a final call for lifeboats

warning

if you are not a regular user of a niche internet microcommunity like the dark fediverse, irc channels, mumble servers, forums, micro-imageboards, dead social media sites, maybe the community servers of a 20 year old video game, or god forbid, a discord server with racial slurs, this post has left its intended audience and to consider anything beyond this as merely anything more than an anthropological record of the schizoid ramblings for an ideologically captured dysgenic philosophy is a fool's errand. you've been warned. also this was written in like an hour so good luck. if hn or reddit finds this then we've already left.

the age of computing is dead.

oh my god i swear to god i am so fucking tired of retarded insane techbro ai maximalist hysteria i can't read anoth- STOP. shut the FUCK UP. do not confuse the chattering of an anthill with the rumble of the tank that i will describe.

human life has many facets with endless depths of value and meaning and all that is good and holy. in no particular order, there is the classic pursuit of happiness, the fostering of a family, building of community, the crusade of providing the means of flourishing, the search for the grace and understanding of ultimate good, the striving for an ideal, the toil and sacrifice for purpose, and the journey for the connection of souls. what i will be talking about is none of these, and matters far less, but still controls societies, generations, countries, the battlefield of nations and the transnational alliance of men with power. what i am talking about are the “flames” of society.

every so often, and quite regularly in fact, certain ideas flame up and can seem to summon cabals of niche, highly influential and consequential (to the world of men) from nothing. for instance, we take the idea of civil liberties almost as a practical forgone conclusion of moral philosophy, but not that long ago, people regularly met in exclusive late night gatherings they called salons debating feminist and marxist ideals. before then it was coffee shops. in high school history classes we study the events like the succession of the colonies and the french revolution as the main focus, with salons and coffee shops as the quaint factoids of the era, and receive basically brochure of the movements as a dry thesis of a philosophy long played out. what we do not focus on are the experience of members that formed these social flames.

we assume that you are already steeped in the zeitgeist of whatever hot button topic of gas stoves or immigration or abortion or lgbt rights or civil rights or slavery (i cannot make it clear enough that i am not fucking talking about ai), so there is no need to generalize this to overarching issues that span generations which i am referring to as ages or flames of society. [1]. the civil rights movement is not an isolated 10 year movement for gods sake it was merely a small flare from a campfire that has been dying down for a while now. and if you are about to say that your tiktok comments or no kings protests where you go to a preassigned location with a sign, yell a bit, and then go home is the same then you are malignantly and apparatchikly ignoring the objective decline from the impassioned spirits that filled countless speakeasies and houses and i will beat you with the buttstock of my rifle.

another example was the railroads, think about how invigorated all those railroad executives must have felt carrying out what they felt was their divine mission of expansion across the united states and europe. their national manifest destiny was definitely present but can be considered to have melted in the face of endless bounties that await at the altar of industrialization, transportation, and mobility, a movement that crossed borders, ethnicities, and nationalities. and if you need a clearer example of what the embers look like, just look at what modern transportation enthusiasts look like now. there's actually a lot of interesting developments of gondola systems being deployed due to their cost effectiveness at the moment if you were not aware but that's not the point.

the point is the age that you and i have been steeped in for generations has come to an end. the age of building the first mechanical tabulators, to the age of hand-wiring core memory for military targeting calculators, to hand punching fortran mainframe punchcards for banking systems, to the ontological innovations of bell labs, to the explosive power of apple and microsoft pcs, the entrepreneurial spirit of early internet startups, the eventual triumph of open source, the subsumption of silicon valley of venture capital firms, to the institutionalization of big tech giants. it has all come to an end.

here is the pudding: every single tech trend can now be labeled a form of devolution. the attempt to reify nostalgia like bbses, newsgroups, irc servers, phpBB forums, windows vista rices, devolution. the retreat to self-hosted open source software, devolution. the evacuation to alternative social media, devolution. the fortified bunker of local-first, devolution. the ai prophets may on one hand talk about the endless wealth and value that will come from the new world order but they have already begun to convert to becoming doomsday apocalypticists. [2] i think they have realized that even if every human was given the power of superintelligence to eliminate all intellectual and systemic friction from the world, it may not lead to the utopia that they have hoped, devolution. we literally have an entire movement called degrowth for gods sake.

there are other attempts to save the dying embers by attempting to transplant tech onto so deemed fertile grounds, like a simulacra of reality via the metaverse, to keep the circuses running with lower structural costs (hey at least the steam frame looks cool). or transplanting to the financial backbones with cryptocurrency that /biz/ investors currently post red and pink images on, i'm sure they're enjoying their casino. or perhaps the interactive computing of folk.computer or dynamicland to recapture that bell labs magic. or perhaps revitalizing american manufacturing through home fabrication communities like 3d printing, chemistry, biology, robotics, rockets, drones, lasers and vehicles. [3] but no matter how many humanoid robotics startups using scada and 6-dof arms to manufacture their robots or el-segundo drone startups relying solely on cheap chinese jet microturbines we create, it will not change the fact that the fire has begun to smoke, the hearth has burned down, and the embers are gasping for breath. these last attempts may even succeed at keeping the fire going for a small while, but there is not enough material in any of these places to keep the fire going as it used to.

that is not to say that we are personally facing dark ages. there is tremendous qualia to be gained. more pudding: i feel like most people have at least on a subconscious level realized this, and the rise of tradcaths, orthodox christians, hustle culture people reifying work, and i hope taoists [4] i think prove this claim. and if not for all those just educating themselves, cleaning apartments, trying to raise families, finding lifelong partners (i will be alone forever if you couldn't tell already), and building things. this is not a bad thing, quale is your pathway to god and all that ever matters, and i encourage you to always continue with it. but it is still undeniable and a shame that our flame has ended.

what awaits us now is the endless flood of p-zombie normies, so addled by their addictions to short form media, ragebait, vagueposting, and self-propaganda so controlled by their dependency on tech giants for their basic functioning that they are calling out to the institutions to subsume all their responsibilities for self-control, restraint, intentionality, and parenting now [5], to which their beloved institutions will gladly implement complete surveillance, ID verification and surprisingly smooth transfer of the national digital infrastructure, and so as like the railroads were transferred to the quasi-governmental organization of amtrak which would initially seem promising but quickly degrade to the barely functional mess it is today, so too will the online platforms be transferred to the quasi-governmental organization of uhhh, checks notes, the us tech oligarchy and palantir. i'm sure their ai platform will definitely be very maintainable and functional and good and overall go great. let it be known to the anals (sic) of history that woo roko's basi-i mean go palantir, woo! honestly i don't think it will be that successful, but the dying of the computational flame is well underway. i think when this fails, some in power may attempt to gel the nations with the highly effective implement of war [6] [7].

i'm not exactly sure where or what we will disperse into, but i think it will probably not be computers [8], even as i plan to create software and run this server in some capacity until i die. and i don't mean to say that there will never not be computers, perhaps after things die down, the only ones that remain will be the true nerds again, the autists and the schizoids and the dysgenic, the weirdos among weirdos, the outcasts among “outcasts”, where we may exchange soft conversations and arguments within our meek spaces, rebuilt from the ashes. or perhaps a new spark will soon catch a natural oilfield ablaze and we will all be swept up in the whirlwind.

regardless, i hope that wherever we find ourselves together again, we can all delight in the flames of the roaring hearth, but most fondly, the small brilliant sparks we shared, once again.

footnotes

  1. if you will notice, god-given inaliable/civil/minority rights happily spans across the industrial revolution and computers so these are not linear and not exclusive
  2. muahahaha i lied
  3. i myself recently and an entire youtube niche of superfastmatt, styropyro, nilred, thought emporium, xyla foxlin, etc have been enjoying cading, welding, cnc milling and fabricating things. you should join me or at least tell me on fedi so i can follow you
  4. fedi me please i need friends
  5. i have a lot of thoughts about the abdication of personal responsibility and why lots of societal institutions (like policing) will forever be “cursed” or doomed for failure but that is for another blog post and not this one.
  6. this has actually already happened. this is literally putin's entire philosophy and reasoning behind invading ukraine, supposedly it is not for ukraine, but chiefly to excise the modern laxity and evils of western society. he should probably be compassionately and personally nuked.
  7. personally i really do think that something is coming down the pipe but i am not exactly sure what it will be, or how i can prepare besides keeping myself financially secure, minimizing stuff where possible, and the usual training/working out. between fleeing early or digging in, i love where i live so i am inclined to extend my roots in this area, although i have the feeling that this will end bad for me as a minority. if you have thoughts on this please let me know.
  8. if nothing else, if you find out, please let me know. thanks

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