I was trying to write the STARSET-fanfiction story but I couldn't figure out how I want to do it.
I still feel obliged to warn people of the same things they're trying to warn us about, and others they're not, including:
- The exacerbation of the climate crisis, in part thanks to AI (you see all these gas plants popping up to power those resource-guzzling plagiarism machines). It's too hot to go outside in the summer, too cold and dry to go outside in the winter. Food is expensive and limited, because the viable space to grow it has shrunk so, so much. It now has to be either grown in an expensively climate-controlled greenhouse, which doesn't work for some plants and doesn't produce nearly enough because of the available space, or shipped from far north. These end up making the climate even worse, even faster. This is just one way climate change will self-perpetuate. (STARSET strangely doesn't talk about climate, at all. Or maybe they mentioned they "solved" it in passing in the second book, which considering the BMI and quantum shit means they need to have had several significant breakthroughs in several different places all at once. But the blueprints for the tech came from even farther in the future. So.)
- Also, we're already going to see places like Miami and the Outer Banks go under the sea during our lifetimes. The available land on Earth is shrinking, although that's not so much a general problem as it is a problem for the people who live there.
- Certain technology, VR in particular, will end up largely replacing real human interaction. I expect us to be driven to this by a combination of factors, particularly our rapidly vanishing "third places," fights against public transit, the EV push (to some small degree, mostly safety), maybe self-driving cars, the resistance to RTO (which is justified btw), and the rapid pushes and pulls for online shopping. With nowhere to go and no way to get there anyway, VR, and video games, sees a boom. We're already seeing this with the "chronically-online" people on social media!
- Eventually, we start seeing apartment buildings full of "VR-ready apartments," which would mostly just be a tight studio with just enough space to install a full-featured VR setup in it (or perhaps, in some cases, with the necessary equipment already installed).
- Or, we start seeing neural VR become available and then go mainstream. STARSET particularly warns that neural VR could easily be commandeered by governments, and other adversaries, to perform surveillance, thought policing (although in their lore, they generally don't do this; thoughts are fuzzy and unreliable), and to remove people from their bodies if they misbehave (supplication, a neural-VR prison for the mind). They not just mandate them but, as far as I can tell, provide and service their BMIs for free, as the bedrock of their police-state. Eventually, spoiler; hover to view.
- Basically, the conditions making your house and maybe your workplace the only places you can possibly be, mixed with the climate crisis, could very well end up enabling a (possibly government-controlled) VR company with better, more realistic marketing than Meta (and a competitive price!) to make an absolute killing.
In TokSik, the message is a little bit larger than just "you're in a cult." It's talking about everyone. Not just the Trumpists, but from further right of them all the way to "commie consumers". And probably beyond that, too.
We're all being played. The division the upper levels are showing is fake. They're all the same type of person, rich and self-centered. They may not be conspiring per se but they are acting in their own individual self-interests, which for the rich and self centered means protecting their wealth and power, keeping it from others, and doing everything possible, laws be damned, to make sure it stays that way. You can't trust anyone who possibly could have a vested, usually financial, interest in the status quo: the media, every single politician (yes, including Jeff Jackson), and every single CEO, company, or startup. (Co-ops are generally better with this but when it comes to money, they do still care.)
We've got to have a proper revolution. Voting isn't enough. Striking isn't enough, but you will need a union for this, and a mutual aid network.
Stay tuned, I guess, and stay ready.
