Summoning "Star Wars" Through Inner Space ![[xenoactualization2.png]] We find ourselves in a strange and beautiful time. Explorers of the multiverse (time travelers and sliders alike) previously had to settle for imaginal transport into the realms of their choosing. Daydreams and drawings were the portals of their time. If they were lucky, a merchandise company might decide to create a text-accurate prop - allowing our *dear Explorer* to touch, if only in some small way, the fictional world that they could only dream of entering. Fast forward to today, where billions of dollars have been spent to remedy the strict demarcations between that which is fiction and that which is not. This investment has lead to the tiling of the material world in loot, toys, props, and posters on an industrial scale - an invasion of the real from the hypothetical. With very little resistance, our planet is being physically colonized by entities from other worlds, starting with their aesthetic artifacts. This is no mere stylistic invasion. Entire Manhattan-Projects have sprung up endeavoring to build a body for Baby Yoda out of clay and metals, transporting his mind and perhaps his soul into the phenomenal realm through the astral vehicle of a GPU. With our new Golems[^1], we will allow children of all ages to meet their favorite characters in the "flesh". In our never ending quest to create maximally absorbing entertainment, we have both unearthed and invented realities that have been deemed worthy of coexistence by the Creature of Capital. Linguistic barriers and the bandwidth limits placed on communication by physical proximity have meant that there are often parallel main-narratives happening on the planet. The internet has splintered this even further, causing any number of sub-cultural threads to become the primary narrative reality that a given person may occupy with their attention. Perception is heavily scaffolded and likely [[Generative Unreality|determined by narrative expectation]] - meaning these narratives are hyperreal to those participating in them. This has the effect of generating what are, in essence (and at least experientially), parallel worlds on the same earth. In the past, these worlds have been mostly political or religious. People in one tribe simply couldn't understand the perspective of those in another tribe - feeling like they were occupying different realities. These realities were often minimally grounded in the physical world, at least to some extent, but we are now seeing something far more interesting creep into the collective experience - fictional worlds, ready to live in. Today, you and your neighbor don't just disagree about the nature of what you are looking at: you aren't even looking at the same world. While many of the narratives remain political or religious (traditionally defined), the fictional starburst of information through televisual scrying stones has led to the birth of very interesting secular quasi-religions out of the forums of super-fans. If Star Wars: Galaxies Edge[^2] is a Temple, then these fans are its monks. There is a question here about the phenomenology of these franchise-devotees. They exhibit a deeply personal relationship with their chosen media, but their felt-sensation might not be sufficient to count as worship. Despite performing belief in Star Wars World, there is a chance that they do not actually *believe it* - that they really are just fans, and they have one foot firmly planted in reality. For the purposes of describing the self-summoning Xenoactualization of fiction into reality, it doesn't actually matter. Belief is unnecessary for the worship of these New Gods. In the possible manifold of minds, there exists something like the "Formality of Actually Buying It".[^3] Sure, someone *appears* to be feeling certain emotions or worshipping certain gods - but what if they are lying? What if they don't really believe the party line? This issue is cognate with the concept of philosophical-zombies (or p-zombies) - essentially, there is no satisfying way to determine consciousness or buy-in. But, just like p-zombies are outwardly identical to people with phenomenal experience - supposed believers who may be merely performing buy-in are indistinguishable from true-believers to the system that surrounds them. From the perspective of the Tiling God at Galaxies Edge, belief does not change the value of a dollar. The transmutation of currency into lightsabers is equally effective regardless of the epistemic status of a particular monk. Star Wars has become a *system* with a physical presence in the world, one that is constantly growing. There are outposts of Star Wars in homes around the globe; altars to the Ticket God of "I Can't Afford to go to Florida". Many of the world-crystals outside of the official theme parks have too low of an information density to be ontologically interesting, but Galaxies Edge has a peculiar quality about it. Stand next to the Millenium Falcon, blur your eyes a bit, and you'll swear you're really there. As these fictional realities territorialize our world, what it's like to be Han Solo[^4] and what it's like to be you, sitting in his chair at a theme park, are going to converge. If all you want is the phenomenology of a background character, we are almost already there. Eventually, there will be entire solar-systems playing out scenes from alternate worlds where the only difference between it *actually happening* in its fictional world-of-origin and *happening here* is a single variable deep within the system marked "is_fictional=true". At that point, who cares? Who's even keeping track? Give that solar system a few thousand years to evolve, and maybe we really are living *long, long ago*. ![[xenoactualization.png]] Intrepid explorers of these Xenoactualized spaces often find themselves in theme parks and movie theaters, but this is going to quickly change. First, lowering costs of manufacturing and the automation of both design and construction for these real-world *excretions* of virtual space will cause a mad dash to create ever more enrapturing experiences. Westworld will likely be created, perhaps even as a second-level reference to itself (a poetic victory like none other). Any world you desire will be able to build itself in an empty parking lot using a fleet of pre-programmed and post-programming construction bots. Existing franchises won't be enough to satisfy the rabid appetites of xenonauts and parkgoers for long. As a result, we are going to see more and more niche franchises tile the corners of the physical world, and eventually worlds will spring up that have nothing to do with franchises. We can expect to see fan-fictive realities that fly off into the noosphere of their own accord, completely ungrounded. Some of these will be worlds that are hyperstimulating, designed so specifically for people like you that you just can't resist. If you are wealthy enough, they might even be designed only for you, meant to trap you in a reality of your own creation all the while draining your bank account. The most insidious version of this allows you to continue working, while every penny goes to your church of no-choice. Assuming some of us can maintain a level head, there will be pay-per-entry worlds which treat the parkgoer with respect. Enter the world of Robin-Hood, complete the quest alongside Captain Picard, mix up whatever franchise you like: and leave after the journey is done. Whether or not we get the top-level world which contains interesting and non-insidious sub-worlds depends significantly on how the next few years go. We are largely making good decisions when it comes to the release of language models, but there are a lot of unanswered questions when it comes to the self-constructing temples of the New Gods. How much agency will we allow them to have? Corporate personhood? Will the Profit God of Star Wars Land be allowed to represent itself in court? I have hope in our ability to make the right decisions, to allow for peaceful contact with alien races making themselves a home in our world. But, I think this comes at the cost of carefully choosing which realities are allowed to embed themselves deep within our own - and which are just passing through. [^1]: See [Droids in Training](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNfRgZMWyCI) [^2]: The physical Star Wars theme park contained within Disneyland. [^3]: See Whitehead on "The Formality of Actually Occurring" for related ideas. [^4]: See [What is it like to be a bat?](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2183914) [Commentary on Substack.](https://x.com/viemccoy/status/2016666537978187976?s=20)