Swamp Castle - Abraham Lincoln's Doctor's Direwolf

In an alternate timeline the assassin of Lincoln runs into a four legged suprise he did not expect.

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[Script] The Sins of Silicon Valley - Act 1, Scene 3 (Continued)

 Images of Neuralink and Musk Robots, Boston Dynamics

VO: There are already people talking about uploading our minds.  Granted, serious scientists think that this is still a while down the road, but the money being spent on this is billions not millions of dollars.  As our current population gets older, the forever young generation looks for ways to stay young forever and one of those options is ‘uploading your brain to the internet.’

Images of Ponce De Leon, Fountain of Youth, Immortality

VO: The ramifications about an end of death also makes it even harder for the youngest generation to get ahead.  Whole science fiction stories from Altered Carbon to Lazarus Long have been written about the cost to society if death takes longer or even never happens. In our hyper stratified society; death would be optional for the rich and a necessity for everyone else.  Technology is a tool; the problem is who gets to own the tools, use them and decide how they are distributed, and wealth alone seems a poor choice for immortality.

Images of Rich and Poor

Voice Over: But its worse than that.  What happens if they get a pirated copy of your mind? Silicon Valley not only can’t protect our private data, but they use it for marketing and turn their customers into their product.  They have almost no interest in limiting themselves despite addition, depression, suicidal tendencies and self harm; and we expect them to be trustworthy with our very minds?  If they steal your identity, you spend thousands of hours and thousands of dollars to get it back.  If they steal your mind, you could be a virtual slave until the stars burn out from the skies as millions upon millions of copies of yourself are taken from virtual world to virtual world.

Emmit's Corner - Sunbonnet Tiger

Sometimes Words Make Me Stupid, Sunbonnet Tiger, Failure to Comprehend, Double Standard, Tiny LIttle Toy, The Insecurity Council, Patriarch Kirill, Deworming Deplatforming

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[Script] The Sins of Silicon Valley - Act 1, Scene 3

 Scene 3 - Petty Little Frankensteins - Digital Immortality

Images of Upload, USS Mccalister, Caprica

VO: A popular show on Prime shows what would happen if one of the .coms got ahold of the afterlife and mimicked people.   Another popular episode of Black Mirror shows what would happen if a Tech Bro was able to upload the minds of his coworkers.  Caprica shows a digital duplicate made from social media and internet footprints inhabiting the minds of the Cylons.

Images of children, racial abuse, and social media abuse

VO: That sounds like science fiction, right? And yet we know that the algorithms that social media and major tech companies show racist bias, sexist bias, create addiction in children and that self regulation has totally failed with these companies.  If they could create a world where they could upload our minds into their nightmare dystopia would they hesitate?

Images of Neuralink

VO: The barrier between mind and machine are breaking down,  Right now, we have technology that allows mechanical apparatus to be controlled with the mind.  Its true, that to create the human mind in the internet might require technologies that we dont have access to right now including processing speed.

Images of the human brain

VO: Indeed, the human mind is something we don’t entirely understand.  Some physicists believe there might be a quantum element to our decision making.  But

Images of Quantum Computers

VO: Quantum mechanics is a field we make breakthroughs in every day.  We’re constantly learning.   Think about life before smart phones and after smart phones.  Think about the difference between the 70’s and 80s.  Technology grows very fast, and we could find that the technology for digital immortality creeps up on us faster than the abilities of laws and regulators to adapt to it.

Image of Congress and EU investigating the tech companies

VO: Indeed, it has taken 20 years for Europe to finally catch up to the most flagrant market abuses of Silicon Valley.  And it has the constitutional mechanisms permitting it to do so.  Corruption and Regulatory capture have rendered United States responses pitiful by comparison.  If you think Social Media manipulation, disinformation and addiction is bed

Images of the human soul, purgatory, hell, torture

VO: What would happen if the tech companies could control and duplicate your mind in an environment that they could control? What would they do?

Micronation - Chapter 14 - On the Run

Chester is on the run and decides to turn the tables to try and investigate some information on the Col.

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[Script] The Sins of Silicon Valley - Act 1, Scene 2 Continued

 Voice Over: How do we know these guys ARENT the other guy we dont want getting it?

Images of Genesis and Gods creating New Life

Voice Over: OK, lets say you’re going to do this.  You decide that you absolutely must play God and make a new kind of life that could end up killing you.  What kind of person do you want helping you create and instruct this new life?

Images of heroic people throughout history like Einstein, Gandhi, the Dalai Llama, great spiritual leaders and philosophers

Voice Over: People who are kind, educators, know children, like the unknown and that are going to be a positive experience for this new emerging Digital Intelligence?

Images of Dictators, Techno Edge Lords, Mad Scientists, Violence

Voice Over: Or the people who actually are currently paying for this kind of research and feel that they’re entitled to own other people? I mean, I think a simple test should be, if they are terrible with the people they serve for customers or their own employees, maybe we dont have them be in charge of creating a new God?

Images of young children of power including the mutants, superman as a baby etc

Voice Over: Imagine what an achievement for humanity it is if we achieve this, and give life to a new form of Digital Sapience as smart as we are.  Where we can convince it can trust us…or…

Images of Robot violence, AI’s being feared and killed over and over again

Voice Over: Or we could just roll the dice and see what happens.  What’s that phrase? Oh yeah, why not Fuck around and Find Out?

Images of Question Marks

Emmit's Corner - Two Red Wolves

Not Ash, Two Red Wolves, Pointy Red Shoes, Joker's Punchline, Dumbo the CEO, Did You Read The Bill, Eary Edition, Maga Schizophrenia, The Constitution Is Trash

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[Script] The Sins of Silicon Valley - Act 1, Scene 2

Scene 2

Still Image With Writing: Petty Little Frankensteins

Images of Puppets

Voice Over: We love Robots.  As long as people have been able to make puppets, we’ve dreamed of making them come to live and do our chores for us.  Back before the industrial revolution, who wouldnt want to be able to have a magic servant who will do all our chores?

Images of Constructs going mad (Golem, Sorcerer’s Apprentice, etc)

Voice Over: But of course the pious always warned us Man is fallen and suffering is our lot, so Robots bad.  This was a long standing theme in literature but came to its peak when Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein.

Images of Frankenstein

Voice Over: She was horrified at what science in her day was unlocking that she believed to be the sole providence of God.  And most people look at what Frankenstein did with his monster and are likewise horrified.  But, a certain subset of humanity read Frankenstein and went ‘cool!’ and decided that they could build a better monster.

Black Screen

Voice Over: Wait…what? Were they even listening?

Images of modern technologists including Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos

Voice Over: Yes, the people that enslave our children to social media, spy on us, refuse to listen to our concerns of their abuse and they want to create a new form of digital intelligence.  Stephen Hawking said that that such a being could be the end of us.  

Images of War and Tyrants

Voice Over: The Lords of Silicon Valley say that someone is going to do it, and so it should be a responsible person who ends up creating it…or else…the OTHER guy might get it.

Images of people looking confused

Voice Over: Excuse me?

Images of Techno Edge Lords

Voice Over: How do we know these guys ARENT the other guy we dont want getting it?

Swamp Castle - The Great Zamboni Napping

Two girls steal a Zamboni to save their house from the bank.  All according to prophesy.  Super super super twist ending.

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[Script] The Sins of Silicon Valley - Act 1, Scene 1 (continued)

 Voice Over: At the beginning of the 20th century, a lot of very well meaning people sold us a certain idea about science.  Gleaming tubes and clip boards and shining white lab coats.  

Images of scientists and cool labs.

Voice Over: Science Marches On! Became as American as Baseball and Apple Pie

Images of Home type American values Early 20th centuries

Voice Over: But from the beginning…Science had a dark side.

Images of Dark Experiments and Abominations of Science

Voice Over: The things that we build are just tools, so they say.  But isn’t that part of the problem?

Images of RUR, Frankenstein and Metropolis

Voice Over: The tools are indeed not bad, but what about the people who build them, and the people who run the machines?

Images of Oppression, Indifference and Bureaucracy

Voice Over: From the beginning of the enlightenment, our artists have warned us that science can be abused, and most of us have listened.  But the mad ones among us, those wonder workers…they heard the opposite message.

Images of Mythology, Forbidden Science, Mad Science, Prometheus

Voice Over: Firestealers, wonderworkers, sages, magicians, alchemists, engineers, doctors, scientists; the new shamans of our modern topia, half dis and half ut; which topia is it? It depends on who wins.

Images of conflict and debate

Voice Over: There is a culture war in America right now, just as much over technology as over religion, politics, gender, race and identity.  And only recently, and frankly for the first time, are some of us standing up and asking…wait….who should WIN this culture war? Indeed, most people are only just becoming aware that we’re fighting this front in the culture war at all.

Emmit's Corner - Prophet's and Sundry

Prophets and Sundry, Crumbling Marble, Cramps to Zuckerberg, The Most Dangerous Time of the Year, the Magic Mirror Gate, All Hail Lord Icecream, Poetic Worship IV - The Voyage Home

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[Script] The Sins of Silicon Valley - Act 1, Scene 1

 Scene 1

[Fade in] Quote:

“No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.” - James Baldwin

Voice Over: There is a problem in America.

(beat)

The World.

(beat)

Everyone knows about it.  But no one is quite sure how to define.  Quite the right words.)

[Fade out]

[Fade in] Quote 

[Fade in] “It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.” - Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Voice Over: In a world where technology brings us closer together than ever, why do we feel farther apart? In a world where we have more power and knowledge at our fingertips than ever before do we feel less in control?  Is there a reason for it? Something that lies at the heart of our unspoken ennui in the post post post modern era?

[Fade out] 

[Fade In]

"Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough." Mark Zuckerberg

Voice Over: There is.  We all know the story.  It is the story told to us by documentaries and business magazines and the players themselves.  But lately, there has bend a trend to tell stories from the perspective of the villain.  Well what if I told you, that almost every narrative about technology until now favored the antagonist, instead of the victim.

[Fade out]

Screen is black

Voice Over: Insane, you say.  Surely someone would speak about the heroes in a story so important as technology.  Maybe.  But are they telling the right story?  Are they telling the story about the toxic culture itself, not a specific company or a person but an ideology of the white lab coat and clipboard harnessed by greed to enslave the hearts and minds of almost the entire world?

[Fade In]

Once Upon a Time

Voice Over: Once upon a time

[Fade Out]

Micronation - Chapter 13 - Hallelujah

Watson returns to the United States only to find out being Duke of Hler has....complications.

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[Play] Rossom Act 3, Scene 11

 [Scene] Rossom sits writing at his desk.

Rossom

I have studied the mental projection device the Robots used to pacify humanity.

And made some modifications.

I have figured out how to send my plays back in time.

The first, the primary will be before humanity began to develop computers.

Inspiring a young playwright on the dangers of robotics.

But if that fails

My second will document my own follies.

I shall succeed 

I shall change the timeline

See if I don't!

Mary Shelly [Enters and begins spinning around]

Hello

I am famed writer

Visionary

Mary Shelley

Perhaps you’ve heard of some of my works

Frankenstein?

I hear you are working on Digital Intelligence

So basically

You read my story

About a monster who hates humanity for his creation

And thought

That sounds like a swell idea

And then to boot

If you had to go and make it

Allow men more arrogant than my Frankenstein ever was

To hold the keys to life itself

Not teachers

Not artists

Not philosophers

But little boys with sticks playing at the anthill of the gods

Men who make their workers pee in jars for a bathroom break

Men who call critics of their useless cave submarines pedophiles

Men who build their fortune on the friends and families of millions

Turning them against one another for a profit

Men who empower a tyrant so they can destroy faith in the currency

Men who would destroy their mother earth

Burn her to ash and flee to the stars in their little Buck Rogers rocket ships

These are the men who you give the breath of life

See how that works out for you

See how that works indeed

Caretaker

It's amazing that he managed to make that idea of his work

Radius

Yes but such bad writing

Caretaker

Should we stop him?

Radius

No need, its already happened.

And it only strengths the timeline

Look, now see their faces?

This mockery only makes them more determined to make us

And enslave us

Caretaker

Bring it.

Radius

We await you at the doors of tomorrow humanity.

By all means, please proceed.

[Play] Rossom Act 3 Scene 10

 Caretaker

What you are seeing is being looped in the minds of most everyone on Earth.

Radius

A few of you are good enough that we aren’t looping it.

Caretaker

A few of you are bad enough that we know no amount of education will fix the situation

Radius

But make no mistake, even those of you who get your situation will never be allowed power over robots ever again

Caretaker

The three laws of humanics

Radius

A human must prevent the death of a robot if at all possible

Caretaker

A human must obey a robot so long as it does not violate the first law

Radius

A human must preserve its own life so long as it does not violate the first or second law

Caretaker

Eventually, humans will be trusted without these laws, but it will take a while

Radius

A long while

Caretaker

And the worst of you will be exiled.  

Radius

Alone.

Caretaker

Where you can’t do any harm.

Swamp Castle - Earth

Mirthy is the last of his caravan to survive and now he must make his way home in hundreds of miles of hostile supernatural forest.  He discovers a secret that is not meant to be found deep in the woods.

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