On Awakening the City

[Chairman Risus]

You really want to wake them all up?

If you can't see the problem with this, I will be glad to spout.

Spout, Dok. I honestly don't know what makes the citizens tick.

What would happen if the citizenry thought that they had a stake in this City game, and that someone was keeping score and holding them accountable?

[Fujikoma]

The real trouble is that we are all the illuminati.

[Doktor Howl]

The real trouble is that we are all the illuminati.

Well, shit, why spout when we can just post RAWisms?

Mood killed.  Will spout tomorrow.

[Fujikoma]

Well fuck, will spout tomorrow, but fuck your mom, on general principal... Shit, wish I didn't feel like some kind of suspended fluid.

[Fujikoma]

Breakdancing, too bad it went out of style.

[Doktor Howl]

Breakdancing, too bad it went out of style.

Why do you do this?

[Chairman Risus]

From the Office of the Bandarlog Society

I've been thinking about it, Dok. I went back through the City and tried to find out where it came from, why it was built like this. I came to the City to find put why people worship television sets, why they become complacent and satisfied with the drivel broadcasted into their dens.

I think at one point what was art and what was life got turned around. People began mistaking what happen on MTV and VH1 with what was real. Art imitated life imitating art until it spiraled wildly and no one could tell what was actual and what was production anymore.


Why did it end up this way? I've got an idea or two, let me bounce them around.
People wanted to be individual; to create themselves be it through becoming a whole person, enlightenment, or salvation. The problem was that they did not want to work for it. They wanted to skip all of the hard, gritty parts of life and get easy access to the end result. Without any real experience of work or pain they never matured. They remained shallow and indifferent to the World because the City kept them warm and safe.

But the Citizens still wanted meaning in their lives, despite never figuring out what a real person was made from. Heraclitus had it right, in that the Human is not a static creature but everchanging and constantly in motion.

The Citizens, though, looked to their televisions and corporations for identities. Instead of realizing what potential they had, they let the Real World and America's Got Talent take up what room they had left for value.

These are my current conclusions on the City, Dok. A little disorderly, as I'm still sorting it all out in my head, but it is a start.


Risus
Eminent Commander of the Bandarlog Society

[Captain Utopia]

The problem, as I see it, is that we're wired towards short-term motivations and when confronted with a problem we don't know how to solve we'll panic ourselves into inaction - staring into the headlights of oncoming disaster.

Have you spent much time actually talking to people outside your normal circles?  Everyone knows the game is rigged, and that they are just pawns in a grander scheme of which they have been handed no control.  Now, they'll each have different perspectives - some may trust the police implicitly but think advertisers and telemarketers are trying to steal their souls, some may distrust each and every corporation but tithe to their church - everyone gets to cop a feel of a different part of the elephant.

And there is no obvious solution.  So what to you wake The City up to?  There is no message or obvious life-raft for them to cling on to.  So we have Real World and America's Got Talent, because that short-term dopamine reward is better than banging your head against an intractable problem.

Of course, there are a bunch of "obvious" solutions we could get close to consensus agreement here, but even if we had a media arm with a built-in audience how would we package that in a way which was as easily digestible as the alternatives fighting for attention/power?

It wasn't always this way.  We built roads and infrastructure and vast civic projects.  Easily communicable goals.  Our open communication environment now allows for seeds of dissent to grow into obstacles of doubt followed by political pant-pissing.  And nothing ever happens.  But it won't always be this way either - one day we'll find that obvious solution, and then we'll climb above this flat evolutionary plateau.

Don't believe me?  Fine.  I have about as much evidence to back me up as those who say that this is the end of civilisation so we may as well enjoy the ride in flames.

[Chairman Risus]

The problem, as I see it, is that we're wired towards short-term motivations and when confronted with a problem we don't know how to solve we'll panic ourselves into inaction - staring into the headlights of oncoming disaster.

Have you spent much time actually talking to people outside your normal circles?  Everyone knows the game is rigged, and that they are just pawns in a grander scheme of which they have been handed no control.  Now, they'll each have different perspectives - some may trust the police implicitly but think advertisers and telemarketers are trying to steal their souls, some may distrust each and every corporation but tithe to their church - everyone gets to cop a feel of a different part of the elephant.

And there is no obvious solution.  So what to you wake The City up to?  There is no message or obvious life-raft for them to cling on to.  So we have Real World and America's Got Talent, because that short-term dopamine reward is better than banging your head against an intractable problem.

Of course, there are a bunch of "obvious" solutions we could get close to consensus agreement here, but even if we had a media arm with a built-in audience how would we package that in a way which was as easily digestible as the alternatives fighting for attention/power?

It wasn't always this way.  We built roads and infrastructure and vast civic projects.  Easily communicable goals.  Our open communication environment now allows for seeds of dissent to grow into obstacles of doubt followed by political pant-pissing.  And nothing ever happens.  But it won't always be this way either - one day we'll find that obvious solution, and then we'll climb above this flat evolutionary plateau.

Don't believe me?  Fine.  I have about as much evidence to back me up as those who say that this is the end of civilisation so we may as well enjoy the ride in flames.

From the Office of the Bandarlog Cabal


The people in the City have become stunted and ineffectual. This issue is not those who appreciate a short term dopamine reward, but those who idolize the shallow and plastic characters living inside their televisions.
The life in the City begins to imitate art. Life becomes shallow and fake. there is no real development and no real progression.

It is not an issue of having some mysterious existential problem or even an intractable impediment stopping our progress.

We are the problem. Our own lack of motivation, our own dormancy and apathy.
This is the same reason why America had an obesity epidemic, the same reason these shitass politicians keep getting elected in the City.