The Future

by Naomi Alderman

What on earth made him take to FantailSwift social video to accuse that mountain rescue team in Borneo helping a group of elderly veterans of being “dog-fuckers”?

So Lenk is Elon

“He sounds frightening and unpredictable,” said Zhen. Martha shook her head. “No one follows anyone if they’re not right about something.”

“OK. Enoch used to say, ‘The city is a marked environment.’ Like a marked deck of cards. Fixed so we can read it easily. Filled with symbols. Paving slabs are for walking on—blacktop is for cars.” She pointed around the hall to the cup sign over the café, the signs for the restrooms. “Symbols for food, drink, empty your bladder. And look, the real world’s not like that. The world doesn’t exist for our convenience; it doesn’t talk in our language. The wilderness doesn’t have symbolic drawings to tell you where to find food or where it’s safe to take a piss. Where you find a sign in the real world, it’s a sign made by the thing itself: deer tracks are made by deer hooves. Do you see? It’s done something weird to us to live in this human-made, human-centric space all the time. It’s made us more selfish, but also more anxious, and more depressed because we think everything’s about us. I think Enoch was right about that.”

The internet of Medlar and Fantail and Anvil was designed to cut away the middle. There were no clicks or eyeballs in the sensible, reasoned middle ground, and all the money in the world in encouraging users to rush to treat the extremes as if they were the center.

You know what the theme of Genesis is? Men—mostly brothers—who hate each other. Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, Abraham and Lot. You know why they hate each other? Every single time: one is a farmer and one is a hunter-gatherer. This was the teaching of Enoch, OK? That Genesis is about the stupidest thing human beings ever did. We ended our own world. We captured and domesticated ourselves.

Same basic pattern again and again. They’re not brothers, they’re two groups of people. One group is settled, one group wanders. One lives basically a nomadic life, supplementing hunting with sheepherding. The other stays home and grows crops and farms livestock. The hunters hate the farmers and the farmers hate the hunters. The hunters think the farmers are weak and wily. The farmers think the hunters are brutish. They try to kill each other.

Rwanda, Hutu and Tutsi

Men having consensual sex with other men is a) great and b) tbh Genesis doesn’t seem to have a view on it so anyone who reads homophobia into it brought it there themselves, probably from Leviticus which you’ll notice I’m not defending.

The only thing it’s like is the Gutenberg print revolution and that was followed by four hundred years of bloody war. Suddenly, people were exposed to so much more information than ever before. They had no systems to process it or to tell truth from lies. They were overwhelmed. That’s where we are. And humanity doesn’t have time for four hundred years of bloody war right now. There are so many emergencies to deal with.”

Ridiculous! There were thousands of years of war before Gutenberg and war after G didn’t end after 400 years. A bad case of “infodeterminism”

saxe blue,

PMS 285

There is a thing in human life that can never be predicted or controlled. It is dangerous and terrifying; it destroys your life and fucks up your plans. That’s why there are so many stupid songs about it.

You can’t really make wine if you’re living alone in a cave.)

Wtf? Does Alderman not understand how wine is made? Grapes in a bucket, yo.

“Whatever has been done to me, that is what I may do to others; and whatever others have done, that is what may be done to them.” That’s how people live on the internet these days. It’s the golden rule’s dark twin.

Lot offered his daughters’ vaginas to the mob. So they felt justified in doing what they wanted with his cock. That’s the last we ever see of Lot in the Bible. That’s where he ends. Sitting alone in a cave, having involuntarily knocked up both his daughters. I think we can all agree: he might have gotten out of Sodom but he didn’t thrive.

The algorithms can’t do everything. But if they can make us more polarized, more angry, and more hateful, surely they can do the opposite of that. There is no “neutral” anymore. There is no leaving things as they would have been before the invention of the internet. Our minds have already learned how to interact with the algorithms and we are part of

You never could be neutral on a moving train.

“Spend time making yourself invisible. Then be more careful than before forever.” “Thanks for the positivity.” Marius laughed. “You want positivity, you go America, white teeth big smiles. You want realism, you come former Soviet bloc, OK?”

Martha said: “What do you call it when you can’t do anything, but you can’t do nothing?” Albert said: “I’ve tried despair already.”

Research had established that using Fantail products for more than eight minutes a day increased a teenage girl’s suicide risk. The same was true for the risk of eating disorders, of bullying and being subject to bullying. The mental health of the world continued to deteriorate—depressed and anxious people were less interested in engaging with real problems, more willing to escape to fantasy worlds, more willing to believe hoaxes and conspiracy theories.

We hate Fox like our ancestors did, and that’s why we Rabbit people persecute and loathe and murder Native people and Indigenous people and traveling people and nomadic people and homeless people and anyone without a house and a nation-state as we understand it. When this nation tried over hundreds of years to annihilate all its Native and Indigenous people, that was the hatred of Rabbit people for Fox people, the violence of symbols against reality.

Listen: nothing in the world is truly owned. There is no tree or patch of soil or animal or mountain or river that grows a label naming its owner on its bark or on its flesh or through the strata of its rocks. Once upon a time, “owning” meant “having a special duty to care” for something, not that you alone could have it or use it. “Owning” is invented, it is a symbolic behavior.

“I think I could kill Zimri,” said Selah. “A lot of people feel that way after a decade of marriage,” said Albert.

With the approval of the governments of Nepal, Bhutan, Thailand, and Indonesia, she installed Anvil’s drones to protect the last wild tigers in the vast areas of wild land she’d bought up. The drones tased without mercy and dragged the poachers out by their feet. The population of wild tigers began to increase.

We note with grim recognition the emphasis on charismatic mammals

You locked down for between a week and a month at home, and when you came out the streets were quiet, the air was clean, the children were safe to play. With the car-sharing system, only one-quarter the number of vehicles were needed. The streets weren’t clogged. There was room for bicycles and tricycles to pedal through the quiet roads. Working town by town, city district by district, and state by state, they converted most of the world within nineteen months. Every year, 1.3 million people didn’t die in road traffic accidents. Every year, 7 million people didn’t die from air pollution. Once it was over, it was hard to believe we’d ever been willing to sacrifice that many people to the gas engine.

This is kinda like Ministry for the Future