No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons

“You want to convince me that SF can change the world?”

I mean, the arguments both for and against fictional dystopias and SF influencing society at large are nonsense. Very few people read anything, even fewer read anything that would make them think, and only a tiny fraction of this negligible minority gets the right message from what they read.

On a more optimistic note, the effects of climate change will soon become disastrous enough to make us stop worrying about privacy and government surveillance and the machines taking over. The Grim Dystopia is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.

I clicked on the link to “The Uninhabitable Earth”, then added it to Pocket to read later. Pocket threw up some suggestions for other, related articles. The first in the list was from the Daily Telegraph (British conservative broadsheet), with the title “No one ever says it, but in many ways global warming will be a good thing” (Bjorn Lomborg, of course).

Maybe this is the next stage for the people currently trying to deny the problem. We’re already being conditioned by quite a lot of bad sci-fi coming out of Fox News and Murdoch’s other ventures (among others): “In a world where capitalism had made everything just wonderful, a band of evil scientists invented a hoax that would trick us into hamstringing the economy …”. They’ve now moved through denial (“It isn’t real”) to minimization (“It won’t be that bad”). Once the reality and seriousness of the problem can’t be denied any longer, maybe the political Pollyannas will switch wholesale to telling us that climate change actually represents not a problem but a Wonderful Opportunity.

“The fruit of that labor was Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future; a number of my friends can be found within its pages, although for some reason I was not approached for a contribution.”

Probably for the same reason Mengele was not approached to contribute to the journal of bioethics, I might think. /s

Your points on optimism vs pessimism and the dangers of complacency in SF are well taken, but I think the problem is that no matter how well intentioned, most people simply start to tune out after a certain point of too much pessimism, nonstop dystopias, and “you are bad and everything you know is wrong” sermonizing. It doesn’t matter that you may be right if nobody reads SF any longer because it becomes just such a fucking bummer.

Understandably you’re protective of your own niche. It would be nice, however, to be able to accept the reality of this and find a middle ground between simple escapism or Zuckerbergian “pay no attention to the the man behind the curtain” pro-tech cheerleading, and cultivated disdain for any SF that doesn’t make you want to kill yourself.

Dystopia is right outside the window. Getting spit-roasted by big nonstop thorny dongs of pessimism in both ends by reality and recreational intake is cognitively taxing at best, and truly physically oppressive for someone like me who’s biologically depressive. Don’t take this the wrong way–Peter Watts is an important part of my recreational intake–but if all SF was Peter Watts, I wouldn’t read it anymore. How many great ideas and important, expansive speculation would I be missing out on then?

The reality is that wonder, discovery, and big expansive ideas and shameless optimism *were* a big part of the science fiction from the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s I read growing up, and to the best of my ability to filter the inevitable nostalgia, I don’t get the same feeling from most contemporary SF. I personally enjoy SF that is content to leave the mundane posturing over societal issues to genres better suited for it, and instead explores the fabric of reality itself. A lot of contemporary pessimistic SF may be more “credible” from certain points of view, but I’m not sure I’d have ever become a fan if that was all there was when I was growing up.

My personal notion of ideal “optimistic” SF would be stuff that calls out and acknowledges the downsides of modern tech, while still making a case for how it might be dealt with and moved beyond. Is it as *likely* as a more pessimistic appraisal of where humans are headed? Probably not. But it keeps me reading, and it keeps me thinking about the things the writer wants me to think about.

“People are shitty animals, everything is horrible, and you’re all going to die” is a true story, but it’s also an old one that everybody learned at a young age. What else have you got?

> Blame them now, and avoid the rush.

Some of us have been blaming you for a decade or so now. I’m not inclined to stop just because it’s going mainstream – I’ll wait until the inevitable over-correction, of course.

> You want to convince me that SF can change the world?

You presuppose a belief in the possibility of convincing you (collective) of anything at all. I’m beginning to wonder if that scepticism (theirs not yours) isn’t at the bottom of some (most?) of our ongoing socio-political problems.

If Amazon were choosing my purchases, it would be just a series of alternative versions of the last thing I bought with some women’s clothing and jewellery thrown in for some reason.

Aidan: I wonder if any of those criticising the dystopian peddlers has taken a moment to look at the very simple way we go about motivating populations in time of war (justified or manufactured) – why, funnily enough we tell them the most fearful stories about what will happen if we don’t all pull together and sacrifice for victory, right now. Those monsters will rape our women, enslave our children and eat our babies.[…]It’s beyond obvious that the only way to motivate and achieve action at a population level is through fear and creating an urgent sense that we must act now, or we perish.

Not really the same thing. War propaganda dehumanizes others and casts the target in a heroic light–a narrative human beings are all too eager, even wired, to gobble up. Pessimistic SF, at least in the minds of the authors, is holding up a mirror, casting the people reading it as the monster (by virtue of being a member of the human race)–a much more difficult sell and one people are inclined to reject, especially if it seems like that’s the only thing on offer.

Pessimistic SF is a vital part of a healthy and varied SF landscape. That landscape becomes less healthy if it starts to skew too far in one direction or another. To far one way, and all you have is toothless, complacent escapism. Too far the other, and the body becomes equally impotent as people start to reject it wholesale and your impact is limited to preaching to the already converted who stick with you because it reinforces their own opinion.

In order to peddle one’s wares, you need to get your foot in the door. If they see you coming with your sackcloth and “the end is nigh” sign, they’re going to lock the door and release the hounds. It doesn’t matter if the end might actually *be* nigh, or if you might actually have some worthwhile insight–you’re going to get rejected because of the resemblance to all the other people currently riding into town on their impossibly high, vaguely skeletal horses, peddling their trite baubles of casual outrage and gloom.

Have you come across the concept of Depressive Realism? I think that when you say clinical depression, you might be referring more to DR. The concept basically stems from the idea that those with mild depression are prone to make more logical/rational judgments. My intuition is that the inverse is also true and that those who are more rational about the nature of the universe and don’t shy away from it are somewhat depressive as a result. The psychotherapist Colin Feltham has written much on the subject and his book, Keeping Ourselves in the Dark (which has been on my to read list for a long time) covers a lot of the issues of self deception and optimism bias that you’ve pointed out here. There is a good interview transcript where he discussed some of this here: http://www.knunst.com/planetzapffe/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Interview-Colin-Feltham-2014.pdf

Crownbacks: Have you come across the concept of Depressive Realism? I think that when you say clinical depression, you might be referring more to DR. The concept basically stems from the idea that those with mild depression are prone to make more logical/rational judgments. My intuition is that the inverse is also true and that those who are more rational about the nature of the universe and don’t shy away from it are somewhat depressive as a result.

Oh yeah. Dr Watts is all about Depressive Realism.

The problem with holding up DR as some sort of superpower of the clinically depressed, is that there is plenty of other evidence suggesting people in depressed states are operating in a mentally diminished capacity. Bi polar creatives do their best work in their upswings, because their brains aren’t functioning at capacity during their depressive episodes. Handel wrote the Messiah in one of his manic phases.

As someone prone to depressive episodes, and who’s going through a particularly rough one right now, I can testify to this. Being depressed is like being hungover all the time, without the previous night of fun. I’m generally a very articulate person, but I have been struggling to get my thoughts out here in a coherent fashion through the fuzz.. It feels like I’ve easily shed about 30 IQ points.

So while people determined to make a pessimistic or nihilistic case about the state of the world like to cite this little tidbit, with the implication that people who refuse to see it that way are dumb or irrational, the choice isn’t that clear. The actual choice is more complicated–less deluded but “dumber” and lacking the ability to solve problems, or deluded but “smarter”, with the potential capacity to actually solve the problems that make life so shitty.

I know which I’d prefer. God, whatever happens to my brain during an up episode, we need to bottle that shit. Capable of going days without sleep, artistic output tripled, notebooks filled with ideas, and the downside is that I’m no longer capable of seeing myself as shitty as I am? Yes please.

***

For whatever it’s worth to you, the fact that I might come to the “correct” conclusions when I’m depressed seems entirely incidental. While you might be much more aggressive in filtering out the more optimistic but irrational interpretations of data that makes normal functioning possible, you’re also highly dismissive of any sound evidence that doesn’t conform to the most negative interpretation as well as the possibility of *new data*.

You could take me out of my current life and drop me in some future utopia where all my problems were solvable, mental functioning could be re-wired at will, all the empirical evidence suggests a high possibility of a rewarding life, and I would *still* be depressed. The fact that the world is empirically shitty, and I am also empirically shitty, just makes it easier for me to make a case I’m determined to make in any event.

Peter Watts: Me personally? Well, I’ve got ruminations on the functional utility of consciousness, and the implications of Darwinian selection in the context of digital ecosystems, and over there I’ve got intelligent clouds and a living membranous Dyson Sphere. And space vampires, if you’re into that.

No, not you personally. Sorry, that was a generic “you” pitched out into the void to some theoretical “you”. I do that all the time. It’s a regrettable defect, and frequently gets me into trouble when opinionating.

I love your space vampires and assorted speculative gee-whizzery. It’s why I show up for a Wattswork. Often I love them in spite of your aggressively pessimistic stances.

But it costs me something to read your books. Which is good…nothing worthwhile is free. Sometimes the price is awfully high, though, and I do fear that it is entirely possible for too many joyless contemporary SF writers to tax their fragile and largely inherited audience out of existence. Optimism and wonder may be dirty words if you want SF “cred” now, but they played a big part in creating that audience in the first place.

I think part of the reason that climate models are consistently too positive over the last 30 years is that climate scientists are unused to dealing with non-linear effects or even imagining the worlds climate as a dynamical system.

A pattern I noticed almost 20 years ago when following climate change is: “We predict this change will happen no sooner than and will proceed at this rate to this extent” And then what happens is that the change occurs sooner, proceeds at a much higher rate and to a far greater extent than predicted.

The follow up was worse, it’s when I realised that the polical/economic/cultural institutions that govern us are incapable of reforming themselves to the extent necessary to stop catastrophe.

So yeah, we’re fucked, it’s going to happen sooner than expected, I’m betting social collapse across the OECD countries by around 2025-30.

I haven’t noticed any boulders rolling toward my house. Instead (perhaps), I continually notice greedy behavioral patterns in folks whose rely on government funds, i.e. money looted from taxpayers.

From the perspective of a skeptical Regular Joe, which is more likely: that i) an invisible force will end life as he knows it in his children’s lifetime, or ii) an army of state-funded scientists who advocate in favor of more taxes and more government control, as their paymasters expect, will bend the truth or outright lie in order to feed a narrative that keeps their gravy train rolling?

Item “ii” seems far more likely to me. Dark politics infects everything when “free money” is involved, not even empiricists are immune.

Plus, there’s a medieval, religio-apocalyptic overtone to the climate change narrative. Most commentators here who favor carbon controls are not climate scientists, have not crunched the data and admit to merely trusting climate scientists at their word.

We know war is the health of the state. People are willing to change their lifestyle during periods of crisis, assuming they believe in the cause. You lament the massive, fascist surveillance state which was justified by bullshit corporate-state crisis propaganda, disillusioning hundreds of thousands of skeptics, then you question why more of the same doom porn isn’t directed toward the real threat, which happens to be invisible and must be taken on faith by 99% of people, so that the royal “we” will be saved. No thanks, Peter. If skepticism of the matter makes me anti-science, then so be it.

Here’s a not-so-invisible crisis: western governments have unfunded liabilities which literally enslave future generations. Unborn generations! This is perhaps the only crisis that overspending governments (oxymoron) actively avoid discussing in PR forums, going so far as to manufacture crises as a distraction–one reason I’m skeptical of the climate change narrative. Only time will tell.

While it may be that item “i” above is true, for now I say come what may and choose to focus my advocacy elsewhere, namely that the clear and present danger to humanity are tyrannical monopolies of violence. At this point in history, to advocate in favor of climate controls is to feed the enslaving leviathan, rather than to rip it apart, tentacle by tentacle.

My one consolation is that all the “regular Joes” who dont trust the big gubbinment and all the evil evil scientists, will go down with the rest of us when our biosphere collapses, regardless of how many guns they hoard in their little libertarian utopias.

Because the nature and the universe dont give a flying shit about what people believe or not believe, and who the “real” enemy is, be it the Judean Peoples Front or the Peoples Front of Judea.

Fatman: BTW it’s a little odd that you deem climate change (and its rather visible effects) “invisible”, while the debt crisis, which is based on nothing tangible or real, is sufficiently “visible” to result in such portentous predictions.

It’s not a prediction, Fatman. As long as the gubbiment fancies itself solvent, meaning as long as it can jail you for failing to pay taxes, future generations are on the hook for terrible decisions of the past. It is taxation without representation, pure and simple. It’s slavery.

As I said, the climate in my part of the world hasn’t changed in thirty years. I have two young kids and there is no question, at this time, that unfunded liabilities are more likely to significantly affect their lives significantly than climate change.

Things change, of course. I’m just shooting the alligators closest to me.

Peter Watts,

Nice work on the Shruggalo. I never fail to be amused when such people hold themselves up as paragons of scepticism, when what they’re displaying is the credulity of a True Believer.

DA:
I’d go so far as to describe “objective person” as an oxymoron, but that may be a sore subject.

Touche, DA. Objective person is somewhat of a contradiction in terms.

I’m fleshing out a response for Peter currently. Then you can pile on.

Peter Watts: Oh, look, people. Today’s first science denier. Gather round.

Enjoyable as that was, would you say that such people as in the minority or the majority of any given first world population? In my experience with a fair share of them, they tend to herald themselves as a paragons of a skeptical minority, where much discussion is a mixture of a typical gish gallop and JAQ’ing off seasoned with healthy doses of libertarian paranoia and persecution complexes to boot, with dashes of a messiah complex depending on tribes social ladder rung.

Peter Watts: I’ve seen a fair bit of raw data on the timing of migrations, the epidemiological spread of various pathogens, expansion of parasite ranges due to climate-mediated host-switching— a whole shitload of stuff, actually.

Think I could trouble you to toss a few of those my way? I’ve yet to read up on the biogeographic angle on climate change.

Speaking as a Poor Wannabe Libral, Down here in Gloriass Trumptowpiea.
All I can say is, HUUWEEEEEEEE Bruthers and Sisters can I get an AMEN on this one!!
The son of the preacher man done speak the TRUTH!!

Petar Istinetz: why do you think carbon tax is a bad policy?

Layman to potential layman, I could be talking out of my arse here so bear with me but going by what Peter says in his post about how you risk associating carbon footprints with a monetary value, which I assume, would lead to actors attempting to game the system and try to minmax the rules, as opposed to genuinely try to cut down on it altogether.

Also, it sort of seems like putting a price tag on incremental damage to the environment doesn’t exactly stop said damage or deter it since as Peter so eloquently put,

Peter Watts: [..]it’s only a matter of time before some asshole shows up with a checkbook and says “OK— here’s your price, paid in full. Now fuck off while I continue to destroy the world in time for the next quarterly report.”

Personally, my opinion is that I wouldn’t consider it bad policy per say, but I feel like it contributes to the illusion of something meaningful being done about the whole affair, whereas what it really does is put a price tag on the damage, which doesn’t seem to be too much of a deterrent to big industry actors, as you said, not enough.

@Aazad,

Yeah, I get that, of course that companies will try to game the system. It’s just their profit maximizing nature, you can’t expect different. This is why you constantly fix the loopholes, as new ones are found. Sometimes all you have to do is *ask* industry experts for advice.

RE: the asshole with the checkbook, that just means that the tax is not high enough. Just raise it over and over, until it becomes prohibitively expensive to use coal or whatever. Tax has the added benefit that it allows arbitrage over industries. E.g. let’s say it turns out that the cost of switching to clean cargo tankers is relatively lower than the cost of lowering meat consumption. What will naturally happen is that the shipment industry will make a cost-benefit analysis, switch to clean ships, and slightly increase prices. While the animal husbandry industry might find that it can’t innovate ways to reduce methane emissions, well, they just have to pay the tax, which increases prices, which decreases consumption of meat. You see what happens here? While a committee might reason that since cows release too much methane, we should cap the consumption of cow meat, a tax allows the most efficient reduction of GHG, which would allow us greater results for the same social cost. This is very good.

The tricky part is that you have somewhat less control over the results of such a tax, compared to just banning the offending products/industries. E.g. we have some data on how the consumption of cow meat has changed with the changing prices, so we can estimate elasticity, so we can estimate how a certain tax will affect consumption of cow meat, but the data is not free of noise and the data is not perfect. Moreover, pretty much every single industry and supply chain will be affected by such a tax, so doing all of these calculations becomes a herculean task, even if you relax your standards. There are ways around that, of course, you can estimate the cost increase for a basket of goods or a subset of all industries and extrapolate, but again, it decreases the accuracy of the estimate. Further, you cannot predict what kinds of innovations will happen to decrease the costs that come with GHG emissions.

So you can make an estimate on the effect of carbon tax, but such estimates become exponentially harder to do with the more accuracy you require. What do you do then? You just make a rough prediction, and see what happens. If the reduction is not enough, you increase the tax. If the reduction is too much, you might want to decrease the tax. If you are more concerned with the potential environmental impact, you want to overshoot the initial tax, better to be safe then sorry. If you are more concerned with the social cost, you might want to be more conservative with your initial estimate and the adjust it in the future.

There is also one added bonus that you’re all overlooking, namely, that establishing even a little carbon tax and putting it in place is good, since it would require very little legislative effort to increase it later on. You can even make the increase automatic, if certain benchmarks are not met. While if you ban all gas cars, as an example, and then find that the effect is not enough, you have to go through the same process to ban whatever else, which will take another several years of drafting legislation, opening it up for public comments, fixing the holes, and passing it.

That’s all. The blanket tax on carbon emissions is a very good policy, as long as you consider carbon emissions a good proxy for pollution. If it’s not a good proxy, find a better one.

Oge: Carbon over-emitters can buy offsets by e.g. planting carbon absorbing forests, but these forests are sometimes unwanted by the local populations. Similarly, if you killed more civilians than you were supposed to in a war, you might want to encourage the production of new ones, but occasionally, no local population might want those new civilians.

I’m not sure I buy that argument. If the local populations don’t want the forests, they can negotiate a higher price for them.

Oge: As a carbon emitter, if you reduce emissions one year, you can over-emit the next; this might strike observers as gratuitous.

Again, don’t see the issue here. As long as the carbon emitters are hitting their goals, why should the observer’s opinions matter? I’m seriously lost. The emitters presumably took some costs to cover the reduced emissions on the first year, because it was more efficient for them. If you don’t allow this sort of switching from year to year, they’re just going to hit the maximum every year; and you end up with no less emissions, but needlessly higher costs for the emitters.

Did the coup already happen?

It’s kind of crazy how people have so much difficulty really perceiving the problems in our society. We can identify them sure, and we can even talk about them, but actually *feeling* them and being pushed into some sort of action in response? Practically impossible. People need to be dying in the streets for that to happen.

And honestly, I can feel myself being drawn away from it. Being angry over big-picture abstract things is hard, and once you realize the full depth and extent of the problem it can get extremely demoralizing. Shit is currently hitting the fan, has been for decades, and really it doesn’t seem to be letting up whatsoever. Might as well enjoy myself like everyone else, I guess.

EMP: Ayn Rand pretty well summed up money in D’Anconia’s Money Speech from Atlas Shrugged.

I’ve read (unfortunately) Atlas Shrugged, and I did Google the speech to refresh my memory. Which means that I have wasted a second 30 minutes of my life on the same specious drivel, so I guess I deserve the LOL – you just Rick Rolled me.

Not sure where you live, but my dollar bills are issued by the US Dept of Treasury. I’ll keep looking for some that aren’t and will post results.

EMP: As I said, the climate in my part of the world hasn’t changed in thirty years.

Ah, the “it’s still snowing here, therefore no global warming” argument. The pinnacle of climate-change-denier logic. You’re really pulling out all the stops here, sport.

EMP: I have two young kids and there is no question, at this time, that unfunded liabilities are more likely to significantly affect their lives significantly than climate change.

What’s to say we can’t simply default on the unfunded liabilities? The D’Anconias of the world do it all the time, then come back and make even more money.

If considering a response on the possible negative impact of default, please make sure you list your credentials (a PhD in economics is a minimum) and provide evidence that you’ve crunched the numbers in support of your argument. I wouldn’t want to take anything on blind faith 🙂

Petar Istinetz:

Again, don’t see the issue here. As long as the carbon emitters are hitting their goals, why should the observer’s opinions matter? I’m seriously lost. The emitters presumably took some costs to cover the reduced emissions on the first year, because it was more efficient for them. If you don’t allow this sort of switching from year to year, they’re just going to hit the maximum every year; and you end up with no less emissions, but needlessly higher costs for the emitters.

Hi Petar,

You’re right and I agree: carbon taxes will likely reduce global emissions. I only reached my opinions about carbon taxes recently so they’re not well-formed.

I’d like to convey an intuition: from a God’s eye view, any net reduction in carbon emissions is a plus. However, from a local’s point of view, letting people from far away pay to destroy my home (either by polluting it or forcibly planting carbon sinks) seems unfair, especially if I don’t get a say in how that destruction is carried out.

Peter Watts: Speaking of Russian troll-farmers, does anyone here know why I suddenly belong to a facebook group called “Russia and Allies versus globaliZation”?

My guess is that you joined an innocuous seeming group, like, just by way of random example, “Fluffy Kitties are the awesomest!” and at some point the owner/moderator of that group (who may or may not have been the original, lots of sites like these gather likes/followers with broad appeal and then sell them) changed the name to something you don’t agree with in the slightest. Seen it happen before.

It’s also possible that an actual cat is on your computer while you sleep and joining stuff on Facebook that matches its interests (you think they walk all over our keyboard for our attention? No, they’re trying to commandeer it).

To paraphrase Kim Stanley Robinson, capitalism killed utopian science fiction, the future, and perverts everything from robots to AI. What makes Watts’ SF tolerable is that he sees through the BS of how technologies are perverted by sociopolitical and human limitations. Robinson’s tolerable for the opposite reason, an optimist who sees technology and its effects tolerable only after emancipation from sociopolitical straightjackets.

Hubert:
Think you’re completely right, as usual.
I’ve just finished reading a lot of Phil. K Dick’s shorter work, and alongside a lot of his mainstream fiction, almost all of his short fiction seems to be set in a post-nuclear war setting. It almost stops being mentioned in some stories, just seems to fade in the expected background. This kind of thick, gooey all-encompassing pessimism is just the sort of happy thing we can smile back on from the present, as we should be able to smile back on the environmental pessimism of today in fifty years when, with luck, the situation is resolved.

Last time i looked we were all still one press of a button, intentional or otherwise, away from a nuclear holocaust. With the US Arsenal in the hands of an orange maniac, the Russians investing billions in refurbishing their doomsday stockpile, and rampant nuclear armament proliferation around the world, a (perhaps limited) nuclear exchange seems to be more likely every day. In fact, i would be surprised if, say, India and Pakistan DONT come to nuclear armed fisticuffs in my lifetime.

If anything, Phil K. Dicks work is way too utopian…we sure as hell wont get shiny offworld colonies in 2050 or so. The ruined landscape dotted with hydroponics that will serve us delicious Nutri-Slime seems all too real to me, though. All the more reason to cram as much tasty snacks into my mouth while i still can.

I’m not trying to shit on Favro. Why the hell not? Even ignoring your cogent objections to all the implications she ignores, about 50% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, with less than US$1000 in savings. That percentage is only going to increase as those robots and algorithms Favro is so enamored of eliminate an ever-larger fraction of jobs. None of those people are going to be enjoying ” the surprise and delight that comes with something new always waiting for us at the door” (Oh look! An eviction notice!) or debating the merits of lactose-free low-fat milk versus table cream.

From your quotes, this book sounds like such mindless, clueless techno-cheerleading that I assume much of it has already been excerpted in Wired.

Peter Watts: So long as economics runs the world, I don’t think your “raise [the tax] over and over, until it becomes prohibitively expensive to use” solution is going to work— or rather it won’t be allowed to work.

It’s possible. I don’t know exactly how painful it will be, it’s very possible you’re right. But in that case, your solution won’t work either, since the social cost will be strictly higher. So shit on human nature and greed if you will, but the carbon tax is a good policy.

Peter Watts: Maybe we’re not on the same page with regard to how far the Titanic is from the iceberg. I’m of the “we don’t have time to dick around it’s already later than you think and all these experiments and trials will converge on a solution about three days after we break in half and sink into the abyss” school of thought. But I could be wrong.

I hope I’m wrong.

No, we’re totally on the same page, world is ending and we’re fucked. It’s not my field, but I can see where the consensus is pointing. I was just trying to disentangle my personal views on what *should* be done, from the objective possibilities and effects of the possible options.

Re: economics is not as objective as physics. Yeah, it isn’t, because people are fractally complex and any “laws” we write about human behavior will always have exceptions, which is why we avoid writing laws. If you do take the time to open an economics book though, you’ll find that some very smart people over the centuries have devised some very clever ways to work around human nature.

And you’re free to call them useless abstractions, just as I’m free to point out the window and show you the myriad ways each of them changes your world as an objective evidence that they are not just useless abstractions.

I know, I know there are a lot of bullshit books and talk shows that can twist any argument until it proves whatever they’re peddling at the moment; but so what? If I see a talk show selling homeopathy or quantum crystals, does that mean that medicine or physics are useless pseudoscience by the same token?

Nestor,

so, Oumamua is gonna blow up the sun? At least it wouldn’t be our own damn fault when everything fell apart.

The Baffler crew have been calling Wired out since the 90s for esentially selling tech corporation interests as inevitable progress. “Visionary” projects like Mars colonization serve as reinforcement that the tech sector carries our hopes and needs to be given tax freedom and customer loyalty in order to save us all.

I can’t find the the more recent article I’m thinking of on my phone right now but here’s an example in line with your comments here: https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/future-fail-silverman

Watts, have you read any of Timothy Morton’s books about the anthropocene? I’m finding his approach in Humankind useful in getting my mind past the doom perspective I’ve been stuck in for a long time, due in part to both my fundamentalist and traditional ecology backgrounds.

Things are still bleak on the large scale (what he calls hyperobjects – concepts that we can’t point at but are caused by humanity and have massive implications to our lives) but these overarching groups/wholes do not dictate our actions. We have to find a way of living that isn’t predicated on the logic of efficiency, as tech industries would have us do. Life needs to be more than a quantity of base survival and exploitation of human and non-human resources.

This does lead back to a post-scarcity theme, which is also found alongside technology and is suspect as a fantasy mostly predicated on everyone being able to 3D print their own plastic junk. Unfortunately for a lot of sci-fi, it’s less about magic technology and more about moving past intensive, efficient farming logic to a more granola situation of holistic resource growth and small-scale design.

Morton’s approach brings me back to probably the only message I continue to remember from the end of Hyperion – Humankind needs to adapt itself to their surroundings and other life, rather than warping everything to themselves. This is where technology can help us, even if only as a way to wean off of the current economic structure and logic of society. Renewable energy, for example.

I’m about to jump on a plane and burn hella fuel so I can get back from a commercial holiday in time for my Corp job, laters.

Aye, the logic needs to widen and incorporate all things perceivably alive, not only because we’re all in it together, but also because life is more interesting when we can share and flourish.

It’s hard to talk this way in the face of industrial achievement and technological complexity, though, especially when you’re trying to entertain people. You can’t make a compelling novel about a perfectly happy colony of rifters and their fishy friends, eh?

If you’re interested, Verso have everything half off right now, including Morton’s new book. I’m fascinated by it lately.
https://www.versobooks.com/books/2465-humankind

I think Pete’s been holding out on us. Doesn’t just make mice wanna play with cats.

Toxoplasma linked to S&M in humans.

See, it doesn’t actually matter if you *ARE* a female *AND* a feminist.

Atwood responds to ‘not a good feminist’ critics on left and right.