Time to piss some more people off...
Short-Term
1. Shorten the work day to four hours.
2. Provide a public alternative to social media websites.
3. Legally abolish the practice of inheriting fortunes.
4. Shut down all credit card companies and imprison their stockholders.
5. Nationalize all corporations.
6. Legally abolish planned obsolescence.
7. Increase the number of teachers per classroom and decrease the number of students.
8. Eliminate the boss/partiality dichotomy in parenting and promote real friendship, trust, and honesty between parents and children.
9. Criminalize alcohol consumption and possession.
10. Abolish the death penalty.
11. Legalize assisted suicide.
12. Criminalize the production of meat.
13. Promote automation in the industrial and service sectors of the economy.
14. Criminalize all forms of gun possession.
15. Criminalize pregnancy.
16. Teach how to think in the classroom before presenting any individual item as a fact; discourage memorization and tradition.
17. Eliminate all legal age requirements for everything and encourage individual demonstrations of skill and responsibility.
18. Encourage corporate collusion using an "open source" method.
19. Encourage the free downloading of any kind of media.
20. Shut down frivolous businesses (jewelry chains, professional sports franchises, record companies) until we can confirm both that no businesses can utilize child labor for acquiring their raw materials and that there are no longer major threats to sentience warranting immediate attention and resources.
21. Legally abolish the lottery.
22. Criminalize all forms of gambling.
23. Reform public broadcasting in all realms of media such that there is greater public awareness of its presence; make critical thinking entertaining in an effort to gradually phase out the currently prevailing forms of entertainment in media.
24. Scorn those who promote indefinite growth -- whether of population, economic output, or irrelevant information about our personal lives.
Long-Term
1. Make everyone on Earth a member of the government.
2. Allow ideas to rule our lives, regardless of who their originators are.
3. Do away with Daylight Saving Time and time zones.
4. Eliminate all languages except one.
5. Institute peer review by unaffiliated parties in all empirical matters.
6. Replace corporate advertisements with individual advertisements of new ideas and innovations.
7. Abolish the monetary system and all methods of trading and bartering; eliminate private property and the general conception of ownership of anything, whether intellectual property, ideas, or material goods.
8. Eliminate the concepts of the school day and free time in favor of an augmented concept of nurture; allow only certified, temporary personnel within youth centers to raise children -- never their genetic parents; eliminate the distinction between life lessons and academic lessons in favor of a unified model for raising children under a singular mode with uniform methods.
9. Eliminate the dichotomy of socializing and the news media in favor of fully transparent, technologically facilitated communication.
10. Design architecture to accommodate moods in innovative ways; stray from modern, square-shaped designs wherever possible.
11. Engineer a highway system for goods and raw materials such that said materials arrive at a given location on demand at the press of a button, thus encouraging individual creativity as a replacement for corporate appropriation.
12. Penalize extended privacy.
13. Eliminate all forms of extrinsic motivation.
14. Instead of retroactively treating symptoms of problems one-on-one indefinitely, address each emergent problem at its source.
15. Painlessly terminate as many consenting conscious agents as possible while enrolling the rest into full-time simulations of reality aimed at reducing as much suffering as possible.
16. De-emphasize individuality and personal identity; make all efforts to improve Earth about moments, experiences, and sensations rather than persons, rights, etc.
17. Remove the presence of finite resources from society altogether; promote cyclic alternatives.
I understand criminalizing pregnancy, but criminalizing alcohol? While also "enrolling the rest into full-time simulations of reality aimed at reducing as much suffering as possible." You just described watching cartoons with a six-pack right there.
ReplyDeleteComputer simulations would be monitored stringently by, well, computers. They'd keep constant track of heart rate, blood pressure, brain activity, oxygen intake, fluid intake, vitamin/mineral intake, etc. Additionally, the user would have the same amount of granular control as they would in the case of the best of our extant computer programs, if not more. I think video games are more analogous to simulated reality than altered states of consciousness, where the user has little or no control over the altered state, let alone their actions. You can't press the power button to turn off a drunken night out that you'll never remember.
ReplyDeleteAlso keep in mind that within a simulation, it's just you and anyone else who consents to participate, if anyone. In some cases, it could be you living out your own fantasies without needing to worry about the welfare of any other real, sentient creatures. There would be no risk of hurting someone against their will, whether by killing them with your car, keeping them awake all night, getting into a fight with them, invading their personal space, making them feel uncomfortable, ruining your relationship with them via dependency, etc. It would just be a very robust video game with additional sensory layers to aid in immersion.
By the way, I should note that I talk of criminalizing things somewhat for the sake of provocation, here. I recognize that bandaids very rarely do much good for society, and that they often have adverse effects.
All of that is true, but until we GET the computer simulation, people are still going to want to settle for cartoons and beer. (Also, whether one is occluding real life via computer or via beer, who gives a fuck about vitamins? The value of longevity is dubious.)
ReplyDeleteHow about we just eradicate bars? Make it illegal to go outside while intoxicated? That would help the drink-television simulation inch closer to the harmlessness of the computer simulation.
Making inheritance illegal is an excellent suggestion, however. Inherited wealth makes the idea of a "free market" utterly senseless.
ReplyDeleteWhat people want is not as important as what people impact. It really depends on the situation; in some cases, settling for a lesser option is acceptable, but in others, it could cause a harm easily prevented by eliminating the option. If the object being sought after is superfluous, then why bother at all with the lesser option in the absence of the greater one if the lesser option tips the value equation in the favor of negativity?
ReplyDeleteA lot of this comes down to society being horribly flawed as a system. For example, much alcohol consumption is the result of meaningless, arbitrary social customs needing to be obeyed by the consumer of the alcohol. Without such customs acting as walls preventing people from properly communicating with one another, that particular motivation for alcohol consumption would cease to exist. If we can build solutions into the system by introducing memes powerful enough to change the culture, not only will the application of technology follow, but so will the gradual phasing out of most of our social problems as a society.
The "no intoxication while outside" rule is interesting. The only problem there is that it encourages people who would otherwise let off steam by getting drunk in bars to beat their wives, molest their kids, keep their neighbors up at night while blaring music, destroy property, etc. These are extreme examples, of course, but they nevertheless aid the core point that some degree of loss of control is always involved -- which is a willful forfeiture of personal responsibility.
Also keep in mind the short-term and long-term effects of alcohol consumption on the individual; harm to oneself that does not negate a greater harm is just as irrational as the same kind of harm when applied to another. Light intoxication is normally mostly harmless, but I tend to take reality very seriously. You never know when you'll need to be sober in the event of a fire, earthquake, or home intrusion, and I'm wary of anything which relinquishes self-control in the absence of an "off" switch.
Drunkenness is not an absolute sin, and isn't always a horrible thing in this current society, but if we could do it right, I wouldn't want drunkenness present in a future society. Then again, I seriously doubt that life should exist in the first place, so the real ideal would probably be perpetual nothingness.
I don't care about monitoring vitamins in the trivial way advocated by the modern health and fitness industry. What I meant when mentioning vitamins was that, when we eat, there are very specific chemicals that we need in at least some amount in order to live; the rest gets excreted as waste (which, as a process, is also tremendously inefficient and needs to be revamped, I might add).
Anyway, congrats on providing some of the more constructive comments to date on this blog. Relevant lines of questioning, additional suggestions, and genuine investigation are rare, here -- an unsurprising revelation, given our context.
Thank you... now that I think about it, pardon me if this is a gross oversimplification, but if you could (good luck with this!) just get people to run with the "criminalize pregnancy" idea, the rest would more or less sort itself out, assuming you made the penalty stiff enough. (Makes macabre throat-slitting gesture, is kicked out of the human race.)
ReplyDeleteThe ideal scenario would be to engineer virus strains or nanobots somehow guaranteed to destroy the DNA in the germline cells of all sexually reproducing organisms on Earth, as well as all unicellular organisms. It would have to be done in a way that would prevent mass starvation by ecosystem collapse, though.
ReplyDeleteIt's quite a daunting task, but something to think about for the future nonetheless.
I liked your thoughts about criminalizing pregnancy. Seriously, I believe the real problem is that in the modern society the decision to reproduce is not scrutinized, even when it is known that nothing good awaits the kids when they are born.I would say at least if someone want to get pregnant they should pay a deposit that would cover healthcare, childcare and education of their kids.
ReplyDelete"Criminalize all forms of gambling."
ReplyDeleteNo way. I depend on poker for a living, working just sucks and should be abolished immediately. No one should ever work, as Bob Black wrote.
"Criminalize alcohol consumption and possession."
ReplyDeleteNo way. Every real artist -- especially writers, these kings of art -- needs booze in order to be productive. And life without art would be a mistake. I look at paintings at least two hours every day, and read three more hours high quality literature. I just couldn't live without it, couldn't breathe.