To be fair, somebody will always decide what you wrote was a warning and they should fear it, even if you specifically intended a utopia, just as people insist on rooting for and even imitating the bad guys from stories because they misunderstood "cool" as "good".
Example: Some people think San Junipero, the one positive Black Mirror episode with an actual Happily Ever After romantic ending is a dystopian vision.
Some people think the Primer, the technological device at the heart of Diamond Age, is the problem, not the Neo-Victorian aristocrats like Elizabeth's parents with their pseudo-colonial control over part of China, not the huge corporations whose greed is tearing the world apart and their engineers like Fiona's father, nor the Cyberpunks left over from a previous era like Nell's father - no the problem is the machine.
In the Tweet framing it's easy, it's named a Torment Nexus and the book is literally titled "Don't Create The Torment Nexus" but what about the Horseless Carriage? The Novel? The Television? Are we creating the Urban Sprawl, the Wasted Youth, are we helping to Manufacture Consent ? Or maybe these are Freedom and Art for the Masses ? Framing.
> Some people think San Junipero, the one positive Black Mirror episode with an actual Happily Ever After romantic ending is a dystopian vision.
IIRC, after the couple prances away hand-in-hand into the sunset, the camera pulls back through the fourth wall to reveal the darkened server room in which their minds are being emulated, blinkenlights glittering in the darkness among the monotone drone of case fans, zooming out to reveal an endless row of servers receding into the distant blackness in a scene reminiscent of The Matrix. If the showrunners intended it to be unambiguously happy, I feel like they would have omitted that part... Or maybe I'm hallucinating, because I found the implications utterly horrifying, much to my partner's consternation.
Not to mention that Black Mirror's entire agenda is near-Sci-Fi horror.
The episode is specifically about getting trapped in nostalgia, a non-existent past. Yes, love is found in this pursuit, but so it death. All the music in the show is about living in a box and forgetting about the real world. Other characters talk about forgetting they're in the simulation and they talk about how they live in a graveyard. There's that hole conversation with Greg about how the timelimit exists so people don't kill themselves to permanently leave the world behind and "live" in San Junipero forever.
And I'd expect of all people HN people (computer people) would understand that uploading into a simulated reality is not the same as you entering that reality. Remember, once "you" are data, you can be copied. Then who is the real you. If you can be uploaded without being killed in the process then certainly that entity is not "you," but rather a different entity who has all your memories and is not able to distinguish itself from you. But you are still experiencing your experiences and not their experiences, so you are different entities. It is just an AI double. The promise of an afterlife is no different than the promises of old. A story to help you move on, to help you find comfort in the end. But this story is just more tangible for those who are left. San Junipero is not much different from many of the other stories who approach this topic. Even the happier Upload is quite dystopian between the lines of being a rom-com. It is that happiness that is the dystopia itself, the lure of false promises. The poisoned desert so sweet and tempting it is impossible to not take a bite.
> Remember, once "you" are data, you can be copied.
If you're copied that's what "Hang the DJ" is about, and more darkly the short story "Lena". But San Junipero deliberately doesn't do that.
Alas, the thing you claim isn't the same as being is in fact exactly how you work today. Is this an existential nightmare? I got used to it pretty quickly, and in San Junipero you'd have a lot longer to get used to it. Greg Egan posits that, to the extent consciousness is anything it's somehow a consequence of patterns of computation. That is, if somehow the same patterns that you represent came into existence again they'd "be" you in every sense that matters. The "Lena" scenario remains horrifying, all those copies are the same person, instantiated over, and over, and over again to do menial tasks. But San Junipero is just life after death.
The Permutation City reference is irrelevant to San Junipero. I never made the claim that the entities in the simulation were not sentient. I made the claim that they aren't "you." These are very different things.
I haven't seen the newer seasons. But looking at the synopsis on wiki (Beyond the Sea?), this is a very different scenario. Permutation City might be a better one to look at for what I'm getting at. Remember in that story that you are essentially making a copy of yourself and putting it into that universe. That entity is not you, but it is sentient, conscious, and it's own thing. But you aren't in that simulation with it unless you virtually go in (and in their scenario you need to deal with the time differential).
San Junipero is a corporation promising you life after death. The same way Amazon Prime's Upload does. But San Junipero in Black Mirror itself made no claim, and the writers place a lot of not so subtle hints as to the idea that it isn't. Not only by nature of being a Black Mirror episode, but I suggest you look closer at the soundtrack of the episode and how its used in context.
> I made the claim that they aren't "you." These are very different things.
I understand what you're claiming, as I pointed out under this understanding your current existence is already terrifying. Not just when you fall asleep, but even moment by moment the underpinning compute substrate is repaired and replaced and yet it feels as though this is an ongoing experience, there's no reason Yorkie experiences this any differently even though intellectually she knows the transformation was more... substantial.
It's just Trigger's Broom / the Ship of Theseus, this isn't even a new idea.
> the writers place a lot of not so subtle hints as to the idea that it isn't.
Like the hint where Charlie Brooker specifically said that no it's the Happily Ever After ending ? Maybe he wasn't patting his head like you knew he would be if he was addressing True Fans like you ? Didn't give the secret sign ?
I thought I already spelled this out well enough, that somebody will insist that the heroes are villains, that the bad guys are the good guys and so on. Sometimes they have a point, but more often they just didn't see what was in front of them. I am kinda tangentially interested in the Slash scene (e.g. I know people involved in AO3) and the Slash communities are the same - sometimes you're like sure, this was barely subtext in the movie/ TV show/ novel, in a braver world the writers would have had them kiss on camera, but other times it's like "Where did this even come from? Were you watching the same show?" - and sometimes that's deliberate contrariness but other times it really isn't.
It's not as though I don't have my own divergences from what writers believe about their own works - for example in my opinion Firefly was a TV show about the bad guys (people who lost a civil war and just decide that doesn't count) written by someone who doesn't understand that they're the bad guys. Obvious Whedon doesn't agree and I don't expect him to. Or for example Vinge insisted he doesn't know who/what Rabbit is in "Rainbows End" and in my opinion there's only one option which makes any sense.
But I guess I kinda asked for people to insist their wrong interpretations of San Junipero are the only correct one when I gave the example.
That was not clear from the prior conversation. Lost in translation I guess.
Sure, we can go into sleep and is reality even real. But it's a bit different when we're talking about a specific reality we know is not real and the point I'm getting at is that we know that version of you is for sure 100% with no uncertainty not you. Since both entities can exist simultaneously and independently. Which is an entirely different construct than say dying in your sleep and being replaced because there's not multiple entities with shared experiences existing at the same time. What I'm pointing to is this so yeah there's clearly miscommunication when you're talking about an even more abstract concept.
> If the showrunners intended it to be unambiguously happy, I feel like they would have omitted that part...
I think this has the same direct purpose as my favourite modern Doctor Who scene but with different larger strategy. To tell the audience something explicitly, because it's not necessarily obvious and otherwise not everybody will have guessed. Often the Doctor understands what's going on and the audience are learning as they go, but in "The Girl In The Fireplace" the Doctor never actually knows why this spaceship chose this girl, in this time. The audience does at the end though, because we pull out to show the spaceship's name.
Both the women know exactly what we're shown at the end of San Junipero. That "Heaven is a place on Earth" in a very literal sense, but while it's explained somewhat, the details aren't mentioned because they'd be clunky as exposition - hence the explicit visualization of the data centre where they're running.
You aren't alone in finding this horrifying, but for Charlie Brooker, myself and a large number of people this is the best case scenario - and since Charlie wrote the show...
Same goes for certain types of lead characters in things like American Psycho, Fight Club, Mad Men and Wolf of Wall St. These are seen as aspirational instead of cautionary tales.
And, famously, Michael Lewis's first book, "Liar's Poker":
> Despite the book's quite unflattering depiction of Wall Street firms and many of the people who worked there, many younger readers were fascinated by the life depicted. Many read it as a "how-to manual" and asked the author for additional "secrets" that he might care to share.
I go to a restaurant where the owner has recently hung a sign reading “The World is Yours” as though Tony Montana from Scarface should be regarded a fount of wisdom.
If you want to deify Tony Montana, there is one quote that is the John 3:16 of his proselytizing, and the world is yours is not that quote. I guess you can't put it in a restaurant.
There was a recent article in NYT about Grand Theft Auto and the author mentions that their friends became a little more racist after playing it as kids. My takeaway was that these forms of media aren't for children because they probably won't understand that it's satire. Then I realized that many adults don't understand that it's satire either.
The framing and cut scenes in GTA may be satire but the gameplay where you actually immerse yourself in the game in get into the character's shoes mostly aren't. Those parts are largely just shooting people.
I guess you could argue that it's some other kind of satire than being anti violence.
The tech company is right since this appears to be a reference to the Total Perspective Vortex from Hitchhiker's Guide, which notably didn't do anything bad when it was turned on.
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus
https://twitter.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538