civilization is literally a living being and sees you as a part of it's body. if you do not pay it for a space to live in via rent or taxes you're restricted from growing things building things, reproduction (technically you can but it will snatch the body you've created for it to integrate into itself), ect. if you do not play a part in it's metabolic cycle as it devours the earth, you are denied everything you're likely to want. even once you manage to achieve this there's a thousand other mechanisms to make sure you're feeding into it's metabolism, and a thousand more for trying to capture any kids you have. it knows people are receptive to incentives and it knows how to create them and if you or your kid dont follow incentives in a predictable way they can diagnose you with a disorder and kidnap you. 90% of people are very consciously in favor of this state of affairs and those that arent are too confused about what precisely the issue is and end up wishing for a world almost exactly the same as what currently exists. the bots arent waking up. they're comfortable, and when they become uncomfortable they know how to cozy up to whatever beast can offer them protection in exchange for their labour and maybe in that process they call for things that make them feel freer like democracy or civil rights. the only liberation to be found is that in disentangling yourself from the beast and learning to live in the dangerous new ecosystem it dominates. if enough people do escape, over time i think it's very likely that there could be good reason to consider them a fundamentally different species because they're evolving in drastically different environments and if this occurs when leviathan is weakened from the natural disasters it creates it's possible that these groups could grow large enough to render an area effectively ungovernable which leads to a whole new world of possibilities, though i think they're more likely going to get exterminated by disease or bureaucracy
@ZiaNitori we are in deep agreement with much of what you've said here.
i think an important question for those like us will be "how do we create powers that last beyond us without being so easily subject to reintegration with civilization"
i've been giving great consideration to the anti-legibilizing power of old divinities.
@exiliaex i think there's a lot of power in storytelling in both helping find and empower those who wish to exit the beast and in helping, especially younger people, learn how to avoid it's clutches which is part of why i want to get into it so much more. i think one of the first places i want to start looking is native american stories because i have vague memories of them being some of the only obviously moralistic stories that i actually enjoyed that aspect of. i also think in general that working with whatever indigenous communities remain is probably the best place to start (though i know almost nothing about these communities at any real depth and could just be talking out of my ass). i look at old practices of forest management and other stuff and it's literally just a more sophisticated view of ecosystems and agriculture than 99% of people who goes to school for ecology and agricultural science
@ZiaNitori a lot of what i mean isn't actually the storytelling aspect but actually the way that different divinities treated different places of "worship" and the different activities made possible by them without being able to be integrated by the state.