A science fiction history where infrastructure has become so complex that everyone is devoted to maintenance and innovation has stalled to a halt
Conversation
Will probably be in Spanish :P. I somewhat feel this is the blurry background of some far future ambiented universes (Warhammer 40k, Dune), where society works on top of machinery no one really knows how to reproduce anymore but they do know how to keep working
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So the same thing but less epic, in a more mediocre/bureaucratic way. Just exploring it.
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Now I'm gonna use this thread to place a bunch of notes :P.
I have this theory that society is basically two kind of symbiotic groups: One group I call the "alpha", which is the core of society. This is made up of people who play zero-sum status games, to control out what...
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...the other group built in previous generations. I call it alpha just because it reminds me of alpha gorillas in-fighting for stablished groups, without really adding much besides fighting for control.
The other group I call the explorers. This would be the people who...
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...are genuinely curious or just plain suck at status games and totally lost it. These go out/get kicked of the alpha group and find/found out new forms of wealth that future generations of alpha will fight for. Usually 90% just utterly fail, the other 10% start new alpha dinasty
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So I have to wonder how the world got to a point where there's no more frontiers to scape, and just this maintenance zero-sum mess
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I don't get this dichotomy bw 0sum and maintenance cruft. You can have one without the other- the only commonality is they both result in no net improvement over time. Be interesting if, say, organizational game theory of maintenance infra forces 0sum interactions
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Yup, that's what I'm thinking about. It's a society fully committed to maintenance a zero sum one? How that looks like? Fully recycling?
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One version simply looks like most of the world before 1600. It’s actually the historical default. Your explorer type was only 0.1% and almost never had any impact and your alpha typed fought over land or gold or women. That’s boring. It’s low tech.
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I think deepness in the sky which someone else mentioned has hints of an interesting high-tech version.


