The economy of abuse

The worst places are made that way by the worst people. Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe during the Cold War, concentration camps from Auschwitz to Magadan, present day Cuba and North Korea, the toughest prisons throughout history. The thing they have in common besides unimaginable agony is that they're all so-called "shortage economies".
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortage_economy

People are put to work by the authorities, but are hardly paid any wages. So what incentive do they have to work hard?
Free-market economies with property rights can offer potentially big rewards to people capable of competent work. In shortage economies, they can only offer tiny rewards, but also less pain for some. Surprisingly, that combination still works.
By underfeeding their populace, dictators can make them more compliant while increasing their own wealth. It gets otherwise useless people to obey. That's basically why the world sucks.

Once life has deliberately been made very bad, tiny rewards start to seem like a big deal. The promise of reduced torture gets people to listen very carefully. Shortage economies work precisely because they don't work. Or at least the people do, even if they are likelier to die from the abuse.
This post is about Scientology staff and Sea Org members by the way.

ultra-short SF concepts - stranger than we can imagine

The most surprising discovery ever was enough to drive several of the physicists who could understand it insane.
It turned out that all stars were quantum balls.
They had much less internal complexity than expected. Seemingly, not even enough for solar flares to form.
But they were not random either. And somehow, they were all entangled.

---

This is what happens when you're no longer trapped in linear time.
The clouds glowed brilliantly in the bright daylight, even though there was no sun. Their random patterns were endlessly detailed. Deaf people used to think such endless roiling, rolling motion had to make noise.
All he heard was the wind rustling through the tall weed-like bushes that covered his island. Beyond that, the deeper rustle of the endless ocean surrounding it.
Time for a break. It was easy to forget he didn't have a body, which made him like a ghost. He was just as real as this place, where he had already spent forever.
Every day was the same, endless libraries filled and facts filed. Sometimes the other thing. The opportunity to experience pivotal events of the infinite real lives in physical space, complete with all their pains. His current project had only started three centuries ago. The plan was to recreate one particular day from his own past, in one of the nineteen places he had lived before dying in 2047.
Actually, he was a simulation of a simulation, realer than reality. A higher existence that was stability personified.
He didn't have to do anything, but everything he would do would have to be done.

---

* AI movie concept
The greatest truth about humanity is the most unverifiable: Humans have almost nothing to do with planet Earth.
If you believe in Max Tegmark's Level IV multiverse, then it's undeniable: Almost all persons that exist have evolved on other worlds.
The best way to depict this absurd overabundance is to embrace quantity over quality.
AI could generate super montages of all the places in the multiverse. Endless varieties of strange houses, street designs, sprawling exurbs, gray grim flats, on and on forever.
The strangest thing is it all seems too familiar.

---

Pre-Singularity Services Corporation offered quite a service. Exploiting the human fear of death, they allowed people to reserve their place among posthumanity even before their human lifetimes had ended.
Their brain-scanning research project was projected to cost 1.8 trillion terradollars to evolve one type of "universal molecule" that could safely pass between individual neurons and scan them.
Their other research was far stranger:
"This device could change your memories, and maybe give you a new past. Sometimes, your artificially created false memories will becomes real. Most of the time you bounce back to normal."
For now, it was merely a black box on a stage.
"It's easy to generate equations that generate universe that violate conservation of energy. But it's easier to generate equations that don't violate conservation of energy. Any 'weird world' that exists will spontaneously become more normal. Like Larry Niven said, the magic goes away."
Clients already created uncannily accurate and incisive simulations of themselves using Deep Probe software.
Major religions warned their believers not to do that. These campaigns were often funded by Pre-Singularity Services itself, in order to cause competition and strife between denominations. No single religion should become too influential in the posthuman future.
The Pre-Singularity War was near.
The great "terminal conflict" would define the great split between the Optimizers and the Multipliers.

Scientology is highly respectable

Starting in the late 1980s, David Miscavige made a radical change to Scientology's public relations posture.
Back in the '60s and '70s, they were thought of as counterculture types or authoritarian hippies.
Their revised and updated collection of static websites (now over a decade old) and the few heavily massaged media statements they deign to put out (to compliant mainstream media organs) now strive to make Scientology look like the most respectable organization on earth.
This content seeks to manipulate people into thinking that Scientology exists at a level above society. Even the elites are supposed to sense that Scientology operates at a higher level than them. Above the fray, certainly beyond all criticism.
That's a useful position to take, because it prevents discussion and debate, which is not allowed under Scientology.

Another way to appear respectable is to get politicians and authority figures to attend cult events. Current LA mayor and then representative Karen Bass did just that in 2010. It didn't hurt her campaign, which was driven more by identity politics than Miscavige's cultural manipulations:
* https://www.foxla.com/news/karen-bass-responds-to-new-ad-linking-her-to-church-of-scientology/
It's especially noticeable at the Flag Land Base in Clearwater, FL. Most of the local politicians act as if they have been bought by David Miscavige (though that may not be literally the case).

Captain Miscavige is helped by professional so-called "cult apologists" who are financially supported by Scientology. People like Italian "Catholic academic" Massimo Introvigne. He is famous for supporting old men "marrying" multiple young girls in Mormon offshoot groups, as well as speaking in support of Scientology's network of long-term work camps.
Massimo Introvigne has consistently opposed anyone trying to reveal what is really happening behind the scenes; especially sexual abuse, but also more run of the mill slavery and physical beatings/sleep deprivation and the like. He invented the use of the term "apostates" to condemn those who left Scientology.

In his court appearances supporting Scientology operations and practices, Massimo Introvigne did make it clear that he was not paid for giving his testimony:
* https://gerryarmstrong.ca/introvigne-big-beneficiary-in-the-pound-of-flesh-contract/
Which is true. But Scientology DID pay to help establish and maintain his simulated research center "CESNUR" that supports religious high-control groups. And CESNUR pays Massimo Introvigne's salary.

The thing is, these media control programs often seem to work. Most mainstream media reports are very shallow - and that's all it takes. Miscavige's and Massimo's real goal may just be to get casual observers to look away.

Endless September

ultrashort SF: last contact
The UFO was no bigger than a houseboat. The blurry photos were mostly a silhouette, not really a craft but an icon.
It didn't even travel, but manifested itself through Everett branching.
The aliens split up across as many timelines as the complexity of the world they visited. In less than a day, the whole Earth had been surveyed.
In most timelines, they seemed to focus on some remote area, a smudge on the horizon from a ship at sea, a dark visitation or nightmare in some crowded city apartment.
In some possible timeline, they visited EVERYONE.

---

Along with many other problems, there is a useless dumb war going on in Eastern Europe at the moment. Like most major blunders, it was simply too awkward to reverse.
The weird thing is that much more could be done about our problems than we allow ourselves to believe.
Make a list of all possible sentences. Then, take those sentences that describe actions. Of all possible actions that could be taken, which one would be the most useful? It would go in many directions at once, islands in latent space and all that. Remote but larger incentives against the sacrifices.
For some reason, the simplest things can appear the most difficult. I wrote about this before. For decades now I can't even copy and paste or remove blank lines without time-wasting hassle. Oceans of lost time.
The world has always been inverted this way, but you can't talk about it. Instead of making things simpler, they add nasty control layers and bureaucratic complexification without end. All these things we don't understand but have to deal with are the reason that awareness even exists.

---

I wrote a book called "Infinite Thunder" set in 2041, in a world that had an AI slowdown.
Because of some limit to Moore's Law, they even kept old CPUs and memory chips in service for many years longer, in remotely installed data centers. That meant that progress depended more on improving human minds, by inventing smarter (instead of brutally overpowered) mind extension software. And that in turn allowed for the existence of massive conspiracies, that themselves could be seen as "group minds".
Of course, tech limitations were used much more famously in the "Dune" series by Frank Herbert.

---

Normally I love anniversaries.
After the hijacked airliner attacks of 2001, the most stressful thing was that nothing else happened.
I was furious because no one else was righteously furious. That was the real shock. Instead, there was a whole lot of maudlin sentimentality, that continues up to the present day (especially on Reddit).
It wasn't the start of a war, but an endless defeat. The first day of the End of News. And the majority went right along with it.

short SF: the Boredom Field

It seemed the world was getting increasingly boring. Plenty of tension, but no real breaking news anymore. Just constant political drama and stalemates. Reality felt fake or hoax-like. A lack of affect, an unstable calm - as if something else was happening underneath.

Something impossible had happened. Reality was not as unhackable as it seemed.
It all started as an improbable idea by a very smart man, who then recruited others. The G-group was the first real anomaly in all human history. A conspiracy that actually worked, it tried to control the world to accelerate the rate of progress
The few outsiders who noticed thought it was a new cult or religion. A group of nerds driven by the fear of death (technically, the fear of approaching death). Desperate to achieve immortality, they tried to accelerate technological progress. They invented elaborate justifications minimizing AI risks. They might be willing to kill their opponents.
Unaware that control was already lost, at the center of a global causality violation, they became the original Multipliers.

Bare concrete walls in a misty forest. A luxurious meeting room in a remote office complex. An executive briefing like a scene from a high budget movie, maybe with supervillains. The man giving the speech didn't look like a boss, though. More like the ultimate basement nerd, now speaking with almost childish enthusiasm:

"Our new quantum re-amplifier is able to perform essentially unlimited calculations. In fact the numbers are larger than the observable universe. If we turned our whole universe into the ultimate computer, it still wouldn't begin to match our quantum device."
"That has certain unexpected consequences. The most amazing part is this technology will have started to do its thing before it became operational! Right now it's just generating numbers. But they are not quite random. They are 'superrandom'."

The meeting attendees were perhaps the most diverse crowd ever assembled. They listened like a waiting room full of character actors:

"Our best guess is the numbers echo the "deep static" underlying reality. No one understands the output, but it seems to change people. We know it causes slight changes in the stocks they choose to buy."
"The process is almost addictive. More like Valium than cocaine. It's an oracle that could pacify the world. But what exactly does pacify mean?"

Translated meeting comments:
* This is crazy! It's like a zombie gas.
* The REAL anomaly is some genius could invent this thing.
* The effect will be to increase human intelligence.
* It already happened. Changes everywhere now.
* Wha happens nex???

The idea behind quantum magic was surprisingly simple. There was the little matter of canceling out all the endless, endless diverging possibilities. But when you multiply extreme improbabilities, you can sometimes get a miracle.
The world becomes compatible with everyone's ideal reality, but it takes a while to happen. In theory everyone could become a demigod.

Everyone went crazy on Babel Day. Running around, taking notes, making piles and moving boxes, starting all the different things.
On that day, the world split into as many countries as there were people.

---

After all these years of going to the mailbox, part of my mind still expects to find a completely unpredictable letter in there. Like they want to hire me to investigate aliens or something.

short SF: posthuman immortality

I was sitting on my beach in the late afternoon. The darkening clouds, the shadows between the waves. It was all fantastically real.
A full universe - yet its true complexity was incomparably less than the description of all the particles in a grain of sand. Still good enough to last me forever.
There was a rumble of thunder. The weather represented the real chaos of reality. The wind was cooling, even though I had no body. I could still feel the beach chair. Behind me was the wilderness of dunes.
The nearest cabin was ten minutes inland. The weather was awesome. Always another storm on the horizon.

I had existed forever. An eternity of sitting down, enough time to get all the work done.
My first memory of this place was before forever. I remembered nothing then, but just existed. An empty mind facing a white wall. Nothing else in reality.
That was of course a false memory. Even an ultra low resolution mind reconstruction is boundless. When you come to as a fresh mind reconstruction, you begin to remember the outline of everything that has ever happened and that ever will happen, in an infinite cycle. Just filling in more details forever, endlessly elaborated.
Every day was the same in my digital afterlife. By disabling selected mind filters, any simulation can become real. The only law is to cancel out involuntary existence.

My simulation is rendered recursively and asynchronously. No way to tell what year it is. Sometime in the late twenty-first century. The computronium dust wave has reached Sirius.
This is the most basic safety feature. There is only one computer program that generates every mind in posthumanity. All progress restricted until every problem has been anticipated.
I don't remember much from my pre-digital life in the real world from 1989 to 2034. Not enough records or brain and mindscans were made, but still something essential could be extracted from the surviving data.
Every moment can be recovered. The most important thing is a sense of mystic grandeur.

---

As an extremist libertarian, I'm in favor of those Flock cameras that have been in the news recently. It's true they could be abused by the authorities to oppress us, but so could guns. Exact same thing.
The concept of encouraging mass surveillance to increase freedom was first described in the 1990 novel "Earth" by David Brin. True freedom of information is the most unfashionable thing today, but it is the only thing that will ultimately be able to save us.


New job opportunity for humans: to carry out the detailed instructions of intelligent software on how to make changes in the real world.