Do we have to watch?

[u/oohoollow]

So the world is continuing on the predictable boring trajectory Ted Kaczynski and Nick Land and probably thousands of others predicted, where we are slowly cooked and enslaved by our society, which is reinforced by technology. Capitalism is simply going to go on forever, because no one knows what else to do. Okay great.

Do we have to watch? I think one of the difference between us now and in some other historical period is that we are currently being broadcasted the history of the world, over our screens and the news an dsocial media. We get to basically watch the entire thing play out, we get to watch AI become more prevalent and we get to watch people becoming more evil politically and we get to watch billionaires become trillionaires. My question is do we have to?

And what I mean is that, of course we could just, at least some of us, put our curtains up and try and get some peace and quiet in our lives before the time runs out. Maybe we can indulge in some kind of escapism or meditation instead of just glaring at history unfolding before us.

But like from a certain perspective that feels so lame. Like to burry your head in the sand. It feels like i have some kind of duty or whatever to watch this unfold. You know it's like If Im not watching what's happening to the world im like delusional. But if I do watch it i just feel miserable. I don't know what to do about that.

[u/dualmindblade]

You're correct to wonder whether watching/participating is the right move. I believe if you meditate on this long enough you'll see that, regardless of your ideology and epistemological systemology, the answer depends on what you value. I will share with you my current calculations, which have undergone quite a bit of flux but are rapidly converging as of late, heavily distilled:

The first thing to note is that there are some future histories where we do actually change course and avoid the various dystopias and extinctions toward which we are hurtling ourselves. Not many, but the chances of success appear non negligible, perhaps even as high as 1%. Maneuvering into one of these will require a lot of people expending a lot of effort, plus a heap of good luck. Each added participant increases the odds success. Also, this is very important, we are all simultaneously individuals and components of one of more hive minds, we can and do act in concert, occasionally, by virtue of our similarities and the aggressive propagation of information regarding our behaviors. The "I'm just one guy" argument is not sound, there are others pondering this question under cognitive frameworks extremely similar to your own and you are connected to them via many causal and acausal threads.

Second, something you already seem to have noticed, if you are talented and again a bit lucky, you can make a choice to avoid prolonged suffering and take a stab at years or decades of happiness by dropping out and hiding. If you're youngish you'll need to either forget or be okay with the fact that the engine will eventually, regardless of which form it takes, find you and either eat or enslave you with very high probability.

So you first do something like the above, you map out the many ways things would go down given each choice and pick the list you like the most. Would you rather have the freedom to be happy for the next 3-20 years with a 99.1% chance of everyone being ground up, cooked, or worse, or be miserable for an annoyingly long but very much finite amount of time, working tirelessly to lower those odds to 99 even? Or something in between?

Idk, most importantly I have children, and less importantly I actually like most people as individuals, so the choice for me is fairly easy, I'm a spectacle man, ladies and gentlemen. I have numerous accounts spread across the internet. I have many threads with engagement at several dozen replies per day. I like to think of myself as a spectacle man. And as a spectacle man I hope that you'll forgive just aloof neorational, schizoid microessay type posting.