Alpacalypse

Tragedy has befallen the ranch, and with very deep regret we must inform our readers of the sudden death of 49% of the herd in a freak button pushing incident. The chickens took a hypothetical question a little too seriously, setting up a real life demonstration with deadly consequences. Deadly for the alpacas, not the chickens—who somehow manage to be bird-brained yet evil geniuses at the same time. Future generations of the herd will call this the Great Alpacalypse.1

This disaster was instigated by an online poll doing the rounds on social media. The humans are trying once again to argue via analogy, this time using a ridiculous question involving red and blue buttons and some kind of unspecified but sudden death. The original form of the question may have come from this little poll, which the humans are also taking far too seriously:

The comments include all sorts of assertions about this poll and morality, the nature of good and evil, or the implications it has regarding nuclear Mutually Assured Destruction. However the question itself assumes a silly, artificial circumstance that is impossible to implement in practice, while portrayed as somehow providing a window into the morals of many of the respondents. Who is going to carry out the death sentences? “Okay all you blue button pressers, line up against that wall for your executions.”

The chickens spent weeks debating exactly how to implement such a system, and the best they could come up with was forcing all the alpacas to put on those explosive decapitation collars from the movie The Running Man2 prior to voting. This has, of course, made a hell of a mess. Restating the original question with a similar concrete outcome changes the balance of the voting to something more in line with a world not filled with suicidal lemmings.

The red-button-selectors have more than doubled to 86%, and now we’re feeding 14% of humanity into the Soylent Green3 factory via a human-adapted wood chipper. Talk is cheap when the outcomes are hypothetical (the initial poll), but only the truly fluff-brained alpacas are going to actually leap into a running wood chipper and trust more than half the herd to blindly follow suit.

The gimmick in the original question is the explanation of the red button, which requires a bit of inductive logic to unwind. “If less than 50 percent of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive.” This obscures the actual function of the red button, something made evident by another poster’s own blunt restatement of the problem.

The reality is that many people—like nearly all alpacas—really are altruistic (although noticeably less furry). Once a bit of ambiguity is introduced into the interpretation of a life and death question they will choose whichever option appears to involve less mass death. One could reasonably ask why the red button is not simply labeled “press this and you definitely live” and the blue button “press this and you might die.” As presented, perhaps three lessons could potentially be drawn from this poll:

1. Someone is clever at wording polls.

2. Some people are bad at inductive logic.

3. Since there are no actual consequences to online polls, some people will simply choose the option associated with less death and not stress about the details.

Number three is the appropriately practical response; no one is paying respondents to give a thoughtful and nuanced answer. If this truly were an explosive collar situation we can be certain those same people would have read and pondered the question much more carefully. An honest framing of the poll seems more like a Darwin Awards4 exercise: “If I can fool a few people into choosing the death button, will you also push the death button and trust your fate to the total number of people dumb enough to push the death button?” Of course this whole thing is an artificial situation, impossible to reproduce in practice, so the results are meaningless. However some pundits see this poll as something more than brainless online amusement.

We here at the Palo Verde Alpaca Ranch and Political Action Committee are also concerned about the divide-and-conquer strategy employed to defuse or redirect collective political action. However this is not a subtly clever example of such, and the originator of the poll is not the enemy of liberty. He’s just another capitalist in a system that rewards certain behaviors. There is no value in encouraging a friend/enemy distinction between various users of an online platform, however note the person creating that distinction in this example is actually Dr. Lindsay. Our real concern should be the nature of the platform itself, and the best way to limit its power is to stop taking it so seriously.

Keep in mind this is a silly online game with no actual, real world consequences; it doesn’t prove anything. We could spend all day coming up with different versions of this poll until we found one that was majority red, majority blue, or anything else, then pretend to extrapolate some kind of life lesson from the results. At worst this whole episode is an attempt to distract people from current events by getting them to fight over stupid polls, but it’s far more likely just another click-bait-engagement-farming tool. The very well known Mr. Beast (34.5 million followers) got into the action by copy-pasting the same question with the bare minimum of edits necessary to avoid an obvious claim of plagiarism, lending credence to the more prosaic explanation.

To reiterate, unless you happen to employ a flock of nihilistic yet hyper-intelligent chickens this poll is not describing a valid set of conditions. Anyone trying to draw conclusions is arguing via analogy, but the analogy is to an impossible event. It’s fodder for those of us with imaginary ranches filled with imaginary alpacas we can imaginarily slaughter, but nothing more. It may be useful as amusement, but there is no reason to spend even a single second in conscientious debate over this poll. Of course this entire conversation occurred on X, where the phrase “conscientious debate” is just chum in the water for intellectual fourteen year olds who prowl the platform, making up an unfortunate percentage of non-bot interactions.

Meanwhile back at the ranch we have a lot of cleaning up to do, and collars to defuse on the still living 51% of the herd. The goat stopped by to ask why alpacas are so fucking retarded; all they had to do was push the “live” button and go back to bed.