Babylon Today | My old story is back

[firestar464]

IDK maybe in the end she's freed from torture and society goes to shit, but then everybody then decides not all is lost and pledges to rebuild, but this time in a more "honest" manner.

[Yuli Ban]

The simulation idea is a good justification, the only other justification I could think of hearkens back to what I know of the original plot a bit, but in a modified form. The Medine forces are doing this out of some warped collective psychopathy that developed as a result of the tumultuous times during the revolution and wars. There could be a plotline where resistance members see Meki's torture as an inspiration to resist. Or alternatively, if it's more realistic that too many proles have it too good as automation is taking off, perhaps there's a weak small resistance organization that wants to free Meki purely out of empathy like how the Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front operate in the US today. Far too small to actually accomplish their aims, but just large enough to be a thorn on occasion and branded terrorists for it.

The OG Mother Meki remains as dark as ever, but whatever version of Babylon Today I actually write would not be so dire.

That said, OG Mother Meki is what this forum wants, so I may post it here exclusively.

However I must thank Claude 3. GPT-4 was a piece of crap in comparison, but Claude helped me rationalize a few things I never would have before. Concepts I've been struggling with for FIFTEEN YEARS NOW, trying to capture the core ideas of what Mother Meki is supposed to be ever since 2009, finally are so obvious to me but only with the Machine's help.

You misunderstand on multiple fronts.

The collective psychopathy reminds me of Jakob's response to the Antihumanists of Panamerica, trying to see an extremist ideological point of view that would drive them, when in actuality they were pure Orwellian brutalitarians obsessed only with power and human suffering because they could inflict it.

The extremists keeping Meki in such suffering in Mother Meki and to an extent in Babylon Today, I now realize have the inverse where there is an ideological justification that need not rely on being forged in the crucible of oppression (though a helpful dollop of raw sadism and schadenfreude certainly boosts it).
It's literally built into Marxism-Leninism-Maoism that there quite literally is nothing Meki can do to redeem herself. This referring to the concept of "social origin determines class consciousness". Perhaps proving the horseshoe theory correct. Lenin and Mao both came to the same conclusion that the ruling class, bourgeoisie, and labor aristocracy could not provide meaningful allies to the proletariat and that even those who do side with the revolution will carry the ideological and subconscious trappings of bourgeois thought and thinking that no amount of reeducation can prevent from reemerging.

Your bogstandard socialist and Marxist radical will defend revolutionary leftism. The difference between the left and the right is that the leftists hate the wealthy, the capitalists, the defenders of capital, colonialists, and expoiters. The rightists hate the Jews, the blacks, the weak, and the outcastes. Essentially egalitarianism vs hierarchy (that is where the terms originated in France after all). See, you can stop being a rich man anytime you please. You can't really stop being black.

As I alluded to earlier, once you go extreme-left, far further left than most you'll encounter even at a communist forum or meetup, the idea goes "actually, no, you can't stop being bourgeois. You can stop being materially wealthy, but you can't remove the conditions of your upbringing." Hence why nowadays I tend to see Commissar Céleste Defarge and her cadre as particularly intense Maoists who get sidelined by shifting material conditions (i.e. technism) Though I suppose technism/hypercapitalism/fully-automated luxury communism fundamentally altering the material conditions of humanity and eroding the proletariat and bourgeoisie alike into a "katoikidia" class regardless of whether a country is capitalist or socialist is only a matter in Babylon Today, which as I've mentioned is not Mother Meki but actually attempting to be a proper story (and a technistic one at that).

Perhaps the name "Defarge" does inform why the Medine Soviet in particular has it out for Meki to such a psychotic degree. Much the same situation, where the sins of Marquis St. Evrémonde are visited upon Charles Darnay who's sentenced to death for circumstances beyond his control.

Meki is a far more intense version of this, going well beyond Darnay into the realm of actively undermining her father with Terios's help, sabotaging the plutofascist state, and unconditional surrender of everything (the case in both stories)


"Meki Liberation Front" is a hopeless endeavor as well. I mean if it happens in Babylon Today, sure, but I needn't know how many times I have to repeat that Mother Meki has the logic of a nightmare.
But even if people did come to Meki's defense, I feel you vastly underestimate what is possible technologically. A totalitarian regime, especially one essentially established just to repress a single person, is in heaven in a post-AGI future as they inflict Hell on another. There's no limit to the potential for repression. Indeed, that's why Meki acts at all— she sees her father and his regime will essentially enslave the world's underclasses until the heat death of the universe, or if merciful, simply exterminate them. When you have BCI tech which such lovely names like "LoveNet" and an omniscient automated police force, there is no hope of revolution or even the ability to conceive of it.

In Babylon Today, it's not so dire for the world, but Meki essentially had no moral choice in Mother Meki, lest she live with the idea that there is an eternal immortal transhuman brutalitarian elite reigning forever over a defeated Dalit caste of billions of humans left in a permanent reverent stupor and love for their own psychotic repression. Trading places so that this elite is defeated and she is the one left in that stupor is a worthy trade, and part of the sense of tragedy: that she achieves the dream of helping liberate the underclasses and achieving a post-Singularity utopia to which she is forever denied (.... usually.... in the bleakest ones, certainly not the ones where her fortunes change circa the 2120s and 2130s, leading to her becoming a faux empress in 2145).

Even though the post-proletariat do not exist under any repressive conditions— actually, rather, the luxury and pleasantry is the point. If society as a whole was so repressive, there'd be no point. Much like how Meki herself necessarily has to be Christlike and very much ideologically aligned with her tormentors to maximize that sense of "satisfying tragedy" and cloying sentimentality. It's just a better concept in my head for this Type I-ascendant supercivilization to almost arbitrarily deny access to itself to a single person, that person being the one most responsible for allowing such universal prosperity amd social justice to flourish at that.