Visions

WARNING: This article is linked from Strange articles!

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Visions are just best cases that are too good to be true. That is, we don't believe in them, and consider them pleasant fantasies. Like the most optimistic best cases, some will always consider them too strange or unreal, so this page should usually be linked from strange articles. We'd wonder what was wrong with people if they thought everything here was totally reasonable.

We do visioning for several reasons:

1. Someone might actually believe in what you think is a fantasy, so you help to expand best cases by documenting visions that you personally don't believe
2. It summarizes the more pleasant Consumerium User Stories in an efficient way
3. It inspires us to think about what really must or might be possible
4. It provides terminology with which we can more readily debate best cases. For instance it's easier to think of our best cases as being "almost as good as perfect empathy" than it is to think of them in technological terms... Visions allow us to talk directly about the empathy we want with other life, instead of getting always bogged down in details, and even envision whole new societies where Consumerium Services are basic.

So far, we seem to lack vision! So add some fantasies here, and develop the most interesting and insightful of them as Consumerium User Stories which should tone down the fantastic and play up the realistic elements.

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REMEMBER: IF YOU CONSIDER ANY OF THESE CREDIBLE THEN YOU MUST PUT A CREDIBLE VERSION OF THEM IN best cases - VISIONS ARE ONLY FOR THE IN-CREDIBLE.

If you believe that someone's utopias are actually dystopias, then, feel free to write a parallel entry for threats to emphasize these aspects. If you think worst cases will arise from pursuing the vision, e.g. someone loves the prison-like power structure of the Panopticon, then, feel free to add these aspects to the vision but include some mention (possibly this is the unrealistic element) of how those issues are overcome.

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Consumerium Credit replaces all other electronic payment services. No institutional buying criteria can ignore our label data scheme, and it slowly becomes standard. Eventually, you just can't sell any red light product at all, anywhere, to anyone, and expect to still have any customers.

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Consumerium Country actually comes into existence! A real country declares that nothing that does not get a positive Consumerium buying signal can be imported at all, and nothing made in that country will be allowed if it is a red light product. The WTO is replaced by Consumerium Services.

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Perfect Empathy

A virus embeds a sort of radio receiver in everyone's DNA. Now everyone who picks up anything in any store anywhere feels all the pain that was created by the product, including the damage done when it is disposed of or burned or whatever. That is, you will feel a small part of the cancer that is caused by a product whose plastic wrapping can only be disposed of by burning.

The meat industry dies. People can still hunt and fish for themselves, but, if the meat goes through the processing system, the radio-like signal causes the pain to anyone who picks up a package. Unpackaged meat off the back of a truck not being too safe, people go mostly vegan. Overall impact on the land goes down.

Most logging also dies. Cutting a tree generates so much fear and panic and loss and despair due to extinction, and worse and more obvious despair due to the new diseases (HIV, SARS, Ebola ALL came from unpredictable species contact in deforested regions), that just touching an old growth log makes people want to commit suicide. After some do, people work hard to keep old growth out of the market place, and restrict wood use to wood that is taken without causing any extinction.

Weapons can still be made, but it's quite hard to touch one that has been part of any import/export inspection regime, because, after that, you literally feel the pain of being shot with them. Only those who can bear this pain tend to handle weapons and shoot loggers and hunters of endangered species. It's something we all do once in a lifetime, as a rite of passage. Males remain competitors and killers at heart, so, we just admit that, and just make sure to kill the right people, and feel their pain. All this is a very small part of life:

Forests start to grow back, endangered species flourish, and human conflict is only small scale and directed towards protecting those. It's a garden of Eden. Someone evil who hates this looks into the DNA of the virus and tries to figure out "where it came from". It bears an amazing, but totally coincidental resemblance to code used to deliver Consumerium Services way way back in the early 2000s or so. Everyone who looks into this DNA mysteriously dies... Eventually this is explained: it came directly from God and God doesn't want His Work investigated, or tinkered with, especially not by these stupid monkeys who very nearly destroyed His Most Perfect Planet. Goddamn stupid hairless apes! Thankfully they have little power now, and are kept in line by what they start to think of as a totally natural karmic feedback effect....