I wrote a utopian flash fiction wayyy back in 2019 and didn't do much with it until I got the idea to expand the story into a novel/novelette.Thrilled, I experimented by combining other stories I had written with my utopian story. Long story it just wasn't coming together so I stopped writing... until recently. I now jot down cool ideas and it's all coming along nicely. I'll lay out the beginning of first chapter of the story in the following greentext (if you are only interested in why I created this thread ignore the greentext)>A senior college student (from "War College" which is the name of a college that prepares you for IRL war games which is the main activity of the times) is tasked with completing a capstone/research project as his last course. He decides that he wants do an ethnographic study on a women's community college where the whole premise is that female students train in a internship commune for post-graduate life as a community member. It's like his excuse to watch women stressing themselves. Of course the commune is portrayed idealistically (young beautiful women getting a work out) which serves as a introduction to the utopian topic of the story.So like a week ago some brillant guy on the internet brought up the idea of the 20th century "isms" being about the relationship between labor and capital. Cool cool. However, it got me thinking... it seems like the meaning behind the isms and ideologies of the 20th century were about creating a utopian society, and now that we're in the 21st century the civilizational priority is different. I ask ChatGPT about this and it said that the 21st century is about Post-Utopianism.Well shiz, I'm writing an anachronistic story then (it's set in this century)!What do you guys think about storytelling in or out of or the importance of context?
>>25089709why can't women close their mouth?
>>25089724They’re hungry
>>25089731hungry for what?
>>25089709All art is valid.>Is X so last Y?Fashionistas have never been valid>>25090219ME.
>>25089709Read The Hedonistic Imperative. Since suffering is ultimately just chemical reactions in your brain, utopia might be possible if we genetically engineer everyone to be physically incapable of suffering.https://www.hedweb.com/
>>25089709Lol this Nat hoe is still around.
Won't die until direction brained retards die.
>>25090219Cock
>>25090432What would compel people to do anything if they couldn't experience suffering
>>25090432>just immanentize the eschaton, bro!
>>25090432>just chemical reactions in your brainthat's soooo early 19th century
>>25091111>What would compel people to do anything if they couldn't experience sufferingGradients of bliss. David Pearce has written about how alternative signalling systems might be possible that have the same function as pain, but without the pain.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xYuJcjbWZQhttps://www.hedweb.com/object33.htm> A motivational system based entirely on heritable gradients of well-being is a less radical prospect than the abolition of motivation altogether. This is because hardwiring constant maximum bliss entails discarding the information-signalling role of the pleasure-pain axis completely - not just recalibrating its scale. Barring some extraordinarily advanced technology, uniformly happy beings will be out-reproduced. So for the foreseeable future, at any rate, encoding a physiological maximum of lifelong bliss is simply not an evolutionarily stable strategy. Then there's ideology to consider. If maximising gross cosmic happiness depends on (post-)humans embracing a classical utilitarian value system, it's presumably an unlikely scenario on that score too. Pluralist or perhaps quasi-utilitarian value systems are more sociologically plausible. Yet HI's (tentative) forecast that a motivational regime of gradients of bliss will be conserved indefinitely is itself no more than a conjecture. One counterargument is that choosing less fulfilling states of mind runs counter to the hedonic roots of our decision-making psychology itself. When mature technologies of emotional self-mastery become ubiquitous, it's uncertain who - if anyone - will really settle for what subjectively feels like an inferior option. What dial-settings will rational agents choose for their own mood-range when freed from the old Darwinian roulette? In practice, informed preference utilitarianism and classical utilitarianism tend to converge. Just possibly, the cumulative outcome of our choices may be the transcendence of traditional decision-making. As a slogan, "freedom to control one's emotions" invites readier assent than "freedom to enjoy limitless bliss". What's unclear is whether the ultimate cosmic outcome will be substantially different - or ethically, whether it ought to be so. Obviously care should be taken here to separate normative judgement from positive prediction. Certainly, billions of years of pan-galactic hedonism isn't quite what Jeremy Bentham had in mind when first enunciating the greatest happiness principle. A lawyer by training, Bentham had in mind institutional and legislative reform. Yet harnessing biotechnology to a classical utilitarian ethic dictates saturating the cosmos with blissful euphoria/positive value and then computationally sustaining this theoretical maximum indefinitely - whether in the form of discrete superminds or perhaps a Borg-like collective mind. The logic of "hedonistic" utilitarianism is inexorable, even if its premises can be challenged.
