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Encyclopaedia Ex Nihilo

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What Came Before:

--- Quote from: Auriga ---This is a re-post of Scott Bakker's blog post, not my own idea. It's a pretty interesting question, but didn't get any answers on Bakker's blog, so I wonder if you guys have any ideas on this?


--- Quote ---So we stand on the cusp of the Second Enlightenment, the point in history when the technical and cognitive resources of humanity allow it to master material and biological complexities at the cellular and molecular level, at long last delivering a historically fixed human nature to the whims of human desire. The Second Enlightenment, of course, is nothing other than the Singularity, which means it also marks the collapse of our ability to predict what will happen on the basis of what has happened. This renders the question, What will the post Neo-Enlightenment world look like? religious, insofar as this world transcends our knowledge as completely as does either Heaven or Hell.

And, just as Heaven has no heaven, and Hell has no hell, Ex Nihilo is a Last World, humanity’s departure gate. After it, we will be extinct, either because we have committed collective suicide, or because our technologies will have transformed us into something incomprehensible.

What I want to do here is gather entries for an Encyclopaedia Ex Nihilo, speculative snapshots, written in a dry, academic tone, describing some cultural movement, institution, political or cultural figure, historical event, you think our grandchildren might find in Ex Nihilo. Let’s restrict the time frame to 2044 to 2084, the year of our extinction event. As for satire, try to make it as wry and believable as you can manage.
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I have quite a few fittingly dystopian ideas for this "Ex Nihilo" future, I'll probably have time to write them out tomorrow.
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What Came Before:

--- Quote from: Madness ---I'm very interested in this, Auriga, and though I worry about informing culture, I do have thoughts to add...

I let things sit for quite awhile. Perhaps, this thread can serve as a sketching ground for stuff submitted to Ex Nihilo.
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What Came Before:

--- Quote from: Callan S. ---I had one but I have to say, in terms of writing about real life I have some optimism (not 'everything will turn out fine', but in 'there's space to manouver to give a chance of things being rendered fine by some standard'). I couldn't go hardcore pesimism and felt that I just wasn't going to be fitting.

This is what I wrote ages ago and have resting on file so far...
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Gamsians.

While ones life might be briefly affected by the protocols of a set of traffic lights, for example, the Gamsian lives within a set of protocols, their lives affecting the numerical values of the protocol itself. Yet only within a set amount, again set by their protocol. So while it's numbers may change, the larger protocol technically remains unchanged. The traffic lights, so to speak, are made to conspire as to when they turn green (or red). But only within so much of a set frame.

The Metzingia movement tends to view Gamsians as having trapped themselves in full body casts, able to merely wiggle their fingers, when such restraint is hardly necessary for anyone of a clear mind. They see it as thoroughly paternalistic and provide many convincing essays, particularly from their intellect modified members, on how such external restraints are merely clumsy and debilitating towards what they are quite capable of managing as individuals. Even more so with their greater capacity gained from mental enhancement. The sort of issues Gamsians raise in return, the Metzingia simply reply there are often good reasons, within a bigger picture they'd grasp if they weren't so entrenched in terms of red lights and not running them.

Gamsians continue to grapple with the contradiction between games having goals (something long refuted by the DayZian movement), which is to say, ends, and yet the necessity of life continuing.
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What Came Before:

--- Quote from: Madness ---Weapons, prosthetic: Developed concurrently with the prevalence of neural prosthetics for amputees in the mid-twenty-first century, military application of weaponized prosthetics and sensory augmentation became a battlefield norm (see augmentation, sensory, drones, perceptive). Scientists working towards marketable prosthetic augmentations for able-bodied consumers, discovered that they could use existing motor function of cortical architectural as triggers for novel function, bypassing the painstaking process of defining new function-specific neural structures. In this way, the architecture previously used to initiate muscle-specific behavioral functions, such as flexing or extension, were hijacked as trigger commands for weaponized augmentation.
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What Came Before:

--- Quote from: Madness ---Devoid, the: One of the first followings (see cults, augmentative) to arise from the consensual augmentation of cortical structure by its membership. The Devoid arose from principles espousing the embodied rejection of emotions as evolved traits and the historical dangers of socioeconomic expressions of emotion and its various symptoms of dis-ease.
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