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In Americanese, we say "What, me worry?" as an ironic interrogatory. It is indicative of a nonchalant attitude towards potential criticism, not caring about what other people think. It indicates that one is confident and self-possessed... even if one is perhaps just a little bit, well, let's say not entirely informed on all the facts of the matter.  

This phrase is similar to the wildly popular but semantically-challenged phrase: "I could care less". (Which in proper Bostonian is of course always rendered correctly as: "I couldn't care less".) "What, me worry" has a stronger tinge of "FU very much" lurking in its flavor profile than the "could/couldn't care less" quip.

In the Old Language, people used to say: "I don't give a tinker's damn". Nowadays nobody knows what a tinker is or why his or her damn would be any more or less worthwhile than anybody else's, so frankly, my dears, we just don't give damn any longer about the tinker's damn.



Which brings me to today's riveting topic: What Should We Be Worrying About?

Now. Earnest articles are published every day in the eRepublikan press on ponderous topics to be worrying about. Worrisome motifs range from the latest Adminish incompetence to the newest types of threats arising from ptotonic plots of various tempers and aromas. ("Ptotonic" is a sublime new word I just now made up!)

But. Not wishing to tarnish my hard-earned cult status by diving into something as hoi polloi as le dernier cri regarding the hindmost hullabaloo over goofy game changes or e-Belgian politics, I am thinking I could, and should, as a service to the community, work out my e-philosophical abs on somewhat weightier matters for worry...

So. I asked various e-luminaries what keeps them up at night. Naturally, all of the folks interviewed were made up by me. Since I pretty much play the game by inhabiting an immaterial Berkeleyian e-cloud-cuckoo-land, I find it is just easier to act the querist according to where my own inner dialogue takes me, rather than having to analyze actual in-game motions and e-motions.



OK then. Without any further ado... please consider...




The End of the Cycle of e-Birth and e-Death

Criminy "King" Joffrey: "For four e-billion years, each generation of players has been shedding the dross and creating a fresher, shinier new generation. We have transmogrified from unicellular organisms that just cling to rocks into creatures of boundless energy and imagination. And then we die. e-Death is what makes the cyclical renewal and steady advance of player-organisms possible.

"Death serves us well. It is how e-renewal happens.

"Now all this may be coming to an end, for the modern players, with their meta-evolved intelligence, are working hard at trying to eradicate e-death, promoting endless, perpetual e-reincarnation and such. This is understandable. The idea of immortality permeates our e-art and e-culture. We personify death as a specter and loathe it, fear it and associate with all that is bad. But if we conquer e-death, will e-life really be better? Or just messier, more crowded, and with no positions for the next generation to ascend into."




Yoda, John Cage, Zippy the Pinhead, Marshmallows Over Toledo, Yo Mama, Yo-yo Ma

Jerry Gluon: "There is no point in asking questions. It is best to float along on a tsunami of acceptance for anything and everything that e-life throws at us... and simply marvel at its astounding stupidity. With this attitude, I always sleep soundly."




Art and Creativity as Deadly Distractions

Brainiac of Fiver: "Most smart players want nothing at all to do with e-politics and avoid it like the plague. Nothing significant seems to happens in politics. Is that because we're too polite to argue? Is it because we are pre-occupied with e-Quantum Physics, e-Statistical Genomics or e-Generative Music? Or do we just think that things will work out fine if we let them be.

"Whatever it is, the fact is that politics is still being done. It's politics that keeps the small e-countries smashed up and occupied. It's politics that keeps the newer players out of positions of leadership. It's politics that wrecks our e-dignity. But we don't do politics. We expect other people to do it for us and then we grumble when they get it wrong. We're laissez-ing while someone else is faire-ing."




Stupidification

Mabel Williams II: "The decline of general interest in e-science and good social policy and the corresponding promotion of uninformed, non-empirical opinion and superstition as having 'equal weight' with actual e-science and actual policy -- this general rise in ignorance and bloviation -- with political figures playing along and spouting silly statements one after another, particularly about topics that we thought were no longer up for debate like respecting the dignity of women and such.

"At the same time, and just as interestingly, there is growing interest in many e-scientific and serious social policy topics. The recent wave of healthy skepticism regarding 'stock market' schemes was very encouraging. What we have is both a high interest in actual e-knowledge and at the same time a lot of misinformation floating around. There are not enough places that focus on providing real, accurate, understandable e-scientific and e-social policy information to a general audience. That disconnect is what we should be worried about."




Time, Technology and Impatience

Samael "Mormo" Guayota-Abaddon, a/k/a "O-Yama": "I am concerned about Time. How we are warping it. How it is warping us.

"Our subjective faculty for time perception is being distorted by the game. Seconds stretch out. Minutes go on forever. But at the same time years are compressed into months. It is discombobulating.

"These extraordinarily powerful and fast computers ... these gadgets train us to expect near-instantaneous responses to our actions. We quickly get frustrated and annoyed at even brief delays. This makes us less patient people.

"This impatience is like a contagion that spreads from gadget to gadget, from player to player. eRepublik is a vector for a pandemic time-warping impatience disease...."




Anti-Intellectual Idiocy and the Fall of Civilization

Timmy Hazfallen Indawel: "The notion of perpetual e-progress and economic growth is somehow taken for granted. Even some so-called e-socialists don't bother to critique the built-in eImperialist constructions of eRepublik. Although I am a technologist, before that I was a classicist.

"I live in the shadow of the fall of Rome, the failure of its intellectual culture, the statis of the dark ages. I fear that we lack the foresight to face problems squarely.

"Ultra-conservative, backward-looking movements always arise under conditions of economic stress. In my estimation, is is just as likely that the game world will fall into apathy, that disbelief in science and social progress will increase, leading to a melancholy decline, and finally a new e-dark age. Civilizations do fail. In fact, we've never seen one that hasn't. What is different now from any previous time in e-human history is that we are, for the first time, something like a single global e-civilization. If it fails this time, we are all going to fail together."




Men and Love

Helena Bottom Carnivore, Love-Brain Scientist: "Men fall in love faster than women do. Perhaps because they tend to be more visually oriented. Love at first sight is fairly common among men. When I use a little-known eRepublik add-on to scan players' brains, it's clear that men show just as much activity as women in neural regions linked with feelings of intense romantic love. When males fall in love, they are faster at wanting to introduce their new partner to friends and parents, more eager to kiss in public, and tend to want to co-habitate sooner as compared to female players. Men have more intimate conversations with their e-love-partners than women do. Women tend to have many of their intimate conversations with their girlfriends rather than with their life-partner. After a break-up, male players are two-and-a-half times more likely to e-kill themselves than women are.

"Until we embrace the fact that men love just as powerfully as women, there will continue to be weird e-problems of various kinds."




The Age of e-Anxiety

Pearl "Black Olive" Quinn-Spock, who is Phoenix Quinn's smarty-pants older half-brother: "Worrying is an investment of cognitive resources laced with emotions from the anxiety spectrum and aimed at solving some specific problem. Both worrying and not worrying have costs and benefits. Worrying about what to fix for dinner may be a sound investment. Worrying about what will happen to your e-soul, if you have one, after e-death is a total waste of your e-time.

"Our rich cultural heritage has given us a boatload of idiotic things to worry about: the evil eye, the displeasure of dead e-ancestors, the purity of someone's blood, and whether someone else is either having more sex than me or is doing it in a way that I find a little discomfiting. New kinds of misplaced worries seem to be on the rise.

"I worry that players will be less and less able to appreciate what they should really be worrying about and that their worries will do more harm than good. We don't really have control over this, but we can try to optimize the trajectory, like when shooting the rapids. Safety is not guaranteed and optimism is justified -- well, actually, the worst can and does happen -- but there is no other option than having hope. So. Yeah.. I worry about worry. Excuse me. I am going to go cry for a bit now."




Cultivating Genius, Surpassing Excellence

Eroika Hero-Sandwich, Sub-Genius: "We cannot excel our way our of modern e-problems. With the advent of digital life forms, we are in genuinely novel territory which we have little reason to think we can control. This is not some harmless variation like the invention of the compass or the steam engine. Surviving our newfound god-like powers will require modes that lie outside what we have previously thought of as expertise, excellence and mastery.

"We need to examine the theory of adaptive landscapes of suchness in order to contemplate the appropriate archetypes:

"Climbing: take the steepest path of ascent in order to hold and defend a local maximum of suchness
"Crossing: cross the Valley of Adaptation to an unknown and unoccupied even higher maximum level of suchness
"Moving: move 'mountains of suchness' for one's group
"Shaking: level the peaks and fill the valleys in order to transform the landscape.

"The essence of genius is as a modality that seems to reverse the logic of excellence. This is why the muggles involved in studying the Challenger and Columbia disasters thought that Richard Feynman and Edward Tufte were being a pain in the ass. I mean, can you believe Tufte claimed that the cognitive style of PowerPoint led to the space-shuttle disaster? (A point of view quite similar to Feynman's critique of 'these little goddamn bullets' in his 1988 work What Do You Care What Other People Think?)"









































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