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Sketch-A-Society

Professor PopulistApr 18, 2021, 2:26:22 PM

Our current society has reached a dead end. Transhumanism seeks one path out of the cul-de-sac which would end Homo Sapiens. It's important that those who reject such a path develop viable alternatives or the current societal inertia will simply choose Transhumanism by default.

Criticizing an existing system and developing a new one require fairly different skill sets. There's certainly some overlap but much does not. So critics of capitalism will often just pick up whatever alternative system is lying around and say they're "for" that one. Critics of communism will often do the same.

But they're all flawed ideologies that end up empowering a tiny group of elites. The sooner enough of us recognize this the sooner we can begin working collectively to develop something that actually can work for average people. I'm quite sure that something will look nothing like capitalism or communism as we know them today.

It seems that we have repeatedly failed throughout history, in this country and others, to properly scale our communities up from the simple tribe. Every seemingly necessary more complex social construct ends up twisted and perverted. As time passes we even forget what particular pieces of the social construct are even "for."

In some sense, once we got beyond our small tribes culture has always been used by the elite for control. I think now that we exist in a globally-connected society it becomes both clearer and more dangerous: We no longer have the buffers of distance and slow communications. Bad ideas spread faster and faster. Unfortunately the speed of analyzing bad ideas has not necessarily increased in tandem.

Such a task would, I think, be significantly easier with fewer minds to make aware. In a world of nearly 8 billion, is it ever possible to make enough "see" at the same time? And do it without harsh acts of repression? Changing a mind isn't like changing a tire.

"Imagine a large population of Bertrand Russells—a Bertrand Russell Island—each of whom will inspect every doctrine placed before them, and will infallibly consign each doctrine to its proper place: the error bin or the correct bin. However, in each case, it takes a week to decide. Even on this ideally rational island, all new bad ideas would propagate for a week or more. Bertrand Russell Island is like any normal population with birth and death. Because there’s always youthful Bertrand Russells who have yet to inspect the bad ideas, bogus ideas could, in principle, last forever. There would still be a disconnect between the system of ideas spreading and the rationality/cognitive power of the individuals in the population. You don’t have to think that some people are irrational or closed to argument to explain the prevalence of error or stupid ideas. Even Bertrand Russell Island would have fake news." [Source]

So with that in mind perhaps this project, Sketch-a-Society, can be useful. The goal of this enterprise is to hopefully provide an activity which will prove both humbling & empowering. My desire is that this will help you think about your beliefs and hopefully push you to learn more about areas where you come up short.

I also wanted to make this something more theoretical so that people can really tap into their creativity without having to worry about practical reality just yet. So these sketches do not need to include a path from here to there. Though I would encourage you to keep them within the realm of reality in terms of existing technology & physical rules (e.g. no faster-than-light travel and gravity still exists) in order for the final products to be most useful in our future endeavors.

I've put together a list of things that you'll likely want to consider & address. But feel free to add your own as well since mine is probably incomplete. After all, this is YOUR society you're sketching.

One thing to keep in mind when outlining the details for these items is what does day-to-day life actually look like? Another thing to keep a look out for is what ethical questions, if any, are raised by your chosen course?

I know there's no flashy graphics. No cool sound effects. No exciting quests to complete. There's no badges or titles on offer. No clear monetary rewards or incentives. Heck, there's no promise of any real reward at all.

And I know the task of creating an entire society from scratch may seem daunting. But remember: Everything Massive Once Wasn't. So just copy the above list of categories into a blog (well preferably into a plain text file first and then a blog) of your own and begin with some simple bullet point notes. Once you've got some of those, you'll begin to have more and more spontaneously come to you. You'll also be able to start expanding upon the ideas highlighted in previous bullets. Before you know it you might end up with quite an impressive document.

I've begun creating my own and will be slowly adding to it over time but I'd really love to see what others come up more than what I have so don't expect mine to become quickly filled in anytime soon. You can find my ongoing example here. As of this writing I have added nothing more than a few (at most) bullet point notes for each category. I know every one of you reading this can do better than that. So let's see it!

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Sketch-A-Society

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