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4Chan's First Feature film is also the first Feature length AI Film.
The Conceit? Aside from a few Joke stills, none of the visual film is AI. It is a "Nature Documentary" Narrated by David Attenborough... It is also maybe the most disturbing film ever made, and possibly the most important/impactful film of the decades so far.
Reality is more terrifying than fiction.
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Notes -
This is the only image you need to understand the 2 hr documentary and the 2000 word blog.
India is not western civilization. The west permanently conquered every civilization except India.
In the eyes of the west, there are only 3 major civilizations - Abrahamic, Chinese and Indian. African and Native American cultures get a lot of praise, but only because they are considered to be ideologically harmless. The west sees Chinese and Indian civilizations as threats.
China is wierd. First, China nuked its own civilization and replaced it wholesale with communism (an explicitly western construct). Second, China was isolated (hard to access information on internal suffering) and became successful (harder to critisize). Lastly, China became an enemy. There was no reason to use dirty methods for critisizing China, because you could now be aggressive over the table. "Every Chinese person is a spy. Ban their brands. Sanction them to death, etc. etc.". It helps that China's population is in steep decline, where they might self-own themselves into extinction anyway.
India on the other hand remains an intact competiting (well, not so successfully) civilization that isn't an enemy. It has preserved its civilizational values. And if you're American, the Indian diaspora appears to be ascendant. Indians here are rich and peaceful citizens. They are now becoming powerful. And worst of all, for the first time, they are getting portrayed as cool (Monkeyman, RRR, list goes on).
If you are a 4channer, it gets your blood boiling. The short, meek and unsexy Chinese and India kids from school are now doing better. You (the socially madadjusted western dude) are better than them and you know it. You gotta hate. China is easy. Your President has given you a free pass to hate on China. But, hate for Indians has to be packaged into something more 'underground'.
Now, you're in luck. Because as great as the Indian diaspora is doing, India SUCKS. It is poor, and has 1.6 billion people. It sucks as much as any country in its socioeconomic class. It is 1.6 billion people, in poverty, with an uncensored internet and decent handle on English. There is so much content. Every time you show India as worse, it makes you feel a little better about falling behind your local Indian diaspora.
The hatred has become even more prominent now that India is ascendent (from an admittedly low base). You don't beat someone while they're down. But if they're starting to do better and a little too unusually proud of if, they're ripe pickings.
India is the best country to be portrayed as the worst in the world. India is civilizationally distant (so ciriticisms aren't self-owns). India is ascendent (so it is a threat). Indians near you are rich (so it is okay to make fun of them). It has no consequences (unlike China or Muslims, where such a documentary would have implications) and there is an ounce of truth to it (India is still very poor).
My dream in life is to under-go a public cancellation. It means you are threating enough and your competition has ran out of ideas. They're pulling out every dirty weapon to bring you down, and if you make it out this. You're part of the ruling class for good. An inevitable 'rite of passage'. India seems to be facing (very very) early signs of something like this. If the Indian economy keeps growing, I predict this kind of hatred is about to get a LOT LOT worse before it gets better.
To every Indian, I have the same advice. Everything is a dick measuring contest. Grow a bigger (economic) penis. Your economic penis is the only thing that matters. Until then....sucks to be us.
PS:
The leading image would be confusing to an Indian. India's economic tumble began during the early mughal rule, and was decimated through colonial times. Post independence, India was left in the hand of west-sympathizers and socialists (Nehru's Congress). They systematically eliminated any sign of Hinduism from Indian governance and politics. To any Indian, India's 'hindu era' begins post 2014.
I exclusively blame the Nehru for India's urban decay. Nehru was a 20th century white cambridge professor in Indian skin. The worst part is, like most leftist educated white men in power, he was well meaning, of sound thought and well spoken. Makes it hard to hate on him. I wish he was more like a Trudeau or Rahul Gandhi. Lot easier to carricature.
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No.
You cannot understand how much India sucks.
Maybe the next generation will. Or the one after that.
Wrong too, but expected.
I do. I spent my whole life there. Not just the big cities, but smaller places too.
I have friends from towns like Wasserpur, Prayagraj, Ranchi, Patna.....people who have seen the real underbelly of the country. I know someone who killed by dacoits by being tied to a tree. I've seen a dalit college friend start crying because he he stained the only good shirt his parents could afford. I knew when to start holding my breath as the public transportation traversed through the worst slums in the country. I have been stuffed in a train like sardines, and forced to smell the collective odor of a 1000 men at once. I had to learn to ignore female beggars with toddlers, and naked kids with distended bellies playing besides burning rubber tires. Victims of human trafficking can be seen in broad daylight. I grew up being threated by my mom that she'd sell me off to the 'lady under the bridge' if I didn't finish my homework.
I know.
This is the only place I used all caps. It was not an accident.
Can you elaborate ?
Affluent and educated Indians simply have no retort to the core criticism of many people on the DR about India, which is that it is the only place in the world in which the rich are so permanently content with public squalor.
You cannot simply appeal to ‘socioeconomic development levels’. No. African countries with small fractions of India’s median income have much cleaner capitals. I was in Central Africa again last week. Kinshasa is much cleaner than Mumbai or New Delhi. I work, on occasion, with senior African officials across many sub-Saharan countries. One of the first things they’ll do, even the most corrupt ones, as they increase state capacity and collect more tax money, is beautify public spaces, hire people to clean the park opposite the national parliament, that kind of thing. I have walked through shanty-town level African neighborhoods where the working class is and you will see boys picking up litter, sweeping streets and so on. Of course, sheer poverty means these places are still squalid by first-world standards.
But they are much cleaner than even middle class neighborhoods of Indian cities. Even wealthy ones. If you are a wealthy Indian you have probably been to Soho House in Mumbai (a few years ago at least it was one of the places the wealthy younger people hung out, probably less fashionable now). Even there, the street outside was dirty, garbage everywhere, unswept, sandy. Street cleaning has been solved, we have machines for it now, India can afford them (many other cities with much lower median income than Mumbai manage it). This squalor is a choice.
India fills me with a certain horror that the rest of the developing world does not. You see, I can go to Singapore and see what a Chinese civilization that is rich looks like. It may not be to everyone’s taste, but it is pleasant enough, competently managed and a high-quality place to live. Even the Arabs, when they have money, create a passable or moderately livable society. There are good parts of South and even Central America. Africa is very poor, but as I said, I am encouraged. Only in India are the rich content with public squalor. I cannot understand why. I don’t think even you know, exactly, I’ve engaged on this issue with the many intelligent Indians here and I get the sense that it’s not something they really think about, even though to me it is obviously, by very very far the biggest issue with their country.
I don’t condone the ridiculous racism of the 4chan troll, Indians are by and large decent immigrants to the West. But the question of India’s squalor looms over every stamped visa.
We have no way of measuring a person’s aesthetic or (full) ethical value through educational and visa selection processes. This is the problem underlying immigration where immigration looks good on paper. Are Indians smart, hardworking, and nonviolent? Yes. But this is only part of the value of a human being. We must also care that a human has a high ingrained sense of empathy without the threat of punishment, and that a person can sense visual beauty and the invisible value of beauty. These are almost terminal values: an ideal world must consist of empathetic humans who love beauty, because these qualities are necessary for an optimal world according to Western values (love-filled people in a beautiful world).
When I look at videos of India there does appear to be people whose eyes never rest momentarily to notice the ugliness and poverty surrounding them. They do not seem to feel the pain of guilt when they rip off tourists (an eternal complaint about gypsies, whose extraction is Indian). It is as if their inner life is too locked in to the ratrace of personal interest. Cognitive science has begun to understand the role that eye movement plays in a person’s inner life, and the way that some Indians stare at people sets off a threat detection alarm to Westerners.
I do not know the best way to measure the full ethical dimension of a person for the purposes of immigration but looking at how they live is certainty better than ignoring the question altogether. And maybe better then this would be looking at what happens in their brain when confronted with suffering strangers, or scenes of ugliness, and looking at infant behavior for AI-determined signs of empathy.
Indians appreciate public beauty so long as the cost of maintaining such beauty is borne by others. It is the tragedy of the commons writ visibly large on a societal scale.
The irony of course is that indians are actually perfectly happy, and even proud, to live in clean public spaces. The Indian elites in quaint English cottages are hardly violaters of personal space and public cleanliness like travelers or junkies; Indians do not lower property values by their presence.
No, the observable difference is in civic consciousness: Indians make no attempt to clean up their public spaces in India, because such huge costs are immediately wasted when the tide of humanity washes its excreta upon the shores of civilization to bleach in the sun with each passing day. Is it a fundamental moral deficiency, or a total collapse of state structures? A convincing case can be made for both, but when considering how much elite (and frankly non elite as well) Indians are net acretive outside of India, there must be something uniquely terrible about Indias structure that ruins the country so.
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