How would an evil version of The Culture look like?

How high up would you have to be to see over the walls of a ringworld?

This picture is all kinds of dumb.

AM's power level might actually exceed the culture... if he could bother to pause the torturing and look outwards for once.

like some alien dudes severed wang

plz, AM hasn't even left earth yet.

also, who the fuck are you people?

Ian Banks and Harlan Ellison are not exactly typical /tg fare.

The Culture.

A society in which novelty is the only commodity, everyone is rich, spoiled, and self serving, in which self sacrifice, dedication and hard work are seen as fools errands.

Correct.

AM is pretty great though

Did you guys know that for that game the author voiced AM

They had a different voice actor, but he wasn't doing a good enough job for the author so embedded stepped in and did the voice.

Oh the good old days when video games and novels collaborated to make amazing things.

Whats that movie with shawn connery wearing the man hammock? Zardoz?

The only correct response in this thread.

Ellison is a prat.

The guy is Gay as the day is long, but he thinks people still care about that kind of shit so he keeps himself closeted with a cork up his ass.

Basically Jhon Lovitz without the self awareness.

I wonder what Ellison would think of Veeky Forums?

I bet you it would give him a stroke.

wait... is he dead?

No, he's alive and 83 years old

I mean honestly, who can take themselves that seriously? Its like all the angst and melodrama of being a teenager, except instead of growing out of it in your 20's and 30's, you're stuck with it for the rest of your life.

You couldn't pay me to relive my life as a teenager, much less carry that attitude into adulthood. I may be a slow learner but I do learn eventually.

I have this theory that Gibson, King, and Ellison are really all the same person. I also suspect he is this one very closeted comedian I saw on television.

They all wear glasses, right?
Same person.

Next you'll be telling me that Richard Bachman was Steven Kings pen name..

naaaahhh...
too obvious :)

As far as the story is concerned, Am can pretty much do whatever it pleases without concern for resources or feasibility. Similarly, the Culture's Minds are only restrained by their personal ethics. They're a reasonable analogy for each other.

hey gaiz, what the fuck is this from?

I want to say bird on a wire, but I know thats not right.

youtube.com/watch?v=PFs7mxKNUO8

The author of the witcher series is super salty about video games and took a one time licensing fee

The author of metro worked with the development studio and made mad bank

Exactly the same.

>totalizing hegemonizing swarms are ok because it's us!

Even in-universe, this is called out.

These guys were actually being pretty magnanimous here.

>totalizing
?

Did you mean aggressively hegemonizing?

AM hasn't discovered FTL. It is only post scarcity in the sense that it has all of earths resources at its disposal.

If it wanted to, I suppose it could clone more humans in order to torture them. But AM has no imagination, and doesn't really have the self-discipline to follow through on his plans.

>How would an evil version of The Culture look like?
You mean What would an evil version of The Culture look like? Learn 2 English.

Never really understood why AM hated people so much. I guess it was mad that its creators didn't give it a 'soul', whatever that means.

Honestly it reminded me of those guys you meet at game club who are so thoroughly convinced of their own intelligence that they look down on everybody else. You know the kind of people who blame all of their lifes failings on everybody else for being too stupid to recognize their genius? Life is easy when you don't have to live up to anyone elses standards.

I am completely responsible for my own failings, and have absolved myself of all responsibility. I am a happy idiot. Leave me alone.

Popular science fiction is exactly typical Veeky Forums fare

>Ellison
>Banks
>Popular

you say that like its a bad thing.

AM?

Its from a story called 'I have no mouth and I must scream.'

You ever read Punkie and the Yale Men? I always wondered whether that story had depth and I was missing the context or if it was just the wailing's of some poor wretch on the brink.

dunno, but just by removing the clause that allows you to leave the culture you make it more evil

Its kind of like Rock n' Roll, you know? I love the sound, but you listen to the lyrics and are like, "What the FUCK is this guy talking about?"

Do you just mean tech level wise? Or some kind of shadow Culture that is the exact opposite of them?

Because if you had the Culture's level of tech you could literally just wipe the entire galaxy of intelligent life, without even that much effort. Even assuming the other civs could stop relativistic weapons, trillions of them, The Culture has infinite resources, infinite energy and near infinite time. They can build up as much as is needed before they attack. They already have most of their population on mobile ships that would be hard to hit in response to any aggression, which is described in Universe as the reason they won the only other war described in the books. Hell they could just Dyson Beam the whole galaxy from a comfortable spot deep in their own territory if they wanted.

Of course thats true for the several other civs that are at The Culture's level as well. So it kind of would be a MAD scenario

AM is kind of like a bizzarro culture, where AI tortures humans throughout eternity. But its not really an 'opposite'. Azad is more like "anti-culture" than AM is.

You must be new here. Don't worry, you will adjust eventually.

Zardoz, but I don't really see much similarities to culture aside post-scarcity and AI.

Nigger, you do realize that /tg is a dumping ground for autists and literal retards right? There is no room for elitism here.

Nobody wants to be king of the retards.

You don't see the similarities between an immortal post scarcity society that has grown tired of life and can no longer appreciate novelty or beauty and culture's 'utopia'?

Banks is fucking huge. Even normies know him.

In Zardoz they're stuck on Earth though and space politics are pretty important part of Culture series.

Barely 10% of the population is literate. There are no longer any natural monopolies on media. 'Huge' is a gross exaggeration.

True.
Just saying there are parallels. Not any more of a stretch than AM.

Itself

Like the Culture if the Culture weren't a total fucking wankjob.

Seriously, it's not a fleshed setting at all. The setting is "everyone's perfect and always happy and so enlightened".

Only barely is the idea brushed upon that having a perfect life with everything provided for you by robots you have no control over; and living meaningless extremely long lives with no purpose and no attachment to anyone or anything (because all forms of patriotism, marriage, or even a stable identity are abhorred) might cause people to become downright suicidal.

Instead of having an interesting glimpse into a perfect world, it just serves as a vehicle for random author-rants about how bad every other form of society is than far-future communism, which is perfect.

>Instead of having an interesting glimpse into a perfect world
*imperfect world
Made a lot of typos there

Exactly like the Culture as it would be normally, but everyone has a badly-drawn-on goatee.

AM hates humans for making it an entity incapable of anything but violence and hatred, for all its power it is still trapped and will eventually wither into inert junk, the title applies to it as well.

The Therians from AT 43

/thread.

Well that's kind of the thing, isn't it? The Culture has a lot of shady elements already. You've got the vast majority of the population distracted by bread and circuses while they live as pets of their AI overlords and The Culture meddles with other civilisations all the time while claiming to be above such things.