Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[prokopetz]

Thesis: the narrow focus on public performance over substantive action in certain activist circles has less to do with cynical schemes to game the system for progressive brownie points, and more to do with the fact that many folks basically think social activism is a form of ritual magic. Popular histories give us images of Great Men making speeches and leading marches and circulating petitions, and completely erase all the ground-level infrastructure that made all that stuff work; the end result is that a lot of folks seem honestly to believe that bringing about social change is a matter of performing the appropriate symbolic actions and waiting for reality to reconfigure itself accordingly.

[nuclearspaceheater]

Also, for any issue that society gradually comes to a new position on, the popularity needed to stage mass activism is almost the level needed to simply institute the desired policy. So, for those issues determined more by material circumstances, it’s possible that the policy would have happened without any activism whatsoever, but you’ll still see the most activism just before it’s accepted, creating the illusion that it was accepted due to activism.

[mitigatedchaos]

Interesting thought.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

In Second Life, your gender presentation isn’t just who you are, it’s a signal about your intent.  It’s a bit complicated, and I can’t fully explain it.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

Okay heres what makes me dead on curious about this indie game about someone who only cares about the feelings of men (boohoo)... How do you make a feminist cyberpunk future? Isn't that kind of like the opposite?

cyberpunkpixeljunk answered:

Nah, just make sure the women in the setting fit the setting. Plus, what do we know about this game? It could be just fine.

[mitigatedchaos]

Ugh…

Transhumanism destroys gender/sex binaries by enabling mass alteration of bodies, sex, and gender.

Done properly it will be “Post-Feminist” because Transhumanism massively weakens the boundaries around what the term “woman” even means, and fundamentally alters the mechanics of human reproduction.  (I mean, just take the idea of artificial wombs by itself and you’ll get big changes.)

Feminism itself is already struggling to adapt to the world it has created with only modern technology levels.  The “Feminists” of 2065 (or whatever) will likely be very different from the ones of 2017.

[argumate]

WE USED TO HAVE A GENDER BINARY

[fluffshy]

This assumes that the gender binary isn’t something many people want (on some level or another). Considering that clothes often up being gendered, it wouldn’t be surprising to me if bodies become even more gendered among a significant portion of the population. We already have this to a certain extent. After all, men don’t get breast implants even though (unless you count transwomen or related things). Even if you could trans people, then number of ciswomen getting breast implants and cismen getting breast reduction out-numbers them (I think, I am not sure where to look for stats about this.)

Even women shaving legs while men generally don’t could be seen as a evidence that give the opportunity to make the gender differences even greater, people will.

[mitigatedchaos]

Absolutely.  Go on Second Life and you’ll see muscle mountains posing as men.

What I’m expecting however, is mass defection from a significant contingent of men, and a smaller counter-part group among women, into something new.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

Okay heres what makes me dead on curious about this indie game about someone who only cares about the feelings of men (boohoo)... How do you make a feminist cyberpunk future? Isn't that kind of like the opposite?

cyberpunkpixeljunk answered:

Nah, just make sure the women in the setting fit the setting. Plus, what do we know about this game? It could be just fine.

[mitigatedchaos]

@ms-demeanor: <long post>

Honestly, I think once you start creating a Feminism that isn’t a gender war munition (e.g., one that actually deconstructs the threat narrative around men and so on), it stops being Feminism and starts being something else.  But I don’t have a whole lot of intellectual charity left for Feminism or SJ in general.

I think a lot of people absolutely underestimate the amount of totally useless medical problem bullshit that already exists and is not any kind of sublime commentary on the nature of humanity.

I think you’ve got it wrong on MGTOWs (and I’ll note you said them and not MRAs - good, since they aren’t identical).  MGTOWs aren’t an activist movement, they’re debris from problems we aren’t supposed to notice or talk about.  That 1 in 1,000 woman that hit all the problems in her life from bad man after bad man?  MGTOWs are the male version of that.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Somewhere in some distant alternate universe, anime girls browse a blue website, posting pictures of scantily-dressed neckbeards, arguing about their inability to see with their tiny, unrealistic eyes and bizarre body proportions.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

@discoursedrome: in the grim darkness of the far future, the furry vs. scaly war knows no end

That’s the spirit!

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[ufo-the-truth-is-out-there]

I want to leave: [submission]

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

honestly I’d really appreciate it if people who dislike transhumanism point me in the direction of why

[discoursedrome]

The main reason is that most people I’ve encountered were big boosters of transhumanism seemed to consider it a kind of cheat code for fundamental social and ecological problems – in other words, they conceptualize it as a way to get easy answers to hard problems, with the details left extremely vague. Very often they seemed to have a fantasy of technological wonders saving them from death and taxes. So, that all goes in the same bucket as other sorts of utopianism.

I’m not against the idea of using technology to solve our problems, even if it means changing ourselves in the process, but that isn’t some kind of new thing, it’s a continuation of the same process as the invention of agriculture, in the same way that GMOs are a continuation of ancient crossbreeding. Calling that “transhumanism” implies a quasi-religious millennarian outlook, which makes me extremely wary. It seems like a way to get religious salvation out of technology for a lot of people, and that is not the kind of outlook I want someone to have when tinkering with radical, dangerous civilization-scale technology.

[mitigatedchaos]

I don’t think it actually solves race or gender, per se…  I mean, kind of.  It sort of explodes them instead, and new issues are created, but often dealing with the new issues will be preferable to the old ones.

What does race discourse look like when you can change your race?  Or less radically, when you can copy all the non-appearance genes from whatever race you like?

What does meritocracy look like when everyone already has the basic “good” genes and massive, expensive genetic problems only exist in the time-local version of anti-vaxxers?

What does gender discourse look like when people can change their sex easily?

Et cetera.

I think it’s net beneficial to go there, but I see it as important that we are prepared, first.

(Also, notice how totally unprepared most WNs are for these changes.)

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[obiternihili]

Had a thought about a future with men being forced to take some kind of drug when their partner’s found to be pregnant that stimulates bonding hormones, with a hell dump of it when the baby’s born, to mirror bonding hormones in the mother and dissuade abandonment

[argumate]

don’t men naturally already get something like that?

[mitigatedchaos]

Yeah, isn’t this already the Bonding Hormones AU?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

honestly I’d really appreciate it if people who dislike transhumanism point me in the direction of why

[mitigatedchaos]

Some of it is consequential - there are some potential dark futures in that direction.  But I think mostly, they’re at peace with their sex, their body, and with aging, so H+ seems like an alien, “arrogant,” or “immature” value system to them.

[argumate]

kinda independent though? like I’m at peace with not being splattered across a mountainside but I don’t get enraged at people who fly wingsuits.

[mitigatedchaos]

Once the Transhuman Genie is out of the bottle, there’s no putting it back.  The alternative of banning it prevents them from having to become the cyberpunk version of the Amish, leaving them in the mainstream.

To pick another example, letting gays get married also means living in a society in which gays can marry, in which that becomes normal, even if you don’t get gay married.  And that’s a bit less irrevocable!

So if you don’t want to see what Tumblr users will become when allowed access to 2090-era robotic surgeons, implanted computers, and automated tissue engineering facilities, you have to oppose it before it starts.

You’ll also die because a cure for whatever disease you have won’t exist, or else your body will fall apart, but you already didn’t care as much about that, soooo…