Dumb People Will Shoot Me All The Same
In the wake of America deciding democracy was a bad idea, several of my friends have tried to halt my slide into misanthropy by trying to “reassure” me that people aren’t evil, they’re just really dumb and easily mislead!
This is not as reassuring as they think it is.
It doesn’t help that I was already something of a misanthrope. What kept me optimistic was transhumanism, the belief that, even if the average human is too dumb to ever sustain an interstellar empire, we are rapidly approaching the point at which we can augment our own intelligence and move beyond the constraints of our biology. Perhaps then, the way forward was through augmentation, either mechanical, biological, or simply uploading ourselves to computers somehow. This possible future, however, is now at risk, it’s very existence looking very unlikely.
In 10-20 years, we will likely see one of three things happen: radical biological modification from bioengineering DNA, the rise of androids thanks to the minificiation of ECMO systems, or partial mind uploading made possibly by brain-computer interfaces.
However, this election has made two things painfully clear: a majority of people are very dumb, and a majority of people hate what they don’t understand. This means they are definitely going to hate anything coming out of the transhumanist movement. Any attempt I make to augment myself will be met with fear, hostility, and guns. It doesn’t matter if they’re just “scared and confused”, they’ll still shoot me all the same. And, y’know, the threat of being shot is very good at dissuading people from doing things.
People do not seem to understand just how bad things are going to get. You can say “how bad can 4 years be?” and be somewhat right: I think Trump is too senile to actually dismantle American democracy. That’s not the problem. The problem is that this entire election has solidified conservative power in a big way. Do you really think they’ll stop at concentration camps for “illegal” immigrants? I can see today’s waves crash into tomorrow’s shores, and it’s not pretty.
Part of Project 2025 says they are going to dismantle all attempts at addressing climate change. This means you’d better familiarize yourself with what things will look like in 2050 without any reduction in emissions, because that’s what is going to happen. Don’t buy a house unless it will survive a 70 meter rise in sea levels.
The cruel irony is that this will fuel an explosion in VR entertainment in the next 5-10 years that will cause hundreds of millions of people to realize they aren’t as normal as they thought they were, only to be thrown into a world of their own making that hates them for it. The sheer amount of suffering that we have created in this moment is mind-boggling. 4 years of Trump is nothing compared to the decades of civil rights unrest that we are about to plow into. Did you really think they were going to stop at attacking trans people? They’ve already been gearing up to go against furries. The bigotry will never stop, because there will be a never ending supply of people they hate - anyone who is different from them, anyone with the wrong “vibes”, anyone who isn’t an heterosexual cisgendered extrovert is going to be ground into dust or thrown into a camp.
The astounding success of fearmongering conservative politics means the dystopian world of Dues Ex is somehow optimistic, one where augmentation was possible at all. Given the current political climate, it seems unlikely that widespread augmentation will ever be tolerated. The rich will find ways to get augmented, and then simply fearmonger all the poor people into ensuring none of the other poor people get augmented, which is exactly what the cartoon villains in Dues Ex wanted. Drone warfare will become commonplace. Civilians will become targets. Scientific progress will be heavily bottlenecked, as rampant elitism makes herding behavior much worse.
I no longer see any viable way out of this for humanity as a whole. Perhaps if we splinter into factions, one of us might get lucky and colonize the moon, or something, from inside the comfort of a glass dome. But right now, we are in a crab bucket, and this election has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that humans will do anything they can to drag everyone else down to their level. The only escape now is to hide from the other crabs, so that one small group might be able to continue making progress.
Either way, this will probably be my last blog post, unless something changes. I may be forced to delete the blog entirely, given how everything on this website will inevitably be weaponized against me. Besides, I no longer have any desire to talk to other people. I’d rather buy a gun.
