Strangecoin: a calvinball economy

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Strangecoin: a calvinball economy

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

RealityApologist posted:

I'm getting bitched at because it's not in 5 paragraph composition format.

That, and because you're an insane techno-fetishist with a history of denying he's an insane techno-fetishist while advocating insane techno-fetishism.

# ¿ Mar 31, 2014 04:19

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 23:46

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

RealityApologist posted:

Traditional economics is like alchemy, and I'm like one of the early chemists before the periodic table or anything else was developed but who has a pretty good sense that alchemy is just bad methodology and that there's an alternative science just around the corner. And you all are like "but why should I believe in the atom" as if I'm heretical for suggesting alchemy needs some updating, and there's honestly nothing I can say to satisfy the lot of you. The only thing I can do is be earnest and try my best. It's never good enough, but I can't reasonably expect anything more.

Allow me to repeat my sage advice from when you went off bemoaning the horrible discrimination you envisioned cyborgs (like yourself) experiencing at some point in the future, which you expected to be as bad, if not worse, than that of racial minorities and homosexuals: get the gently caress over yourself, Eripsa.

# ¿ Mar 31, 2014 14:33

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

Escolopendra posted:

Wait a moment, what is the basis exactly for fearing future cyborg discrimination? There are people right now with mechanical prostheses, and they don�t seem to be objects of hate and discrimination.

Eripsa's entire basis for such fears were his own feverish sense of self-importance, and hopes to somehow shame those of us laughing at our lunatic ideas by comparing himself to civil-/gay-right activists. Oh, and someone used the term "glasshole" to describe a particularly obnoxious Google glass wearer, which is clearly equivalent to a Jim Crow lynch mob.

# ¿ Mar 31, 2014 17:19

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

Who What Now posted:

If anyone still has that short-story posted in one of the OP's last threads about the Attention-based Society and the big Cat Video Gundam vs Porno-Titan battle please post it. This is a perfect time to reread it and I wanna share it with some friends.

Your wish is my command, in this and only this specific instance:

Cefte posted:

Attention Deficit Disorder

The afternoon sun angled through a tear in the tent. Ma Bao-Zhi grunted, then shifted his face towards the shade and screwed up his eyes. In the absence of light, the retinal burns from his always-on pupil-tracking HUD-halo danced before his field of vision. He sat up and stretched. It was a new day.

The corner of his visual field that was perpetually occupied by the DistroNet feed blinked. A major announcement was incoming from the most influential association of experts that he had ever been a part of: The Council Of Two Million With A Remit Of Everything.

The upstart replacement of last year's not-hegemon, the Coven of Eight to the Seven; Masters of Knowledge, the Council had, yesterday, consisted of just over 50.3% of the surviving inhabitants of what had once been Taiwan SAR. However, as he scanned the headlines, he noted that an overnight disputation on the meaning of Buddha-nature had resulted in nearly two hundred being purged from the membership roster, and, more importantly, from the Council's ReDistroList. Ma had never posted to any discussion regarding Buddha-nature, for which he was now extremely thankful.

Attention Distribution Cannot Be Gamed, he though, nodding to himself. It was a mantra every child knew, and it was obviously true. 'Gaming' would imply an illegitimate practice, and since the attention economy was inherently legitimate, any practice that arose thereof could not be 'gaming'. The use of randomly-assigned attention redistribution lists to strengthen the network-influence of an association of experts was one of the most powerful practices there was - without it, no modern association of experts could compete.

With the saccadic grace of long practice, his pupils flipped to the updated, slightly smaller ReDistroList, and settled down to start his highly-encouraged ten hours of daily network-reinforcement. Ten hours - ten icons - each one painstakingly designed by the expert it represented. The Coven of Eight to the Seven had highly encouraged eight hours of ReDistroList attention, but the Council's superior attention ethic had led to an expert association network both wider and deeper in links, and thus, far more influential. The Coven defined their area of expertise too narrowly, and left themselves open to a ratio attack. It was a trivial task for the Council to dial down the attention ratio of key knowledge industries overnight, leaving the Coven rudderless and sinking. Ma had been a third-quartile defector, holding out longer than most; his punishment was to enter the Council with six month's half-ratio deficit. Half as likely to be randomly assigned to other experts ReDistroList, he counted himself lucky - the fourth quartile had been exiled entirely. As is, he was comfortably off in a deficit camp outside Taibao.

Ma shook himself; introspection was an audience of one. The first icon belonged to Tracy Liu: 166kg, pink highlights and moderator by acclaim of a yaoi fandom for the ancient classic, Glengarry Glen Ross.

The minutes ticked by, and as the completion bar for the first icon flipped over into green and Tracy's hand-drawn icon faded from sight - young Al Pacino gently cupping young Jack Lemmon's testicles on a bed of index cards - Ma decided that he would treat himself with an hour of free attention. He rucked the covers back from his legs and withdrew his 75MHz future-proofed laptop from its pouch.

Minutes later, halfway through the boot-sequence, Ma heard the unmistakable whirring of a Bother-Gyro. He dug rapidly through the contents of the tent for the thick blanket he'd found the week before, to muffle the fans of the laptop, but the blanket had been redistributed. It was too late anyway: the Bother-Gyro's tracking software had heard the fans.

"Go away!" shouted Ma.

< Hello Friend And How Are You And Woo! >

The Bother-Gyro hovered just out of Ma's reach.

"滚蛋!"

< Would You Like A Comestible?! Marmalade Is In This Week! >

"gently caress off."

Bother-Gyros were increasingly common, flying over the water from the Penghu Collective, and Ma had tangled with them before, when he was a high-ratio member of the Coven: an attractive target. The Collective were Min-speakers, and the language barrier was starving them of culture-based attention, and forcing them to desperate measures. He knew that while they would advertise to any moving object, their main purpose was to gain the attention of the victim. Even compared to the average camp member, Ma's influence ratio was low...

"Hey! Bot! There's a high-ratio family just over that wall! You can bother them all at once! Think of the attention gains!"

Unfortunately for Ma, the Bother-Gyro was also running off a 75MHz chip, which did not support voice recognition. Even more unfortunately, what little resources it did have to bring to bear were mainly concentrated on measuring the direction of gaze of the victim, and Ma's gaze had briefly moved from the Gyro to the wall he was gesturing at. The Gyro aimed a module at the RFID tag on Ma's halo.

*pffffsss*

"gently caress!"

Pepper-spray will catch anyone's attention.

Whilst Ma rolled around in the dirt, the Bother-Gyro gently settled on the ground next to him, conserving battery. Proximity was worth less attention than direct eye-contact, but it was still worth something. After a minute, the database updated the Gyro on Ma's uninspiring attention value, and it buzzed off in search of less deficient prey.

----

The afternoon was nearly over before Ma's eyes stopped watering, and the pupil-tracker started to update correctly. Luckily, his HUD-halo was undamaged - it could still receive and transmit audio, video, pupil-tracking data and, indeed, record everything that Ma did. Nine hours of ReDistroList remained on his schedule, but he had bigger things on his mind. Of all the places, his deficit camp was lucky enough to be in viewing distance of a celebrity battle.

It wasn't entirely by chance, of course. Celebrity Mechas were very power-hungry, and required tethering to the grid network, and deficit camps had the tendency to spring up in unused land along grid lines. While city dwellers might have had the massed influence to force such a destructive event outside their municipal margins, a deficit camp by definition could not face up to even the most minor celebrity's choice of land-resource.

This particular battle was between the gigantic robots piloted by a pornography magnate and a man who was extremely good at making videos of cats. Hovering cameras darted about the provided every possible angle around the machines, while in-cockpit vision was granted by cameras attached to both control modules. There were no adverts - the battle itself drew all the attention the participants needed.

The pornographer had outfitted his mecha with water sprinklers, providing the substrate for projected holograms of noted starlets and their riveting performances. The cat man, showing disdain for the practice of up-attending, had a far more stripped-down mecha, bowing to demand only by having a control module shaped like a cat's head. While his initial surge in influence had been off the back of a pet British Shorthair, his true power came from his decision to breed several thousand of the creatures and lock them in a vast complex filled with pastel colors and assorted common household items. Cuteness, too, can be brute-forced.

As the two machines started to stride towards each other, Ma watched camp-dwellers who sought influence more than health run between the legs of the mechas. Like so much in the attention economy, it was a dual payoff. Simply being near a mecha guaranteed a proportion of the attention that the pilot was constantly exuding, and that was worth the risk of injury in itself. But, if a camera tracked by millions happened to autofocus on a lucky expert? Why, a single second's worth of attention was more than the expert might otherwise see in a lifetime.

The battle was joined, and as the mechas stamped to and fro, they came closer and closer to the western edge of the camp - the edge furthest from Ma. Even those experts in the camp whose lack of attention ethics had placed them dangerously close to exile from their associations could not help but pay heed. Lasers flashed, missiles flew, and clouds of smoke emerged even when not strictly necessary. In fact, the battle, like most battles, was more bark than bite: it was considered bad form to actually kill another celebrity, not least because it tended to alienate part of your potential audience. After all, who didn't enjoy both pornography and cat videos?

The din didn't just attract the attention of experts - from miles around, Bother-Gyros wheeled in, guided by the very human tendency to correlate decibels and attention. Ma gazed in wonder as a two flocks of gyros of different manufacture, bathed in the proximity wash from the mechas, each mistook the other flock as the source of attention. Overriding the normal guideline that led them to disperse for maximal coverage, the gyros spiralled madly in ever decreasing circles as they sought to increase that flow.

As he watched, the gyrating super-flock, consisting of nearly a hundred Bother-Gyros, whirled into the cloud of spray being produced by pornographer's mechanical contraption. A hundred automatic protection circuits flared into action, and the mass of gyros punched in the opposite direction - straight into the air intake ducts of the cat-mecha.

One gyro would have been unfortunate. Five would have led to an emergency shutdown. But no mecha-designer had considered such a freak occurrence as the emergent behaviour so briefly displayed by the gyro-flocks. Admittedly, QA and Safety were neglected disciplines ever since the advent of the attention economy - who would dedicate their lives to a discipline that involved something so unquantifiable as preventing rare occurrences? After all, it's not as though someone might lose their accumulated attention - just their lives.

With a massive crunch, the flywheels at the center of the cat-mecha broke apart, releasing a torrent of kinetic energy, and sending parts of the mecha in every direction. The pornographer tried to backpedal his mecha away from the burning debris, but his attention elsewhere, he stepped directly on one of the experts that had been trailing his footsteps. As his machine overturned, the pornographer clutched at the control panel, seeking the emergency eject key, but by chance also fat-fingering the steam overcharge system. The porn-mecha's control module blasted off the chassis - straight into the side of one of the few fixed-wall buildings in the camp. The steam explosion, while softer, was far more deadly.

Ma had hit the ground as soon as he saw the first gyro sucked into the air-intake - luckily so, as burning debris had taken out several of his neighbours. Now, his view obscured by what remained of the same three foot-wall he had urged the gyro to surmount earlier that day, he flicked his eyes to open a newsline. The events of the past minute had gone viral - his feed was already filling with commentary from the other side of the world. Every last survivor would soon be bombarded with requests for commentary on the death of the celebrities.

Celebrities plural? The feed from the cat-mecha was still active. In fact, the explosion had blown the control module right over the camp, landing to the east, far from the screams of the scalded and poisoned camp dwellers. Ma held a rag over as much of his mouth and nose as he could reach through his HUD-halo, and levered himself to his feet.

The cat man was alive. In fact, he was almost unhurt - a mere fractured collarbone. He was, however, trapped inside his module, and mouthing something - the audio feed from his cockpit had cut out. Ma tore his attention from his HUD-halo and looked out, directly at the smoking module in the distance.

Never mind proximity attention - to be the man who saved a celebrity from almost certain death? To be the only source of an audio feed for the sole celebrity survivor of what the international feeds were calling the Disaster of Taibao?

Ma started to trot towards the control module, avoiding the prone bodies of those less fortunate survivors, around some of whom flames still flickered. He tore his foot away from the grasp of one, whilst muttering thanks for the last few seconds of absolute attention they granted him. He stepped over a corpse, then briefly glanced behind him. The least concussed of the able-bodied camp survivors were already moving after him. Turning his back to the setting sun, Ma broke into a run.

For those of you who are having their first go-around with Eripsa's feverish lunacy, I highly recommend reading the thread that really started all this, or at least clued us in that he and reality have been seeing other people for some time now.

# ¿ Mar 31, 2014 17:55

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

Pesmerga posted:

This is absolutely hilarious, and has my full attention

As an academic, I start rolling my eyes when people start going on about academics not being part of the real world, or just navel-gazing, etc etc, but RA, seriously, do you actually get funded in any way for this? I find the idea mildly disturbing.

I'm one too, and normally I'm a big advocate of inter-disciplinary exchange but it every time I start to think about maybe seeing what someone outside of history would think of my current work, Eripsa posts a new thread. I really hope he's an edge case of what goes on in philosophy grad studies.

Who What Now posted:

Awesome, thank you! You're a good person.

My pleasure, but all credit ought go to Cefte for writing that. I nearly fell out of my chair laughing when I first read it.

# ¿ Mar 31, 2014 18:27

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

SedanChair posted:

He once posted a link to what he claimed was the first part of his dissertation. It was a bunch of word salad without citations. If he is actually in a program his advisor should face consequences for not nipping this poo poo in the bud.

I thought we ~~invented from whole cloth because it was funnier~~ came to the conclusion that committee knows his work is indecipherable gibberish but keeps him around for comic relief, and to serve as a cautionary tale to incoming grad student as to what you turn into if you don't make progress after comps.

# ¿ Mar 31, 2014 18:41

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

R. Mute posted:

Has the OP answered why we'd want this system yet?

Do you even need to ask?

MD2020 posted:

I'm marbling the gently caress out of this iron ore over here, so the first step is taken care of.

You have no idea how hard I'm looking at this rusty bumper someone left over by the dumpster. I'll expect my dividends shortly.

# ¿ Mar 31, 2014 22:43

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

RealityApologist posted:

You linked to obdicut's post, which has such insightful criticisms as

Is this the expert criticism that I casually tossed aside? What claims did he make in that post that you think I failed to treat adequately?

I dunno, you might actually give us something concrete to support your assertion that this actually is a big idea, rather than just continuing to assert that it is. Or were you using "big" to refer to the amount of brain swelling your suffered prior to having the idea?

# ¿ Mar 31, 2014 23:13

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

R. Mute posted:

Actually, they are both gaining money! It's amazing!

Does this mean when he flops his dissertation defense, his undergrads get expelled?

# ¿ Apr 1, 2014 00:35

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

Wanamingo posted:

I'm 4 pages into that marble thread somebody linked a little while back, and holy wow does RA have problems. How can somebody function in society if they so clearly don't understand how people work?

Fellowship extensions would be my guess.

# ¿ Apr 1, 2014 04:04

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

Who What Now posted:

This brings up another point, just how exactly are people supposed to have any access to this information, much less be expected to decipher tens of thousands of pages worth of information that is constantly updating?

Why, that will all be handled by The Computer. Trust The Computer, citizen! The Computer is your friend!

# ¿ Apr 1, 2014 17:50

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

Who What Now posted:

Somehow I don't think he would be too unhappy of real life was more like a game of Paranoia. I also have a feeling that engaging in RA's supposed end-goal reality would, in fact, require neural implants in order to keep in constant contact with the necessary information streams.

Is that what this is, RealityApologist? Are you just trying to get us to imagine a world where we too would be cyborgs like you so that we will be more sympathetic to the plight of true cyborgs like you?

Ah, that solves it: he's a Copore Metal sympathizer.

# ¿ Apr 1, 2014 18:01

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

Slanderer posted:

In the cyber future, gender will be as arbitrary as your choice of shoes. Nanosurgery drones will be able to perform gender replacement surgery while you sleep (utilizing your home bank of replacement genitalia).

Cybernetic implants, like google glass, are for life, however.

"I didn't ask for this...Oh wait, I totally did. Repeatedly."

# ¿ Apr 1, 2014 19:11

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

SedanChair posted:

Eripsa I'm stoked that you're off to see Judith Butler. That ought to help you bring your abstruse, inchoate pop-theorizing down to earth.

You eternal optimist, you.

# ¿ Apr 1, 2014 22:56

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

Zachack posted:

It's been well over a decade since I read it but wasn't the basis of the economy revolving around free maker piles that provided basic necessities for all while fancier maker plans were controlled by neo-victorians? And people made nanoviruses to steal info? And the Middle class was service/IP creation because manufacturing literally didn't exist? And little else of society was shown?

Pretty much, though the Vickys only had a commanding share on top-level design/production, rather than a total monopoly. The other top-tier phyles were seen as serious competition, and lower-level phyles could also be in particular areas.

# ¿ Apr 2, 2014 00:40

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

Adventure Pigeon posted:

I'm beginning to think that as soon as he's vaguely offended by whatever anyone says, he puts them on ignore. There's a reason he hasn't responded to Obdicut or anyone else who's been criticizing him in more than a few posts.

So he's an intellectual coward in addition to a crank.

Hey that's a little harsh, don't you think? He's clearly got a lot on his plate what with all the thinking up new unreasonable nonsense and not reading books.

# ¿ Apr 2, 2014 01:01

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

Adar posted:

If you retards hijack this thread away from Eripsa the terrorists will literally have won.

Eripsa: I have considered becoming an architect because I think that triangles are cool. Imagine an upside down triangle house. Wouldn't it be awesome to live in one of those? Let's transfer all of society over to upside down triangle houses ASAP. I may not know anything about engineering or design or urban planning or anything at all, but here's a 5000 word essay on HackerNews about it LOOK AT ME

Hmm, wait a minute, upside-down triangles you say? We all know what those unnatural things represent!

# ¿ Apr 2, 2014 02:06

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

RealityApologist posted:

I'm really disappointed that this has become the caricature of my style. I've come back to this forum for years to talk about and refine my thinking about different aspects of this theory, and I spend a lot of time responding to criticisms and providing interpretations and elaborations on my work. I really feel like the strangecoin proposal demonstrates some improvement, both in focus, organization, and technical clarity, of anything I've written about on these forums. I feel it represents a good faith attempt to meet a lot of the legitimate criticisms that have been put forward. I feel like I get no credit for this work on this forum, especially given how ambitious it is.

This is the second time you've pulled a BernieLomax defense, and I'm no more inclined to let it go unnoticed than I was back in the "world run by software" thread.

Adar posted:

Thomas Friedman is both much more right about everything and a better writer than you, sorry.

Jesus, man. That is harsh. Let's not say things we can't take back.

# ¿ Apr 2, 2014 03:05

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

Who What Now posted:

Then why, and this is super important so really think about this and answer well, why should we even care at all?!

I'm going to stop being mean for a moment here, no joke: this, Eripsa, is one of the most important things about real academic work. All my committee members, both for comps and dissertation, always cautioned me that no matter what I found interesting, I had to be able to answer the "so what?" question someone might toss at me after asking what I was working on. I've found it very helpful to remind myself when writing that other people might not give a poo poo about my ideas just because I, personally, find them interesting. That I find them interesting does not necessarily mean they have value, or even interest, for literally anyone else at all. I always, always need to have at least some justification for what I'm talking about and how it fits into/contributes to the historiography of the field.

You've babbled on at exceptional length about how neat you think strangecoins are, fine; so what?

# ¿ Apr 2, 2014 03:18

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

RealityApologist posted:

^^ I just haven't been funded in years, and they pull your access if you're not enrolled. I was on google scholar

Wait, didn't you say you were defending at some point in the near future? My funding ran out before I was finished and I still managed the one-credit continuing research course, with all the journal access that went with it.

Maybe I'm assuming too much: have you even had comps yet, or finished your course work?

# ¿ Apr 2, 2014 23:23

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

RealityApologist posted:

Learning is an active process that includes both writing and study and also engaging peers. I am learning. You are my peers.

When was the last time you submitted a chapter draft to your committee?

# ¿ Apr 2, 2014 23:39

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

RealityApologist posted:

For instance, Strangecoin users might be better able to stabilize their network, and might be able to arrange more efficient divisions of social labor than on other models, because of the feedback from the network it makes available.

Good Dumplings posted:

[*] A word longer than 3 syllables (besides "Strangecoin") or longer than 10 characters (again, besides "Strangecoin").

Available is 4 syllables, you lose.

# ¿ Apr 3, 2014 01:13

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

RealityApologist posted:

It's worse than that, because many of the books required for such a library haven't been written, and some of the basic scientific research for writing it hasn't yet taken place.

It was claimed in an earlier post that one of the characteristics of cranks is that they compare themselves to Copernicus or whatever, and since I've been talking about paradigm shifts it seems that I fit the mold. But in my analogy to alchemy, I didn't posture as Boyle, as a scientist making cutting edge discoveries that is changing the field. Instead I compared myself to a disgruntled alchemist who was waiting for the paradigm shift to come.

I have a very hand-maiden view of philosophy: we're not the ones making the discoveries, we're the ones trying to interpret the results of science and their implications to the issues that matter to us. My model is of Kant commenting on the debates of Newton and Leibniz; although Kant's grasp of the physics was only just passable, the conclusions he draws from these debates represents a turning point in intellectual history. The virtue of Kant's system was how his big picture, comprehensive view spiraled out of these fundamental debates at the core of natural, science. Almost nothing about Kant's system works, and he's wrong about a lot of the science, and the whole framework has been superseded numerous times, and yet his tremendous intellectual labor continues to bear fruit.

So I know the devil is in the details, and filling out that library will take generations of dedicated work from serious scientists. And I know that to generate an understanding of those details I have to put in that work. I have done some of that, again primarily in network theory and in agent-based modeling, and these biases are very clear on my work, and I have a long way to go.

But I also think that enough of the library has been filled in, and there are enough parts on the table, that we can start thinking about the big picture view again: that genuinely comprehensive framework that unifies not just scientific practice but our knowledge and power itself. I think this trend towards unification, and the importance of networks as a fundamental explanatory device in this unification, is both suggested by the science I've cited but also plain as day in the social and cultural trends over the last decade. The rise of the internet and social networks has made us all a little more competent at thinking in terms of networks and their dynamics, and it is finding application in just about every domain of human life.

When you say "keep it simple, stick to what you know, and don't get ahead of yourself"-- and don't get me wrong, that's good advice-- it also has the effect of saying "don't look at the big picture, keep your head down and cloistered with your provincial concerns, and stay in your place." And look, I'm all in favor of serious science and an intellectual division of labor but gently caress that. Everyone in this thread is right that I'm not capable of speaking on behalf of this library of developing knowledge, but no one else is either. And yet there it is, this massive global network that we're all suddenly attached to as if it has always been there. We all know it is there and that it is new and special, and we are all terribly uncertain about what it means or what to do about it. Most of us don't even know where to start to describe our condition; they are confused and bewildered and scared, and that makes them easy pickings for the Singularity theory and other simple myths that make the world seem like a simple place.

I'm not interested in simple myths. This is the story of our first steps into the digital age as a global species. It is among the biggest stories we've every told, and it outstrips every one of us in our attempts to tell it. It is a song we all know a few words to, but we're struggling to find the melody to harmonize around. I know a verse or two, and if you hum a few bars I can fake some more, and I'm happy to perform them at open mic night for a general audience until the rest of us can catch the tune and sing along. By the time that happens it might be a different song entirely, and that's okay. It's a beautiful song.

I've said this before in dismissive terms, but this time I want to repeat it in a more serious, concerned tone: get the gently caress over yourself.

Seriously: you are way too high on your own supply here, dude. You've taken some interesting ideas about the roles integrated technology in modern/future society and whatnot and turned them into staggeringly utopian pipe dream, in which you're way too personally invested. It's fine to daydream and whatnot but for gently caress's sake try to keep at least one foot on the ground as you do so, else you'll never actually manage to contribute anything about the level of fetishistic blathering. This thread, and your previous ones, show that clearly enough to any even mildly sober observer.

# ¿ Apr 3, 2014 18:41

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

RealityApologist posted:

I'm literally stunned every time I see someone online inferring from the phrase "tragedy of the commons" that all commons are tragic.

Wikipedia is an existence proof of the extraordinary constructive power of the commons. Reciting catchphrase folk economics is a security blanket.

Tell me Eripsa, how long have you and reality been seeing other people? Has it been a decade by now?

# ¿ Apr 4, 2014 02:01

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

LGD posted:

I mean those techniques could have been science if they were taught to our ancestors by the ancient aliens. Just, you know, alien science. And not something that actually happened or could happen. Still, that "theory" probably has more basic plausibility and evidence behind it than Strangecoin currently does.

Before I decide whether or not to take this seriously: How out of control is your hairdo right now?

# ¿ Apr 5, 2014 23:12

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

LGD posted:

Extremely. I'm like a month overdue for a haircut and I just got out of the shower.

Then I fully believe you were serious about the aliens from a really long time ago.

# ¿ Apr 5, 2014 23:15

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

Adar posted:

They trade with them anyway because why the gently caress wouldn't you, it's just that it will be on the barter system, in the black market or at a 20% discount or all of the above. Also the black market would quickly overwhelm the regular "economy", using that term loosely, as people quickly realize that they don't really *want* to calculate the exact benefit of coupling with the guy who brings them their coffee or the guy who inspected their sewer pipe prior to every single time they make a trade for something and other people realize they can launder every transaction made by the -rep crew and become billionaires until they themselves fall into -rep 200 billion richer and recruit the next guy to take their place ad infinitum. At some point before -rep becomes standard and total societal collapse because, again, why the gently caress wouldn't it, you can rest assured I will run bartertown on my throne of starving orphan skulls.

Well good to know I didn't take one sleeve of my leather jacket for nothing! Now to find a bitchin' muscle car and a sawed-off.

# ¿ Apr 7, 2014 18:12

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

Who What Now posted:

How did that one go? (Besides spectacularly awful)

About as you'd expect ie: spectacularly awful. But don't take my word for it, see for yourself.

# ¿ Apr 8, 2014 01:41

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

Who What Now posted:

7) Insist if a programmer would just make a model of what was described in 1 it would prove it works
8) Ignore when programmer does make a model and explains how it fails because it's fundamentally flawed
9) Beg programmer for more help while continuing to ignore literally all attempts to explain how the model is flawed

10) Use an example from an unrelated field, make a glaring error about said example and/or field while doing so, handwave furiously.

# ¿ Apr 8, 2014 17:04

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

Kjoery posted:

Wait what, I'm not even sure what the "problem" was, but the solution (after 5 paragraphs of salad) was to apparently to present 20 people with 50 servings of food.

30 servings would be wasted.

why

Why indeed, Kjoery. Why indeed.

quote:

e: doesn't his example actually demonstrate inefficiency of self-organization? Did he just refute himself with his own argument?

Probably, who can tell!

# ¿ Apr 8, 2014 17:43

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

SedanChair posted:

This would have been the post that convinced me you're a Turing test entry if I hadn't seen and heard you do it in person. Wait a minute, I feel like I've said that before...years ago..weeks ago?! What is real? Who am I? What's happening to me?

Oh no, it's suddenly all clear. The blathering word salad, the constant repetition of poorly-expressed points, none of it's actually there to convince us of anything! Eripsa's just trying to create a thread so densely packed with technofetishistic nonsense that it collapses into the singularity!

# ¿ Apr 9, 2014 03:07

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

RealityApologist posted:

Once this list is complete it might be useful to compile a list of things that are genuinely interesting about attention economy/strangecoin and worth developing independent of my crackpot ramblings.

I admit it would be a total cheap shot to say "absolutely nothing."
...
...
1) Absolutely nothing.

EDIT: beat me on the draw this time, Who What Now.

# ¿ Apr 9, 2014 05:05

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

RealityApologist posted:

Not at all. But I think most of you are groupthink idiots who haven't demonstrated a basic comprehension of anything going on in this thread, and whose only interest is getting out shots in where you can. It forms the constant background of hostility which fields people like obdicut can launch their more obsessive concern for my identity and existence.

This is the third thread in which we've dance the same dance, and to my utter lack of surprise you've shown virtually identical behavior. Are you really surprised that some of us are getting a wee bit tired of the effort of asking valid questions and raising concerns about your feverish thought experiment, only to get back gibberish and/or dismissal in return? Especially when it comes in the form of:

quote:

I think the most objectively helpful parts of the thread are when others clarify confusions expressed in the thread, or link discussions to similar ones in previous threads, or work through various dystopian possibilities with the proposal, and in general When other people contribite to the development and systematization of the idea.

Which presumes that, somehow, the burden is on us to help you flesh out, or shore up as the case may be, the idea in question. You proposed this strangecoin nonsense, you are the one that is responsible for making it make sense. This isn't a research seminar, dude.

quote:

Amateur psychoanalysis is, you might expect, not particularly productive.

Well I'll certainly grant if anyone in this thread is an expert on not being particularly productive, it's you.

# ¿ Apr 9, 2014 17:07

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

Obdicut posted:

The weird part where he cites Adar as someone offering 'interpretation' and how great that is when Adar has been more (hilariously) merciless in his mocking than anyone else.

And again the whiplash of "You guys are all groupthinking morons/thank you so much for helping me (even though I ignore the ways that you tell me I'm full of poo poo!)".

Yeah, that is truly bizarre. Eripsa, I've said it before and no doubt you'll ignore it again this time but seriously: you are too drat personally invested in this idea. Please, please, please; step back, take a breath or two, and at least try to consider this entire thing on its own merits alone, separate from how much of a digital pioneer or whatever you feel for having thought it up.

# ¿ Apr 9, 2014 17:15

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

RealityApologist posted:

I'm not bothered by it, or I wouldn't be here. But it makes the conversation much more difficult than it would be otherwise, and the standards demanded of my posting are that much higher.

Again, you all seem to think that only a genius demigod is worthy of considering these ideas publicly, and that I should be ashamed of the hubris I've displayed by entertaining the thought in a comedy forum.

I mean lol. I'm not bothered but the deep irony of the criticisms thrown at me is certainly necessary for interpreting the thread, and I'm just pointing it out.

Ah yes, "knowing anything at all about what you're talking about = being a genius demigod." You sure got us there, what absurdly high standards we've required of you.

# ¿ Apr 9, 2014 18:10

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

Slanderer posted:

The endless circularity of his reasoning makes perpetual motion seem so close....

Careful, send the derail in that direction and we all may get a steorn warning...

# ¿ Apr 10, 2014 03:25

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

Yiggy posted:

See you guys again in a few months!

Don't be so quick; once Eripsa gets back from his traveling or whatever I've no doubt he'll have some "new" thoughts that will totally blow our minds, man.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2014 14:23

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

Adar posted:

In Strangecoinland, the prices may as well be a quantum wave function because there are too many variables for anyone to give a gently caress about so they feed you and in exchange you fix their pipes next month. But assuming barter doesn't work because handwaving, one day, you do well at your job and get a big bonus. (We will assume this bonus isn't a total waste and doesn't put you over the account cap). You go over to the restaurant and order a meal which, today, is more or less or indeterminately expensive than it was the last time you ordered it (it is a mere 15 step process to figure this out). You pay them this new amount and find that there is a discount applied for being good at your job. The restaurant also found this out for the first time and is very displeased, so takes the economically beneficent step of throwing you out and only serving people who suck at their jobs, who pay more for the same meal.

I sorta pictured it being more like that scene in Road Warrior where Max eats dog food straight from the can.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2014 17:48

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

Little Blackfly posted:

What RA obviously wants out of all this is community enforced ethical consumption. Any attempt to purchase products or services from nodes caries an explicit economic cost, so presumably it would disincentivize dealing with those nodes. Basically every transaction people would do between each other would become a complex calculation as to how much of your economic karma you'd want to risk. It's a lot like a libertarian's fetishizaiton of contracts.

As well as their presumption that loss of reputation/scammer tags are effective ways to disincentivize scummy-but-profitable behavior.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2014 23:39

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 23:46

Captain_Maclaine: Sep 30, 2001; Every moment I'm alive, I pray for death!

Republican Vampire posted:

Eripsa is basically peak Californian, and the Californian ideology is an outgrowth of libertarianism.

I dunno about that. While there is considerable overlap between utopian technofetishists and libertarians, they're not entirely synonymous even among Californian tech/startup whackadoos. If I remember right from one of the earlier iterations of this thread, Eripsa doesn't consider himself to be libertarian, though I may be misremembering that.

# ¿ Apr 11, 2014 01:04

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Strangecoin: a calvinball economy

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