when people show up to vote and then just disappear from political life for the next 2 to 4 years. Ironically, the MAGA hats are better at democratic exercises of power, even though the end goal of their thought leaders is to dissolve democracy. You have to keep in mind that if there's two people in the room, Trump is telling them three different contradictory things. The MAGA coalition is stronger than, say, the "everything's fine" DNC one, but it's still full of contradictions that can't be reconciled. Actually listen to what the MAGA hats are saying - instead of getting into apoplectic fits over the dog whistles they spout - and you can start to spot the cleavages. Here's some examples of how that could work: - Do you have a neighbor that works for the government who got that weird Elon Musk fork offer e-mail? Maybe slip them a copy of the Simple Sabotage Field Manual. - Are you in a terrible workplace? Get to know your co-workers. Find time to talk with them when the boss isn't watching. Plan shit. - Take any opportunity you can to get to know people who work in service. Economic stratification and the lack of third spaces mean there are precious few opportunities for the "middle class[3]" and the rest of the working class to socialize and co-mingle. - If you have family members who have their head in the gaping maw of the MAGA cult, point out the contradictions between what they want and what Trump is doing. Don't try to disprove Trump with facts and logic. Just plant the seed in their minds. What you want is to build multiple overlapping coalitions of people who are willing to fight for their democratic rights in whatever way they can. [0] This means hold off on the purity tests. Those are for you, not your friends. [1] To be clear, I am not ruling out all computer-mediated communication; merely the kind of communication that is designed as a substitute for socialization. This means less political Twitter, Mastodon, or Facebook; and more IRC, SMS, or Discord. [2] In game design, gimmies are the portion of your score, tokens, or performance, that must be played for, but can safely be assumed to be taken by one player at the start of the game. This would be the person who's voted D or R all their life no matter who or what is running. [3] "Working class but in denial about it"

jonstewart 2y ago

Small wonder that the ultra rich who grew up playing these games want to… play these games.

wwweston 2y ago

But they think cyberpunk is really cool! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGhsEADnbOU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGhsEADnbOU

forgotTheLast 2y ago
If I had a dollar for every time I've seen someone embrace cyberpunk aesthetics while misunderstanding its ethos, I'd have enough money to buy my favorite social network and run it into the ground.
- wwweston 2y ago
  But would you have enough to buy your favorite society and run it into the ground? Re: embracing aesthetics while misunderstanding ethos - I've noticed this about religion too. There is frequently a divide between subscription to deep ethos and social aesthetics and the latter often seems more popular. This is especially puzzling to me with Christianity considering that a fair bit of the New Testament (and some of the Old) appears to be a criticism of exactly this problem and attempts to transcend it. It might be that style over substance is a long-running human problem.
  - tbrownaw 2y ago
    > It might be that style over substance is a long-running human problem. Standardization is useful for scaling.
    - CMCDragonkai 2y ago
      Understanding the ethos isn't necessary for reproducing behaviour. Someone has already worked out the why, just do what they tell you do.
  - Philpax 2y ago
    > But would you have enough to buy your favorite society and run it into the ground? If you pull it off right, you can get a 2-for-1 deal on the social network and parlay the result of your ketamine bender into a role as Shadow President.

aranelsurion 2y ago

Funny that the future Cyberpunk 2077 envisions is IMHO optimistic about AI. Unlike ours, in that world AI has already presented itself as a threat, and worst of them were somewhat successfully contained behind Blackwall. Perhaps because of that and NetWatch, there isn't a strong positive outlook on AI as we have, neither from corporations nor from most people. There are some AI and robots, but they are more specialized and many jobs still require humans, so those who aren't already rich are still to a degree needed. It's a dystopia in many ways, but AI isn't one of them. None of that has been tested yet in the real world of course. Perhaps we'll manage to build a world that makes Cyberpunk look better. :)

dartos 2y ago
Uhh… cyberpunk 2077 literally had AI Wars and made a big wall around most of the internet to prevent AI from affecting anyone, except for one taxi company. Does that sound optimistic?
- aranelsurion 2y ago
  Optimistic part is that they’ve made it to the other side.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  I think parent poster's point is that those AI were independent equal-opportunity menaces, as opposed to tools of powerfulb humans to seize more power.

belter 2y ago

"I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible” - Peter Thiel - The Atlantic 2023

kjkjadksj 2y ago
This guy is such an obstinate dumbass. I’ve never seen a quote from him that didn’t look like a caricature from Silicon Valley.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- klabb3 2y ago
  I don’t think he’s a dumbass. He’s selling pseudo-philosophical guilt-washing to the neo-oligarchs and their temporarily embarrassed billionaire posse, which is a product worth its weight in gold. He hosted the post-election party for all of the trumps, bezoses and Zuckerberg at his estate, so no small player. It’s reminiscent of the growth of the neocon movement – I mean the ideology doesn’t have to be comprehensive or consistent. It just has to be convincing long enough for short sound bites and hot takes, so they can legitimize the rapid transformation of society faster than people have time to refute it.
mbeex 2y ago
Much older: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/ https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...
- pragmatic 2y ago
  "extension of the franchise to women" Yeah he's been out there in plain sight for a decade plus.

parineum 2y ago

We've not seen down that road. Fiction isn't reality. Fiction's problems are imagined and exaggerated to give the hero something to overcome. Dystopian fiction doesn't have a great track record for prediction.

quadhome 2y ago
Moreover, the vast majority of the callbacks to cyberpunk-- both aspirational and critical-- somehow miss that the entire aesthetic was a response to Reaganomics! Moreover, and somewhat ironically, Reagan was the last US president that used the Heritage Foundation's publications as his policy template. I wonder what great aesthetic and fiction we'll get from Trumpism?