
The Death of Richard Dawkins: A short story by Steve Yegge - mstevens
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/05/programmers-view-of-universe-part-3.html
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mstevens
If anyone has worked out what his point is, please let us know.

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lesbianmonad
It is the Christ story darkly recast as a parable of mankind's urge towards
hierarchy and domination, realized through the fetishes of capitalism,
religion, and technocracy.

The poor and dispossessed brothers represent mankind's thirst for freedom, for
opposition and resistance. They symbolically kill Darwin, the story's central
power figure and the main avatar of the hegemonic singularity. Yet they do so
in an attempt to erase the boundaries between themselves and that oppressive
structure. Darwin, whose domination of humanity has rendered him godlike,
grants them their wish and transforms them into the insipid tourist children
they wish to become. In the end, their struggle for justice and self-
determination has come to nothing, and they go, indistinguishable from the
other siblings, for ice cream.

You should also consider its similarity to the 1975 short story 'Let's go to
Golgotha'

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arakyd
Well, lesbianmonad, that's an interesting take I guess, but it's even more
obscure than the story itself. I can't figure out whether you actually
intended to refer to Charles Darwin or whether you were just smoking too much
weed to remember the name of the main character.

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rw
Steve, please continue blogging. Nobody's figured it out yet, or if they have,
we probably have few ways to confirm their correctness.

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jbrun
Why does this have 23 points?

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adbachman
Because it's a short bit of worth-reading hard sci-fi written by someone known
to much of the HN community who's not known for writing engaging fiction, but
clearly capable of it.

So, it's interesting on few levels, but probably divisive in terms of audience
(i.e., you're either going to like it or hate it).

The story is part of a bigger narrative, so it's here because it's part of the
thread he's been tugging on for a few months. Feel free to ignore.

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nopassrecover
Anyone able to help with these questions:

What are external events?

What is going on with Dawkins being out-of-body and able to influence the
world?

How did Dawkins get from the date of his death to a simulation in the future?
Is it because he was at the moment they've copied in their time bubble?

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csbartus
I think External Event is What We Are All Afraid Of: when the system must be
rebooted, softly or hardly.

The cache and temp data is lost, the heavily imprinted / written data
persists, and the function remains the same but probably some bugs fixed.

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twism
I'm willing to bet that the "neat programming language" he's referring to is
clojure.

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rw
More likely, the "programming language" is going to be about programming the
universe. Here's some inspiration:

 _And then there's the weirdness beyond M31: According to the more
conservative cosmologists, an alien superpower – maybe a collective of
Kardashev Type Three galaxy-spanning civilizations – is running a timing
channel attack on the computational ultrastructure of space-time itself,
trying to break through to whatever's underneath._

\- "Accelerando" by Charlie Stross

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tocomment
I think there was a South Park episode on this ..

