u/CipherGarden

Being rich can effectively be boiled down to having a lot of influence or power. Of course, there are people who have a lot of power but are not very rich, but those people are either few and far between or at the immediate beck and call of the rich. Though there have been times where the rich have held more power and less power, it seems that we are now trending towards the rich having extremely consolidated power over workers because of the coming automation wave.

When the automation wave arrives, many businesses will often no longer have to interact at all with everyday people because jobs will become scarce, and even if people receive UBI, the increased efficiency of automation will make their buying power significantly more limited when compared to other companies. Instead, most of these transactions will simply be between businesses, decoupling the profit motive from its original aim of producing the best product for the consumer.

This problem will only continue to worsen until either the profit motive is done away with, or the average person becomes so powerless that they are deemed useless eaters and discarded.

However, I do not think that AI and automation are in any way bad things. In fact, I want these two technologies to be accelerated. However, if they are to be accelerated, then our end goal must be FDVR. FDVR is the ultimate logical terminus of the profit motive. Within FDVR, you are able to do whatever you want and infinitely maximize your level of influence and power, going beyond any level of influence that you would be able to have in the real world. With the implementation of the decoupling of money from what has hitherto been seen as its tautology, power, we are able to move society away from this dystopian end and towards one where FDVR might be universalized, allowing everyone to live their optimum life.

In his 1990's book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, the author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discusses two personalities: the autotelic personality (describing a person who engages in activities because the activity itself is rewarding) and the exotelic personality (describing a person who is motivated mainly by outcomes outside the activity itself). The former, the autotelic personality, is more readily able to achieve the flow state due to its innate proclivity towards actions for their own sake rather than to achieve an end goal. As I have said previously, it is my belief that an uninterrupted flow state constitutes the perfect human existence; however, unfortunately for us, society often persuades us away from that ideal.

Society has been, is, and will always be goal-oriented. You are judged in society by what you are able to produce or engender. You are a good worker if you produce a lot, you are a good partner if you engender strong positive emotions, and you are a good person if you produce more for society than you consume from it. All interactions between oneself and society are graded on the scale of results, with no interest in assessing one's internality to the extent that it does not affect one's perceived externality.

Because of this, society actively moves us away from achieving flow states, because it disincentivises the autotelic personality type. This is not something that can be changed by implementing a new political or economic system. For this to be fully done away with, we would need FDVR. Within FDVR, one is able to engage in whatever activity they wish for its own sake, rather than for the end result of said action.

If you have spent any time doing any introspective work, you would have realised the unfortunate reality that having a sense of self is not a given. Though you may exist, make decisions, and manifest yourself in all the ways that constitute a "self," it is still possible for you to completely lack a sense of self, for you have frighteningly little knowledge of who, as a person, you actually are.

However, if we take that as a given, that having a sense of self is not a prerequisite for human existence, that leaves us in an interesting situation in relation to attempts towards contentment.

Let’s say we have someone with a fairly weak sense of self that lets the opinions of society and others dictate to them who they are and what they are. If this person were to ever reach a point of contentment, a point where they feel truly satisfied with their lives, how would they ever be able to know such contentment is authentic? If they have, in all effect, externalised their sense of self to others, then will that same feeling of contentment not also be an internalisation of their feelings and opinions towards him?

In such an example, you have someone that thinks they have reached the pinnacle, that they have made it, but in reality, due to them having a weak sense of self, they are still far from their apotheosis. It is my opinion, however, that this is the highest point we can ever get to. No matter who we are or where we come from, we are always going to, at least in part, offload our sense of self onto others, precluding us from ever reaching our highest state.

However, with FDVR this is not the case. With FDVR, there is no longer any need for us to externalise our sense of self onto others, because the others within said simulation can align with our own true selves (or sense of self). In such an example, the malforming force of externalisation becomes an impossibility, and the contentment that we feel will be the true highest form of existence.

When you ask men and women to pick the ideal traits that they'd want in a partner, you often get fairly typical answers. Height, weight, personality, economic situation, and other characteristics all fall in the predictable range. However, when you ask people about their actual dating history, you will find that people go for drastically different partners than what they stated were their ideal. It's logical to think that this is because people settle for less than perfect partners. However, this doesn't seem to be the case. What is actually happening here is an example of the difference between stated preferences and revealed preferences, and there is no better example of the difference between these two than our treatment of the idea of resistance.

Resistance can be thought of as the effort, or lack thereof, that we have to employ in order to achieve a desired goal. When it comes to everyday life, it seems like we are explicitly asking for more resistance: setting time limits on apps, trying to reduce screen time, being against short, quick dopamine hits in favour of longer, more arduous ones, ect. ect. However, when we look at many people's revealed preferences, we see a stark inversion. People are using short form apps more, spending more time doom scrolling, and doing small things that (by their own account) are just wasting their time or, in the worst examples, actively damaging them (with rage bait content, for example.)

We say that we want more resistance in day to day life, but we keep on opting for more and more "slippery" activities (here I'm just using slippery as the opposite of resistant.) The reason why this is the case is obvious: we're animals, it's only natural for us to look for the quickest and easiest way to get to a given goal. However, as time goes on, things are getting more and more slippery. The amount of effort needed to engage with the world is becoming less and less, and eventually we will be in an a-resistant world, or close enough to one. Whether you are pro or anti billionaire, this is the world that they want. Logically, they want things to be as slippery as possible. They want you to not even click a button to check out, just liking something hard enough should bring it to your door. This is the logical endpoint of capitalism. This is the contradiction of capitalism brought about by its founders' inability to differentiate between stated and revealed preferences, and it's something that we will all pay the price for.

Slipperiness cannot be banned in a capitalistic economy because it is the core of capitalism, and, since it already exists, banning it will just create other markets for it. The solution to this problem then becomes FDVR.

As I have stated prior, FDVR ought to be an experience of perfectly tailored resistance, where one is able to be completely in the ideal state of existence, that being the flow state. If this is not done, and FDVR is not implemented, then we will all slip down the slope into full, unadulterated slop, becoming slippery shells of our former selves. Weak in every sense of the word, like a tree that had never had to endure the wind, breaking and buckling at the lightest breeze.

The flow state can be described as a balance between two extremes: anxiety, and boredom. When you are at the perfect middle point between these two extremes, neither overloaded, nor under loaded, you are able to achieve a state where the conscious and the subconscious are able to become one, and you are able to become fully engrossed in the given activity you are partaking in.

In the reality, however, we constantly encounter states of over or under loading (anxiety and boredom) meaning that we are never able to be continuously in that ideal flow state. This, in my opinion, constitutes the main force behind our frustrated desires. In an ideal world we would never be bored, nor anxiety ridden however because we are not in an ideal world this happens all too often.

As it stands now there seems to be no way to fix this problem. No matter what political ideology you might subscribe to or what economic system you think is the best, it seems that this imperfect loading that constitutes the non-flow state will always exist, and because of that humanity will always be faced with this frustrating negative force.

The only solution to this problem is FDVR. In my opinion the perfect life can be seen as one where one spends the maximal amount of time within the flow state, and such a state is only possible within FDVR, within a world tailor made for you. As it stands now there are simply too many different people existing in the world for the world to contort itself to be made for everyone, so it prioritises a select group of people: those with the most influence over it. If we want to live the perfect life, as I have described it, we NEED to create FDVR, there is NO other solution to this problem, to THE problem of human existence.

With this we can live a perfect life.

A few weeks ago I made a post talking about how FDVR was not inevitable, and how if we did not put serious effort into bringing about its genesis then it might never exist. Now, although I still agree with that initial claim, I have come to the realisation that the "if" of FDVR is not what should be focused on, but rather the "when." From this realisation I have come to the conclusion that it is better to advocate for reasons why we should accelerate FDVR's advent, motivating people towards active pursuits to make it a reality, in whatever way that might be.

The first of many reasons that we should want to accelerate FDVR is because it solves a fundamental problem of politics.

In my opinion, the reason for the existence of politics can be boiled down to various political ideologies vying for power over one another. Said "vying" might take many forms depending on the type of political framework, however, each system attempts to achieve a "correct answer" so that the "majority" of its citizens will be satisfied with the decision arrived at after the process. However, in reality this is almost never the case.

For whatever reason, the majority opinion will always have to be compromised upon and altered, often in an attempt to not too badly upset the losing party (or parties). This, however, leaves both parties dissatisfied, living in a less-than-ideal system, similar to a friend group that, because they cannot decide where to eat, goes to a restaurant that none of them hate, but also none of them love.

This issue of compromise and loss is solved completely within FDVR. Within FDVR everyone might live within their own individual, non-compromising political systems, no matter how eccentric or unconventional that ideology may be. Imagine living in a world, where whatever ideology you want can be made manifest, and you also don't have to impose you will on others that would like to live in another system.