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Evening menu: The Fall, Gaslit Nation
Mr. Beat + Socialism
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Aliens that were acculturated to western society wouldn’t be off, they would be super on POINT
Scarily so
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CryptoVaper
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Thoughts on consensus reality
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Ed Piskor + Ethan Persoff
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http://www.openculture.com/2018/03/how-much-money-do-you-need-to-be-happy-a-new-study-gives-us-some-exact-figures.html
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https://twitter.com/BrimleyLine
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Brexit: What Is Democracy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vr-ZeToI4R8
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The Fall
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THE CULTURE – Look to Windward
http://www.e-reading.club/bookreader.php/1005070/Banks_Iain_-_Look_to_Windward.html
Reinventing Money
The dozen or so civilisations which would eventually go on to form the Culture had, during their separate ages of scarcity, spent vast fortunes to make virtual reality as palpably real and as dismissibly virtual as possible. Even once the Culture as an entity had been established and the use of conventional currency had come to be seen as an archaic hindrance to development rather than its moderating enabler, appreciable amounts of energy and time – both biological and machine – had been spent perfecting the various methods by which the human sensory apparatus could be convinced that it was experiencing something that was not really happening. Thanks largely to all this pre-existing effort, the level of accuracy and believability exhibited as a matter of course by the virtual environments available on demand to any Culture citizen had been raised to such a pitch of perfection that it had long been necessary – at the most profoundly saturative level of manufactured-environment manipulation – to introduce synthetic cues into the experience just to remind the subject that what appeared to be real really wasn’t. Even at far less excessive states of illusory permeation, the immediacy and vividness of the standard virtual adventure was sufficient to make all but the most determinedly and committedly corporeal of humans quite forget that the experience they were having wasn’t authentic, and the very ubiquity of this commonplace conviction was a ringing tribute to the tenacity, intelligence, imagination and determination of all those individuals and organisations down the ages who had contributed to the fact that, in the Culture, anybody anytime could experience anything anywhere for nothing, and never need worry themselves with the thought that actually it was all pretend. Naturally, then, there was, for almost everybody occasionally and for some people pretty well perpetually, an almost inestimable cachet in having seen, heard, smelled, tasted, felt or generally experienced something absolutely and definitely for real, with none of this contemptible virtuality stuff getting in the way. The avatar gave a snort. ‘They’re really doing it.’ It laughed with surprising heartiness, Kabe thought. It was not the sort of thing you expected a machine, or even the human-form representative of a machine, to do at all. ‘Doing what?’ he asked. ‘Reinventing money,’ the avatar said, grinning and shaking its head. Kabe frowned. ‘Would that be entirely possible?’ ‘No, but it’s partially possible.’ The avatar glanced at Kabe. ‘It’s an old saying.’ ‘Yes, I know. “They’d reinvent money for this”,’ Kabe quoted. ‘Or something similar.’ ‘Quite.’ The avatar nodded. ‘Well, for tickets to Ziller’s concert, they practically are. People who can’t stand other people are inviting them to dinner, booking deep-space cruises together – good grief – even agreeing to go camping with them. Camping!’ The avatar giggled. ‘People have traded sexual favours, they’ve agreed to pregnancies, they’ve altered their appearance to accommodate a partner’s desires, they’ve begun to change gender to please lovers; all just to get tickets.’ It spread its arms. ‘How wonderfully, bizarrely, romantically barbaric of them! Don’t you think?’ ‘Absolutely,’ Kabe said. ‘Are you sure about “romantically”?’ ‘And they have indeed,’ the avatar continued, ‘come to agreements that go beyond barter to a form of liquidity regarding future considerations that sounds remarkably like money, at least as I understand it.’ ‘How extraordinary.’ ‘It is, isn’t it?’ the silver-skinned creature said. ‘Just one of those weird flash-fashions that jumps out of the chaos for an instant every now and again. Suddenly everybody’s a live symphonic music fan.’ It looked puzzled. ‘I’ve made it clear there’s no real room to dance.’ It shrugged, then swept an arm round to indicate the view. ‘So. What do you think?’ ‘Most impressive.’ The Stullien Bowl was practically empty. The preparations for that evening’s concert were on schedule and under way.
Children
Estray Lassils was that despite being there in this arguably quite consequential ceremonial role – she did represent nearly fifty billion people, after all – she had, apparently on a whim, brought along one of her nieces, a six-year-old child called Chomba. The girl was thin and blonde and sat quietly on the padded edge of the central pool in the personnel module’s circular main lounge area as it sped out to meet the still decelerating Resistance Is Character-Forming. She wore a pair of deep purple shorts and a loose jacket of vivid yellow. Her feet were dangling in the water, where long red fish swam amongst artfully arranged rocks and beds of gravel. They eyed the child’s waggling toes with leery curiosity and were gradually approaching. The others stood – or in Tersono’s case floated – in a group in front of the lounge’s forward screen section. The screen extended right round the circular wall of the lounge so that when it was all activated it looked as if you were riding through space standing on one large disc with another suspended over your head (the ceiling could act as a screen too, as could the floor, though some people found the full effect unsettling). The tallest, deepest part of the screen faced directly forwards and it was there that Kabe glanced now and again, but all it showed was the star field, with a slowly flashing red ring showing the direction the ship was approaching from. Two broad bands of Masaq’ Orbital traversed the screen from floor to ceiling, and there was a big storm system of whorled clouds visible on one mostly oceanic Plate, but Kabe was more distracted by the sinuously swimming fish and the human child. It was one of the effects of living in a society where people commonly lived for four centuries and on average bore just over one child each that there were very few of their young around, and – as these children tended to stick together in their own peer groups rather than be found distributed throughout the society – there seemed to be even fewer than there really were. It was more or less accepted in some quarters that the Culture’s whole civilisational demeanour resulted from the fact that every single human in the society had been thoroughly, comprehensively and imaginatively spoiled as a child by virtually everyone around them.
Public works
Kabe was looking out over Ziller’s head through the front windscreen of the car. From the tall pylon they were heading for, cables stretched away in six different directions along lines of masts disappearing into the distance, some in straight lines, others in lazy curves. Looking out over the fractured landscape all around, Kabe could see the pylons – each between twenty and sixty metres high and shaped like an inverted L – everywhere. He could see why the Epsizyr Breaks were also known as Pylon Country. ‘Why was the system built in the first place?’ Kabe asked. He had been quizzing the avatar about the cable-car system when it had made its remark about almost forgetting the place existed. ‘All down to a man called Bregan Latry,’ the avatar said, stretching out across the couch and clasping its hands behind its head. ‘Eleven hundred years ago he got it into his head that what this place really needed was a system of sailing cable cars.’ ‘But why?’ Kabe asked. The avatar shrugged. ‘No idea. This was before my watch, don’t forget; back in the time of my predecessor, the one who Sublimed.’ ‘You mean you didn’t inherit any records from it?’ Ziller asked incredulously. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, of course I inherited a full suite of records and archives.’ The avatar stared up at the ceiling and shook his head. ‘Looking back, it’s very much as though I was there.’ It shrugged. ‘There just wasn’t any record of exactly why Bregan Latry decided to start covering the Breaks in pylons.’ ‘He just thought there should be … this … here?’ ‘Apparently.’ ‘Perfectly fine idea,’ Ziller said. He pulled on a line, tightening one of the sails underneath the car with a squeak of wheels and pulleys. ‘And so your predecessor built it for him?’ Kabe asked. The avatar snorted derisively. ‘Certainly not. This place was designed as wilderness. It couldn’t see any good reason to start running cables all over it. No, it told him to do it himself.’ Kabe looked round the haze horizon. He could see hundreds of pylons from here. ‘He built all this himself?’ ‘In a manner of speaking,’ the avatar said, still staring up at the ceiling, which was painted with scenes of ancient rustic life. ‘He asked for manufacturing capacity and design time and he found a sentient airship which also thought it would be a hoot to dot pylons all over the Breaks. He designed the pylons and the cars, had them manufactured and then he and the airship and a few other people he’d talked into supporting the project started putting the pylons up and stringing the cables in between.’ ‘Didn’t anyone object?’ ‘He kept it quiet for a surprisingly long time, but yes, people did object.’ ‘There are always critics,’ Ziller muttered. He was studying a huge paper chart through a magnifying glass. ‘But they let him go ahead?’ ‘Grief, no,’ the avatar said. ‘They started taking the pylons down. Some people like their wilderness just as it is.’ ‘But obviously Mr Latry prevailed,’ Kabe said, looking round again. They were approaching the mast on the low hill. The ground was rising towards the car’s lower sails and their shadow was growing closer all the time. ‘He just kept building the pylons and the airship and his pals kept planting them. And the Preservationeers – ‘ the avatar turned and glanced at Kabe, ‘they had a name by this time; always a bad sign – kept taking them down. More and more people joined in on both sides until the place was swarming with people putting up pylons and hanging cable off them, rapidly followed by people tearing everything down and carting it away again.’ ‘Didn’t they vote on it?’ Kabe knew this was how disputes tended to be settled in the Culture. The avatar rolled its eyes. ‘Oh, they voted.’ ‘And Mr Latry won.’ ‘No, he lost.’ ‘So, how come-?’ ‘Actually they had lots of votes. It was one of those rolling campaigns where they had to vote on who would be allowed to vote; just people who’d been to the Breaks, people who lived on Canthropa, everybody on Masaq’, or what?’ ‘And Mr Latry lost.’ ‘He lost the first vote, with those eligible to vote restricted to those who’d been to the Breaks before – would you believe there was one proposal to weight everybody’s votes according to how many times they’d been here, and another to give them a vote for each day they’d been here?’ The avatar shook its head. ‘Believe me; democracy in action can be an unpretty sight. So he lost that one and in theory my predecessor was then mandated to stop the manufacturing, but then the people who hadn’t been allowed to vote were complaining and so there was another ballot and this time it was the whole Plate population, plus people who’d been to the Breaks.’ ‘And he won that one.’ ‘No, he lost that one, too. The Preservationeers had some very good PR. Better than the Pylonists.’ ‘They had a name too by this time?’ Kabe asked. ‘Of course.’ ‘This isn’t going to be one of those idiotic local disputes that end up being put to a vote of the whole Culture, is it?’ Ziller said, still poring over his chart. He looked up briefly at the avatar. ‘I mean, that doesn’t really happen, does it?’ he asked. ‘It really happens,’ the avatar said. Its voice sounded particularly hollow. ‘More often than you’d think. But no, in this case the quarrel never went out of Masaq’s jurisdiction.’ The avatar frowned, as though finding something objectionable in the painted scene overhead. ‘Oh, Ziller, by the way; mind that pylon.’ ‘What?’ the Chelgrian said. He glanced up. The pylon on the hill was only five metres away. ‘Oh, shit.’ He dropped the chart and the magnifying glass and moved quickly to adjust the levers controlling the car’s overhead steering wheels. There was a clanking, grinding noise from overhead; the stubby pylon whooshed past to starboard, its foametal girders streaked with bird droppings and dotted with lichen. The cable car shook and rattled as it crunched over the first set of points while Ziller loosened his ropes, letting the sails flap free. The car was now on a sort of ring round the top of the pylon from which the other cable routes left; a set of vanes on the top of the pylon powered a chain drive set into the ring, pulling the car round. Ziller watched a pair of hanging metal boards go past; they bore large numbers in fading, flaking paint. At the third board, he shoved one of the steering levers forward; the car’s overhead wheels reconnected and, with a screech of metal and a sudden jolt, it slipped onto the appropriate cable, sliding down by gravity alone at first until Ziller hauled on his ropes and reconfigured the sails to haul the swaying, gently bouncing car along a long bowed length of cable that led to another distant hillock. ‘There,’ Ziller said. ‘But eventually Mr Latry got his way,’ Kabe said. ‘Obviously.’ ‘Obviously,’ the avatar agreed. ‘In the end he just got enough people sufficiently enthused about the whole ridiculous scheme. The final vote was over the whole Orbital. The Preservationeers saved face by getting him to agree he wouldn’t clutter up any other wildernesses, even though there was no evidence to show he had any plans to do so in the first place. ‘So he went ahead, planting pylons, spinning cables and producing cars to his heart’s content. Lots of people helped; he had to form separate teams with a couple of airships each, and some went their own way, though they mostly worked under a general plan drawn up by Latry. ‘The only interruptions came during the Idiran War and -once I’d taken over – in the Shaladian Crisis, when I had to commandeer all the spare production capacity to be ready to build ships and military stuff. Even then he kept building pylons and spinning cables using home-made machinery some of his followers had built. By the time he’d finished, six hundred years after he’d started, he’d covered almost the whole of the Breaks in pylons. And that’s why it’s called Pylon Country.’ ‘That’s three million square kilometres,’ Ziller said. He had retrieved the chart and the magnifying glass and gone back to studying one through the other. ‘Near enough,’ the avatar said, uncrossing then recrossing its legs. ‘I counted the number of pylons once and totted up the kilometrage of cable.’ ‘And?’ Kabe asked. The avatar shook its head. ‘They were both very big numbers, but otherwise uninteresting. I could search them out for you if you wanted, but … ‘ ‘Please,’ Kabe said. ‘Not on my account.’ ‘So, did Mr Latry die with his life’s work completed?’ Ziller asked. He was staring out of a side window now, and scratching his head. He held the map up and turned it one way, then the other. ‘No,’ the avatar said. ‘Mr Latry was not one of life’s diers. He spent a few years travelling the cables in a car, all by himself, but eventually he grew bored with it. He did some deep space cruising then settled on an Orbital called Quyeela, sixty thousand years away from here. Hasn’t been here or even inquired about the cable-car system to my knowledge for over a century. Last I heard he was trying to persuade a pack of GSVs to take part in a scheme to induce patterns of sun spots on his local star so they’d spell out names and mottoes.’ ‘Well,’ Ziller said, staring at the chart again. ‘They say a man should have a hobby.’