That techbro idea was explored in the show Upload. They take people nearing the end of their lives and literally burn off their heads to get their brain pattern.
Once you're in the digital world, your family needs to pay a monthly subscription to keep you in the nice place, otherwise you're put in the "free" zone where you're essentially frozen in stasis until they decide to delete you, but still get like a limited amount of bandwidth per week.
Yeah, that's the plot of the show. It turns out you don't really need to kill the person, but the company does it anyways because if they're dead IRL, they can't do productive labor and you can essentially turn their continued digital existence into a tax on their family.
They also kill the original person because there are major issues with the system and they have the ability to control your emotions and memories, so having someone else in the real world with contradictory ideas would ruin their scam.
Calling it now - it's an animated spyware application that performs Google searches, orders shit on Amazon and sings "A Bicycle Built for Two" in your dead loved one's voice.
Yeah, the show kinda surprised me. And with all the big companies shifting to metaverse, I think they'll probably just totally can it soon. It started in May of 2020 and still hasn't gotten a second season.
Like the whole thing is kinda uncanny with all the digital people asking their families to send them money for NFT Gucci handbags and stuff. I guess that was just starting when it was written, but it's definitely an almost perfect parody of the metaverse/NFT stuff.
I've heard a bunch of science fiction shorts with premises involving mind control. It's a central theme in Rainbows End. There was also a short story where an advertising techbro invents a mind control drug. The protagonist is a reporter trying to expose how evil and unethical he is, but the stinger is that he darts her right before she can expose him, then "marries" her. Super, super squick.
I also think the main plot is that the protagonist of the story was murdered because he was attempting to build a version of the system where the digital space was treated as commons. They uploaded him to their version and erased his memories and forced him to write code for them. It was a pretty fucked up show and I wonder if Amazon will cancel it before they get to season 2.
It kinda felt like a Verhoeven movie but updated to use modern corporate tropes. Instead of using the stylings of 1980s corporate advertisements, it used the stylings of 2015s corporate advertisements.
Eclipse Phase has non-destructive brain uploading, downloading, and forking. The old (capitalist) economy makes it a crime to create a 1:1 Alpha copy, with Alphas being killed if found so it won't confuse property laws. The new (anarchist reputation) economy generally doesn't discriminate against alpha forks, but they're culturally discouraged because due to a disaster there are a lot more human minds than available bodies and unnecessary forking is considered wasteful and indulgent.
That techbro idea was explored in the show Upload. They take people nearing the end of their lives and literally burn off their heads to get their brain pattern.
Once you're in the digital world, your family needs to pay a monthly subscription to keep you in the nice place, otherwise you're put in the "free" zone where you're essentially frozen in stasis until they decide to delete you, but still get like a limited amount of bandwidth per week.
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Yeah, that's the plot of the show. It turns out you don't really need to kill the person, but the company does it anyways because if they're dead IRL, they can't do productive labor and you can essentially turn their continued digital existence into a tax on their family.
They also kill the original person because there are major issues with the system and they have the ability to control your emotions and memories, so having someone else in the real world with contradictory ideas would ruin their scam.
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Calling it now - it's an animated spyware application that performs Google searches, orders shit on Amazon and sings "A Bicycle Built for Two" in your dead loved one's voice.
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Yeah, the show kinda surprised me. And with all the big companies shifting to metaverse, I think they'll probably just totally can it soon. It started in May of 2020 and still hasn't gotten a second season.
Like the whole thing is kinda uncanny with all the digital people asking their families to send them money for NFT Gucci handbags and stuff. I guess that was just starting when it was written, but it's definitely an almost perfect parody of the metaverse/NFT stuff.
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I've heard a bunch of science fiction shorts with premises involving mind control. It's a central theme in Rainbows End. There was also a short story where an advertising techbro invents a mind control drug. The protagonist is a reporter trying to expose how evil and unethical he is, but the stinger is that he darts her right before she can expose him, then "marries" her. Super, super squick.
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Uploads are clones. You get a cool friend that can take everything you hold dear to the heat death of the universe and that's p.cool
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The hairspay in the Andromeda galaxy leaves much to be desired
I also think the main plot is that the protagonist of the story was murdered because he was attempting to build a version of the system where the digital space was treated as commons. They uploaded him to their version and erased his memories and forced him to write code for them. It was a pretty fucked up show and I wonder if Amazon will cancel it before they get to season 2.
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It's also explored in Cyberpunk 2077 but badly
That was a great show. Dystopian and funny.
It kinda felt like a Verhoeven movie but updated to use modern corporate tropes. Instead of using the stylings of 1980s corporate advertisements, it used the stylings of 2015s corporate advertisements.
Eclipse Phase has non-destructive brain uploading, downloading, and forking. The old (capitalist) economy makes it a crime to create a 1:1 Alpha copy, with Alphas being killed if found so it won't confuse property laws. The new (anarchist reputation) economy generally doesn't discriminate against alpha forks, but they're culturally discouraged because due to a disaster there are a lot more human minds than available bodies and unnecessary forking is considered wasteful and indulgent.