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ziq wrote (edited )

calling himself an anarchist

From his twitter:

If you must know, I am a utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks

I looked into Iain Banks' writings:

What is The Culture? There are two comparisons that I think really explain it. The Culture is like Star Trek’s Federation, flipped on its head. A hyper-advanced post-scarcity, post-Singularity human civilization. An anarchist collective that just works, where you can get anything you want, do anything you want. Tooling around the galaxy in spaceships with billions of people on them, run by the Minds. The Minds are…well, the post-Singularity bit. Humans build an AI and then that AI builds a better AI, and then later, rinse, repeat until the super-sentient computers are building their circuits in hyperspace because the speed of light was getting to be a drag on their processing power.

How is it like The Federation you ask? Oh, simple! They’ve got the Prime Directive, only turned inside out to make it their obligation to meddle with other societies. See, when you have a post-scarcity techno-utopia… why would you let some planet of aliens linger in their “nasty, brutish and short” phase? So Contact was born. Contact’s job is to introduce cultural ideas like freedom and responsibility, and introduce technology and new inventions without causing more problems than they solve.

Mentorship, on a massive, species-wide scale. Most of Banks’ Culture novels involve a sub-set of Contact, called Special Circumstances. Because…well, sometimes you can’t make an omlette without breaking a few eggs. By which I mean you might have to assassinate a genocidal space alien Hitler, or undermine an oppressive political system, or…get your civilization’s greatest gambler to play high-stakes poker.

It's literally space colonialism. This explains SO much about a lot of the 'anarcho' transhumanists I've been exposed to.

And of course near everyone on reddit is convinced this shit is anarchy:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarchism/comments/6romtx/is_the_culture_of_iain_banks_an_example_of_an/

Manifest destiny in space.

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[deleted] wrote

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ziq wrote

Someone on reddit tried to 'prove' it's not colonialism by linking to Banks saying "it's not colonialism, it's way better".

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libre_dev wrote

As someone who's been an observer of the LessWrong crowd for several years, transhumanists are full of shit yeah. Perhaps not all of them, it's just the entire thing reeks of privilege.

Manifest destiny in space.

I'd be careful making such comparisons when there's almost certainly no other sentient or even multicellular life outside Earth. While Musk's idea seems to be "Reddit island in spaaace", there's nothing wrong with having humans on other planets/dwarf planets/moons in say a couple of hundred years. It's either that or go extinct in anywhere between 100 - 1,000,000 years.

Personally I think we have a long long way to go considering we don't even have a self-sustaining colony on the south pole yet.

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GrimWillow wrote

oh god, they just had to describe life as having a "nasty, brutish and short” phase...quoting an ignorant racist colonialist to infer ideas about primitive culture and its value...

I never knew much of Musk before, but he's quite the joke.

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