Better late than never

[Rynn]

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.

That's not inevitable and whatever article you've read that modosophont societies don't last I'd like to see. Either it's out of date or maybe you're misreading it and what it really means is that modosophont nations aren't stable over long periods, instead they change, fragment, merge etc.

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.

Sephirotic modosophonts have vastly more say over their local politics than any society in existence IRL. The archai might have set the limits of law and sure there's nothing modos could do to change that but the democratic systems they have for local governance are miles ahead of real life in terms of fairness and effectiveness,

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.

Freedom from coercion is impossible. There will always be some level of it. I understand the fear in the abstract that there's nothing you can do, but that's true of so many things in the universe that I really find it a hard position to empathise with.

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.

Given that I wrote Boh again I think you're massively misunderstanding the effort the sephirotics take. It's absolutely, completely trivial. The effort the archai expend maintaining the sephirotics is even less significant than one molecule of ATP's worth of energy in your body. Whether or not the archai really care is completely irrelevant, given it's impossible to know what their motivations really are you can only go by what they do. And Boh seeming kind is no more indicative of Boh's internal state than the smiling paperclip is for microsoft word. And finally the sephirotics are not the entire setting. They aren't even a majority. There are vast, alien, hyperturing societies where the less-than-one-atp-molecule worth of energy isn't expended to take care of modos.

Feels like we're having this conversation three times a week lately with the same points stated over and over.