Caught the bit on lesswrong and figured you guys might like.

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsM
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    1 year ago

    Apropos:

    Musk, the boy, loved video games and computers and Dungeons & Dragons and “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” and he still does. “I took from the book that we need to extend the scope of consciousness so that we are better able to ask the questions about the answer, which is the universe,” Musk tells Isaacson. Isaacson doesn’t raise an eyebrow, and you can wonder whether he has read “Hitchhiker’s Guide,” or listened to the BBC 4 radio play on which it is based, first broadcast in 1978. It sounds like this:

    Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former galactic empire, life was wild, rich, and, on the whole, tax free. . . . Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural because no one was really poor, at least, no one worth speaking of.

    “The Hitchhiker’s Guide” is not a book about how “we need to extend the scope of consciousness so that we are better able to ask the questions about the answer, which is the universe.” It is, among other things, a razor-sharp satiric indictment of imperialism:

    And for these extremely rich merchants life eventually became rather dull, and it seemed that none of the worlds they settled on was entirely satisfactory. Either the climate wasn’t quite right in the later part of the afternoon or the day was half an hour too long or the sea was just the wrong shade of pink. And thus were created the conditions for a staggering new form of industry: custom-made, luxury planet-building.

    • raktheundead@fedia.io
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      1 year ago

      Musk, the boy, loved video games

      And so he went on to make one of the worst Sega CD games. Bad show.

    • Deborah@hachyderm.io
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      1 year ago

      The kicker of that article is one of the best kickers I’ve ever seen, at least for readers of Hitchhiker’s:

      (I know the image won’t appear on awful.systems but the article’s not paywalled and the entire paragraph is chef’s kiss perfect.)