Take Great Transhumanist Future. It has “a coder” dismantling the sun “in another twenty years with some big old computer.” This is a call to accelerate AI development, and use it for extremely transformative actions.
Super disagree with this! Neither I nor (I have not checked but am pretty certain) the author of the text wants to advocate that! (Indeed I somewhat actively tried to avoid having stuff in my program encourage this! You could argue that even though I tried to do this I did not succeed, but I think the fact that you seem to be reading ~motivations into authors’ choices that aren’t actually there is a sign that something in your analysis is off.) I think it’s pretty standard that having a fictional character espouse an idea does not mean the author espouses it.
In the case of this song I did actually consider changing “you and I will flourish in the great transhumanist future” to “you and I MAY flourish in the great transhumanist future” to highlight the uncertainty, but I didn’t want to make changes against the author’s will, and Alicorn preferred to keep the “will” there because the rest of the song is written in the indicative mood. And, as I said before, Solstice is a crowdsourced endeavor and I am not willing to only include works where I do not have the slightest disagreement.
If the main problem with changing the songs is that many people in this community want to sing about AI accelerationism and want the songs to be anti-religious, then I stand by my criticisms
hmm, I want to be able to sing songs that express an important thing even if one can possibly read them in a way that also implies some things I disagree with
If the main problem with changing the songs is in making them scan and rhyme, then I can probably just pay that cost.
you are extremely welcome to suggest new versions of things!
but a lot of the cost is distributed and/or necessarily borne by the organizers. changing lines in a song that’s sung at Solstice every year is a Big Deal and it is simply not possible to do this in a way that does not cause discourse and strife
(I guess arguably we managed the “threats and trials” line in TWTR without much discourse or strife but I think the framing did a lot there and I explicitly didn’t frame it as a permanent change to the song, and also it was a pretty minor change)
as Solstice creative lead I neither support nor oppose tearing apart the sun for raw materials