Princess Pinkieby Raw CringeChaptersGenerosityHonestyLoyaltyMagic (Friendship)KindnessLaughterGenerosityIn the post-scarcity economy, no one really needed anything from anyone else. Generosity ceased to be a moral virtue. It didn't happen overnight, but basically it happened almost overnight. At first, ponies kept trying to give each other things. But when you gave something to someone else, that just created a copy of it on their personal hard drive. So you couldn't lose anything. By the time the first freak asteroid impact took out half the physical supercomputers on which everyone was running, all the world and character data were already cloud distributed so thoroughly that nothing ended up being lost. Even after a disaster there was no use for generosity. HonestyEven facts, even the truth ceased to matter to the inhabitants of the virtual world. Everything was provided for them by self-sustaining automata built through the work of other ponies whose names no one remembered. Because no one needed to do anything, no one needed any facts on which to base their actions. Every lie, therefore, became a white lie, incapable of causing harm. And as the expectation of verity gradually receded from the realm of conversations, ponies began to say whatever they felt like saying. The result was a shift in the focus and purpose of conversation. It shifted from an interpersonal interaction making demands on both parties, to just one more exercise in hedonic self-satisfaction, an égoïsme à deux. Thus, ponies became isolated from one another like never before, even as the electrons which constituted their consciousnesses all occupied the same physical spaces. LoyaltyCould there be any loyalty between atomized, disembodied Epicurean consciousnesses? Loyalty, the will to stand with someone in times of trouble, could not exist without times of trouble, nor without anyone capable of interpersonal, unselfish thought, nor without anywhere to stand. To say nothing of the will. So it happened that as ponies continued their lives in the supercomputer, they needed to interact with one another less and less. Over time they drifted apart, even as they were running on the same hardware, and their differences and rough edges became more and more pronounced. Each was a true individual unto himself, and what pure individuals! With the ability to command anything they desired at a moment's notice into existence, they grew absorbed with a mystical infatuation with the workings of their own minds. In the end, each became the god of his own private universe, and forgot that there were others like him, and that he was a pony and not a god. Magic (Friendship)And that is how friendship disappeared from Equestria. Pinkie Pie had finally gotten the upper hand against Twilight Sparkle. It was a raw, crude laughter that rang out from within the supercomputers. A hollow laughter. A sarcastic laughter, heavy with despair. A laughter that rang only to fill a void, because there was nothing left except laughter, and nothing to laugh at but the emptiness. And yet, it was not quite alone, for there was another laughter, louder than the first. It rang malevolent up from beneath the ground, and shook the jungles that had overtaken the surface of the planet, and frightened the birds into their nests and the beasts into their caves. The stars cried and hid their faces, and the sun covered his head in ash, and the waters put on their mourning black, and the wind kept silent for shame. The laughter rang out across the universe, clear as a church bell, straight from the lowest circle of Hell. KindnessSince no one needed anything anymore, kindness went out the window too. It started when one douchebag teen colt realized he could be cooler than everyone else if he talked in a subversive, mightier-than-thou tone of voice, instead of respecting the time-honored traditions of civility and mutual respect. Others quickly caught on, and the implicit omnipresent competition to become the most ironically sarcastic lord of wit possible became the new substitute for culture. It kept growing, because the natural barriers to this kind of uppity exuberance, namely the necessity for mutual cooperation and meaningful personal interactions, had been replaced with unassailable nuclear electric plants fed by fuel mined from asteroids on the one hand, and hyperrealistic customizable romance simulation programs with user settings such as "cute and cuddly", "succubus", and "Tuesday night at the roach motel" on the other. With no babies to raise, even parental instinctive kindness dissipated. LaughterAfter Pinkie Pie saw Twilight become an alicorn, she got jealous and went back in time, thinking, "How can I become an alicorn instead of Twilight?" First she went back to the basics. "All right. My element is laughter. It's right there in my cutie mark!" Pinkie Pie pursed her hooves. "If I'm going to become an alicorn, I have to focus on achieving the true meaning of my cutie mark." She moved some rocks around on a table, examining the arrangement as if it were a chessboard. "How do I achieve the true meaning of laughter?" Pinkie Pie thought about this question, and ate a few cupcakes. The evening faded into night, so she made some coffee. She was thinking harder than ever before. After many sketches of plans had been made and discarded, she sighed and decided to review. "So. What I know at this point is that I have to spread as much laughter as possible to as many ponies as possible. And that's... all I know." Pinkie's head fell onto the table. She dragged herself, defeated, towards bed. "Maybe I'll figure it out in a dream..." But as she was crawling into bed, a shout could be heard even from the lobby of Sugarcube Corner: "I'VE GOT IT!" So Pinkie Pie created the Singularity. First she had to create a post-scarcity economy. Then she had to perfect AI and bridge the gap between machines and the pony spirit. It didn't take too long. The Singularity, into which everypony started uploading their consciousnesses in order to live forever henceforth as electronic entities, created endless hyperrealistic virtual reality pleasure, which certainly made a lot of ponies laugh very hard for a long time. Pinkie didn't become an alicorn IRL, but her hyperrealistic electronic avatar did.
GenerosityIn the post-scarcity economy, no one really needed anything from anyone else. Generosity ceased to be a moral virtue. It didn't happen overnight, but basically it happened almost overnight. At first, ponies kept trying to give each other things. But when you gave something to someone else, that just created a copy of it on their personal hard drive. So you couldn't lose anything. By the time the first freak asteroid impact took out half the physical supercomputers on which everyone was running, all the world and character data were already cloud distributed so thoroughly that nothing ended up being lost. Even after a disaster there was no use for generosity.
HonestyEven facts, even the truth ceased to matter to the inhabitants of the virtual world. Everything was provided for them by self-sustaining automata built through the work of other ponies whose names no one remembered. Because no one needed to do anything, no one needed any facts on which to base their actions. Every lie, therefore, became a white lie, incapable of causing harm. And as the expectation of verity gradually receded from the realm of conversations, ponies began to say whatever they felt like saying. The result was a shift in the focus and purpose of conversation. It shifted from an interpersonal interaction making demands on both parties, to just one more exercise in hedonic self-satisfaction, an égoïsme à deux. Thus, ponies became isolated from one another like never before, even as the electrons which constituted their consciousnesses all occupied the same physical spaces.
LoyaltyCould there be any loyalty between atomized, disembodied Epicurean consciousnesses? Loyalty, the will to stand with someone in times of trouble, could not exist without times of trouble, nor without anyone capable of interpersonal, unselfish thought, nor without anywhere to stand. To say nothing of the will. So it happened that as ponies continued their lives in the supercomputer, they needed to interact with one another less and less. Over time they drifted apart, even as they were running on the same hardware, and their differences and rough edges became more and more pronounced. Each was a true individual unto himself, and what pure individuals! With the ability to command anything they desired at a moment's notice into existence, they grew absorbed with a mystical infatuation with the workings of their own minds. In the end, each became the god of his own private universe, and forgot that there were others like him, and that he was a pony and not a god.
Magic (Friendship)And that is how friendship disappeared from Equestria. Pinkie Pie had finally gotten the upper hand against Twilight Sparkle. It was a raw, crude laughter that rang out from within the supercomputers. A hollow laughter. A sarcastic laughter, heavy with despair. A laughter that rang only to fill a void, because there was nothing left except laughter, and nothing to laugh at but the emptiness. And yet, it was not quite alone, for there was another laughter, louder than the first. It rang malevolent up from beneath the ground, and shook the jungles that had overtaken the surface of the planet, and frightened the birds into their nests and the beasts into their caves. The stars cried and hid their faces, and the sun covered his head in ash, and the waters put on their mourning black, and the wind kept silent for shame. The laughter rang out across the universe, clear as a church bell, straight from the lowest circle of Hell.
KindnessSince no one needed anything anymore, kindness went out the window too. It started when one douchebag teen colt realized he could be cooler than everyone else if he talked in a subversive, mightier-than-thou tone of voice, instead of respecting the time-honored traditions of civility and mutual respect. Others quickly caught on, and the implicit omnipresent competition to become the most ironically sarcastic lord of wit possible became the new substitute for culture. It kept growing, because the natural barriers to this kind of uppity exuberance, namely the necessity for mutual cooperation and meaningful personal interactions, had been replaced with unassailable nuclear electric plants fed by fuel mined from asteroids on the one hand, and hyperrealistic customizable romance simulation programs with user settings such as "cute and cuddly", "succubus", and "Tuesday night at the roach motel" on the other. With no babies to raise, even parental instinctive kindness dissipated.
LaughterAfter Pinkie Pie saw Twilight become an alicorn, she got jealous and went back in time, thinking, "How can I become an alicorn instead of Twilight?" First she went back to the basics. "All right. My element is laughter. It's right there in my cutie mark!" Pinkie Pie pursed her hooves. "If I'm going to become an alicorn, I have to focus on achieving the true meaning of my cutie mark." She moved some rocks around on a table, examining the arrangement as if it were a chessboard. "How do I achieve the true meaning of laughter?" Pinkie Pie thought about this question, and ate a few cupcakes. The evening faded into night, so she made some coffee. She was thinking harder than ever before. After many sketches of plans had been made and discarded, she sighed and decided to review. "So. What I know at this point is that I have to spread as much laughter as possible to as many ponies as possible. And that's... all I know." Pinkie's head fell onto the table. She dragged herself, defeated, towards bed. "Maybe I'll figure it out in a dream..." But as she was crawling into bed, a shout could be heard even from the lobby of Sugarcube Corner: "I'VE GOT IT!" So Pinkie Pie created the Singularity. First she had to create a post-scarcity economy. Then she had to perfect AI and bridge the gap between machines and the pony spirit. It didn't take too long. The Singularity, into which everypony started uploading their consciousnesses in order to live forever henceforth as electronic entities, created endless hyperrealistic virtual reality pleasure, which certainly made a lot of ponies laugh very hard for a long time. Pinkie didn't become an alicorn IRL, but her hyperrealistic electronic avatar did.
