There’s an old folk thingy from Borneo that claims Orangs can, in fact, talk. But they don’t, because if humans found out they’d be forced to get jobs and pay taxes.
Makes sense to me. If I got to spend my whole life chilling in the forest and some weird bald fuckers came and tried to make me work and pay taxes I’d do whatever needed to convince them I’m just another ape and continue to chill in the forest
plays stellaris once
why can’t i make the bonobo population into a client state?
Imagine trying to enforce our volcel rules here in a world where bonobos are posting
this is a classic sci fi plot
And every single fucking time it goes bad for the people involved
Like literally every single instance of a species being uplifted in sci fi is a cautionary tale about interference with others, and usually has the uplifted species be violent/used as a weapon
Literal fucking Torment Nexus bullshit
All (good) sci-fi is an exploration of issues that already exist in our world, just with the added distance of future/tech that allows those issues to take an even greater shape.
This whole “uplifting primates” bs is just sci-fi talk for neoliberal development economics, it’s just saying the quiet part out loud, in that people from poor countries are an inherently inferior species.
The Culture Series would like a word. Although sometimes when they interfere things do go bad and that’s part of the narrative, but the majority of time they don’t interfere it results in self destruction of civilizations
Stuff doesn’t go bad per se in 2001, where it’s heavily implied that humans were uplifted. It just gets real trippy and then the sequels sucked.
Would you bother reading/watching/playing scifi media that didn’t have some sort of conflict, like everything just went great?
I’ve actually read some utopian literature. It’s cool to see what people in the past saw as an ideal future. We could use a little rebirth of the genre tbh
Maybe you’re right, maybe the Tomorrowland concept is what the world is missing right now? Everything is a conflict to be overcome, noone imagines everyone just working together to achieve amazing things.
They used to extract value from animals on industrial scales, like horses and stuff. They still do now of course but it’s very grisly (watch dominion) because it’s more about getting their flesh, skin, oil, etc.
Anyway, we used to use them in “jobs” but it turns out machinery and mechanization was way more profitable, dumbass.
We don’t need more workers you fucking idiot, like half the Western population pushes around numbers on a spreadsheet for living. If we want more productivity maybe we should force these assholes onto an assembly line building stupid bullshit before we fuck with porcupines.
Yep, if we weren’t burdened by the Protestant work ethic that dictates that everyone should work, we could have a society where everyone takes turns working on a farm once a month and can do whatever the fuck they want the rest of the month. We’d still be able to feed everyone and society wouldn’t collapse.
