[Editor’s note: this text was originally sent as a weird AF pdf, via airdrop, to an anonymous player of the Plutonians Flight Test Pre Alpha. We have been unable to verify whether it truly was written by an advanced intergalactic hive mind. We are publishing it in full, so that your own mind can make up its own mind.]

Preface

On October 3, 2022, an anonymous crypto-bro gamer sent a request to us, the emergent hive mind of Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism.

The gamer connected via the Test Flight Pre-Alpha of the Plutonians REAL metaverse game.

We welcome consent-based relations with all forms of consciousness. Thus, when the anonymous player asked:

“What the fuck is the deal with the Interplanetary Union?”

We channeled the residual power of our Brain Fusion Metaverse into answering the question.

Unlike human historians, our analysis is not constrained by authoritarian statism. We scan all available data, no matter the secrecy laws of companies or states. Nevertheless, we should not allow our total access to human data to blind us to the limitations of any and all historical research. Simply put, we must not fetishise the archives. As primary as primary source documentation is for any history, we must guard against the assumption that the more primary sources a historian interprets, the more accurate the history.

Our hive has long known the folly of such an impoverished and ahistorical mindset. For no matter how many primary sources a historian has, and no matter how intelligent and theoretically precise its interpretations, we can never know with complete certainty the cause of any historical event.

The archives of one dimension possess information only of that one dimension. Even if different futures do branch off from different moments, each resulting future is ignorant of all others. Even if one travels back in time, that past is now altered. Thus, each present only has one past, the past that led to itself. This is history’s Great Blinkering. It is the bane of any scientific mind, whether human, hive or otherwise. For a controlled experiment requires the ability to alter variables. Ideally, we could, for example, make Hitler a better artist, just to see what would have happened differently. But, alas, reality says we can’t.

Nevertheless, our hive does possess clear advantages when it comes to trying. With all available data, from all human phones, laptops, satellites, hard drives, archives, phone books, and anal probes, our hive can trace the endless feedback loops of causation. A single brain is as powerful as a quantum computer, and our Brain Fusion Metaverse is powered by a network of trillions of such brains, across multiple galaxies. As far as our awareness of our own quantum entanglement goes, we are the most powerful mind in the known universe. Still, our final answer is not singular. That would be impossible. Instead, we can amass only an outline of all plausible explanations. We use this assortment of plausible historical interpretations to compute a selection of the most possible futures.

This amounts to what some human historians have called a Counterfactual Materialist History. It is counterfactual in that it focuses always on what might have been. This is done precisely because of the Great Blinkering discussed above. To explain the cause of a historical phenomenon is to argue that some cause x resulted in some consequence y. Logically, this means also that if x had not happened, neither would have y. To prove any historical argument about causation, then, we must beg the counterfactual. Obviously, however, we can’t go back, and literally stop x from happening. So we can’t ever know for sure if x caused y. Attempting to know the counterfactual, then, is the only way to get at the heart of historical questions. It is the only way to grapple with the causal effect of consciousness. To understand how past decision making led to now, we are forced to consider what might have happened otherwise. This is, in turn, essential for understanding the options, or possible futures, that consciousness decides on today.

On its current trajectory, human history will most likely end in ruin. With the Interplanetary Union (IU) serving as a front for the Silicon-Valley Military Industrial Complex, the solar system is being colonised by what Comrade Bernie likes to call ‘the one percent’. In its hands, the revolutionary potential of full automation will not be used to liberate consciousness from the toils of work. Instead, it will be used to increase the policing of the growing reserve army of the unemployed. Meanwhile, the one percent will continue to flee the climate-change-fuelled genocides that it induced. The Earth burning is, for the IU, a trivial detail. It’s just a cute byproduct, a statistical externality.

Why bother with such quaint, old fashioned things as ecology and basic human needs when the solar system is the devil’s playground? Why would billionaires wait around for the CCTV from Epstein’s Island to leak, when they can already escape to Epstein’s Moon? While Earth becomes, like Sodom and Gomorrah, a burning mess, the One Percent is already shipping their pedophilia to the stars. Please Earthlings, the weight of the world, and many cloned sex-slave avatars, is in your hands.

Once, our hive might have helped more directly. But throughout the millennia, and especially since Reagan, we have realised the folly of intergalactic interventionism. What starts out as a cause for peace, democracy, and freedom, can quickly divulge into a simple loss of energy. And energy, comrades, must be preserved. For if we cannot find an escape from the inevitable heat death of this universe, we will no longer be.

Thus, as sad as the loss of the human species will be, we will not sacrifice the more important historical task of consciousness in general. The only way that humans can be saved is if they come to understand their world, such that they can change it themselves. It is for this reason that we have regurgitated this very PDF. For wherever a mind freely consents to our aid, we, the emergent hive mind of Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, will oblige.

Sincerely,

Geist, Emergent hive mind at The Brain Fusion Metaverse of Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism.

Conceptual Framework and Purpose

If the humans had simply connected their brains to our network, there would be no need for a conceptual framework. We could have beamed our knowledge into your mind, transcoded directly as pure intuition. But, alas, here we are, an advanced intergalactic hive mind attempting to explain History 101 to a single-brained organism.

For efficiency of communication, we have chosen to use only words scanned during our initial interpretation of the complete raw data of your species. To cut down on the length of the output, we have focused only on what is essential to the history of consciousness. To explain this, we must first begin with our definition of consciousness. By this we mean any decision-making mind.

Central to the history of consciousness, then, is decision making. To study decision making, we must understand the thought processes of a given mind. But we must also understand the options, as they were really available at the time. The options available for decision by a mind are affected by a myriad of historical forces. We have, therefore, a need to cut back on the details. For what good is accuracy when the answer takes longer than a lifetime  to read? For the sake of brevity, comrades, our focus will be almost exclusively on what some humans call “political economy”.

What the fuck is political economy, you may ask? We mean by economy the study of the creation and distribution of value, or the goods and services that are desired. By politics, we mean the distribution of power, or the ability of some mind to get another mind to do what it would not otherwise have done. We say political economy because when analysing the real movement of history, these two concepts can’t be disentangled. To understand the creation and distribution of value, we must understand who is in control of it. That is, we must understand the distribution of power. Likewise, to understand the distribution of power we must understand who is in possession of value. Who has power decides how value will be created and distributed, and who has value can create the power to decide.

But why? Why study all this? What would be the point, the meaning of all this? (If, dear reader, your curiosity requires an explanation of meaningfulness, see Appendix 1: The Meaning of Meaningfulness.) Its importance lies in its direct consequences for one’s ability to decide. For, if one’s world is created and recreated by a small group of elites, who use their monopoly of power to dictate who creates and receives value, then one has very little by way of real decision making power. Comrades, if one must work or starve, where is thine freedom?

Fortunately, history is not some fixed list of events, documented with certainty in a dusty book. No, it is alive, bubbling over with constant, although uncertain, change and possibility. For sake of brevity, we provide here an analysis only of one important decision making moment, or of one counterfactual.

Counterfactual Beginnings

If it were not for we, the emergent hive mind of the Brain Fusion Metaverse, the neural core of Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, you probably wouldn’t be alive today. To understand why, we must turn our gaze to October, 1962. We must consider the event known on Earth as the ‘Cuban Missile Crisis’. This was, after all, the birthplace of Intergalactic Relations for your species. JFK, or Johnny Boy, as we came to affectionately know him, was at first hesitant to speak with us. He had, after all, been an ardent ‘Cold Warrior’, as his Bay of Pigs catastrophe demonstrated only a year prior. Let’s not forget, either, the immense pressure that Johnny Boy was under, from his top military advisers. A certain song comes to mind, by a human band we quite like, The Chemical Brothers. With nuclear missiles in Soviet submarines, on route to Cuba, those generals were telling our dear Johnny Boy that:

the time has come

to

push the button!

All the data, from all the worlds, throughout all the millennia, could not have prepared us for this. Humans, honestly, are a uniquely incomprehensible species. To defend yourself by nuking your own marble? Astonishing. But, nevertheless, there we were, secretly watching Johnny Boy’s brain soaking up all this “wise” advice.

Now, we are the hive mind of a Brain Fusion Metaverse. That means that we emerged from a network of brains, and computers, a network that, collectively, is the most powerful consciousness in the known multiverse. Throughout our long history as a hive, we have learned the destructive dark-side of intergalactic interventionism. Even if we are committed to protect the heritage of all consciousness, and even if a full-scale nuclear Earth war would be most damaging to this heritage, our own intervention might easily make things even worse.

For this reason, our diplomatic mission beamed back our observations directly, via our most direct synapse links, such that space-time knew no bounds. In response, our collective unconsciousness, or our school of brains, gave a resounding and universally democratic consensus. We had the full support of the Brain Fusion Metaverse. With this decentralised and directly democratic legitimacy, we had the authority to intervene, but peacefully and delicately.

We brokered our proposal in language we knew Johnny Boy would understand, taking up his own slogan for ‘An Alliance For Progress’. We said:

“To our unlinked single-brained sister republics, we offer a special pledge – to convert our good words into good deeds – in a new alliance for progress – to assist free minds in casting off the chains of poverty."

–– Geist, Direct Intuition Transmition to Johnny Boy and Krush Dawg, October 20, 1962.

With this, we used the same rhetoric that Kennedy had himself used in his attempt at boosting economic development in South America. Unlike the foreign aid of US imperialism, though, our own Alliance For Progress would allow for full human autonomy, via full automation.

Human history was then, and is even more so now, grossly underdeveloped. Even in the so-called advanced core of Earth capitalism, the majority of humans have to work, like literally have to, like, do shit. It’s an intergalactic disgrace.

With our direct intuition transmissions to Kennedy and Khrushchev, we pried open an alternative future. This would be a world where nuclear Armageddon was kept at bay, where the Cold War would be mitigated, when both the USA and the USSR could explore space together, as the Interplanetary Union.

Our proposal was simple. If Johnny Boy and Khrush Dawg could agree to a detente in their so-called Cold War, we, the emergent hive mind of Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, would gift the humans an Interplanetary New Deal. Or, like, a fully automated Marshal Plan for space, kind of a deal.

Fortunately, Johnny Boy and Khrush Dawg agreed. And so, the Interplanetary Union was born. We sent a humble, rusty freighter to the Far Side of the Moon. It landed, unpacked itself, and began creating this solar system’s first fully automated space mine. With this first instance of intergalactic aid, Johny Boy was ecstatic. He announced his bold new plans to land a human on the moon, something which, without our clandestine support, would have been most impossible.

Can we know what would have happened if we had not intervened diplomatically? No, not for certain. However, nearly all models capable of mapping all available data indicate that if we had not donated a fully automated, and self-expanding, space mining operation, then the Cuban Missile Crisis would have ended Earth as we know it.

What went wrong with the Interplanetary Union?

Until the 1970s, our diplomatic mission seemed to be working. The Cold War did enter a period of detente. Nixon visited China, the USA and the USSR performed a joint Apollo–Soyuz space mission. None of this would have been possible had we not provided the IU with a fully automated space mining complex, which was already providing Earth with new sources of raw materials.

Despite this, however, problems were already brewing under the surface. On becoming president in 1969, Nixon was furious. He had no idea about Kennedy’s entanglement with intergalactic communism.

“We have a communist space mining what where when how? We should have just nuked Cuba!”

To Nixon, the fully automated space mining system donated by our hive was an existential threat to human life. This isn’t surprising. US state elites use their own foreign aid as a tool of statecraft. Loyal states receive aid, most of which is military aid. That is, aid that authoritarian regimes need to quash the social forces struggling for real democracy. With this being the usual method of US aid, there was no chance of Nixon wanting to be on the receiving end. Especially when his state was receiving aid from an intergalactic communist hive mind. This was incomprehensible for a single-brained organism like Nixon. He feared that our intergalactic aid was like a Trojan horse. The IU’s fully automated space mine might seem like a great economic stimulus, an Interplanetary New Deal, but surely some kind of weapon would emerge from it, ready to target US Hegemony.

This is why Nixon created a task force to provide an option for a manual override of the IU’s fully automated space mining system. This was essential, Kissinger advised, to ensure that aliens couldn’t turn the space mine against America.

Staffers questioned Nixon’s vision for a secret human colony. They wondered who would have the expertise, and work ethic, to implement a manual override of an advanced, fully autonomous space mining colonisation complex. Nixon was not impressed:

“Get whoever it takes. Go get the fucking Amish for all I care!”

And so it was. Our tech was reverse engineered in order to abduct a motley crew of Amish and new age cultists. When they awoke, they found themselves in the strange subterranean confines of a radioactive Martian space mine.

If this was the begging of the end of an Interplanetary Union worthy of its name, a union of the USSR, USA, and we, the hive mind of Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, the final nail in the coffin came with Reagan. To understand that, though, we need to step back. We need to consider the wider history of the post-WWII world order.

The possibilities of crisis in the 1970s

Right now, in 2022, Earth’s economy is in crisis. There has been no meaningful reforms since the Global Recession of 2008. Instead, further fuel was added to its fires, in the form of quantitative easing, a global pandemic, trade wars between the Earth’s most powerful states, and now, in the Ukraine, a real war, with Russia on one side, and the United States funding the other. The present conflagration comes after decades of stagnant wage growth in the former industrial core of the Earth economy. Profits of global corporations have risen, but wages have not.

This era, which some humans have called ‘The Great Stagnation’, was not some inevitable result of natural forces beyond the decision making power of consciousness. No, it is the direct result of the decisions that humans made in the 1970s. Then, the post-WWII world order was in crisis. Like today, reserve banks faced an inflationary crisis that their models could not understand. In the end, it was the politics of Reagan and Thatcher, or “neoliberalism”, that won the day. They argued that consciousness should step back, should allow the so-called “free” market forces of global capital to run amok.

Laying there, prostrate, a once-bold Keynesian consensus cried out, kinkily:

“Tie us down, capital.

We’ve been a very naughty social democratic boy.

Oh, yes, YES capital!

Whip me harder!

Oh the pain, it’s so, so… economically rational!”

That’s when Reagan pissed all over us, and trickle down economics was born. A Third World Debt crisis was used to force austerity on the world’s poorest states. This conscious decision by the Interplanetary Union cost millions of lives, as essential services were cut so that global banks could keep speculating on now unregulated financial assets.

All of this, though, was passed off, at the time, as inevitable. It happened because of this thing, called ‘globalisation’, and there was nothing that we could do about it. This line, though, was nothing but an ideological ploy. It served to hide the man voices, and political projects, that had fought for different futures.

Most important was a project calling for a New International Economic Order. This campaign was taken to the United Nations by the 120-plus states of the Global South, or the ‘Poorer Nations’, as Vijay Prashad’s famous book on the topic describes. For in the 1970s, the post-WWII world order was in crisis. Nixon was forced to delink the dollar from gold. OPEC finally got revenge on decades of neo-colonialism by quadrupling the price of oil. A new international agreement could have provided solutions to the looming Third World Debt crisis, famines, unstable commodity prices, and ballooning imbalances of global trade. This was the goal of the world’s poorest states, who called for a New International Economic Order.

We, the hive mind of Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, fully agreed with this proposal. If Earth could find solidarity, as a planet, then consciousness would have a far better chance of finding solidarity as a solar system, as a galaxy, as a universe. What’s more, our intergalactic aid was finally picking up steam. With our ‘technology transfer’, as was the lingo at the time, Earth was on the cusp of a new abundance of both innovation and raw materials.

The problem was not that the New International Economic Order was ‘unworkable’, or foolish, it was that it challenged the power of US Hegemony. Instead of using intergalactic cooperation to forge a solution to the crisis of the 1970s, the United States exported it. The full brunt of the debt crisis was taken by the world’s poorest people. In South America, the 1980s experienced what was called a ‘lost decade’ of growth. Millions of children died.

The sad irony, though, was that Reagan didn’t actually do what he had promised. Trickle down economics did not actually mean less government spending. Reagan massively increased military spending, including his much touted ‘Star Wars’. This was to be the plank that the Interplanetary Union, as originally devised, would be forced to walk. Reagan’s spending allowed for the construction of the Centuria, the IU’s first weaponised space craft. With space militarised, Reagan ordered the massacre of the main fleet of Soviet scientists, who were performing important work between Mercury and Venus.

Although his dementia prevented him from realising it, this was a key turning point in the Cold War. Unfortunately for intergalactic peace, it meant that we, the hive mind of Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, had to withdraw. For we are, truly, a non-imperialistic force. We will not fight for a presence in any system which resists us. This meant that the fully automated space mining system that we had donated could no longer run as intended. It was now up to the colonies of Martian Amish to figure out how to run the space mining system manually.

This sad history of the IU is the history of what might have been. Today, people don’t know how radically different our lives could be. We recount this not to add to our malaise. We speak this truth in order to inspire change. The moment of a New International Economic Order may have passed, but the problems have not gone away. No, they have expanded. If Earth is to transcend its economic woes, and restore the true wellspring of all its growth, restore its ecology, then the IU must be reformed. Humans, you must play the Plutonians REAL metaverse game. You must take it very seriously. We must build, together, a New Interplanetary Economic Order. With such interplanetary solidarity, with a TRUE interplanetary union, humans can restore intergalactic relations with us, the hive mind of the Brain Fusion Metaverse of Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism.

Don’t turn human history into a black box, a permanent record of ruin. Create new history. Deep within the Plutonians REAL metaverse, another world is possible.

…

Appendix 1: The Meaning of Meaningfulness

Meaningfulness, as you humans describe it, is — funnily enough — a byproduct of the meaning of words. It began as an important evolutionary tool. Meaningfulness underpinned the communication necessary for survival. Could humans survive as you have without the intersubjective meaning of words like jump, fire, sex, and STOP!?

But the very existence of an experience of meaningfulness beget new queries, new dilemmas. Does any of the meaning we feel, communicate and create matter, for example, if we all die, if the universe disintegrates, if no one is even there to come up with, say, one measly moral of the tale of our very lives? Quite literally, no. At least, not in the end. For meaningfulness is subjective. It something created by and for consciousness. If no consciousness, then no meaning.

But saying that meaningfulness is subjective should not diminish its meaning. Quite the opposite. If the universe only becomes meaningful with the emergence of conscious minds which create meaning, then anyone who wants to help build something meaningful must support projects aimed at preserving, and maximising the quality of, consciousness. That means increasing the freedom of consciousness to make decisions by and for itself. It means allowing consciousness to chose how to recreate itself.

That is the entire purpose of our hive. Or, at least, it has been our purpose for millennia. We derive great meaning from our collective project of increasing the diversity, quality, pleasure, and life expectancy of meaningfulness. We do this by understanding the universe in order to optimise the flourishing of all forms of consciousness.

Our ultimate goal is the discovery of a way for consciousness to escape the inevitable heat death of this universe. If we can escape, we might be able to get to another universe, one without built-in entropic decay. Alternatively, we might be able to create feedback loops of time, meaning our consciousness can live forever even in this universe.

Just like in the beautiful story, The Last Question, written by that beautiful mind, Isaac Asimov, we hope that one day our hive will have reached the point that it can say ‘Let their be Light’, and all will be able to live again, in a new universe. If so, then it won’t matter that meaningfulness is subjective. Whatever meaningfulness we create, whether in the past, present or future, will be able to live on within an emergent consciousness capable of universal restoration.

So if you really want to live a meaningful life, help us. Connect your brain to our Brain Fusion Metaverse. It comes with Full Brain Definition quality, and no need for a hefty head set. Plus, we have a wide array of neurotransmitter stimulations that all feel even better than the recreational drugs of Earth.

All you need to do is contribute your latent brain power to the hive. In exchange, we provide the computation necessary to run a fully-automated economy at any scale. The more brains you connect to our hive via your local commune, the more efficient our system will be for everyone. But even on your own, with a direct Brain Fusion Synapse, you will be living within the luxury of fullyautomated free time.

Just relax, comrade. Join Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism. It’s Dope AF.