From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Wed Jun 14 2000 - 21:43:12 MDT
At 01:40 PM 14/06/00 PDT, Zero wrote:
>>Makes for good utopia novels, but is a complete denial of human
>>nature, all it takes is one bad apple for the whole thing to
>>unravel.
>
>If the bad apple has nothing to gain by being a bad apple then perhaps the
>whole thing won't unravel. It goes back to the nano-enabled plenty to go
>around argument.
This is the scariest aspect of where we are headed in the fairly near
future, to me. Leaving aside the jovial reply of a Robert Bradbury, who
would happily eat and upgrade the cosmos, there's a lot of thwarted or
fucked-up monkey programming ready to hit the fan once most people have
their bellies full and nothing much to do all day except play arbitrary
games.
Last night I watched a chilling BBC program by a journo who infiltrated a
bunch of soccer thugs in Britain and furtively filmed their antics and
boasts. These were not stupid men, by and large. Some of them had (or once
had) reasonably demanding jobs. They just lerrrrved smacking and bashing
the shit out of other people. Their blood was up, it boiled with rage and
delight, they had flow and peak experience. There's going to be a lot of it
going around, even if Banks's Culture emerges.
And please don't tell me this won't happen if everyone's packing heat (as
they used to say on the mean streets)
Damien
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