https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/27/unnecessariat/#rubbuts-stole-my-jerb
"I don't care who you are, there will always be times when hell is other
people. Not because other people are horrible – quite the opposite! Other
people are
wonderful, but boy are they ever
stubborn.
From boardgames to romance, team sports to movement politics, business ideas
to construction projects, there's so much important, enjoyable and essential
stuff you can't do alone. But other people insist on having their own
priorities and goals, and they mulishly refuse to organize their lives to suit
your priorities.
Our species has put a lot of work into resolving this conundrum. Not only did
we evolve a whole brain structure – the neocortex – that helps us understand
others' perspectives, but we also evolved many social structures (like laws and
teams and governments and families and committees and bureaucracies) to help us
coordinate with others to do superhuman things (that is, things that exceed the
capacity of a single human).
These structures are imperfect, but they're better than the alternative:
coercion. Persuading others is not without its pitfalls, but compared to
forcing others to bend to your will, "persuasion" is the hands-down favorite.
Not for everyone, though. There has always been a group of people who refused
to acknowledge that other people have perfectly valid reasons for wanting to
pursue their own goals rather than yours. We call most of those people
"toddlers" and devote sizable social effort to helping them outgrow this
belief.
But there's another group of people who carry this belief into adulthood. If
they're of regular means, we call those people "bullies." However, if they're
sufficiently wealthy, we call them "billionaires" (this is the same force that
allows money to transmute a "hoarder" into a "collector").
Just lately though, we've come up with a new solution to the problem of hell
being other people. Rather than coercing other people into arranging their
affairs to suit our needs, we've devoted
trillions of dollars to
replacing
people with pliant chatbots, in the hopes that these chatbots can be made so
effective that we can just dispense with other people altogether."
Via Russell Coker.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
