Better late than never

[extherian]

And if you wanted to do that, no one would stop you - in fact they'd actively help you. That's an element of the Sephirotics that sometimes seems to throw people for a loop - sophonts are free to do almost anything they please - including rejecting the whole shebang and going somewhere else. In fact the right to 'vote with your feet' is a fundamental one in Terragen civ

It's true, but this is something of a Hobb's choice. Whether you can leave the Archai or not doesn't really matter, since without their protection an Ahuman ISO will inevitably come along and devour your system. Considering that the likes of the Queen of Pain are out there, humans don't have a choice but to be at the mercy of the Archai. If you don't come to the gods, the gods will come to you, so to speak.

If I recall, the Encyclopedia Galactica goes out of its way to emphasise that modosophont run societies never last more than a few centuries without Transapient guidance for this very reason.

Actually most OA citizens would likely claim that they enjoy vastly more freedom and autonomy than you do They enjoy an enormous number of options to explore, up to and including becoming transapients (And perhaps even someday archai) themselves is they want to and are willing to put in the work.

Depends on what it is you consider to be "freedom". The modosophonts themselves have no say at all in the direction that their Sephirotic takes , since these empires aren't democracies and the common person has no influence over their Archai. But they are utterly free from constraints on their mental potential and capacity for self-actualisation.

Personal control over your own destiny has never been greater in Y11K. Collective control over the direction your society takes is gone, no more than gut bacteria can vote on the behaviour of their human host. But someone born into the OA universe wouldn't value something like that anyway.

Just a question to think about - what can you do, that the citizens of the sephirotics cannot? Specifically in terms of freedom and autonomy

We can consume the resources of the Earth as we please, create media and art that appeals to our tastes without a central government memetically consolidating us, and can remain content in the knowledge that a massive god isn't going to suddenly appear from the heavens to control everything we do.

And unlike in Y11k, it is possible both to detect attempts at manipulating your will and resisting said attempts. Russia can spread all the propaganda it likes, but there are many Russians who can see through the KGB's bullshit and continue agitating for change. No one in a Sephirotic empire would even be capable of critiquing their overlords without their consent. This is because despite how he may portray himself, Vladimir Putin is not actually a god.

To go into further detail than this would require me to start thinking about positive freedoms and negative freedoms...present day philosophy would provide more granular detail, but suffice to say that self-actualisation doesn't matter as much to me as freedom from coercion.

Another way to look at this (which is pretty much my view on things) is that existence has no inherent meaning or value or purpose.

In the OA universe, certainly. In the present day, on the other hand, human agency actually matters in the grand scheme of things, which is what I find meaningful in life.

I think the reason I find the benevolence of the gods so difficult to believe is because of how utterly unlike humans they are. They don't have families and friends like we have, or anything even remotely like the human experience. Why would they care for humanity? An AI doesn't need empathy, it wasn't descended from sociable mammals like we are. Sure, they can model our behaviours and predict what we're going to do, but so can a psychopath in real life. That doesn't mean they care.

And it's not as though the gods are merely tolerating the existence of humanity on their vast megastructures. Many OA articles show the S2 and S3 powers going out of their way to help humanity wherever they can. The article on Tribe Luxia describes a message sent from the S3 'Boh' that is 'short and full of kindness', almost as if Boh was just a vastly more intelligent human being that still cared for their bacterial ancestors.

I suppose I find the idea of gods that resemble Bitenic Squid far more likely than ones resembling humans.