It’s og world fairs type thinking, but doesn’t scan as Thielean flying car reactionary nostalgia. I’m sure there is tawdry political calculation there to compete with Dubai, and that the actual project is a shitshow, but I detect a genuine streak of world’s fair excitement
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Part of the problem of course is that tech advances since the 60s have all been invisible or atomic scale — Moore’s law and biotech don’t produce gaudy Spectacle City shit the way trains, electric lighting, cars, airplanes etc did 1850-1960.
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I wrote this thing for Aeon about the World Fairs vs Solve Hunger type civilizational missions many moons ago. Not really happy with my thinking on this, either then or now. I view this essay at a failed attempt to answer the question in this thread.
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All people other than MbS trying to do Gaudy Spectacle City shit are sadly turning to godawful tradarch statuehead cities
Awful choice, but I’ll take MbS’s Brasilia 2.0 over Retvronopolis
What I actually want is New New York complete with sewer mutants and an owl infestation
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read image description
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Also Asimov Caves of Steel but there’s sadly no good gif for that… that’s a show that really needs to be made. Like Bailey +Daneel mysteries.
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My own modest contribution to solving this problem is Tubeworld
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Step 1: Collect cardboard tubes
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Solve civilizational ambition problem
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See, this is a means-ends category error. Education to do *what*? Staff a space program? Build Neom? Train Peace Corps 2.0 to go solve climate change? Make art? Or worse, “all of the above”?
Many of the responses have this issue. You can’t address a vacuum of ends with means.
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Replying to @vgr
Education
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This is also why, despite all sorts of issues, I am rooting for Meta’s Metaverse to succeed somehow. Civilizational purpose by fiat.
Crypto is just a little too abstract to save this purpose. It will only be exciting to engineers while it is disembodied money-like-substances.
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