“Ok, I choose neither, they’re both awful.”

“You can’t choose neither. You have to pick one.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s the game, that’s the whole point of these kinds of questions.”

“Ok so, I have to go for the cyber-city techno, one.”

“Ha, you nearly said technocapital.”

“Did not.”

“You so did.”

“I didn’t, but even if I did, I stopped myself because I had the speed and insight to realise what a dumb annoying thing it would have been to say.”

“Whatever. So seriously, you still think that horrible, horrible world is better than endless happiness. What is wrong with you?”

“I’m defending our humanity, from techno-oppression.”

“Techno-oppression? That’s not even a thing, and it sounds bad.”

“I can call it TOP for short, and in my campaign, I can say, don’t TOP yourself and that makes it cool.”

“It might sound cool, but it’s still wrong, it’s not oppression, it’s liberation, it’s freedom from human misery, to freedom to be happy, our birthright.”

“Is that some weird Eric Fromm thing you’re quoting there?”

“It is. I think he can be gainfully employed here, so long as we define human potential as happiness.”

“And ignore everything he says about human authenticity.”

“Look, don’t get caught up on my bad academia, maybe think of it as his bad academia. He didn’t spot that true liberation is hampered by so called authenticity, not gained by it, in fact who’s to say that ACMB isn’t actually authentic happiness? What’s more authentic than perpetual happiness?”

“Do I have to answer that?”

“Ok let’s say the universe is fundamentally peaceful and it’s only consciousness in its form as organism that produces suffering. Therefore, the authentic state is peace and the inauthentic suffering.”

“But we’re organisms, you even specified that conscious organisms produce suffering, it’s authentic to them. We’re not rocks.”

“But if materiality is antecedent to organisms, then it’s a more authentic state of the universe; it’s what we’re always trying to get back to. This system perfectly synthesises the non-suffering of the universe with the happiness of the organism. It’s literally the meaning of progress.”

“Only if materiality is antecedent to consciousness.”

“I didn’t say that, I said to organisms. Consciousness in its form as organism.”

“But then what if it suffers when it’s not an organism?”

“Then it’s still an improvement, now we’ve improved on matter itself. It’s a win win.”

“So, look, ok. What does everyone do in this happy world? We wouldn’t be fit to do much.”

“No, there isn’t much to do, I guess. It’s not a total eradication of achievement and reward, it’s just all modulated away to a safe non-driving level. But I do keep thinking there’s probably something like a kind of work.”

“What kind of work?”

“Well not real work, I mean no real work needs to be done as such. But maybe there’s like a big flat field type thing with big buttons that come up and down and you have to push them down when they come up.”

“Like whack a mole?”

“Yeah, maybe a bit like that. Big buttons, over a big space so you’d have to walk to get to the different ones as they came up. Then you push them down.”

“But for no reason as such.”

“I mean not one you’d think about or question. But maybe there’s a bonus or even a kind of fake bonus that happens anyway, like extra cheese or something.”

“Extra cheese?”

“There’s the meals, which I imagine are all a bit like different kinds of takeaway but nutritionally adjusted, and maybe for sort of rewards, there could be extra cheese or extra mayo. But it wouldn’t really be merit based as that would trigger striving, it would just kind of have the modulated appearance of reward with none of the danger.”

“No pernicious freedom.”

“Exactly, no pernicious freedom. I mean you could probably still have sex of some kind. It just wouldn’t have any kind of rude or dirty connotation, it would be more like a kind of game type thing.”

“You need to watch that one.”

“Hey, nothing evil here. If it did it would all be adult only modulated sex.”

“Where do I sign?”

“You keep thinking about it the wrong way, you’re still thinking about it the wrong way. You think humanity needs to technologically improve, to strive, to have dirty thoughts. If you have no transcendent power to say there is anything we should do, then there is no point striving in misery for non-existent goals or exalting in the world through the sublimity of art only to crash down to its mundanity later on. Flattish, endless happiness is just a superior option. I mean, even a transcendent deity might look down at it and think, ‘good job people’. You think it’s bad because you’re used to thinking cool stuff and desiring things and going places. But if you had the chip, you wouldn’t miss any of it. You’d be happy with noodle Wednesday or whatever.”

“Noodle Wednesday?”