things that make you go hmmm

[devi]

Thing One: Who else watched Margaret, the feature-length drama about the last days of Margaret Thatcher with flashbacks from her career, last week? It was great - if very slow - but the focus was weird. It was all on the pecking-order upheavals and the personalities of the people involved. Every so often someone would make an oblique reference to some policy or other - congratulating her on her economic programme or saying "you're tearing the country apart for a theory!" - or there'd be two seconds of poll tax protesters on a TV in the background, but that was it. And I was like, wot no miners' strike? Wot no Falklands? Etc.

Someone who didn't know any recent history would have been at a loss to say anything she stood for, on the basis of the drama. The zoom was always tight on her - the brilliant Lindsay Duncan, swinging from chilly to neurotic to vulnerable to sometimes actually kind of awesome. But I wanted to wrestle the camera away from the crew and swing it around, zoom it out, to point at all the stuff going on off-screen, and I was left confused as to how we were meant to feel. Scared or sympathetic? I wondered if it was part of a rehabilitation - a swing back towards thinking she was all right really, in preparation for the next election. (Which seems weird to me, that we should be looking more positively at her right now. Didn't her free market policies do a lot to get us in this current mess?) Dan and I mused that it felt as if there had been more about her policies which had been edited out.

And look! We were right! The script did have more specific, critical stuff, including an anti-war speech by hubby Denis, and it was defanged in the final draft. Hmmmm.

Thing Two is Three Worlds Collide, a thought experiment in the guise of an old-fashioned SF story about first contact between future humans and two different alien species (thanks amuchmoreexotic). It's not very well written - hackwork at best - but it's full of interesting concepts and moral dilemmas. One of the species has based their whole system of goodness and morality around eating their own babies. The others are telepathic, regard the happiness of all as the most important thing (because what hurts one hurts them all, through the freaky and squishy communal psychic sex thing they refer to as untranslatable 2), and thus think not doing one's utmost to eliminate unhappiness is evil. It has a lot of thought-provoking stuff about how difficult it is to conceive of things outside of our evolutionary and cultural worldview. I liked that the baby-eating aliens had science fiction in which all their imaginary other races, however bizarre, also ate their own babies.

(Edit: hey gothwalk, you might enjoy it, given that economics is one of your Fannish Things. The ship uses a model economic system, with things and ideas constantly rising and falling in value, to help make decisions.)

So that's the good kind of hmmmmm, with one exception. The writer says in the comments that he wanted to include some shocking things in his future human society, since the future will almost certainly include things which are normal for the future people but would be appalling and disgusting to us. Fair enough. Unfortunately, his example of this is that in the future, rape is legal.


(In their society there seems to be quite a lot of gender role reversal. There's a coy little bit where the main character thinks how boring his sex life would be if there wasn't the constant background risk of women raping him. It's also implied that everyone is so nice in the future that, for various reasons, rape is no big deal. They use the phrase "risky dating" a lot in the comments.)

It turns out, down in the comment thread, that the writer's working on a whole story about the implications of this supposedly revolutionary idea.

And I mean, seriously, future shock FAIL. Is that really the most out-there, shocking thing he could come up with? He seems to think that in today's world rape is the ultimate taboo, and that 21st-century males are shocked by the very idea because it violates "gentlemanly conduct" and the rules of competition for partners. Dude, I opened the paper just now and found an article about soldiers being ordered to rape villagers in Sudan. And then there's the screeds and screeds of victim-blaming every time there's a prominent rape case or a change in the laws. It's kind of like saying "In the future, everyone thinks [child labour/environmental damage/famine] is okay! Which is shocking because it's completely different from today. Yeah. We don't have any of that stuff now."

I was curious as to what his female commenters would say in the discussion of that part of the story, but he seems to have hardly any. Except for one, who identifies herself as "a female" and tells him to google female rape fantasies. Hmmmmm.

Come on. "What if rape was legal?" isn't brave thought-experimenting into the unknown (especially when you're a bloke and seem to think of it as a man-woman thing; he doesn't read like he's talking about men getting raped by other men, which is a whole 'nother mostly-unacknowledged problem). It's the Gor books.


This is occupying my mind because it's something I've been wondering about in general for years. When you come up against people of former generations who seem to be closed-minded and set in their ways and suspicious of anything new, it's easy to declare that will never happen to you. You'll always keep up with the new stuff and move with the times. But I suspect everyone thinks that when they're young, then encounters new things they can't cope with. I had been trying to come up with changes that would make me uncomfortable, make me want to huddle up with people my age and complain about the young folks. But "rape is the new socially acceptable fun thing!" isn't the sort of thing I mean. It wouldn't be the shock of the new and inconceivable, it would be the gloom of same-shit-different-century.

I bet between us we can come up with some genuinely shocking possible future developments. Ones that, if they came about when we were all old fogeys, would make us feel the ground had melted away under our feet and we no longer had any place in this crazy new world. Ones which were unknown in recent history and challenged things we had always taken for granted as part of the basic rules of being human.

Just off the top of my head, perhaps medical technology advances - to the point where you can regenerate from almost any damage like Claire in Heroes - have made grievous bodily harm a normal way of expressing annoyance at someone the way swearing at them would be today. Lovers and friends routinely stab and mutilate each other for fun, because internal organs are just so interesting to examine, and it's a different kind of intimacy. Duels to the death, person-hunts and jumping out of planes without parachutes are popular extreme sports.

Or perhaps plastic surgery is standard for all. Or the written word disappears and only the most dedicated scholars learn to read. Or (like in The Meme Machine and the end of The Invisibles) the very idea of the individual self disappears. That sort of thing.

Not, y'know, a 'shocking future development' which reverses something which only changed relatively recently and which is still the case in many parts of the world.

What would you be shocked and horrified to find had changed if you woke up in the future?

Comments

It's mostly about privacy, actually.

[juggzy.livejournal.com]

The question can retranslate as "What do you think we're doing right right now that couldn't be changed for the better?", possibly.

One of the things that I have seen change over my life and I am uneasy about is the way that people seem to have given away any privacy. There's a, what seems to me, to be a confusion between the public and the personal. I'm not sure, however, that this is a real change; I think that we yet don't understand how public we make ourselves through online communications. As I have watched people become more and more accustomed to online interactions, I have seen many of the longer term users become more wary about protecting their privacy. On the one hand, we have this protection of children thing, and on the other we have young adults who are recently children spewing forth every detail of embarassment that could possibly ever be a chain around their life in the future.

As a consequence of this, in the future I expect people to become more forgiving of the adventures of young adulthood. That is a good thing.

What do we do pretty much right about now? In this mildly communitarian country, I think we have due respect for freedom of speech and robust democratic processes. I can see how those could be improved, but I believe that society has a general respect for those principles; the eroding of rights of privacy under this government I believe to be a temporally local blip, and the result of misguided decisions by people who essentially believe in the democratic process. I would be shocked to wake up in the future and find the democratic process that allows us to protect our rights all gone.

BTW: I don't believe that the ID cards are specifically the ichor that precede this particular demon; rather, I think that they're ineffective and expensive. I'm more concerned about the data tracks that we leave all over the place and the ability to record and process communications.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Shrewd observations. I find your comments particularly interesting because I see the same indicators but have the opposite preference. I find people's tendency to cling to unnecessary privacy quite frustrating, because it creates so much needless inefficiency.

Unfortunately from a future perspective things seem to be going badly at both ends. The good kinds of privacy, such as stopping strangers from stalking people and stopping corporations from data mining us, are becoming harder to protect. The bad kinds of privacy, such as websites and blogs being crippled by identity-based locks and logins (which break search), are becoming more widespread.

I would be shocked to wake up in the future and find the democratic process that allows us to protect our rights all gone.

It's at least half gone. Did you notice how much of the US election was about spending power?

I see hints of possible futures that would shock me in the net neutrality debate. Imagine a future generation where the idea of being able to pass anonymous data around freely seems laughable and is met with looks of puzzlement and questions like "And who pays for that?".

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

What kind of efficiency do you mean when you say privacy is inefficient? Because I can see (at a stretch) how you could consider privacy to go against the whole "information wants to be free" thing, but I've also heard good arguments that you don't get truly original ideas appearing if all information is required to be shared all the time. Really unusual stuff that goes against the status quo is hard to put out in the open when you first get the idea, if you feel that the eyes of the whole world are on you. The seedlings of really new ideas need quiet backwaters and safe havens in which to grow and get stronger before they make their way out to fend for themselves in the free-for-all that is the whole internet.

That's how a lot of social change happens, as I understand it: if a person believes something unconventional, there's an intermediate stage where they try it out on a few trusted friends before they're ready to shout it from the rooftops.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

What kind of efficiency do you mean when you say privacy is inefficient?

Two kinds: wasted time finding information and duplication of effort.

That's how a lot of social change happens, as I understand it

It's how some people prefer to work, but it's not a good thing in my view.

Ideas "grow stronger" through criticism, redesign and combination with other ideas. They do not grow stronger through accumulating advocates... just harder to stop. Where social change is concerned that's often exactly what people want. Change that is hard to block.

It's essentially the "benevolent dictatorship is the best form of government" argument in a different guise. I'm fine with mature ideas emerging with momentum and an army of advocates if they're good ideas. But just as dictators aren't always benevolent, so ideas are not always good.

For me this kind of deployment strategy for ideas is very much rooted in the philosophy of conflict over cooperation. You talk about "stuff that goes against the status quo" - that could be Kurt Gödel working to overturn Hilbert's systematisation of mathematics or it could be armed militia planning a military coup. I prefer my social change more like the former than the latter.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Well, in terms of telling your trusted friends before going public against the status quo, I'm mostly thinking about ideas like civil rights, gay rights and votes for women. All those things were originally taboo to express support for; some could lose you your job or otherwise destroy your life. If the only way to support those ideas was to go straight to shouting from a public soapbox without the chance to quietly discuss it with people you trusted first, and realise that others shared your opinions and might support you, I think most would have found that a far too intimidating leap to make.

I guess my problem is that yes, in an ideal world all ideas would be subjected to healthy robust criticism, but in practice those ideas need strong champions who are prepared to take risks - with their friends, jobs, families perhaps, if the ideas are really unpopular - to get them out there. A person might have a good idea but just not be that stubborn, tough-minded or brave, and not dare to speak up. So your no-privacy system doesn't select the best ideas, it selects the ideas with the most thick-skinned champions, which is not the same thing.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

So your no-privacy system doesn't select the best ideas, it selects the ideas with the most thick-skinned champions, which is not the same thing.

But that's just it, I don't want to "select" ideas at all! I want all of them.

Your examples are good, but to me these are not about ideas at all. What you show here is that some groups within society must make their plans privately because there exist other groups with interests opposed to their who would otherwise disrupt their activity. I'd certainly agree, but also wouldn't see that as "unnecessary privacy", particularly where illegal activity is involved.

In the more commonly encountered case of people fearing criticism is exactly what I'd like to see less of. The problem can be handled relatively easily: don't open all published material to commentary by the general public. Keep everything world readable, but allow the author to control who is able to discuss things. That way the ideas can get out, search still works, but trolls can't get in. And if someone does behave inappropriately then you know who they are so there's a degree of accountability.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

We seem to be suffering language failure.

When I refer to "commentary", I am not intending to limit anyone from discussing a topic in a forum of their own choosing. I am referring to the author themselves providing a feedback channel.

Each person then writes to their own output channel, but subscribes to read only channels of their choosing. That way you simply never see what the trolls are ranting about, because you don't read them. The usual sorts of informal recommendations would be (indeed, are) sufficient to draw worthwhile channels to the attention of potential readers.