Charles Stross's Blog

For reasons I hope to be able to explain next week, I'm going to be thin on the ground for the next six days—well okay, I'm going to be at Book Expo America, one of the two biggest English-language publishing trade shows.

This has the happy side-effect that I will be absent from the UK during the Queen's 60th anniversary, and thus missing out on the orgy of self-congratulatory forelock-tugging and brown-tonguing reactionary apologetics that will turn the media into a cess-pit of nostalgic feudal wank for the duration. Ahem. Not that I bear any grudges against the current incumbent, but I find the institution intrinsically offensive simply because it defines two classes of citizen in the UK: those who are eligible to be head of state by ancestry, and those who are not and never will be.

Why can't we have a (purely ceremonial) head of state selected by random lottery from the adult population—national-level politicians and serious criminals excluded—to represent us? Discuss.

Here, by way of Bruce Sterling, is an absolutely vital rant for anyone with even the most remotely passing interest in transhumanism, extropianism, the radiant future, etc. etc.

Manages to sum up in a few paragraphs a large chunk of my thinking on the subject since I finished Accelerando and recovered from the dot-bust hangover. Sample:

I have proposed that the "accelerating change" crowed about for the last two decades by futurologists in pop religious cadences and by more mainstream and academic New Media commentators in pop psychology and pop sociology cadences has never had any substantial reference apart from the increasing precarity produced by neoliberal looting and destabilization of domestic welfare and global economies—often facilitated, it is true, by the exploitation of digital trading, marketing, and surveillance networks—a precarity usually seen and experienced from the vantage of privileged people who either benefit from neoliberal destabilization or who (rightly or wrongly) identify with the beneficiaries of that destabilization.

Got that?

Shorter version: a big chunk of the "accelerating change" meme actually emerges from our experience of the future shock induced by our Martian invaders — the corporatist liquidation or privatisation of human social structures not mediated by money, culminating ultimately in the experience of disaster capitalism.

Yes, there is rapid technological progress in some areas. It's not all bad. But the beneficiaries of that particular shift (a narrow technological elite, and their masters in the shape of the 0.1%, the financial/social engineers who direct the new hive-organism aristocracy) have made a fetish out of change, ignoring (for the most part) the uncomfortable fact that "creative destruction" is an oxymoron:

... there is an unmistakably faith-mobilizing pseudo-transcendentalizing strain to be discerned in this very PR marketing imaginary, deranging us from our present distress into a yearning toward consumer techno-futures bathed in pastels and robots and cars and DNA helices and chocolate and glossy hair and youthful skin and golden sex.

So there! (That's us told.)

Seriously, go read the whole thing. It's an essential reality check for those who are too entranced by transhumanism to notice the sordid reality behind the curtain. (Yes, I am grumpy this morning. Wouldn't you be, if you woke from a diamond-encrusted dream of exponential progress to find yourself in a nation gripped by a double-dip recession induced by economic idiocy?)

Update: There is a rottenness at the heart of the transhuman project, and the biggest symptom of it is blindness to its own origins: a mixture of warmed-over Christian apocalyptic eschatology (which Cory Doctorow and I poke with a stick in "The Rapture of the Nerds") and the Just-So creation mythology of the smugly self-satisfied hypercapitalists who have unintentionally done so much to destroy so many of the moral and interpersonal values of post-Englightenment civilization.

This blog is a web site, within the meaning of the EU cookie law. And it uses cookies. As such, it is governed by regulations set forth by the Information Commissioner's Office.

What cookies do we use at Charlie's Diary, and why?

Well, if you're a moderator or a guest blogger, you will need to log in to exercise your special privileges, and the site will use a cookie to keep track of you and grant you 'leet access.

If you're a commenter and you log in, then the site will use a cookie to identify you ... except logging in is currently broken, so you can't do that. Ahem. It will also plant a cookie on you if you try to preview a comment before you hit the post button.

As far as I can remember, that's all. I am certainly not using cookies to gather information about your browing habits or to push advertisements at you. (If you have reason to think you picked up a tracking cookie here, please contact me: it may mean the site's been hacked.)

Implied consent: if you use this blog and attempt to post comments, or are an active moderator or guest blogger, you are presumed to have given consent to the use of cookies for those purposes (and only those).

This has been a public service announcement made necessary by some damn' fool European Commission directive that confused a goal (securing web users' privacy) with a technology (cookies). Film at eleven.

We now return you to your usual viewing.

Much as any artefact exposed to the maw of a small child eventually becomes soggy and turns brown (after it stops working, if moving parts are involved), I am coming to the conclusion that any comment thread on this blog will, between 100 and 200 comments in, circle around to become a discussion of:

* Space colonization

* Automotive technology

* Things that go fast and explode (rockets, military aircraft)

* Alternative energy (from solar through wind/wave to nuclear)

* Libertarianism (and everything is worse with libertarians)

Am I doing something wrong with the moderation here? Answers on the back of a postcard, please.

NB: attempts to derail this comment thread into orbit around one of the above strange attractors will probably result in mockery, before I delete them. I'm serious. Bored, now: want a new commentariat. (If you want to discuss The Usual, you may continue as before in the comment thread under the previous blog entry, a serious essay about the future of genre fiction, which ended up circling the drain in well under 250 comments ...)

A week or so back I was kindly invited to contribute to an SF Signal mind-meld discussion around the question:

Are SF writers "slacking off" or is science fiction still the genre of "big ideas"? If so, what authors are supplying these ideas for the next generation of scientists and engineers?

After thinking about that for a while, I came up with a short essay which you can find below the cut (tidied up a little to remove some annoying snags from the original) ...

This question relies on so many implicit underlying assumptions that I feel some dissection is in order before I can try to answer it.

The first unquestioned assumption is the post-18th century Enlightenment concept of progress. This, if anything, is the ideological bedrock underlying "ideas" SF — that Things Can Get Better. Historically, almost all civilisations prior to the Enlightenment ran on the mythology of a distant golden age in the past, which bequeathed us a bunch of moral precepts and firm knowledge about how the world works which we poor degenerates living in the debased relics of a higher civilisation should turn to for guidance. The very concept that we are actually discovering how the universe works, and improving our lives, was a revolutionary rupture with the past — and one that took a long time to sprout any kind of literary or artistic shoots.

The second assumption is that science fiction has ever primarily been a genre of big ideas. I'm not at all sure that this is the case. Certainly fiction with big ideas has found a home within SF, but that's not the same thing at all! For almost all of its history, most SF has been pulp adventure fiction, conceived and written as escapism — lest we forget, Damon Knight's original characterisation of space opera as horse opera (the Western) with blasters instead of six-guns and space ships instead of horses still holds water. The big ideas are, if anything, secondary, not to mention exhibiting a tendency to date badly and carry sinister ideological overtones (as William Gibson so brilliantly skewered in his short story "The Gernsback Continuum").

Calls for more big ideas in SF are generally a political cri de coeur. We might equally imagine a similar essay in the context of mid-sixties Soviet fiction, calling for more fiction about tractors and breakthroughs in agricultural genomics. Whether earnest depictions of young people in space suits wrangling asteroids and bringing home the carbonaceous chondrites actually make sense is another matter entirely; I'm inclined to think that it's a rather implausible future, unless the earnest young people are robots. Tinned apes don't survive exposure to vacuum and cosmic radiation very well, after all.

But. I have my nagging doubts. Because, despite my cynical pose, I am more than a little sympathetic to Stephenson's project, because I share his axiomatic belief in the loose constellation of post-Enlightenment values that brought us this idea of progress and constant improvement. If only because when you stop moving you're dead, and reverting to a late palaeolithic lifestyle looks like it would be a drag, and that's the most likely alternative long-term future for our species if we burn all the coal and oil, wreck the climate, and turn our back on the Enlightenment's ideological values.

In recent decades SF has been spinning its wheels. In fact, in the past 30 years the only truly challenging new concepts to come along were cyberpunk and the singularity. Both of which amount to different attempts within the genre to accommodate the first-order implications of computers and networking as the defining technology of the near future (as opposed to rockets! for! everyone! a la "Space Family Stone") — cyberpunk was the sociological/post new wave SF modelling of a future derived from the 1970s and 1980s weltanschauung, and the singularity was the chew-toy of those members of the hard SF brigade who actually understood computers. There were other movements, true, and possibly more visible to onlookers; urban fantasy and its hybrid offspring (by way of genre romance) the paranormal romance: steampunk (both first, second, and the current third wave varieties): and a huge bloom in alternate history/counterfactuals as much of the rigorous world-building effort that had formerly gone into the near-future space SF field turned sideways and looked for other outlets. But none of these seem to engage with the future in the way hard SF supposedly did in the 1940s to 1960s. What we call "hard SF" today mostly isn't hard, and isn't SF: it's fantasy with nanotech replicators instead of pixie dust and spaceships instead of dragons. Explorations of Singularity teeter dangerously on the precipice of a tumble into Christian apocalyptic eschatology, and in any event beg far too many questions about the nature of intelligence to make a convincing stab at artificial intelligence.

In fact, those people who are doing the "big visionary ideas about the future" SF are mostly doing so in a vacuum of critical appreciation. Greg Egan's wonderful clockwork constructions out of the raw stuff of quantum mechanics, visualising entirely different types of universe, fall on the deaf ears of critics who are looking for depth of characterisation, and don't realize that in his SF the structure of the universe is the character. On Hannu Rajaniemi's brilliant "The Quantum Thief" — I have yet to see a single review that even notices the fact that this is the first hard SF novel to examine the impact of quantum cryptography on human society. (That's a huge idea, but none of the reviewers even noticed it!) And there, over in a corner, is Bruce Sterling, blazing a lonely pioneering trail into the future. Chairman Bruce played out cyberpunk before most of us ever heard of it, invented the New Space Opera in "Schismatrix" (which looked as if nobody appreciated it for a couple of decades), co-wrote the most interesting hard-SF steampunk novel of all, and got into global climate change in the early 90s. He's currently about ten years ahead of the curve. If SF was about big innovative visions, he'd need to build an extension to house all his Hugo awards.

So what's at the root of this problem? Why are the innovative and rigorously extrapolated visions of the future so thin on the ground and so comprehensively ignored?

I'd put it down to us mistaking Sense of Wonder for Innovation. We used to read SF to get the heady high of a big vision, the "eyeball kick" as Rudy Rucker describes it, of seeing something brain-warpingly different and new for the first time. But today you don't need to read SF to get a sense of wonder high: you can just browse "New Scientist". We're living in the frickin' 21st century. Killer robot drones are assassinating people in the hills of Afghanistan. Our civilisation has been invaded and conquered by the hive intelligences of multinational corporations, directed by the new aristocracy of the 0.1%. There are space probes in orbit around Saturn and en route to Pluto. Surgeons are carrying out face transplants. I have more computing power and data storage in my office than probably the entire world had in 1980. (Definitely than in 1970.) We're carrying out this Mind Meld via the internet, and if that isn't a 1980s cyberpunk vision that's imploded into the present, warts and all, I don't know what is. Seriously: to the extent that mainstream literary fiction is about the perfect microscopic anatomization of everyday mundane life, a true and accurate mainstream literary novel today ought to read like a masterpiece of cyberpunk dystopian SF.

We people of the SF-reading ghetto have stumbled blinking into the future, and our dirty little secret is that we don't much like it. And so we retreat into the comfort zones of brass goggles and zeppelins (hey, weren't airships big in the 1910s-1930s? Why, then, are they such a powerful signifier for Victorian-era alternate fictions?), of sexy vampire-run nightclubs and starship-riding knights-errant. Opening the pages of a modern near-future SF novel now invites a neck-chillingly cold draft of wind from the world we're trying to escape, rather than a warm narcotic vision of a better place and time.

And so I conclude: we will not inspire anyone with grand visions of a viable future through the medium of escapism. If we want to write inspirational literature with grand visions we need to dive into to the literary mainstream (which is finally rediscovering fabulism) and, adding a light admixture of Enlightenment ideology along the way, start writing the equivalent of those earnest and plausible hyper-realistic tales of Progress through cotton-planting on the shores of the Aral sea.

But do you really want us to do that? I don't think so. In fact, the traditional response of traditional-minded SF readers to the rigorous exercise of extrapolative vision tends to be denial, disorientation, and distaste. So let me pose for you a different question, which has been exercising me for some time: If SF's core message (to the extent that it ever had one) is obsolete, what do we do next?

Any answers gratefully received.

I collect conspiracy theories. The nature of what people are willing to believe about their neighbours tells us quite a lot about our attitude to the society we live in, our fears, our worries about deception, and so on. And the past half century has been a boom time for conspiracy theories, from the JFK assassination through the moon landings to the CIA introducing LSD/crack cocaine/AIDS/insert threat here into the USA, to Louis Mountbatten and MI5 trying to stage a coup against the British government in the 1970s ... wait, the last one was real. And, now I think about it, so was one of the CIA ones. That's the trouble with conspiracy theories: true history contains such weird lacunae of surrealism that it's very hard to sift the wheat from the chaff.

I ran across a new-to-me conspiracy theory today; on balance I think it's an urban legend, but it appeals to my credulity very neatly and I can't rule it out for sure. Let me explain why below ...

Hip hop, rap. They're not my preferred musical forms, I will freely admit. I like some, but dislike most: and I really don't like gangster rap, both for its form and for the whole lifestyle and aspirational model it's associated with. Misogynisticre, violent, crude, angry: well, what if it was all a conspiracy inflicted on us, not by the music industry, but through the music industry? And what if the motive behind it was to provide a social model for poor black urban teenagers that would land them in jail and thereby create money-making opportunities for the private prison industry?

Far-fetched?

Well, that's what this conspiracy theory would have you believe. And it ticks all the checkboxes. Pick a group everyone considers to be unscrupulous and corrupt, like the RIAA: check. Come up with an even nastier Big Bad, a shadowy cabal from the private prisons industry: check. Invite industry insiders to a private conference and bind them to strictest secrecy: check. Our leaker is anonymous: check. Dissidents are ejected at gunpoint and threatened: check. This all stays under wraps for nearly two decades but is leaking now due to an attack of conscience ...

Which is where it fails nearly fatally to maintain willing suspension of disbelief. Here's one smackdown pointing out that the crime rate went down from 1991, not up. (Which tends to undermine the conspiracy's effectiveness, if not its existence.) And then there's the content. Conspirators with guns let a witness with a conscience go? More crazily, we're expected to believe that conspirators with such a large project in mind didn't pre-screen the names on the invite list for the conspiracy?

Naah, doesn't work.

Nevertheless, hip hop did turn gangster-obsessed around that time, and the private prison industry in the United States is a gangrenous moral ulcer rotting away that country's judicial system. Linking the two in a superficially simplifying conspiratorial relationship is ... well, it appeals to our instinct to reach for consistent causal links between parallel phenomena in a complex world. It's the modern equivalent of ascribing bad weather or crop failures to the gods being angry (an activity still popular today among the superstitious).

Meanwhile, if you want to see a real life conspiracy unfolding, you need to look no further than this.

We are surrounded by stuff. Physical property, objects we use. Even the poorest of us have some basic stuff: footwear, clothing. Having possessions is one of the defining characteristics of being human—with the questionable exception of a few animal species that have been observed using ad-hoc tools in the wild, nothing else owns anything (and even the tools used by chimpanzees or crows appear to be spur-of-the-moment constructions, abandoned after their immediate use rather than retained for their future potential).

But where do our priorities lie? I am thinking that there are at least two categories: stuff we pay too little attention to, and stuff we prize too highly. And sometimes there are types of stuff that fall to a greater or lesser extent into both sets ...

Stuff we pay too little attention to:

Our beds. (Bruce Sterling flagged this up in a memorable essay a couple of years ago.) You spend roughly a third of our lives sleeping. Your bed is therefore the single piece of furniture you use the most. Nevertheless, because we're unconscious most of the time while we use them, we tend to discount their importance. It's not just a matter of comfort: poor or interrupted sleep is associated with a variety of medical problems, some of them quite serious. (It doesn't get much more serious than tail-ending a truck on your motorway commute to work because you didn't sleep well, does it?) If you're going to spend on household furniture, it should rationally make sense to spend more on your bed and bedding than on everything in your living room put together, 42" 3D LCD TV set included.

Our chairs. I'm not sure I buy into the argument that our chairs are killing us: what's doing the killing is our working practices, which promote long periods of immobility while seated in cramped or poor conditions. But our chairs certainly aren't helping, and if you use one at work, it's the second piece of furniture you use most of the time. Yet all too often office supply departments buy work chairs strictly on price rather than on ergonomics or fitness for purpose. (Memo to self: investigate new office chairs.)

Stuff we pay too much attention to:

Wrist watches. Once upon a time—not so long ago—the capacity to accurately time was an expensive instrumentation problem. A town or village might have a central clock, in a tower; setting it and keeping it running accurately was a technical task. It became critical for trans-oceanic navigation (and if you want to know why and don't know, you could do worse than read this book), leading up to the invention of the portable chronometer in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; for a long period, portable nautical chronometers were used (frequently being carried by hand) to copy time callibration from the Greenwich observatory to other master clocks around London. By the mid-19th century the vast expansion of railway networks made accurate time-keeping a matter of strategic military importance; and the increased availability of horological skills bought the compact pocket-watch, and then the wrist-watch, within the budget of every gentleman.

But today we're surrounded by clocks—fast, accurate, ubiquitous. Clocks are literally everywhere, inside every computer, cellphone, GPS unit. Young folks today, in many cases, don't wear (have never worn) a wrist-watch, because they're never without a pocket phone. The wrist watch is, in fact, comprehensively obsolete.

Despite its obsolescence, the wrist watch has been reincarnated as an article of jewellery. They're everywhere in the shops around us, not merely accurate quartz-controlled watches (or devices controlled by radio-broadcast time signals) but archaic geared analog devices. The user interface—digits or traditional clock-face—is increasingly embelished, while usability takes a back seat to fashion. At the high end, one-of-a-kind individual works by master horologists sell for six-digit prices.

I'm not mocking the cult of the wrist watch as jewellery (I own a couple myself) but I am, nevertheless, puzzled, if not baffled, at the way an obsolete technological niche has been repurposed as a luxury item.

But.

All of this is leading up to me asking a simple question.

Given the technologies we can foresee arriving within the next decade, and the stuff that's already here, let's look forward 30 years. What everyday items in 30 years time will we not be paying enough attention to? Or continuing to use despite their obsolescence, for purposes radically at odds with their original role?

(My money is on: smartphones, in both categories. Maybe laptops in the former. And rooftop solar panels as a social signaling mechanism about the degree to which their owners are concerned for the environment. Bicycles ...? Toilets ...?)

The botnet is back again so we're suspending comments until it stops trying to nuke my server.

Lots of meaty analysis from Paul Mason, economics editor at BBC's Newsnight, on the nature and origins of SYRIZA, the Greek leftist bloc that is opposed to German-imposed austerity measures (as opposed to PASOK, the main centre-left party, which is reluctantly going along with things).

SYRIZA is an umbrella organization with a bewildering, mangrove-like array of tap-roots. It's also quite possible that there'll be a new election in Greece next month—if the current attempt to form an emergency government of national unity, being brokered by President Karolos Papoulias, fails—and SYRIZA will get to form the next government.

As Mason notes:

the resulting government may, in effect, be little more than a left-social democratic government, despite its symbology and the radicalism of some of its voters. By forcing the mainstream parties into positions where they could not express the will of the majority of centrist voters, the EU may end up destroying the Greek party system as it has been shaped since 1974.

Meanwhile, I note with interest that Greece has the highest per-capita military budget in the EU, the military budget has barely been touched by the austerity measures devastating the rest of the Greek economy, that Greece imports most of its weapons from Germany and France (generously funded by German and French bank loans), and that the military, within living memory, have taken an over-active role in Greek political life. (One hopes that the fate of the junta will act as a salutory warning to any would-be successors.)

The smart, fashionable startup-people these days are all trying to come up with brilliant and innovative new business models that disrupt struggling industries and synergize for break-out growth potential forming new markets. (Ahem. At least that's what they say.)

I submit that it is somewhat harder to disrupt an industry that has been dead for so long that the corpse is fully skeletonized. By the time that we've got people seriously pitching for an IPO on the back of the poetry market[*], we're scraping the bottom of the barrel that started out full of brilliant and innovative new business models. What next: a dot-com startup targeting the overdue-for-disruption steam locomotive market?

I am calling this a bubble economy in startup bullshit, and it's just about ready to pop; we are now at the stage of the shoe-shine boys offering stock tips, and if I had any money invested in hyperparasites like Zynga I'd be yanking the eject handle as hard as I could.

[*] I have nothing against poetry; it's just that it has been impossible for anyone to earn a living as a working commercial poet in the English language for close to three-quarters of a century and counting. For various reasons, we just don't seem to consume the stuff any more. Or we give it a backing track and call it rap or rock music or blues. Gramophone killed the poetry star.