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.

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

Ha, I just watched "Eastern Promises" the other night, whose dramatic pivot-point is a Russian mob boss raping a 14 year old girl with the words "if you want to tame a horse, you have to break it first". Double bill with Lilya-4-Ever anyone?

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Duels to the death as light recreation have already been done in Charlie Stross' Glasshouse, and something fairly similar is implicit in John Varley's Steel Beach.

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

To answer the actual question: I think, barring extreme slowdown or reversal of our rate of technological change, it's inevitable that within our conceivable lifetime we'll be able to transfer human consciousness from body to machine. Once this happens, it will be considered ridiculous to stay inside our flesh envelope, with its extreme susceptibility to disease, damage and death. To start with we'll move into android bodies, but frankly that's just an act of nostalgia - any work or activity that needs to be done can be done by machines, there will no longer be any need for us to be present. Humanity will become a leisured class of thoughtforms, indulging in synthetic rather than environmental or physical pleasures. If there is still any need to create new life by the old methods the newborn babies' consciousness will doubtless be transferred at an early stage. Bodies, having served their purpose will, I don't know, be composted or something. If I woke up in this new world it wouldn't just be a culture shock, there'd be nothing left of the world of interacting with an objective environment I knew. I think discovering that the entire human race had turned into a small humming box marked "Internet 2.0" will constitute a bigger culture shock than the risk of being sexually assaulted by my great-grandchildren. And I think it currently looks pretty inevitable. Why would anyone ever just *vacation* in the holodeck?

[sesquipedality.livejournal.com]

I think it people had started modifying their own bodies really heavily I'd find that pretty freaky. Most piercings squick me.

[monkeyhands.livejournal.com]

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 misread the last bit as "I suspect everyone thinks they're young", and I think my misreading is nearer the truth.

I think what happens is that most people sort out their personal morality and their taste in various things by the age of about 25. Then the world gets salami-slicingly different, and you get salami-slicingly older, but you just don't notice because you still feel exactly the same inside and you're still seeing it as "your" world. So you see the shockingness of new things as a quality belonging to those things, not as a quality belonging to your age and shockability.

I keep hearing/reading about women who have cosmetic surgery in their 50s and 60s and say it's because they want to look how they feel. They feel energetic and youthful and they're tired of being dismissed as tired old hags because of their wrinkles. I think the reason they give is very significant. Of course it's a lot to do with ageism and visual culture and sexism, but I think it's also got a lot to do with how time marks itself on your body but not necessarily on your mind.

No time to assimilate all the text and comments

[a-llusive.livejournal.com]

but on the Thatcher point, the interview I saw with Lindsay Duncan before it came out indicated that the programme (as broadcast) was intended to display how she came to power and look at how her character was slanted to the views which prompted her famous later decisions. For a generation who know too much of her premiership, the basis of her rise to power and her appeal at the time is very obscure, so seemed worthwhile revisiting, while the famous incidents are currently too well worn. In another 10 years maybe there'll be a more thorough evocation.

[brightybot.livejournal.com]

Not that I think your man had a great example with rape, I do think your argument that it's a bad e.g. Because it happens *now* is misguided. Lots of social changes, e.g. acceptance of homosexuality or decline of marriage are things that have always happened: the difference is just that whilst before they were frowned upon, now they are accepted.

[leathellin.livejournal.com]

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

I think i'd be most horrified to discover that some things hadn't changed or in fact had gone backwards so if slavery was re-legalised, the vote denied, that kind of thing.