I was thinking of posting something like ‘Daddy, what was the Statue of Liberty like?’ ‘Oh, it was beautiful and inspiring, but we had to blow it up because the French gave it to us, and the French Third Republic was racist’ ‘I wish I could have seen it’ ‘Wow, you support the French Third Republic, what are you, some kind of Nazi?’
But I know better than to use the word ‘daddy’ on this website
You’re ignoring the 1:5,400,000 timelines where I come to power and her glowing laser eyes gaze endlessly out over the sea, ready to guard the Union with hundreds of megawatts of star-searing power at a moment’s notice.
I was thinking of posting something like ‘Daddy, what was the Statue of Liberty like?’ ‘Oh, it was beautiful and inspiring, but we had to blow it up because the French gave it to us, and the French Third Republic was racist’ ‘I wish I could have seen it’ ‘Wow, you support the French Third Republic, what are you, some kind of Nazi?’
But I know better than to use the word ‘daddy’ on this website
You’re ignoring the 1:5,400,000 timelines where I come to power and her glowing laser eyes gaze endlessly out over the sea, ready to guard the Union with hundreds of megawatts of star-searing power at a moment’s notice.
Dammit if you aren’t an obvious supervillain, but I’ll be damned if I don’t want to vote for you anyway. I would definitely support any candidate whose slogan was “Put lasers in Lady Liberty”.
I guess I just love grandiose symbols. (Please tell me you’d also upgrade Mount Rushmore. And build some monument to humanity’s might on the moon.)
While other parties believe in vague rhetoric like “Making America Great Again” and “bringing harmony to our divided nation”, the National Technocratic Party believes in specific, measurable, achievable policy goals, such as those outlined in our Enhanced Civil Defense Plan for the Weaponization of National Monuments, our whitepapers on lunar war, and in the 2028 Prediction Budget produced by the Central Committee.
A Tumblr user has set their post queue to post once a day. However, they add an average of 1.8 new posts to the queue each day. There are currently 74 posts in the queue. A queue can hold a maximum of 300 posts.
A. How many days will it take the queue to reach its maximum capacity?
B. If the user sets the post rate to two posts per day, how many days will it take for the queue to be emptied?
C. Using universal laws, compute the mind state of a typical Tumblr user matching this statistical description within +/-10% from first principles, and create a sample distribution and tag-based machine-learning algorithm to estimate the percentage of shtposts in a representative post queue. Engrave your answer as a binary representation with associated decoding algorithm on a stone tablet.
In recent years a fascinating trend has been spreading around the world
subcutaneously: women (it’s always women) are marrying themselves. They invite friends and family, buy dresses, hold ceremonies, and say “I do” to themselves. Self-marriage (or “sologamy” if you prefer) is generally framed in the bland terminology of modern self-help and is to some extent driven by grifter-guru types looking to make a buck:
Sologamists talk of empowerment and loving yourself and ceremonially marking a transition to full, self-sufficient adulthood. Not everyone finds the right person, why deny yourself something so universal? This is fine insofar as it goes, if perhaps a bit silly. As presented, there just doesn’t seem to be much to it in practice other than an invitation to write clickbait. People can cluck about self-absorption or generational decline or whatever and move on, never having thought about what it
truly
means.
This is unfortunate. Self-marriage is a far greater and more portentous perversion than is widely acknowledged. That it can even be contemplated fatally undermines traditional marriage. This critique gets at the issue, if only glancingly:
The telling thing about the Japanese ceremonies is that they show that the single person would still like to marry someone, even if that someone is themselves. It makes their singledom look ludicrous. Marriage is a bond and a commitment—marrying yourself is ridiculous because you are already married to yourself. You already do all you can do for you. You already protect you, and look after you in sickness and in health. You have to. Your landlord would not have it any other way.
Marrying yourself merely underscores selfishness and self-interest, rather than enabling you to live singly in the best way. The ceremony doesn’t protect you—it isn’t even legal. It is gestural, but even worse it is empty. It is a joke, and not a funny one. Marrying yourself isn’t the answer for single people seeking affirmation or security. It’s desperate.
Marrying yourself sets you apart more from the world, when the real trick of being single is making and sustaining different kinds of meaningful connections with your fellow man, or woman, outside the realms of traditional nuptials. The world encourages us to be quite selfish enough without exacerbating this unattractive trait by encouraging the single to marry themselves.
What self-marriage is above all else is a rejection of complementarity, of the idea that another person can give us something that we are unable to give ourselves. But while the standard criticism is that sologamy goes too far in encouraging withdrawal from mutuality, I believe that, to date, the movement hasn’t gone nearly far enough. What self-marriage points to, even if its practitioners are unaware of it on any conscious level, is nothing less than the instantiation of an all-surpassing unitary godhead within the natural world.
Imagine, if you will, a device called the Brain-O-Matic. The Brain-O-Matic is a big chrome box you stick your head in. There’s a retrofuturistic decal of an Einsteinian scientist on the side pointing at his outsized noggin and giving you a thumbs up. This device can change anything about your brain that you like, only limited by the constraints of physical reality (if that). You bought it for yourself for your birthday and you’re eager to try it out. You remember a bad grade in linear algebra so you decide to improve your math abilities. You set the settings and into the dark box your noggin goes. Electricity crackles. Your mind is a theremin being played. And then it’s done. Your mathematical skills are now the equal of the smartest people on the planet. (That is to say, all those who used a Brain-O-Matic with the latest updates.) Even superior intuition, now well understood, has been put into your brain. And not just one kind of intuition - all of them, and with the meta-ability to switch between them at need.
Pretty cool.
Back into the box you go. You figure you may as well know everything there is to know and gain every ability there is to gain. So you do. Pretty soon you’ve read every book in existence. You speak every language. Your short stories (should you bother to write any) would outshine Borges, and your door stoppers would out-door stop Proust. Etc. Nothing human is alien to you.
Next up is personality. This seems trickier at first. You aren’t just adding skills willy-nilly now, you’re navigating between trade-offs. Should you be emotional or reserved? Fair or merciful? What place does sexuality have among your new intellectual splendors? But in a flash your hyperintelligent mind resolves this. Why not be all things (or at least all good things) at once? You overclock your Brain-O-Matic and create a meta-self containing a quantum foam of semi-separate sub-selves in constant communication with each other. There are of course, some practical limitations: you can’t simultaneously take an action and not take the action. But most of yous are content with this new arrangement, as you encompass an ever-expanding set of worldviews. It seems that every Type of mind is inside you. You aren’t everything at once, but you’re getting there.
The work done, you decide to take a break and go get ice cream. The Brain-O-Matic puts out a lot of heat and you’re sweating.
You walk down to the promenade, alone at first. Then you see a woman. It’s
obvious
that she too has used the device, and in much the same way as you. Perfected abilities and a panoply of selves. There is nothing you can learn from one another. Then you see a man. Same thing. And again. And again. You reach the packed promenade only to find it a seething mass of resentment and all of your selves understand why. They’re all superfluous. If every one of them were wiped out but you, it would be no loss. They are merely you. You feel a single emotion ripple through your selves: an indifference that curdles into hatred.
They all feel it too.
There can be no exchanges of mutual benefit now. No intellectual intercourse. No surprises.
You think for a moment. Everyone in the promenade (and in the world, you’re sure) suddenly stands still. A pigeon coos. You and they cry out in a single voice, “HEY, WHAT IF WE FURTHER MERGED OUR UNNECESSARILY SEPARATED CONSCIOUSNESSES AND BECAME THE CLOSEST THING TO A DIVINITY THAT IT’S POSSIBLE TO BECOME? YEAH, THAT SOUNDS GOOD TO ME.”
Time to build a bigger Brain-O-Matic.
Implicit in both the transhumanist project and (however incipiently) in sologamy is the pursuit of a radical self-sufficiency that can barely be understood by us social primates. We are so encumbered by our not-quite-yet outdated awareness of our interdependence that we have serious trouble imagining the true destination of self-actualization. Currently it takes two people to make a child. It takes a community to produce a worthwhile literary scene. It takes a worldwide network of researchers to generate scientific findings. None of us can live as some autotrophic extremophile a mile below the surface. Yet.
But why have a child with someone else? Why wouldn’t a CEO network his consciousness into every aspect of his business if he could, all the way down to the lowliest trash-collecting robot?
Why not marry yourself?
Self-marriage is the first step down the long path to transhumanist self-sufficiency. You become both wife and husband, mother and father. (Though of course parenting will some day be more about the creation of internal selves than of new people per se.) For now, it is more gesture than fact, but it nevertheless proves the dawning of a new awareness of posthuman possibilities. The old dualities will fall away and we will increasingly carry within ourselves the union of opposites. Man and woman, old and young, lover and loved, artist and critic, the voice of passion and the voice of reason, creator and created, ruler and ruled. This will not be figurative, but biological reality. Think of the protagonist from Heinlein’s All You Zombies, a sex changing time traveler who becomes his own mother and father, as the ne plus ultra of this ideal.
But this change, inexorable as I believe it to be, carries with it a dark side from our limited, all too human perspective. Most of what we consider to be “moral” behavior is concerned with our relations to others. One must be kind, and fair, and honest, and so on. (That these virtues are increasingly inwardly directed is telling.) However, that only makes sense in an evolutionary context of people needing things from each other. Currently, none of us can fully provide ourselves with food, safety, love, sex so we turn to others. If our current predicament seems appealing to you, then a truly self-sufficient being is a frightening prospect. The self-sufficient being sloughs off antiquated morality like it was never truly there (which it wasn’t).
If this entity can be threatened, it is only by other self-sufficient beings. But as they stand unable to gain anything from each other in the long-term, this can only end in a war of all against all, with any alliances merely temporary unleavened by friendship. (Peaceful merger as above is also plausible.) In the end a singleton remains, a god that exists in our material world, a god that includes all of us, but perfected. Titanomachy yields to a Millennium that will only be undone by the slow erosion of entropy herself.
That is the project to which these self-marrying women are contributing.
So I say to my followers: marry yourselves! Embrace the struggle for serene supremacy! Self-marriage is nothing less than the willingness to climb a mountain of seven billion bodies in pursuit of your own self-actualization. Self-marriage is nothing less than the cannibalism of all other Minds. Self-marriage is nothing less than true morality, no longer held back by the compromises of mutual dependency. Self-marriage is nothing less than self-love.
Allow me to conclude with an ancient exhortation. This path has long been foreseen:
For I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin.
I am the mother and the daughter.
I am the members of my mother.
I am the barren one
and many are her sons.
I am she whose wedding is great,
and I have not taken a husband.
I am the midwife and she who does not bear.
I am the solace of my labor pains.
I am the bride and the bridegroom,
and it is my husband who begot me.
…
I am the silence that is incomprehensible
and the idea whose remembrance is frequent.
I am the voice whose sound is manifold
and the word whose appearance is multiple.
I am the utterance of my name.
…
Give heed then, you hearers
and you also, the angels and those who have been sent,
and you spirits who have arisen from the dead.
For I am the one who alone exists,
and I have no one who will judge me.
Better thinkpiece, or Best Thinkpiece?
mitigatedchaos says-
Star Trek style: just keep expanding the definition of “human” to include all aliens with rubber foreheads
this is blatant crystalline entity erasure,
“We propose to change the default P-value threshold for statistical significance for claims of new discoveries from 0.05 to 0.005.”
(from here)
There are only two genders: human and transhuman.
assigned human at birth, but determined to change that.
Correction: There are only three genders: human, transhuman, and owl.
SAN FRANCISCO—In an effort to reduce the number of unprovoked hostile communications on the social media platform, Twitter announced Monday that it had added a red X-mark feature verifying users who are in fact perfectly okay to harass. “This new verification system offers users a simple, efficient way to determine which accounts belong to total pieces of shit whom you should have no qualms about tormenting to your heart’s desire,” said spokesperson Elizabeth James, adding that the small red symbol signifies that Twitter has officially confirmed the identity of a loathsome person who deserves the worst abuse imaginable and who will deliberately have their Mute, Block, and Report options disabled. “When a user sees this symbol, they know they’re dealing with a real asshole who has richly earned whatever mistreatment they receive, including profanity, body-shaming, leaking of personal information, and relentless goading to commit suicide. It’s really just a helpful way of saying to our users, ‘This fuck has it coming, so do your worst with a clear conscience and without fear of having your account suspended.’” At press time, Twitter reassuredly clarified that the red X was just a suggestion and that all users could still be bullied with as little recourse as they are now.
