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With recent events I’ve been thinking about Dune lately. Once you start to compare what happens in dune to what is happening now, it's rather unpleasant. Pres
by hayst4ck 2y ago
With recent events I’ve been thinking about Dune lately. Once you start to compare what happens in dune to what is happening now, it's rather unpleasant.
Prescience allows for the complete domination of humanity, but to some degree we already working on pre-prescience. Privatized intelligence companies have grown as part of our corporate surveillance state. These companies, like palantir, act as “truthsayers,” divining the state of reality from incredible amounts of information for those with the money to buy it. America has companies that rival countries in terms of power, and these intelligence companies that service them can act as king maker and influence, subtly or directly, with some very giant levers.
The US government is closer to the Landsraad, each house is a corporation, each CEO a duke or baron.
Peter Thiel is likely the reverend mother architect of a recent messianic rise to power.
I am not 100% sure exactly what the Bene Gesserit were supposed to represent, but on a deep level I think they represent intelligence agencies like the CIA.
Social Media has a lot of overlap with “the voice.” With A/B testing various groups with divisive messages, to see what divides most effectively, it creates a means of control. Nobody was commanded to show up on jan 6, but the “command” to do so was heard. This is very in line with frank Herbert’s idea of what the voice was. A/B testing messages on humans at scale is like learning the voice.
We now have Cameras, RF Receivers (blue tooth/driver's license detection), phone backups, website logs, and a host of other surveillance all centralized, maybe not directly, into the hands of private intelligence. With all these sources of information we are getting closer and closer and closer to prescience. We are still limited by computing power to make sense of all the data, but the god emperor of dune was not. With the rise of AI, we now have the potential for a thinking/processing agent with no sense of morality to be assigned to every single individual, in order to carry out the absolute crushing of any nascent dissent before it can become cohesive enough to threaten those in power.
We are dangerously close to uncheckable totalitarian rule. When our rulers do something we don't like, they will laugh and say "what are you going to do about it?" Every potential weapon purchased will be fed into their "prescient" machine, so will every communication with another individual, and every use of transportation. When your personal AI agent determines you are at risk of "doing something about it," an example will be made of you.
- tsimionescu 2y ago> We are dangerously close to uncheckable totalitarian rule. I'm not sure we need to look to the future for that. North Korea has really shown that modern weapons and 80s era intelligence and propaganda methods, applied brutally enough, are enough to keep ~20 million people under extreme poverty and deep obedience for 80+ years now, with no signs of stopping (at least not from internal pressures) any time soon.
- tpm 2y agoIt's not enough, you also have to take into account specific culture and circumstances. The same as in NK could have happened in several other countries in Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Cambodia), Africa and South America (various communist dictatorships) and Europe (all countries behind the Iron Curtain). So why only North Korea?
- ViktorRay 2y agoI believe the answer is the hereditary nature of the North Korean system. That is what is different in North Korea compared to those other countries. It leads to a country that is essentially a slave society. The owner is the Kim family. The other top people are overseers. The population are slaves. Propaganda and censorship of the outside world maintain the system. This was true of the other Communist countries also but I think the hereditary nature keeps it going. It’s the only thing that distinguishes North Korea from the other Communist states.
- hayst4ck 2y ago> Communist Thew way you are using this word is wrong. It might be cosmetic communism, but it's clearly a totalitarian state. You called the population slaves, which is very much not workers owning the means of production. Communism is an end state, but no government gets there because once a force is strong enough to forcibly redistribute resources to people not powerful enough to take those resources themselves, the redistributors choose to redistribute the resources to themselves because they have unchecked power. Communism collapses into totalitarianism in almost the same way democracy collapses into oligarchy. Communism is a description of a power relationship. It is supposed to be a re-distribution of power, but in societies that claim to have tried communism, resources get distributed for a time, but power does not. So you get distributed resources (cosmetic communism), but not distributed power (structural communism). This then leads to the deeper problem. Communism becomes a scare word that means authoritarianism which taints marxist ideas, which taints socialism. There is a balancing act. Too much re-distributive power -> power centralizes to those capable of redistribution -> unchecked power -> authoritarianism. Too little re-distributive power -> power centralizes in those who continue to consolidate their power -> unchecked power -> authoritarianism. By using the word communism to describe authoritarianism, you damage the ideas necessary to prevent democracy from the same fate.