Historically, almost every significant economic crash has been due to one factor of the human psyche, the inability to conceive of change. Not adapt to change; we’re pretty damn good at figuring things out after the fact. Beforehand? Not so much. Entire industries collapse because of the assumption that the fourth quarter will be exactly like the first, only more so. This is true even when those assumptions are based on patent absurdities.One incredibly obvious absurdity that infects everyone from a two person tech startup to the federal government; prosperity requires indefinite growth. It’s ingrained in our psyche. But think about it. Economics is not divorced from the physical world, and in the end economics is still the organized distribution of resources. Things will always run out. Labor, energy, capital, customers, people’s attention spans, bandwidth, tax base— everything is finite. Therefore, at some point, growth must stop. The problem, of course, is because of the assumption prosperity requires growth, we’ve done everything to insure that when it does stop it becomes a massive disaster because all the systems we’ve constructed to assume growth don’t really work when growth stops. (Case in point, the design of the Social Security system, which requires a constant permanent growth in the working population in order to work.)Now, Microsoft’s existence is based on a similar absurdity, the permanent upgrade path. The idea that software is in a continual state of improvement, and that it is a valid assumption that the end user will continue to buy the new version of an application every few years or so. Both are at odds with reality. Every technology has an endpoint, there comes a time when a system is so mature that it does what it does well enough that any future meddling actually makes things worse. I write for a living, and deal with several flavors of MS Word every day. I can say that, for my purposes, there is absolutely no functional difference in any version of Word released since 2000. It’s a damn word processor. You’re not making it any better. The OS is facing the same problem. Intel has said there’s no compelling reason for them to upgrade their 80,000 PCs to Vista. The only reason the public’s buying the OS is because it comes on new machines— a substantial number of which are being downgraded to XP. The fact that XP is “good enough” is going to become a big problem for Microsoft. They’ll continue to push new OS’s onto new PCs, but fewer people are going to bother “upgrading,” meaning that developers are going to serve a Windows market that’s more and more fractured, and therefore they will not be as likely to utilize new “features” in the OS, (if half the computers there are running XP, you’re losing half the market when you develop something that only works for Vista or Windows 7). With less software requiring the new OS, it becomes even less attractive to upgrade. And as more and more of the stuff people do with computers moves to the internet, the OS on the machine becomes irrelevant. If your browser does all of what you need, why do you need Vista?In fact, Intel’s decision should give itself pause, because it’s based on a similar model. What happens to the tech industry when people don’t buy a new PC every three years? What happens when the five-year old PC works just fine?
Just saw an interesting post on The Feminist SF Blog that draws attention to one of those little cultural blind spots that are really useful in worldbuilding. You know, the kind of thing everyone takes for granted, so when they read about another culture (real or fictional) that does it differently they're all like "whoa."In this particular case, it starts off by noting that female reproductive parts et al. tend to be named after male doctors, scientists and so on. It got me thinking less about the patriarchy of it all (since, one presumes, as gender becomes more equitably represented in the sciences, the number of female eponyms will likewise increase) but about the narcissism of it all. The fact that science is rife with terms originating with individual people seems an interesting quirk, and it would imply something very "other" about a society that doesn't do so.
I've gone on at length about the replicator economy, what will happen to commerce as the cost of "stuff" goes to zero and the ability to copy anything becomes ubiquitous. Understanding the implications of this is going to make the difference between success and failure for whole industries. It also will help in drafting a post-Singularity tale that has logical economics. Well, I came across an absolutely magnificent article by Kevin Kelly on The Technium on exactly what you can sell when copies (of everything) are free. The premise is simple: if copies are ubiquitous, copies are worthless, so we trade in what cannot be copied. Think about that long enough, and you can leverage yourself out of the 19th century widget box much of the western world is still trapped in, and achieve, zen -like, an economy independent of things. This is the kind of article that will make an RIAA executive's head explode.
. . .and provides an example of a point I was making over ten years ago. You may or may not have visited my home page, which predates this blog by about a dozen years or so, if you have, buried in the writing portion are a couple of essays I did on plot and world-building when I taught some classes on those subjects way too many years ago. While such writing advice, when it isn't market-specific, isn't prone to become dated (one of my favorites in my collection of writing books is a little compilation of essays entitled Of Worlds Beyond which was originally published in 1947. And Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses are as offensive today as when Mark Twain wrote about them in 1895.) it is true that specific examples used in such advice may date badly, especially if you are talking about SF and technological change.Exhibit one from "Worldbuilding: Constructing a SF Universe" by your's truly:
Unintended consequences are especially rife when talking about technological change. Every piece of technology will eventually find niches other than what its developers intend. (Consider the identification of pagers with the drug culture.) [emphasis added]
Making your world different can be as simple as locating it in that vast unknown territory, "The Future." But for every element of difference you introduce in a story, there will be a multitude of consequences rippling out from the point of difference. Consider one example: Once computer animation becomes cheap and detailed enough that a lone hacker can produce a feature film, what will this do to the major movie studios, television, advertising, intellectual property laws, politics, culture, and the nature of celebrity?
L. E. Modesitt, Jr. wrote a long post on his blog on why he believes the singularity won't happen. [via SF Signal]According to Modesitt, it won't happen because such visions are based on technology, not on humanity and they're based on a western European/North American cultural chauvinism.He goes on to explain:
One of the simplest rules involved in implementing technology is that the speed and breadth of such implementation is inversely proportional to the cost and capital required to implement that technology. That's why we don't have personal helicopters, technically feasible as they are. It's also why, like it or not, there's no supersonic aircraft follow-on to the Concorde. It's also why iPods and cellphones are ubiquitous, as well as why there are many places in the third world where cellphones are usable, but where landlines are limited or non-existent.
According to The Guardian, ye olde brick-and-mortar bookstore is not long for this world. According to a survey at the Frankfurt Book fair [from SF Signal]:
Almost a quarter of the 1,324 industry professionals who took part in the survey predicted that the high street bookseller would no longer exist in 2057 while only 11% thought that the printed book would be obsolete.
Lois Tilton over at Deep Genre doesn't like Libertarian SF, at least some Libertarian meme she sees as infecting some SF. In a nutshell her main complaint seems to be with the idea that space would be more "free" (meaning absence of regulation) when she sees the scarcity of resources (such as air) resulting in a much more regulated environment.Well, this is a classic "yes but." The "but" here is the fact that Libertarianism respects much more small-scale governmental systems, and the classic Libertarian scenario has each starship/habitat/whatever being sovereign unto itself and the crew of said starship/habitat/whatever being present by choice, and voluntarily subject to the rules/laws/regulations therein. And often those rules can be a lot more draconian than a typical State's laws, and subject to harsher penalties. They just cover a much smaller jurisdiction, population, and subset of human behavior.I don't even see L. Neil Smith at his most didactic devolving into the über-individualism that Tilton seems to dislike. I can't help feeling that she's upset with a caricature of a mindset that she doesn't happen to like in the first place.It's not that I don't want no rules on my starship. I just want the rules set by the people on the starship, and not by a committee of career bureaucrats who never stepped out of a gravity well.
I posted earlier about how we needed new models for an Intellectual Property economy. On John Scalzi's Whatever Blog there's a thread that goes into the specifics of an existing rental model that seems to work.I also had some thoughts about the economy of Second-Life and MMORPG's in general, and now I find a N.Y. Times article that reads like early William Gibson. (via Freedom to Tinker.)
Microsoft seems to be in the vanguard, defending a 19th Century economic model for IP law. Not only has it deformed the purpose of its operating system into one giant copy-protection scheme, but now it’s attacking open-source software vendors with vague threats of patent violations.Here’s the problem in a nutshell: copy protection is essentially impossible. The defenders of old-style IP law are throwing money, lawyers and technology at an insoluble problem. The fact is, if you allow a user to see content, that user can reproduce the content. Throw whatever technical hurdles you want at the issue, in the end, you have to give the user access to the content or there’s nothing to read, watch or listen to.Everyone seems to focus on the wrong end of the problem. The economic issue is not how we force all the consumers to pay for that Metallica song— tain’t going to happen, as everyone who owned a radio-cassette player in the 80s will attest to. The economic issue is how do we compensate content creators for the effort used to produce the content? Paying royalties on copies of the work is a model from the industrial revolution, back when books were just another widget coming off an assembly line. Not a good model in a digital world where one book/cd/movie/article can be replicated ad infinitum with little or no central control. (Ironic example: look here then here)The fact is that lack of control has already happened. And draconian measures by Microsoft, the RIAA and the motion picture industry actually worsens the problem by pissing off average end users and eroding the moral compunction against wholesale piracy— which is the only real clothing the emperor has at this point.The other fact is, I’m not one of those that believe you can legislate the economy. Sure, you can make things worse, or inconvenient, or dangerous— but eventually a new mode of operation will emerge. The corporations that adapt will survive, and those that don’t adapt will collapse, throwing their last few millions at lawyers and legislators trying to make it stop. As for individuals, I am not as pessimistic as the luddite Dr. Hendrix. If anything, the need for entertainment in this economy is increasing exponentially, and there will be no shortage of opportunities for writers, musicians and actors to make a living. Just don’t expect your work to stay in a nice little box after you cash the check.
Ok, show of hands, how many people out there watch the Superbowl for the commercials? Now, think of this, how many Superbowl ads actually look like ads? At least like things we traditionally think of ads? How many of you have received a mepeg in your e-mail of a funny advertisement, or downloaded one from YouTube?In the last century as we developed mass media— movies, radio and television— we (and when I say we, I mean the regulatory agencies of the US government) drew a line in the sand and said that this side was advertising, and this side was entertainment. And for about sixty years the model worked . However, since the adoption of Tivo, DVDs, and streaming media, that model doesn’t work so well.So advertisements are becoming more like entertainment, and entertainment is becoming more like ads. In another ten years, what’s left of broadcast TV will rely on product placement, naming rights, and DVD sales to finance itself— and you may be twenty minutes into an extended ad buy before you realize they’re trying to sell you something.
Anyone writing short stories over the past decade or so may have noticed something of an online renaissance of paying on-line markets for short fiction. I started submitting stuff for publication in the late eighties/early nineties, and at that time there were only a handful of professional markets; Analog, Asimov’s, F&SF and a smattering of others. Today, a cursory examination of a market site like Ralan lists dozens of pro markets for genre fiction. Half are online, and most outside the staid old-timers will accept e-mailed submissions.E-mail submissions make sense, since it not only makes the submitter’s life easer, but it makes the editor’s life easer. Once someone can divorce themselves from a paper fetish, it becomes much easer to track a digital submission; manuscripts can be queued up, can be easily assigned and re-assigned to readers, can be accessed from off-site without carrying around a briefcase full of paper, and once the they’re edited and (if we’re lucky) accepted for publication, the original file can be sent directly to the webmaster/printer/whatever. IT geek that I am, I have trouble imagining why there are still holdouts. I mean, I’ve seen a few editors’ offices, and if I had my choice between a dangerously teetering pile of slush blocking the door, and a couple of thumb drives. . . Well, to me, it’s a no-brainer.Digital submission also allows things that were impossible, or at least impractical, with paper submission. Both Glimmer Train Press, and Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine (interestingly, both are print, not online) give contributors access to web pages that allow them to trace a manuscript through their editorial process— sort of like a Fed Ex package. Baen’s Universe lets contributors view “page proofs” on-line, as well as see the magazine’s issues while they’re in development.Of course, as the tech savvy of the publishing industry grows— even at the glacial pace it does evolve— more uses will be found for these electronic submissions. I can see an editor with an in-house version of Google searching all the submissions for the last two years to find a Victorian vampire story to fit December’s theme issue.Perhaps a scarier possibility is the application of Bayesian filtering techniques to fiction submission. After all, the editor’s job in sifting through slush is to find the few signal pieces in the noise of all the Trek Slash and Adam & Eve stories— not unlike your email program. The same technology that picks the Viagra ads out of your inbox may, someday, be e-mailing you a rejection slip. . .Well, at least response times might improve.
For those interested, I found a really decent article on the economics of Second Life and MMORPGs in general. Thinking about what it is examining more closely, I begin to think that IP and capitalism are more emergent properties in society, and not arbitrary legal frameworks . . .
Western civilization is dealing with a crisis over intellectual property. The fact that any digital medium can be easily copied with perfect fidelity ties our legal system into knots, leading some, like Cory Doctorow to call for the outright abolition of Copyright law. However, DMCA et al is a harbinger of what is likely to become a much more serious problem. Over time, as technology and production efficiency has increased, the “cost” of physical goods has become less and less based on the actual stuff it’s made of. Right now, for most products, the “cost” is mostly tied up in things such as production, marketing, and distribution. And as we move toward on-demand fabrication, and possibly on-site fabrication (a kiosk that burns you a brand new Metallica CD at the local Tower Records while you wait) both production and distribution trend toward zero. . .What happens when everything has effectively zero cost to manufacture and distribute? When the only value an object has is the creative energy expended to design and market it? What happens when you can download a Rolls Royce from Napster? While this resembles some versions of Utopia, it does pose a rather important existential question: Can an economic system exist without scarcity? (aka “How does Starfleet get paid?”)Interestingly, there is currently a model of this sort of “Replicator Economy” in existence. The designers of the "game" Second Life have created a laboratory in economics or intellectual property. In a nutshell, within the game the only resource of any scarcity is land, and to play, you really don’t “need” land; you can just dive in and walk around. Like any other RPG, there’s a currency, and you can buy stuff. Unlike most RPGs, everything for sale (except land) has been created by other players, (including financial services) and when you buy something (except land) you’re buying it from another player. i.e., almost all goods and services for sale in Second Life have a cost derived only from the “creative” input and marketing involved. There’s no material cost, and no distribution cost— in Second Life it “costs” as much to create one Naughty School Girl outfit as it does to create 1,000 of them. One of the consequences of this is the recognition that ALL products are intellectual property.“But, Mr. Swann, it’s only a game— there’s no connection between this and the REAL world”Actually, there’s an exchange rate between the in-game currency and the US dollar. It floats and, as of this writing, is hovering around 260 Linden dollars to the US Dollar. So those 1,000 Naughty School Girl outfits at $L1500 a pop represent about fifty-five hundred dollars. That’s pretty real.So, despite what many inhabitants of this intellectual bubble called the internet have predicted, the first truly virtual economy is not only solidly capitalist, but extremely conscious of IP rights.
One of the more difficult things a writer can do is write about a culture that is truly alien. A lot of bad SF— especially in TV and movies— has shown alien beings that are significantly less alien to someone from a western culture than many human cultures.
My own personal shortcut to the problem of envisioning an alien species is to take some universal base-line facet of humanity and changing it, following the change to its ultimate conclusion. Changing the method of reproduction is one possible change; altering the method by which young are produced will change everything in a society. (Consider how much of human religion is dedicated to sex and gender roles.) Altering the primary method a species receives sensory input is another radical change that would produce profound psychological and cultural differences.
Another possible change, and one that I believe has some implications for the future of our species, is altering the species’ primary means of communication. The most alien of the aliens I have written about are the ghadi in Broken Crescent. The ghadi were a whole species as intelligent as man, but suffering a universal aphasia that removed the capability of verbal and written language. They end up thinking in a way that is completely alien to us.
More concretely, a change in the means of human communication— movies, television, and the mass-media— has caused radical and wide-spread permanent changes in human culture. One of the more profound effects being the ability to propagate a culture beyond its physical boundaries without force of arms. What the Romans did with legions, we do with Nike and Keanu Reeves.
Consider now this blog. The ability of one person to conduct a dialog with an entire planet. It isn’t clear where this will lead, what is clear is that we have no idea as a society how to handle it. The idea of public and private speech is obsolete on the internet. Your employer can Google you and uncover every stupid inappropriate comment you ever made on a Hello Kitty website. You drop a shopping list and someone can post it on—line. You can get fired or expelled because you scared someone in authority— and you can’t take back those electrons.
The more we communicate by text and e-mail, the closer we come to a scary point of universal selective omniscience. When we speak, we speak to everyone, and we can find out everything about anyone we want. What then?
When you write science fiction, you often find yourself in the position of thinking about the sciences in general. And it came home to me recently how strangely out of sync progress in medicine is in comparison with— for instance— physics or chemistry. While it’s easy to point out the massive progress medicine has made over the past ten, twenty, or fifty years, we have to face the fact that a large part of medical science is still limited to doing something to someone and noting the results. Pharmaceutical companies can’t even predict how well a medication might work, or what side effects it might have, until it’s actually used in trials. This would be like an car company having to build several full-scale model vehicles in order to figure out not only which design might actually run, but which ones wouldn’t blow up or fall apart.
The sad fact is that medicine wasn’t really a science until around World War I. To put that another way, a Chinese herbalist is only about 80 years behind your local neurosurgeon technology-wise. For the SF writer, that means that if you want to place a bet on where your next major world-shaking scientific discovery is going to come from, medical science is a good bet. There’s just a lot more uncharted territory. While it's unlikely that any future work in physics will upend the premises set down by Newton or Einstein, we can be certain that some of the current fundamental “truths” of accepted medical science will be overturned.
An example; the accepted fact that nerve tissue does not regenerate and brain damage is permanent and irreversible. 19 years ago, a man named Terry Wallis was in an auto accident and suffered severe brain damage. He entered a coma from which he was never expected to awake. However, three years ago he did wake up. Not only that, his condition has been improving since, and he has been regaining some motor functions. While still profoundly disabled, he is fully conscious and able to communicate. Most exciting, his doctors have found evidence of his brain rebuilding itself.
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