this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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Your bonus points link is even dumber than you're suggesting. The first half of the tweet:
I don't want bad things! I want good-ish things!
Also I've never read Ringworld or Hyperion but the other two stories span literal millennia and show wildly different societies over that period. Hell, showcasing that development is the entire first set of Foundation stories. Just... You can absolutely tell this sonofabitch doesn't actually read.
Kind of funny because while it is dystopian, it is so in a very... calm, ordered and non-threatening kind of way. While Dune is overall just hell. Nothing good about it. Except if you like being addicted. Then there's plenty
It's also kind of weird to see Atlas Shrugged on the list. Not because it's not dystopian because the only thing it's missing from its libertarian hellscape is realistic consequences in the form of bear attacks. But unlike the others the society isn't expressly said to be awful by the narrative. Or, for Scholtzenizen, by reality.
spoilers for a number of works follow
Hyperion - mankind lives in uneasy competition with semi-hostile AIs. Wars between human factions have already killed billions. The Earth is destroyed by a science experiment dropping a black hole into the core. The farcaster (teleportation) network causes ecological disasters on multiple planets.
Dune - after catastrophic wars between humans and AIs, computers are forbidden. The only way to travel interstellar distances are via the monopoly of the Guild navigators. Society is explicitely feudal. Our hero protagonist disrupts this, establishing a theocracy in a war that kills billions. His successor holds humanity in societal stasis for millenia, to induce the Scattering that will preserve it from similar societies in the future. Of course, billions die during this period.
Foundation - humanity collapses into a new Dark Age. Presumably, trillions die.
Ringworld - I read it long ago but it was so 70s I've basically blotted it out. The wiki summary indicates it's not so bad unless you're stranded on the Ringworld itself.
(No spoiler tags because it's just background lore for Dune that's very tangential to the main plot)
That's a retcon from the incredibly shit Dune-quel books from like 15 years after the original author had died. The first Dune was written well before computers as we know them would come in vogue, and the Butlerian Jihad was meant to be a sweeping cultural revolution against the stranglehold that automated decision-making had achieved over society, fought not against off-brand terminators but the entrenched elites that monopolized access to the setting's equivalent to AI.
The inciting incident semi-canonically (via the Dune Encyclopedia) I think was some sort of robo-nurse casually euthanizing Serena Butler's newborn baby, because of some algorithmic verdict that keeping it alive didn't square with optimal utilitarian calculus.
tl;dr: The Butlerian Jihad originally seemed to be way more about against-the-walling the altmans and the nadellas and undoing the societal damage done by the proliferation of sfba rationalism, than it was about fighting epic battles against AI controlled mechs.
Asimov being Asimov, the human consequences of the decline and fall of the galactic empire happens mostly of screen.
How exactly Trantor in a couple of hundred years went from a bustling planetary city to a planet where the last survivors scratch out a living from farming the former imperial grounds, is better left unexplored. If you are living in that world you are much more likely to be among the masses were stuff happens that will eventually be noted by Foundation scholars as "population decline", than being a Foundation scholar.
It's been ages since I read Hyperion but I think it's one of those settings that start out somewhat utopian but as the story progresses you are meant to realize they are deeply fucked.
Also I had to look up Camp of the Saints, and I think complaining about living there may be a racist dog whistle.
edit: So apparently it really is a huge racist shibboleth, which makes me wonder if it's common for grok to recommend it and nobody noticed because it's kind of obscure.
@Architeuthis @sneerclub Referencing Camp of the Saints at all is a racist dog whistle.
"The Camp of the Saints is a 1973 French dystopian fiction novel by author and explorer Jean Raspail. A speculative fictional account, it depicts the destruction of Western civilization through Third World mass immigration to France and the Western world."
More of a train whistle than a dog whistle this one.
No may be about it, Camp of the Saints is only ever mentioned by big racists these days. Might as well be the Turner Diaries.
I live how he put The Gulag Archipelago in there along a bunch of speculative fiction.
solzhenitsyn is pretty sus too, with all that him being orthodox fundamentalist, fan of tsar, panslavic antisemite, 2000s putin fan (died three days into russian invasion of georgia), proponent of enlargement of russia to include "sufficiently russified" parts of belarus, ukraine and kazakhstan and therefore opponent of ukranian independence; also
(all from wikipedia entry on him)
it's a little wonder that american altright embraced his writings
The Gulag Archipelago is the dystopian future after (((Those People))) successfully destroy Western civilisation by flooding it with gay Muslims, of course.
spoiler for hyperion
In the first book it is revealed that the utopian hegemonic force is actually hypercolonialist, which destroyed one of the main characters planets (and killed the dolphins) and made him turn to terrorism. The later books make everything worse.