I dunno—I spend a lot of time “just hanging out” with people who aren’t particularly dazzled by work or intellectual pursuits or higher education. I feel like those constitute one set of processes by which people come together and form relationships and, for those of us who are mainly familiar with that set, it can be instructive to seek out communities that form without any of those elements.

One place to look might be ministry or service. Illness, loss, grief, infirmity, death, age, family strains—people require care and people give care regardless of their postgraduate endeavors. Nuns and Jesuits and the like aren’t for everybody—but look to the neediest among us and, in large parts of the world, those sorts of order are the people doing the invisible, unglamorous, uneconomical, “chop wood, carry water” form of devotion and social labor day in and day out. In intimate community even with very difficult (and sometimes ungrateful) members.

Another might be the sort of ad hoc communities that arise in exigency: disaster, forced migration, encampments, solidarity against forces of difficulty.

Unhoused, unemployed, and retired people can provide a particularly illuminating contrast to the pastimes and concerns that animate a working life. A visible minority fill their days with addiction, but a whole lot are complete and interesting people with the full range of human ambitions and desires and fears and joys, and somehow they fill their waking hours with more than just material striving.

Another might be organizations like union halls, advocacy groups, music scenes, circus folk, jugglers, running clubs, political groups…

Kids are great for this too. They do a lot of hanging out, with nothing more than imagination and a drive to self-expression.

Even our hominid ancestors do a pretty good job of hanging out litigating social hierarchy and nurturing one another—no university degree or novel engineering task required…

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pona-a 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Communities form around shared friction. The sciences used to be sources of great community, solving grand problems with untold levels of friction. Having the right skills and knowledge to contribute could unite people from warring nations and social classes, let alone the benign evils like an anti-social culture, punishing people for talking to strangers...

In the imagined faux-utopia, there is no more adversity, and it's assumed no active effort was made to preserve its struggle. A god-like nanny will step in to meet your every need before it could even cross into your consciousness.

There'd be no point to music if Mozart could already hear the 6th symphony extracted from his brain with the first thought of inspiration. This art would in turn hardly be comparable to the real deal, even if it were an empirically flawless replica, is there is only so much personality you could extrapolate without a long execution limited by effort or resources. But a convincing replica of art might be all we need to sabotage the real deal, either through spam or demotivating the novice artists.

This future is, of course, ludicrous. It's a childish fantasy, a bastardization of sci-fi writers' nuanced utopias, flattening the social systems they wrote to give their characters motivation and meaning, in favor of fetishizing the technology, which was just a plot device to put the characters in such setting, and acting surprised when taking it at face-value will result in immediate social decay.

The author might or might not be surprised he's not the first to write on the subject, and real sci-fi literature already argues the same points in say Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect.

	▲	alwa 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Thank you for the nod to Metamorphosis of the Prime Intellect! I’ve been meaning to revisit it for dog’s years and now I have the impetus :) Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom comes to mind, too [0]… I think you nailed it with respect to the fading magic of scientific culture, and the power of shared purpose to gloss over social differences. Even as a plot device, it feels like the notion that {solving material/energetic needs solves existential needs} feels of a piece with a very particular, commoditized, late-industrial type of social climate. That “tea, Earl Grey, hot” would mean the same thing every time, down to the molecule—to an appreciator of tea, no less—always struck me as a dismal proposition. Everywhere I look, though, I feel like, as soon as one source of friction gets greased, people forge right ahead and find (or create) a new site of friction. Food security’s largely solved? What a challenge dieting can be! Not to mention toxins and gluten and agricultural monoculture and the livestock’s moral standing! Magic robot writes all my code for me? Filthy BigAI, limiting my tokenmaxxing strategy to only billions of words of thought per week! And they want me to pay them an amount approaching the cost of a shared desk in an office?! Plus, the robot sometimes makes mistakes that require me to eyeroll _read_ the code… Or, more benignly: I think of my skater friends. No sooner do they nail one demanding or stupid trick, than they’re reshuffling the obstacles and pushing their flips an extra revolution. A 4-minute mile was revolutionary, now it’s routine. Everest became packaged, so the wealthy seek out lesser but unconquered peaks [1]. No, we’ll have no problem finding and inventing friction and forming ad hoc communities accordingly. To the extent the friction is collectively-initiated rather than imposed by Nature red in tooth and claw, I’d say that’s probably a blessing—just as the unifying friction of the scientific frontier is more wholesome than the unifying friction of war or siege or famine. > But a convincing replica of art might be all we need to sabotage the real deal, either through spam or demotivating the novice artists. I share your worry here. I try to reassure myself on both points. On spam, I tell myself that breadth-of-attention isn’t the same as quality-of-attention: I’d imagine orders of magnitude more humans know Justin Bieber’s work than have ever known Mozart’s 6th. And as far as demotivation: I tell myself the frontier has always been a lonely place to operate. Great artists famously die poor and unknown: their urge, their obsession to create, seems to be almost possessing; to irrational degrees. Most people follow, a few lead; the greats in the past did so at even higher cost than those today. Thank you for your thoughtful writing, here and around HN. Browsing through your comments you seem completely lovely and I’d love to invite you for a meal if we ever find ourselves in the same part of the world :) [0] in which our hero bemoans his flagging stock of Whuffie. In Kissimmee. https://craphound.com/down/Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_t... > in the old days, if you were broke but respected, you wouldn’t starve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum could buy you security and peace. By measuring the thing that money really represented—your personal capital with your friends and neighbors—you more accurately gauged your success. [1] e.g. https://archive.is/9nuSv (Bloomberg)

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za_creature 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Science owes more to the steam engine, than the steam engine owes to science.