#chronofelony

[mitigatedchaos]

December, 2037

With Hollywood having run even further out of ideas, shooting begins on the live-action Erfworld movie. The earnings for the low-budget film are slightly lower than expected, facing off against the adaptation of Ctrl-Alt-Del and surprise hit Penny Arcade.

[iteratedextras]

Instructions unclear; told to post Yang meme, accidentally posted Yang meme.

[mitigatedchaos]

It's monday somewhere in the TimeCube, just poast it now.

Improperly configured chronomail is a huge security risk, as it can be accessed by third parties from parallel timelines. I'm going to send you a test image.

If your computer is setup correctly, you should receive the above image (a motivational poster featuring a kitten, reading "hang in there") immediately.

[mitigatedchaos]

I don't think I would actually want to live in the year 1999, but if I could visit for a few weeks, take a vacation, that might be a lot of fun.

Maybe bring along a few Zoomer 90s aesthetic bloggers. Take them on a road trip.

[mitigatedchaos]

2026: Yeah so, uh, Kontextmaschine decided to become a Far Cry villain.

You: ...

2026: He's calling himself "The Director." Moved into a compound in the Rockies. Told his followers they're filming a movie doing "Extreme Method Acting."

You: what

[mitigatedchaos]

Excerpts, Mirror’s Edge (TV series, 2026)

“We live between the gloss and the reality - the mirror’s edge.”

- Faith, intro sequence, Mirror’s Edge (2026)

Galen (The Architect): “I realize it now.  What if Omnistat invades?  What if an asteroid hits Cascadia Prime tomorrow?  It isn’t that the world of perfect order does not exist, but rather that the world of perfect order cannot exist.  For the rules to account for everything, their designer would have to know everything.“

Tomas (The Usurper): “And yet you will find that it is already too late.”

- Mirror’s Edge (2026)

Dogen: “Before the Regression...”

Faith: “...before the Regression?”

Dogen: “Yes, Faith, before the Regression.  Didn’t you pay attention in what passes for school in Cascadia?”

Faith: “I was a little busy, Dogen.”

Dogen: “Don’t you feel a little bit curious about what happened to the civilization that existed before the Regression?”

- Mirror’s Edge (2026)

“Where is Isabella Kruger?”

- graffiti, Mirror’s Edge (2026)

Faith: “If you win.”

Isabella Kruger (hologram): “It’s not a matter of ‘if,’ Faith, it’s a matter of ‘when.’  Your kind are slowly going extinct.”

- Mirror’s Edge (2026)

Tomas: “A world without pain.  A world without fear.  That’s progress.  Who wouldn’t give anything for that - for a world without violence or crime, perhaps even criminal intent?  A million dead, oh what was the name of that girl you were talking about... Ah, yes.  A million dead Mirandas throughout history - and not one more.”

Toredo: “And you’re going to rule it?”

Tomas: “Somebody has to.”

- Mirror’s Edge (2026)

Dogen: “All of this has happened before.  Can’t you see?  If we don’t stop it, all of it will happen again.”

Dogen: “The ancients... the pre-Regression society - they had a concept called ‘legibility,’ about the limits of systems.”

Faith: “If they knew so much, then why aren’t they still here?”

Dogen: “Because they discovered it only shortly before their demise.”

- Mirror’s Edge (2026)

Isabella Kruger: “No, you misunderstand.  The reason that your systems can’t see me is that I am Reflection.”

Tomas: “Delusional as always.  That code was removed long ago.  That’s why you Krugers aren’t fit to rule Cascadia, and it’s time for a new family - mine.  You are, in the end, only human.”

Isabella Kruger: “No.  I have become more than human.”

- Mirror’s Edge (2026)

[mitigatedchaos]

[mitigatedchaos]

I'm still reeling from my revelation, inspired by the "chronophone" posts, that if you stuff all of Yudkowsky's writings into a chronophone and point it at the world immediately before the founding of Abrahamic religion, a stunningly high-detail founding document for Abrahamic religion comes out. This isn't a "lolol rationalism is just another religion" dunk - I'm both religious and rationalist myself and I find these correspondences fascinating.

In Yudkowsky’s chronophone post, the chronophone sabotages attempts to send information into the past by translating it into the local equivalent several levels up and then back down again - the obvious truths of the sender’s era are replaced with the obvious truths of the receiver’s, such that it’s not feasible to push the receiver into what is a completely unreachable state from their current information graph.

This suggests you view Rationalism as in a position relative to the existing body of knowledge as the Abrahamic religions were in a position relative to the existing body of knowledge back then.

Yudkowsky, of course, argues that most of the truths we’d want to tell people of the past are very non-obvious in the past.

Might it then matter a great deal who we contact with the chronophone?  The ideas alien to one person might seem much more obvious to someone else, now out of sync with his current society.  His knowledge graph may have different nodes, different weights, different edges.

If someone in our era were being contacted by a Yudkowskian chronophone, who might it be?  What might the effects look like?  That’s the question your ask brought to mind for me.