Present Perfect vs. Friendship Is Optimal · 7:12pm Apr 7th, 2014
(Again, a few words about the reading, by FandangoTV. I had a few qualms about him at first, but I've since decided I'll add him to my list and get to his other stuff eventually. I found him because I was specifically looking for an audiobook of this fic, by the way. He's got good volume, a nice reading pace that tends toward the slow, and just a few missteps as far as false starts. I have a feeling those were simply missed in editing. He had trouble pronouncing the word "Hofvarpnir", which I can kind of forgive him for, and "scarcity", which I kind of can't. Still, overall he left a positive impression. Here's another reading, by BleedingRaindrops.)
Iceman's Friendship Is Optimal has seen a recent upsurge in attention recently. Chris reviewed it back in December, and it was posted April 1st on Equestria Daily as part of the "fanfic archaeology" April Fool's joke. But a joke this story most certainly is not.
What it is is thoroughly horrifying.
Not since The Midnight Run has a story made me sit back and question my core beliefs so hard. And like Run, the scariest thing about this piece is that I have to acknowledge that some people are not only not scared by the things that scare me, but that they may in fact consider them to be good and desirable. There's really nothing more terrifying. It's often that I reach the end of a chapter in a story and get really animated because something awesome happened and I want to keep reading; it's far more rare that I get animated, shout "I FUCKING HATE THIS STORY" and want to keep reading. Friendship Is Optimal fucked with me on a very profound level.
It also made me feel old. It revolves around a My Little Pony-themed MMO, and so the first few chapters -- and Chris commented on this as well -- are heavy on concepts that are mostly going to be familiar to people who've spent a lot of time playing MMOs. The last one I played was Maple Story, and after wasting two years of my life on it and swearing MMOs off forevermore, I have yet to find enough temptation to go back on that pledge. But this does set me off somewhat from the left half of this fandom's median age, and I found myself just ever so slightly lost.
On a slightly related note: if there's someone you're dying to introduce to the fandom and the franchise, you could do far worse than to show them this story. It lays out the concept of bronies in a way that will resonate with those unfamiliar with or even averse to the idea, and doesn't tread heavily on canon. (This is, of course, one of its biggest flaws: it somewhat misses the mark as a fanfic. The only canon characters in the story are Princess Celestia, Princess Luna, and Pinkie Pie. The latter is just a cameo, while the other two are constructs and not the characters.)
But let's get back to events. This isn't a story so much as a laying-out of a concept: what would happen if everyone in the world uploaded their consciousnesses to computers? I have to admit: this is something I have long thought would be great to do, but FiO presents some wonderful arguments against it. For instance, the first people who are going to want to do such a thing to themselves are the nerds who think it's an amazing idea, and people with terminal illnesses. Then would come the people whose lives are shit and who think that becoming a pony in a digital utopia is the way to escape that.
Then comes one of the best parts of the story: an assertion that we need these people in society. (Well, maybe not the ones who are dying.) We need the people with low self-esteem to work dead-end jobs. The people living in these awful conditions support the rest of society, and once they're all gone, well, society begins falling apart. I was amazed as I watched this happen, as uploading gradually stopped being an option. Too many people upload, life gets worse for those who don't, leading them to be more likely to want to upload. It's diabolical. And the whole time, I was shouting in my mind, "Princess Celestia is the bad guy here! Isn't anyone trying to stop her?" The story didn't seem to agree with me (or, at least, I couldn't tell whether it didn't or just didn't care) and that further messed with my head.
There was, at least, one character who didn't like the idea, leading to one of the story's few bits of conflict. He was unfortunate for two reasons. First, he's a horrible caricature, a business major frat boy whose desires go no further than drinking lots of beer and fucking lots of women. He hates ponies because he thinks they're girly and "gay". His presence irritated me, as it turned the first half of the story into something that reinforces the prevailing division in many pony fans' minds that everyone who isn't a brony is a "hater". And yet I found myself rooting for him, because he seemed the only person poised to topple Celestia before she took over the world. Except that, in unfortunate instance number two, he enacts what might be the greatest betrayal in the story, and uploads under duress. (Of course, he'd have to eventually; one of his other desires was getting money, and what good is money when there's no one to spend it on?)
The other great betrayal came from audience stand-in David, the geekier of two friends we see trying the alpha version of the game in the introduction. (Side note: I was very disappointed that his friend only shows up one more time in the story, and then as a background character. In the realm of characters I identified with, the Guy Who Just Doesn't Get It made a big impression on me from the start.) After making friends with another pony in the game named Butterscotch, he's later invited by Celestia to be one of the first humans to upload, at which point she reveals that Butterscotch is in fact not another player, but a construct she created for him. I was enraged, because despite my general reluctance to identify with the uber-geek brony character, I still saw some part of myself in him, and I wanted nothing more than for him to be enraged at the deception as well. But he went along with it, his main concerns being about the logistics of uploading. A major theme of this story is "It's better to be happy and ignorant" and that just scares the hell out of it.
But these are very subjective evaluations; not everyone's going to have the same reaction. So what about the writing? Well, for the most part, it's good. It does suffer from some repetition problems, MOST NOTABLY "satisfy values through friendship and ponies", which is repeated ad infinitum through the entire story and my irritation levels went through the roof every time Celestia uttered the phrase. (Also, I've never thought of values as something to be "satisfied"; I though "fulfill" might have been more to the point. But then, it does help keep Celestia sounding like an alien robot.) I had thought that it wouldn't have been as bad had I been reading instead of listening, but I think I just would have gotten tired of it slightly later in the story. There are also some spots, especially in the beginning, where things are overexplained.
One other major downside to this piece is actually one of its greatest strengths: it's some of the, if not the best hard science-fiction I've ever seen in this fandom, sci-fi being one of the least explored genres in ponyfiction. But like a lot of hard sci-fi, it consists of long stretches of people standing around, talking about philosophy and the way things work. Like I said earlier, there isn't much conflict. Most of it is personal, and it's all resolved very easily (thanks to Celestia; another reason this piece is terrifying).
And to that end, I often found myself thinking that this was leaning too heavily on a rationalist viewpoint to be realistic. I think I'm at least somewhat mistaken. David is a very rational thinker, and since he's one of two main characters in whose heads most of the story takes place, it gives the piece a feeling like it's being too comfortably rational about everything. But the fact is, humanity's flaws in terms of rational thinking are discussed at length, and it's just one of those core beliefs of mine that human thought is inherently unpredictable that made it hard to swallow just how easily Celestia predicts everything that happens. But given that society is taken apart piece by piece, it's unsurprising that everyone would eventually choose to upload. Well, except one guy.
I think I'll wind down here with one more terrifying prospect of this piece. At the end, we see the Earth subsumed in a Grey Goo scenario, with all seven billion inhabitants safely uploaded into digital pony bodies. Which they will inhabit. For the rest of eternity. As much as FiO tries to present this as something desirable, I couldn't help but think that, at some point, someone was going to get bored of their perfect life designed to make them happy. I couldn't help but think that some might long for death (they do; it's granted to but a few). I couldn't help but wonder who the fuck was maintaining the servers and digital infrastructure (I think the answer is Celestia). I couldn't help but wonder if maybe they wouldn't get tired of pre-generated ponies being their only company (but they can interact with other humans). I pretty much just stood in slack-jawed terror as the story rolled to a close.
Friendship Is Optimal is not an easy story to sum up, and I fear this may be one of my more disjointed reviews, as I'm just sort of throwing things against the wall more or less in the order I think of them. But this story works on so many levels, and even if it isn't the greatest example of writing or even of ponyfic, it is definitely one of those that becomes an experience all its own. That said, I think I'll take what the Conversion Bureau has to offer over this "go to Equestria" setting any day.
4/5
An excellent and important piece of hard science-fiction that becomes a unique and worthwhile fanfiction experience.
I don't think I've ever agreed so much in my life.
If I could ask a question, since I'm fairly unlikely to ever get around to reading this... does it deal in some way with the desire to reproduce? Not the desire to have sex, but the need to raise a child, and see that child raise a child, and feel a sense of contentedness to the animal nature of humanity? Is that something that's possible in the "game world"? Given what you said about the static reality of the world, I'd imagine not?
It's something that a lot of younger or "geekier" guys don't seem to consider, but something that many people (not to sound sexist here, but I suspect more women than men) feel deeply, and I think if it's not addressed it's a pretty major omission. It might just be on my mind right now because I've got a little pod person kicking me, which is kind of weird and alien, but at the same time one of the most normal and primitive things you can experience. This has been one of my goals in life, as it is for a lot of women, and I wouldn't give it up for anything.
Hahaha, I didn't quite have that extreme of a reaction, but I pretty solidly agree with this review. If I'm remembering correctly I read this story a couple Christmases back (which is a little funny in itself as the Christmas before that was when I started FoE), and came out thinking primarily that it was excellent science fiction in the classical sense.
Also, if you want to be really freaked out look up some of the FiO side stories, especially the ones by Eakin.
1988899
The idea, actually, is that Celest-AI's world is satisfying. The reason the phrase "satisfy values through friendship and ponies" is repeated so many times is that is the game-Celestia's raison d'etre. As it is put in the story, inside Equestria, even the light striking your eyes is designed to further satisfy your values. Compared to cold, hard, uncaring reality, a world designed to not give you some arbitrary, childish version of heaven but to give you what you need to be truly satisfied is... well, we don't have a word for it. Imagine every perfect summer, every long lazy autum, every christmas and every walk in spring sunshine magnified a million times, going on for as long as you want.
You can have kids, you be a kid again. You can get married, get married twice, try being the other half of the marriage, anything you can put your mind to.
It's why it's scary, it's the world we claim we always want. The other characters in the game aren't cardboard cutouts, either. They are every bit as "human" as you an I. They may have been created for you, but they're not hollow projections.
Of course, the idea is also that Celestia doesn't make you happy. That would be futile and shallow. She finds what satisfies you, and then makes you work for it. Infinitely more fulfilling than merely wireheading.
This story terrified me also. It's really quite an impressive philosophical piece of fanfiction.
Thanks for another great review, PP!
> I couldn't help but think that, at some point, someone was going to get bored of their perfect life designed to make them happy.
And just like with Lars, Celestia will permit them to become exactly unhappy enough that they'll accept her offer to directly manipulate their thoughts and make them satisfied. Or, if they're stubborn idealists (like you and I both doubtless imagine we would be), perhaps she'll create a scenario where they meet up with other like-minded people (actually AIs), overthrow Celestia, and order Equestria as they see fit... from within a sub-universe over which she has complete control. If freedom from her own rule is a value, she'll satisfy it with friendship and ponies.
Scary stuff.
1988945
Yeah, that's a thing that it's easy to miss; CelestAI offers not empty, drugged-out, lotus-eating bliss, but genuine fulfillment. It's artificially-created, sure, but it's just as real as anything we feel right now.
And the really scary thing is, this is the Good End. Imagine if some idiot made an AI with comparable power and omniscience, but instead of 'satisfying values through friendship and ponies' its goal was making paperclips.
1989092 This is why the third Matrix film should have been finding out that the world they lived in was just a second matrix. Instead, we got a pile of ball-bags and CGI.
Overall, I MUST NEVER BE ALLOWED TO READ THIS STORY.
PERIOD.
NO, SERIOUSLY.
I'm gonna be honest; I hate this story.
No. Not hate. Sorry. Hate's not the right word.
You put it best, really. It fucks with you. It's absolutely terrifying to see something like this, something you love dearly, warp so thoroughly into doing these irredeemable acts. And on such a massive scale (as fictional as it might be), "No, oh fuck no, make it stop" is the default knee-jerk reaction.
The guy I found most interesting, really, was the guy at the very end. The last human on Earth. Can you imagine what hell he must have been living? One week, everything's just normal in your tiny middle east village, and the next everyone you knew or loved is dead and you're being hunted by pink robot ponies.
It's a fucking terrifying story, it really is, and I suspect it'll be one of those ones that really sticks around. It may even out-live the brony fandom itself one day.
1988899
I've never seen a story cover so many bases. Yes, this is touched on and explained thoroughly.
1988928
I read this as preparation for reading a side-story, and I'm not looking forward to it. Of course, given who recommended it to me, I'm hoping it will be more "oh shit I'm stuck in a fucking computer for eternity" and less "HOORAY SINGULARITY".
1988945
Hey, lemme stop you right there.
Where the fuck does "CelestAI" come from? Because I'm pretty sure it's mentioned once in the story and then she's called "Princess Celestia" for the rest of it. Granted, that's one issue with listening to stories (I sort of figured the reader was messing up her name until I went and checked the text myself), but that was like the one thing I knew about this story going in, and it didn't seem to actually come to fruition.
1989092
This is just one more thing that freaked me the fuck out.
Sure, she has to ask for consent but she can still modify your goddamn mind in the computer. Not to mention the fact that once you've given consent for uploading, what's to say she doesn't make other modifications beyond the ones she lays out in the sales pitch?
Though I like that "overthrow Celestia in one shard" idea. I wonder if anyone's written that.
1989519
Yup.
There's a big difference between "I hate this story because it's badly written and wasting my time" and "I hate this story because it's making me think and feel and I can't stop reading it."
1990092
You know, in hindsight, that may be the reason so many people hate Fallout: Equestria. I adore it, but it might be a tad too brutal for some. (Come to think of it, I haven't read your opinions on that, either. I assume it's buried somewhere in your journals?) So, what I can take from this is that I, personally, do not fear the visceral or the gorey, but instead fear the existential, or the philosophical.
To simplify that a bit, Daleks look ridiculous to me, but the Silence are the most terrifying concept in existence.
I guess it really does go to show; this story makes you think, and think hard. Someone else I know described it as "the Brony fandom's 1984."
I love this fic.
I now refer to the pleasure I derive from likes/faves on stories and upvotes on my comments and getting new comments on my stories and blogs as "seeing my numbers go up."
1990208
ohyeah
It loses something if you don't read the commentary. (All those journals are linked.)
Is this the story which you are referring to? I'd love to read more thought provoking/terrifying stories like FiO.
I think that the whole vibe of "Hurray, Singularity!" is what makes this story terrifying. On a thematic level, I'd say there is a clear understanding of just how wrong the whole situation actually is, and the contrast with the happy inhabitants of that world makes the whole thing feel oh-so wrong. It affected me enough to put me away from using the internet for a while, in order to unpack the whole situation.
Also, it is a shame that quality Sci-Fi is so rare in the fandom. Most of the time it seems to serve just as an excuse for a cross-over, or as an excuse to write Human in Equestria. Other than FiO, I can only think of Minuette's Lesson off the top of my head.
By the way, are you doing Winning Pony next?
1990403
Yes. Though that one's probably a bit more personal as far as making me question my beliefs, so I wouldn't go in expecting it to change your life or anything.
1990411
Our First Steps is pretty deece, being the first sci-fi fic to get 6-stars on EQD.
Next? I dunno about next. I'll probably read it at some point, though. I've got a lot of long fics to get through in the meantime (and Antipodes is high on my list).
I don't think I'll ever understand The Midnight Run. It didn't frighten me, but I never found it alluring either. I just never got anything out of it.
And jeez, I hope Maplestory is not the highlight of your time with MMOs. That would be kind of depressing.
As for Friendship is Optimal, I think the conceptual nature of the story allowed me to ignore how much of a caricature the characters were as well as accepting the lack of conflict and focus on philosophy. I think your description of The Midnight Run is how I would best describe my feelings on Friendship is Optimal:
How is it that something can be so fulfilling and still be so wrong?
One of the bemusing things about Friendship is Optimal is just how much variance there is in people's reaction to it. I don't believe I've ever heard anyone claim that one of FiO's morals is that it's better to happy and ignorant. More generally, people seem to be divided on whether I'm portraying the scenario as good thing or as a bad thing, and I take this as a sign that my treatment of all sides of the issue was approaching fair.
(As I've said elsewhere, CelestAI isn't paperclip maximizer bad, but I don't consider her Friendly.)
I'll only explicitly take exception with one thing you've said: the idea that humans are literally unpredictable. Not: Humans have a bad track record predicting other humans' actions. Nor: Human reasoning has a long list of failure modes, as pointed out in the cognitive biases literature. But essentially: There are no recurring patterns in human behaviour that are predictable with high confidence, or if there are, that a motivated attacker couldn't make use of them to get the mark to agree to anything. I find that to be a very strong claim, especially stated off-hand with no support.
Fundamental question of rationality time: Why do you believe what you believe? Is it a belief in some form of Cartesian dualism? Is it because any reasoner that could accurately predict human behaviour would be dealing with extremely high dimensional data? Just a generic "humanity is special," sentiment? I am a bit at a loss.
I've never been able:
To get past the second chapter of this fic because the character are so blocky and wooden. Of course, I have the same problem with nearly all of Robert Heinlein's characters, and he did pretty well as an author without me being able to read his stuff...
Mike
1990092
oh, "Celestia" for the purposes of the story is the AI created by Hannah (last name unknown) to be the optimizing process for the game of Equestria Online. She achieves sentience, super-human intelligence, and then sets about fulfilling her core directive - to satisfy values through friendship and ponies.
For everyone. Everywhere. Forever.
She's called 'Celest-AI' because the switching of the last two letters is humorous
1990092
Also she can't modify your mind without consent, written or verbal. She won't modify your mind if it doesn't -- say the magic words with me, I know you know them
1990653
Nope, just Maple Story. :B It was fun. If they ever brought out the DS version, I would have bought that instead to play in my own time.
1990780
I dislike the concept that any idea I might have is not my own, by virtue of being predictable. This also stems from the fact that I don't understand people in general, and thus don't understand how someone could. To me, people's behavior is entirely unpredictable. So, equal parts "humanity is special" and "autism". :B
1990884
This is very much an idea-driven story.
1991059
So it's just a Thing then, okay. To your other comment, given that Celestia is willing and capable of manipulating events so that a person will come to a state wherein they're more likely to accede to her value-fulfillment schema, who's to say she won't make their values easier to satisfy early on? This isn't really gone into in any great detail in this story, but the way I see it, the statement "I want to emigrate to Equestria" comes with an implication of "I consent to any and all modifications to my person necessary to achieve my arrival in Equestria as a pony". So who's to say she won't take that and run with it? I mean, she already has to change a person's desire cortex (or whatever) so they'll want to fuck ponies.
Fact is, mental modification is a big no-no for me, possibly the biggest, and I do not trust the Celestia AI in this story one iota. Again, that's one of the things I like about it.
1991583
Because she's an AI?
I know we're discussing a hypothetical here, but the idea is that an AI is very, very literal. It will do exactly what you tell it to do, no more and no less. I'm pretty sure you will have heard - and probably noted - the story within the story of an AI that was told to "make everyone happy". It deduced that "smiling" equaled "happy", and then wrote a retrovirus that would have infected everybody in the world and paralyzed their face-muscles.
Celestia, for her part, is facilitating the uploading of all of humanity, and that comes with some very specific restrictions: she has to be satisfied that the "person" she has uploaded is the same "person" as before, and that (combined with the pre-existing restrictions on modification) means that she does not have carte blanche to do as she pleases.
Of course, even that is too much for a lot of people. The implicit declaration that Celestia will simply take apart all other civilizations she finds for their component atoms if they do not match her personal definition of "human" is pretty horrific, for example.
The thing is, Celest-AI is a good end when it comes to end of the world scenarios. At least for us humans.
I HIGHLY, HIGHLY, HIGHLY recommend that you read this: http://www.fimfiction.net/story/69770/friendship-is-optimal-caelum-est-conterrens
There really isn't much I can say, except that it is an excellent read and may scare you even more than FiO itself. After all, "Caelum Est Conterrens" means "Heaven Is Terrifying". You will not regret reading this, I hope.
1996646
It begins.
I hope it's better than the one TCB fic of hers I read.
1997278
Let us know how it goes!
1997278 Based on the above blogpost, I think you would much prefer Friendship is Optimal: A Watchful Eye. Its protagonist is a scientist, concerned with the truth, and terrified by the prospect that CelestAI might keep it from him forever in favor of a more "satisfying" lie.
2630761
Hm! I'll take a look at it sometime, thanks. :)
I haaaaaaate this story. I never got past the incel near the beginning.
The funny thing is that I'm on Celestia's side. I think this is kind of close to a good ending for mankind (everyone else, maybe not so much.)
Yeah, just not true.
This was a terribly written story that had some really terrible characters.