by Farktoid from reddit.
A couple of decades ago, a girl by the name of Stephanie Meyer was tormented by her peers. Maybe because she was overweight, maybe because she was ugly, maybe because she didn’t conform to the norms of the Mormon groupings she was a part of. She was ostracized from every group she tried to join. She couldn’t be a cheerleader because the cheerleaders didn’t include her. She couldn’t be a theater nerd because she had no talent. She couldn’t even be a regular nerd because she never understood chess and Magic: The Gathering hadn’t been invented yet so she couldn’t pump her cash into that.
With no friends and no real prospects in life, she turned to writing. And being the self-important person she was, she insisted on including herself in every story she wrote. Not as a tertiary character of course, she had to be the main character. The focus of everyone. And due to her flaws, her character’s flaws would be nothing beyond falling over something once in a while. She would be loved by everyone at all times, because that’s how life SHOULD be.
But this wasn’t quite enough. No, she had to be the object of affection by some sort of supernatural being. And since werewolves were too hairy, and mummies were too involved with wrappings, she went with vampires. Vampires are hot. They’re mysterious. They’re sexy.
But they have too many flaws. So dear old Meyer got rid of all the flaws of vampirism. All those interesting traits like weakness by silver, or stakes, or being unable to enter a house without permission. These were boring to Stephanie, because she wanted a big, strong, magic man to protect her. So she wrote Twilight, and jammed herself right into the plot.
Here’s a magic man to protect me, she thought, a magic man who is theoretically a vampire but holds all of their strengths and none of their weaknesses. And this sunlight thing? To hell with that! I’m going to make them sparkle in the sunlight, like the My Little Pony dolls that were my only solace in my cold, lonely years growing up.
Luckily for her, the money-grubbing folks at Little, Brown, and Company realized that instead of providing a challenging, interesting, powerful role model for their young readers, they decided to publish Stephanie Meyer’s book, which consists solely of the mindless wish fulfillment of so many little girls who may actually be hurt in their lifetimes by the tales set forth in this book.
So instead of promoting another fictional character who takes charge of his actions and takes time to understand why things are happening the way they are like the young Harry Potter, they promote a sad, weak character whose only chance at a long life revolves around a magic man who at one point wanted to suck said character’s blood for minor nourishment.
I’m no Harry Dresden, but if I were him I’d scowl at this kind of behavior.
Not only do I believe in the Singularity, I think it’s happening right now.
I’ve always heard the singularity defined as the point at which technological advancements occur so quickly no one can imagine the outcome. By that definition I do believe we’ve been in the singularity since about 2000 or 2001, whenever broadband Internet became widespread.
If you define the singularity as the time after super-intelligence I think it still applies. If super-intelligence is an intelligence greater than one human, any online community would qualify. Software like Reddit and the forthcoming Google Wave bring super-human intelligence to new levels.
Take a look at what has happened over the last few years. I think the Ron Paul presidential campaign and the Campaign for Liberty are perfect examples of the unimagionable things that are beginning to occur. For example, raising 6 million dollars in a single day without centralized planning, creating an advertising company and funding it with half a million dollars to create and fly the Ron Paul Blimp, then there’s HR1207…all decentralized events coordinated by software implemented super-human-intelligence.
I do believe we are on track to experience the hard take off in the next few years as people really begin to imagine new ways of using the Internet.
The 2012 presidential race will likely catalyze the widespread adoption of a new culture of mass collaboration.
Mass collaboration will bring new institutions into being. I imagine business like Walmart or Target being bought by online communities, coordinated buyouts by shareholders with an agenda. Just like people used the Internet to organize political campaigns, they’ll do the same thing for business. Software will replace bloated corporate structures, and likewise bloated government beuarocracies.
Communities will fund the creation open source hardware and businesses to manufacture it. Imagine an open source printer with ink cartridges that cost $4.
Many business charge so much more for their products than the actual labor that went into making them. They spend that money paying exorbitant salaries to people who don’t really do anything, or at least nothing a community couldn’t do for free. They spend it on marketing, something online communities do naturally… by default.
Consider money as electricity. Using the Internet, communities, cities, states, nations, will design the circuits which run our world.
The prosperity which this new culture will bring will unite the world. The huge defense budgets will be a thing of the past. Their arduous and undue burden will be lifted from society.
I believe we are part of the Universe. I believe that we are destined to spread to the stars and galaxies. I believe that without the culture which I have described we are destined to destroy ourselves.
I believe nature provided us religions so we could learn faith. I have faith in this.