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  • TheDoctor [they/them]
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    edit-2
    1 day ago

    Pale is not about hatred and it’s destroying all matter, not just humanity. It’s about Crypto-Conveyent Phenomena and the flow of this radiation against entropic time. In Elysium, the creativity of Magpies is literally pulling ideas from the future to create things which have yet to exist. Pale is created as a byproduct of this process. And we know that Pale appeared in tandem with humans; that other organisms didn’t have this ability. I don’t think anyone reveres social media enough to believe that its output is novel enough to be considered futuristic. It’s the same trash recycled from the past over and over.

    Edit: it’s also worth noting that Harry fails to be able to discern between the effects of the supernatural, the effects of the pale, and the effects of capitalism throughout the game. Feels like this is the core of the thematic meaning of the pale.

    • UlyssesT [he/him]
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      1 day ago

      I don’t think anyone reveres social media enough to believe that its output is novel enough to be considered futuristic. It’s the same trash recycled from the past over and over.

      Sort of like LLM data collection and consequent output.

      • TheDoctor [they/them]
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        edit-2
        1 day ago

        yea As it turns out, most of our problems are coming from a lack of novelty, not its presence

        • UlyssesT [he/him]
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          edit-2
          1 day ago

          The average uncreative techbro sees "innovation" as "find something in society that isn't yet ruinously monetized, and find out what happens when it's ruinously monetized."

          • TheDoctor [they/them]
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            1 day ago

            I was listening to an interview where VC funding came up and the business strategies of venture capitalist funded businesses were discussed. The idea was that a good VC business is able to grow to the point of being so ubiquitous that its usage within a given market is almost a given, passing up smaller scale monetization strategies along the way. So if Google was invented today, it would in all likelihood start charging $15/month for search features and fail to grow beyond moderate success, which would make it a failure in the eyes of venture capitalists. It would ultimately be killed and never be able to reach its current actual status as a global monopoly.

            I think this mentality explains a lot of tech layoffs in otherwise successful companies as well as why naive enshitification is usually an overzealous pivot into disaster for VC funded companies. As far as I understood from this interview, VC companies fund so many businesses that their successes have to subsidize their failures, so mere success is never enough.