It’s quite impressive to see a post this long, with this many considerations being so wrong on so many aspects.
4 Likes
Yep… I could only skim, but, there’s so many problems with this. The author must be kind of sheltered, I imagine, or live in one of those Silicon Valley reality distortion fields they’ve been cooking up…
They do have a point regarding how a shrinking population would actually lead to huge problems, and it’s true, and I think there’s no clean way around that: we built a system which relies on infinite growth and we’re already seeing the beginning signs of what happens when that infinite growth stops.
Meanwhile, nobody has enough control over that system to gracefully collapse it or gently revert it to an earlier state, so no matter what we do, fixing that issue will cost a huge amount of either: lives, time, and happiness, though I still think that’s our best bet vs continuing to try to push for growth.
Though in a Star Trek setting this post would be spot on. People are great when they have what they need!
There are so many wrong assumptions in this post that I don’t even know where to begin.
We can conclude that more people bring more happiness for two reasons:
- This is what has happened in the past
- Looking at first principles
This alone at the beginning of the post is laughable, but how about this?
Note that 45% of the land is dedicated to agriculture: about 14% to crops and 30% to livestock. That amount could be dramatically reduced through higher-density agriculture.
So right now with 8B people we’re using 45% of available land but sure, we can dramatically reduce that % while also producing food for 10x the amount of people. I’m sure that’s an easy problem to solve.
This was great comedy though!
1 Like
The author has 99k subscribers. This doesn’t look like satire, so I assume they’re being serious, but that’s even more perplexing.
I’m reminded of another post I was reading earlier today that talked about 2048 and the path to utopia. It’s all so easy, we just need to <wild hand-waving> fundamentally change how human beings at scale live their lives. It’s really quite simple as long as you <wild hand-waving>.
Oh yeah I know it’s not satire, I was just joking. He’s obviously serious which is why it’s even more funny.
It’s all so easy, we just need to fundamentally change how human beings at scale live their lives.
This is exactly what he’s doing in the replies to that post.
Back of the envelope, you need 700-1000 ppl/km2. That would mean multiplying Italy’s pop density by ~4.
That can be achieved simply by doubling the current cities’ radius, that’s it.
See? That’s easy. Just double the radius of current cities, problem solved. How hard is that? Super easy, take Milan for example. Radius is about 7.5kms. You double that, make it 15 and guess what? Milan is now on top of Modena, a nearest city.
Shit, well I guess we’ll just move that entire city (that also needs to grow) somewhere else? All the people who live on the countryside? Well fuck them, you now have to move somewhere else.
2 Likes
It’s like this author experienced the pandemic through an entirely different reality. Wearing a mask was a bridge too far, but forcing people to completely abandon their way of life in order to stuff themselves into a stacked omni-city is going to go over just great. I guess this utopia skips the part where there’s global unrest when the peacekeepers work toward corralling everybody.
2 Likes
the writer assumes a lot of good-faith participation of governments and corporations that have already been given the opportunity to ‘do the right thing’ and have yet to do so. why would they do it at 100 billion people when they couldn’t even do it at 7? we’d also be hypercapitalistic, imo; worker’s protections would go completely out the window at 100B.
overall, this feels like ‘effective accelerationism,’ and i hate it. 
1 Like
The more he posts in the comment section the more I think he’s just a buffoon. And one quite full of himself. Definitely amusing.
2 Likes
Um, better for whom?
I’ll take billionaire pronatalists and their pet pundits seriously when they adopt every unwanted child. Every last one of them, starting with the black kids who have “behavior problems” due to growing up in a negligent foster care system. Until then, all I’m hearing out of them is complaints about how wage-slaves aren’t breeding well enough in captivity for their liking, and Moloch has a hungry.
This looks like a guy who willfully misread Judge Dredd and decided that Mega City 1 was some kind of utopia. And of course he’s on Substack – the Medium of newsletters.
Oh, wait. Maybe this clown also misread John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar, too?
2 Likes
Ok, I have now proof that this guy’s a proper idiot:
Traffic noise will disappear thanks to electric cars
Congestion will be reduced thanks to self-driving cars, buses, and probably underground that is much faster thanks to tech like the Boring Company.
Lots of commute becomes unnecessary through remote
There are literally a hundred ways in which all these problems will be resolved by tech
But hey, 100k people subscribed to his newsletter so good for him ahah
4 Likes
This guy’s been smoking some bad canip. I don’t know how else to explain it.
1 Like
At least this guy has a theme:
1 Like
He needs a better theme. I propose, “Substack is the Medium of newsletters and anybody who posts there is sus.”
1 Like