0 thoughts on “In Sweden, They Don’t Care Who You Know.”

  1. Oh, it’s because I’m lazy and grabbed the first image I found with a google search and sent it to Jonas who do the web page.

    As for why it actually is blue only Joshua can say.

    That photo up there made me laugh.

  2. Playtest 1 was blue-green. Playtest 2 was sort of red wine colored. Not for any particular significance; more because I liked the colors and wanted to differentiate. Those are still up on the web, but the links to the files are killed, pointing instead to the Shock: page itself.

  3. Joshua, speaking of the Post-Singularity thread: have you seen “Microcosmos”? If not, you really should. It’s my favorite alien-world nature documentary, and it’s absolutely gorgeous. Why can’t all this transhuman/post-human/post-whatever stuff be like “Microcosmos,” rather than being a bunch of sweaty virgins reciting the equations of the thermodynamics of information processing at each other? Sigh.

  4. I actually often think of naked mole rats when I think about odd ways that Humanity can go. They do all sorts of stuff usually limited to insect behavior, like having a fertile queen and sterile population, communicating via urine/hormones, and a caste system.

    I don’t think the Singularity, despite its name, would be at all single. I see lots of “people” doing lots of things. Some of them are bound to be sweaty, hormone-soaked merges with natural processes and moral systems that are completely alien.

    I think I say this because Microcosmos, cool as it is, is limited to insects. They’re not smart. The Singularity is people. They’ve at least come from mammals, and the things they care about are breeding rights and social status (which are more or less the same thing on different scales). Let’s be honest here. Posthumanity will happen because of fucking, one way or another. Psychosexual hangups are as subject to natural selection as any other meme, and a total shift in the meaning of sex (which humans are about more than any other animal) is one of the things that will push the revolution.

    So, yeah, crystaline, stark white future, posthumanity ain’t. I see lots of really interesting mess with equally interesting results. I see a future of humans like nudibranchs — wildly reproductive in a vast world, spraying their semen and ova out into the world to make more of themselves, learning by sex. And I see every one of the resulting zygotes having a change at personhood somewhere in the cosmos.

    So, yeah, I hear your objection to the idea, but I don’t have much worry for it, either as a future or as a literary device.

    Let’s play Shock: about this sometime.

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