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Aaron Bushnell was a radical who believed in post-scarcity futures (slrpnk.net)

submitted 9 months ago by AEMarling@slrpnk.net to c/solarpunk@slrpnk.net

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This is a projection in Oakland. You can find the original art here.

The way-back machine found a March 2023 Reddit post by Aaron Bushnell where he said, “I’ve realized that a lot of the difference between me and my less radical friends is that they are less capable of imagining a better world than I am. I follow YouTubers like Andrewism that fill my head with concrete images of free, post-scarcity communities, and it makes me so much more prepared to reject things about the current world, because I’ve imagined how things could be and that helps me see how extremely bullshit things are right now.”

If you care to see the full quote, you can check @tinythunders on Twitter or Andrewism’s YouTube Channel, the community tab.

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[-] GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip 16 points 9 months ago

Imagine the absolute utopia we would live in if every person would feel the pain of others.

[-] kugel7c@feddit.de 15 points 9 months ago

Altruizine" – a substance that allows individuals within a limited area to completely share all feelings and emotions, including both pain and joy. The idea behind Altruizine is that people who feel each other's pain as their own should treat each other as they would themselves. Altruizine. Klapaucius produces a large quantity of the substance and sends the above mentioned hermit (who is eager to help others) in human guise to experiment on the population of a single planet. Some of the results include villagers feeling the birth pains of a cow, depressed people being violently attacked and driven off and a crowd storming the house of the newlyweds to vicariously participate in their unaccustomed sensations. Eventually, the hermit is identified for a robot (because he does not feel the humans' pain), is thoroughly beaten and tortured, then shot into outer space via a cannon. He then lands near Trurl's house, where the story began. Concluding his tale, the hermit assures Trurl that his thirst for altruism has vanished. src

This is the somewhat harrowing conclusion Mr lem comes to in the cyberiad when confronting this same issue in one of the short stories.

Not to say anything against the sentiment, I largely agree just found it noteworthy. Especially if you've never heard of them give them a read/listen.

[-] GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip 7 points 9 months ago

Sounds like an interesting read, thank you

I did deliberately only share pain for my thought experiment, and also imagined it on a global scale. That would alleviate some of the issues, but possibly not all of them depending on how it would work in effect, and also introduce some of its own. For example if everyone always felt everyone’s suffering and perhaps even deaths the whole planet would go through thousands of deaths every day, effectively stunning everyone into a constant death experience. And if death was not felt but suffering was, people might still end up killing each other.

[-] Zoot@reddthat.com 5 points 9 months ago

I wonder how it might be if any pain you inflicted on others, you also recieved yourself. That might iron out some of those kinks.

[-] hoodles@programming.dev 2 points 9 months ago

This is the first Cyberiad reference I've seen in the wild. Such a great book

[-] MotoAsh@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

A fictitious story that assumes peoples' behavior against those they cannot feel being inexplicable violence in no way what so ever reflects on rational reality in any way.

People already don't feel others' pain and most see the benefit in not mistreating other things, let alone other people.

Also, why the flying fuck would people break in to feel something vicariously that they were already directly feeling via the drug's effects?? That short story is illogical even within its own universe.