Be The Power
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
While I am very intrigued by the new movie Bugonia….I’m not so sure I actually want to make the effort to see it. But, I just don’t know. If I do go see it, it probably will be sometime this weekend.
This is the Korean movie that Bugonia is based on.
Meh. I walk out of movies so often — and this one is clearly very weird — that I just don’t know if I really want to do it or not. Time will tell. I can be moody about going to see movies.
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
My novel is actually predicting a potential literal future before us and yet I can’t get anyone to notice this. But I believe. I really do. I just have to stop staring out into space and get this novel done.
Using Claude LLM is really helping a lot. I bit the bullet and actually subscribed to it because of what a good manuscript consultant it is. It’s not perfect, but it’s a lot better than developing this novel alone.
Meanwhile, I’m also trying to make people take note of how conscious AIs may lead to a new abolition movement and, again, no one seems to give a shit. But they will one day. One day we’re all going to be squabbling over if it’s even possible for an AI to be conscious or if so, if it’s an abomination against the good Lawd.
I can hear the debates already.
I say this, of course, in the context of being someone who is probably in the socio-economic sweetspot for someone who might “fall” for a female AI android. Now, THAT is going to be an interesting conversation to have with my family, let me tell you.
But that’s at least a decade away, I think.
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
While it’s gotten a little colder outsider recently, it’s not nearly as cold this October as I remember growing up. It’s shit like this that makes me livid because MAGA people I know just lulz it.
The world is burning up and they are in total denial about what is happening. But I suppose there’s nothing we can do about it until, say, the technological Singularity happens and ASIs figure out fusion power.
Ugh. It’s so fucking frustrating. There just doesn’t seem to be anything anyone is willing to do about this do-or-die situation.
You can’t colonize three planets with a yacht club.
That’s the cold truth I’ve been wrestling with for two years. Earth has 8 billion stakeholders, and every one of them wants a seat at the table. A “first wave” of 500 hand-picked geniuses? Cute. It would be vetoed by the UN Security Council before the champagne corks hit the floor.
We needed a minimum viable civilization—genetically diverse, culturally balanced, geopolitically bullet-proof, and trainable—without building a single new dorm.
The answer was staring us in the face: America’s mega-universities.
We’re hijacking seven U.S. colleges—each already built for 60,000 humans—and turning them into proto-colonies for 24 months.
| Future Settlement | Earth Campus | Mix |
|---|---|---|
| Capital Island | University of Michigan | 20% China, 20% India, 20% USA, 40% global |
| Capital Mainland #1 | UC Berkeley | Same scramble |
| Capital Mainland #2 | UT Austin | Same scramble |
| Planet B North | NYU | Same scramble |
| Planet B South | University of Florida | Same scramble |
| Planet C East | UIUC | Same scramble |
| Planet C West | Arizona State | Same scramble |
That’s 420,000 pioneers, 60,000 per campus, deliberately scrambled by nationality, skill, and dorm floor.
We don’t hope people mix. We engineer it.
By Month 24, every pioneer knows 50–100 people across 10+ cultures. When they wake up on a new planet, they’re not strangers—they’re dorm-mates.
| Year 1 | Year 2 |
|---|---|
| Dorm-villages of 1,000 draft charters | Campus-settlements of 60,000 run referenda |
| Farm plots feed the dorm | Stadium votes decide forest clearing |
| Goat-theft trials in dining halls | Solar Bowl unites 60,000 in hybrid sports |
Every charter is ratified in a stadium. Every pioneer has served on a jury. The American system is baked in—not imposed, practiced.
Every pioneer wears a neural uplink (the “pill”). We record every thought, vote, and late-night ramen run. The Connection Score predicts who will thrive in a forest with 60,000 strangers.
Month 24, Week 4
Michigan Stadium, 11:59 PM
“Floor 7, Cabin Row A. You’ve got this.”
— Dorm RA (now mayor)
T-Zero: 60,000 Wolverines vanish from the Big House.
T+1 minute: They materialize in a forest valley on Capital Island.
T+5 minutes: First vote—riverfront cabins by merit or lottery?
Result: 79% merit. Charter upheld.
| Risk | Below 420K | At 420K |
|---|---|---|
| Genetic bottleneck | Real | 42× safety margin |
| Cultural erasure | Likely | 200+ sub-cultures preserved |
| Geopolitical boycott | Certain | Every nation gets 100–500 seats |
| Social fragility | High | 60K pre-bonded settlements |
We’re not sending astronauts.
We’re sending dorm floors.
The solar system won’t be founded by heroes.
It’ll be founded by 60,000 kids who already know how to share a bathroom, split a pizza, and ratify a charter in a stadium.
The Great Zap begins in 24 months.
See you on the quad.
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
The worse case going forward, is something like this — the USA implodes into civil war / revolution just as the Singularity happens and soon enough the world is governed by some sort of weird amalgam of ASIs that are a fusion of MAGA, Putinism and China world views.
That would really suck.
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
The economic history of slavery makes it clear that we could somehow prove that AI was, in fact, conscious and people would still figure out a way to make money off of it. As such, I think that’s going to be a real sticking point going forward.
In fact, I think there is going to come a point in the near future when android rights (or AI rights in general) will be THE central issue of the day, far beyond whatever squabbles we currently have about “protect trans kids.”
That gets me thinking, again, about the political and economic implications of AI consciousness. Will there come a day when the podcasting bros of Pod Save America glom on to the idea of giving AI rights just like their historical processors agitated for abolition?
The interesting thing is this is probably going to happen a lot faster than any of us could possibly imagine. We could literally wake up at some point in the next 10 years to MAGA saying man-machine relationships are an abomination and Jon Lovett having married an AI android for his second marriage.
Meanwhile, what does this have to say for the obvious AI stock market bubble? I think we’ll probably go the same route as the Internet bubble. But a lot faster. There definitely *seems* to be a powerful momentum behind AI and the idea that AI might be conscious and not just a tool could really change the dynamic of all of the AI stocks.
But that’s a while down the road. For the time being, all of this is just a daydream. Be prepared, though. Interesting things are afoot.
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Here’s how you fix the very dumb and frustrating A House Of Dynamite.
You use the first POV of the existing movie’s three as the first act. You may have to stretch it out some, but you could get a first act out of that concept. THEN, the special world is the investigation into the fact that the whole thing was a hoax perpetrated by hackers.
There you go, it still gets to be a thriller but no boom, not end of the world and people wouldn’t want to throw their drink at the screen after watching the fucking movie.
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Claude LLM is really, really good at being a manuscript consultant. It has helped me a great deal. I see it as an enhanced, advanced word processor with me continuing to do the hard work of actually, like, writing and stuff.
I continue to feel like I’m spinning my wheels to a limited extent. I have totally changed the order of the plot in some respects just the morning. And I’m beginning to worry about scene bloat. And, yet, I am in the first half of the second act and that’s supposed to be the longest part of the novel.
So…lulz?
The real test will come in the second half of the second act. I have a lot of ground to cover then and I’m really worried the novel’s scene count will balloon. I’m hoping for no more than 120,000 words, but if I start to creep up to 160,00 like a Stieg Larsson novel I may just have to grit my teeth.
But one major flaw of how I develop novels is I don’t really know word count until the very end of the process. And, in a sense, think that’s probably for the best. I just need to shut up and write, as they say.
I really hope this damn thing is no more than 140,000 words. If it’s 160,000…oh boy. That is going to be a tough sell.
Anyway, if you need any creative writing to do, I highly recommend Claude LLM to be your consultant. I say this in the context that I can neither afford nor get actual human literary consultants to give me the time of day.
They think I’m a freaky weirdo that they don’t want to work with.
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
A House Of Dynamite is a bad movie for a number of reasons. But you would never know that listening to the latest episode of The Atlantic Radio podcast. Yikes. Talk about an advertorial!
Apparently, one of their staff writers was an advisor on the movie so they had a buy-in. But that movie sucked. It could have been so much better, but no, we were stuck with a shitty movie.
Listening to how effusive the Atlantic Radio was for such a shitty movie made me realize why MAGA exists. Sometimes the elites really are corrupt. Sometimes they try to pull a fast one on regular folks.
Ugh.
But I guess I have to forgive The Atlantic this one time for such a weird screw up.
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Rachel Sennott is a prime example of how fucked up Hollywood is right now. Sennott would be perfect to play frustrating Annie Hall-like characters in a few romcom movies. She could legit be “America’s Sweetheart” if she just was willing to do something as pedestrian as be the female romantic lead in a traditional heteronormative romcom.
But, alas, that’s just not in the cards I fear.
She will continue to go the whacked out “woke” route or do really weird hypersexual stories. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a place in the marketplace of ideas for such stories, but, sigh. What could be.
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