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Territorial Display
Sep. 28th, 2013 01:32 pmThe Arc advisory board continues to try to work out what exactly we are, with a general notion that we are a think tank who accumulate interesting ideas and speculate about them, and that some of these speculations might eventually suggest outside courses of action. Possibly somewhere between a salon and the Royal Society. Lately, this has taken the form of weekly internal e-mail threads with the prompt "what is the most futuristic thing you have seen this week."
Mainly what this winds up doing is drawing my attention to the ways in which my futurism is not technology-based. Or I should say: is not gadget-centered. It takes account of gadgets. It looks at cell phones and says "interesting how cell phones are allowing money transfers to happen in areas where banking infrastructure has previously been unavailable." It looks at social media and says "hmm, interesting piece over here about how facebook and YouTube are reshaping Chicago street gangs, which is a jumping off point to think about mass media's influence or lack of influence on warfare and state-building." But my futurism doesn't really care about the surfaces of those gadgets, about which company is manufacturing them or whether they're disposable or whether they're implanted. More accurately, I'm not uninterested, but I don't have much attention span.
I could put it like this: If someone at the beginning of the industrial revolution predicted that looms would get smaller and faster, and many of our fibers would be made from things like bamboo instead of cotton, I would be mildly impressed. If someone at the beginning of the industrial revolution predicted that we'd all be living in tall buildings in cities, I'd be mildly impressed (because that was fairly obvious; it was already happening). If, instead, someone predicted child labor laws and the legal implications of defining someone as a minor, I would be more impressed. What would really impress me would be a prediction that mass production would transform the way we manufacture and consume goods, with assembly lines and mechanization replacing the need for skilled labor, but that this change would only last 100-200 years, at which point we would move back to a desire for customization, in which the big technological trick is sending an e-mail to a dressmaker in East Asia, something that looks a lot like sped-up 16th century East India trade.
Such a prediction would, of course, be insanely impossible. But this is the kind of goal I am always shooting for, as you might expect from someone whose path to futurism runs not through Ray Kurzweil but through Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Thorstein Veblen, and Karl Marx.
It is also, probably, why most of my science fiction is often not very interesting to fans of science fiction. Someone says "what's futuristic?" and I say "the difficulty of getting good data on the conflict in the Central African Republic," something that doesn't even seem particularly new (although to my mind there is quite a lot about it that is testing current theories and technologies in ways that might guide future developments).
Anyway, it's this sort of thinking that either makes me uniquely useful or uniquely annoying.
Mainly what this winds up doing is drawing my attention to the ways in which my futurism is not technology-based. Or I should say: is not gadget-centered. It takes account of gadgets. It looks at cell phones and says "interesting how cell phones are allowing money transfers to happen in areas where banking infrastructure has previously been unavailable." It looks at social media and says "hmm, interesting piece over here about how facebook and YouTube are reshaping Chicago street gangs, which is a jumping off point to think about mass media's influence or lack of influence on warfare and state-building." But my futurism doesn't really care about the surfaces of those gadgets, about which company is manufacturing them or whether they're disposable or whether they're implanted. More accurately, I'm not uninterested, but I don't have much attention span.
I could put it like this: If someone at the beginning of the industrial revolution predicted that looms would get smaller and faster, and many of our fibers would be made from things like bamboo instead of cotton, I would be mildly impressed. If someone at the beginning of the industrial revolution predicted that we'd all be living in tall buildings in cities, I'd be mildly impressed (because that was fairly obvious; it was already happening). If, instead, someone predicted child labor laws and the legal implications of defining someone as a minor, I would be more impressed. What would really impress me would be a prediction that mass production would transform the way we manufacture and consume goods, with assembly lines and mechanization replacing the need for skilled labor, but that this change would only last 100-200 years, at which point we would move back to a desire for customization, in which the big technological trick is sending an e-mail to a dressmaker in East Asia, something that looks a lot like sped-up 16th century East India trade.
Such a prediction would, of course, be insanely impossible. But this is the kind of goal I am always shooting for, as you might expect from someone whose path to futurism runs not through Ray Kurzweil but through Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Thorstein Veblen, and Karl Marx.
It is also, probably, why most of my science fiction is often not very interesting to fans of science fiction. Someone says "what's futuristic?" and I say "the difficulty of getting good data on the conflict in the Central African Republic," something that doesn't even seem particularly new (although to my mind there is quite a lot about it that is testing current theories and technologies in ways that might guide future developments).
Anyway, it's this sort of thinking that either makes me uniquely useful or uniquely annoying.
