• Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    6 days ago

    We’ve talked about engineering positive viruses. I wonder if we can engineer positive parasites?

    Actually, create a political platform around a think tank + powerful AI system (and a network of fact-checkers / blue-teams) and then run it to create policy toward long term progress and elevating the bottom rungs of the population into the working class. Make the figurehead a movie star who is great at patriotic oration. This is quite doable.

    The problem is, billionaires and oligarchs don’t want to build a star spanning republic of which they’re personally a small part. They want to rule a silly little banana republic. So autocratic fascists get huge infusions of cash from them to stop projects like the one described above.

    Once we create a society that is a cultural panopolis, though, it’s only a matter of time until the Zaphod Beeblebrox party, above, infiltrates all the dictatorships and causes political trouble, possibly challenging their rule to adopt the same set of principles. It may be this reason that aristocratic elites get very aggressive against anyone who tries to do a communism. (See the USSR who got shut out by Wilson early on, or the massacre of the Black Panthers by FBI.)

    If we didn’t have the climate crisis and the plastic crisis looming as unnavigated great filters we’d have a workable super-villain master plan that didn’t actually involve killing millions of people.