How Dystopian Fiction Shapes Political Attitudes • Hacker News Board

Re: How Dystopian Fiction Shapes Political Attitudes

#111

Post by krapp » Sat, Dec 01, 2018, 1:56 AM UTC

another-one-off wrote: post #73

TeMPOraL wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, the first part of your response sounds pretty much like the very symptom of the problem discussed here. You presented a very bleak outlook, no doubt informed as much by dystopian fiction (and the culture enjoying it) as it is by rational analysis. If everything seems destined to hell, with no one capable of doing anything about it, people just give up and live their lives focused on short-term needs. This e…

Cheerful concurrence. It is worth remembering that most of history and indeed the present can be described in very bleak terms given a little bit of effort. Humans have good reason to fear the future. The future is very scary. However, the future has always been very scary, and it isn't any scarier now than it has been since the invention of record keeping, where basically the same threats were present. The past is a…

Well, any dystopia you can conceive is probably going to be utopia to someone.

Re: How Dystopian Fiction Shapes Political Attitudes

#112

Post by jhbadger » Sat, Dec 01, 2018, 2:30 AM UTC

beaconstudios wrote: post #69

omnimus wrote: post #48

Lately I have seen term Solarpunk on reddits, tumblrs and scuttlebutt thrown around. I think people start to realize we need positive ideas for future. Solarpunk is future where we make it, clean energy wins, automation will empower us instead of enslaving us. Maybe its time for some of that.

post-cyberpunk is pretty positive too. It's basically near-future tech in a society not that far from our own, and the conflict comes from the exact kinds of conflicts we're starting to think about now around privacy, economic advantage, AI going wrong and so on. But it's not inherently dystopian like cyberpunk is.

Even traditional Gibsonian cyberpunk isn't really as dystopian as it is often presented as. I remember an interview with William Gibson where he said the fact that he assumed that there would be a civilization, even a flawed one, in the mid 21st century, was optimistic given that he was writing in the 1970s and 1980s when it was widely assumed that we would likely nuke ourselves into extinction in a few years.

Re: How Dystopian Fiction Shapes Political Attitudes

#113

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Dec 01, 2018, 3:10 AM UTC

another-one-off wrote: post #73

TeMPOraL wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, the first part of your response sounds pretty much like the very symptom of the problem discussed here. You presented a very bleak outlook, no doubt informed as much by dystopian fiction (and the culture enjoying it) as it is by rational analysis. If everything seems destined to hell, with no one capable of doing anything about it, people just give up and live their lives focused on short-term needs. This e…

Cheerful concurrence. It is worth remembering that most of history and indeed the present can be described in very bleak terms given a little bit of effort. Humans have good reason to fear the future. The future is very scary. However, the future has always been very scary, and it isn't any scarier now than it has been since the invention of record keeping, where basically the same threats were present. The past is a…

[deleted]

Re: How Dystopian Fiction Shapes Political Attitudes

#114

Post by labster » Sat, Dec 01, 2018, 5:10 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #103

labster wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, so you're a modernist, and that's ok. You have an implicit assumption that the larger culture is better, and that being more economically productive is desirable. Many hunter-gatherer societies offered more leisure time than modern cultures. If that's your point of reference, Western culture is an abject failure.

I think there's a view that both admits the merits of hunter-gatherer societies and still prefers the modern one. The way I see it, we've made a huge step back in order to be able to move forwards. Hunter-gatherers may have had more leisure time, but they could never have developed airplanes, vaccines, modern medicine, plumbing, Internet or space travel. To achieve those things, we had to specialize and build large-s…

I wasn't actually taking the side against civilization, just saying that reasonable arguments exist. But you get that.

One thing I spend a lot of time thinking about is the amount of things that I'm wrong about. Some of them minor, but also likely something that a future man would find abhorrent, equivalent to slavery or cockfighting or something. Extrapolate from how often people are wrong on the Internet (!!11), and I'm probably wrong a lot. Extrapolate from HN, less so. Civilization as a whole must also have these systemic errors which are unnoticed by almost everyone; modernism definitely had such errors.

The single most modernist institution remaining today is the Olympics, which attempts to use athletic competition to maintain international peace. We all know that the IOC and related bodies have serious problems, but the mission itself is still valuable. Even if it does implicitly promote nationalism.

Re: How Dystopian Fiction Shapes Political Attitudes

#115

Post by TeMPOraL » Sat, Dec 01, 2018, 7:24 AM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #107

TeMPOraL wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But will there be increased demand? For the basics - food, shelter - the demand is pretty much proportional to population. With more money around and same demand, will competition on commodities be enough to keep the prices where they were? My naïve expectation is that they'll in fact rise, and tie up most of the UBI.

So folks will spend their money on other things. I just don't get it - how does "people have money" lead to "I know how they will spend it, and it will be on housing and food"? In a competitive market (I can go to any grocery store I like) the prices are not set to what people have to pay but on what the other stores are selling for. The offerings may depend on that - more caviar if folks have more spendable income.…

> I just don't get it - how does "people have money" lead to "I know how they will spend it, and it will be on housing and food"?

It was more of "people have more money" -> "are able to pay more" -> "prices will raise to what market full of slightly richer people can bear". But I'm not arguing that, just asking about it. I don't have enough economic understanding to make predictions here.

Re: How Dystopian Fiction Shapes Political Attitudes

#116

Post by TeMPOraL » Sat, Dec 01, 2018, 8:56 AM UTC

matt4077 wrote: post #104

TeMPOraL wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in TNG era (TNG/DS9/VOY), Starfleet was only technically "a military". While everyone still wore uniforms and followed a chain of command, the show made a huge point of Starfleet's goals being primarily diplomacy, exploration and scientific research; occasional force projection was considered a secondary and unfortunate task.

The militarism I was referencing isn't defined so much in violence, but in values, organisational structure (, and fashion). It's arguably worse for the trappings of the military (rigid hierarchy, loyalty as the core value, etc) to be used in the context of functions that are civilian by nature, such as science and diplomacy. The essence of life as it's portrayed is that of a benevolent military dictatorship. I know…

I see. True, TNG didn't deal that much with civilian life directly - as viewers, we're following a Starfleet flagship on an exploratory mission. But the show does try to communicate in the background that it's just Starfleet that's the military branch, and the wider Federation is a fully civilian effort.

In DS9 civilian life is almost the primary focus of the first few seasons, as the titular DS9 has only skeleton Starfleet representation onboard, and most of the protagonists aren't part of it. The series also had portrayed an attempt by some Starfleet personnel to turn Federation into actual military dictatorship ("for the greater good", of course).

Re: How Dystopian Fiction Shapes Political Attitudes

#117

Post by TeMPOraL » Sat, Dec 01, 2018, 9:03 AM UTC

krapp wrote: post #110

TeMPOraL wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Getting there is definitely the hard part. Even in the show they had to go through nuclear apocalypse and rebuild society in order to get there. Also a well-timed first contact with arrogant aliens, that made humans want to show their best side. > Another problem is getting people to think "contributing to society is virtuous". It's possible that this idea may be at odds with human nature (similar to Soviet and Chi…

>Also a well-timed first contact with arrogant aliens, that made humans want to show their best side. In the same way the colonies wanted to show their best side when the British showed up to civilize them? Sorry.. this is a utopia, I forgot. Per ardua ad astra and whatnot. Must not be cynical. Must not be... the only reason there was a utopia at all was a global holocaust reducing the population, widespread genetic…

> NO GET OUT CYNICISM YOU DONT EVEN FIT.

I'd say stop feeding the wrong wolf, but you seem to have a whole pack there, searching the forest of your mind for any positive thought to hunt down. You might want to call Wildlife Services on this one.

Re: How Dystopian Fiction Shapes Political Attitudes

#118

Post by beaconstudios » Sat, Dec 01, 2018, 12:17 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #102

bambataa wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is 'best' if not ideological?

Whatever actually works to make things better. The difference is applying science and rational thinking vs. soundbites and reasoning from ideology.

I was going to write up a big essay explaining my thinking but you've summed it up pretty neatly. Ideologies are always based on some level of faith that "if we achieve X, that will make everything better". Id rather use rational techniques to track the outcome of individual policy proposals against some sensible definition of better that could come from a rough consensus. Ideology offers easy answers but rational practises could offer answers that can be proven to work.

Re: How Dystopian Fiction Shapes Political Attitudes

#119

Post by JetSpiegel » Sat, Dec 01, 2018, 1:07 PM UTC

beaconstudios wrote: post #118

TeMPOraL wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever actually works to make things better. The difference is applying science and rational thinking vs. soundbites and reasoning from ideology.

I was going to write up a big essay explaining my thinking but you've summed it up pretty neatly. Ideologies are always based on some level of faith that "if we achieve X, that will make everything better". Id rather use rational techniques to track the outcome of individual policy proposals against some sensible definition of better that could come from a rough consensus. Ideology offers easy answers but rational pr…

> Id rather use rational techniques to track the outcome of individual policy proposals against some sensible definition of better that could come from a rough consensus.

That's the problem, the definition of "better" is the whole point.

Say for USA, setting the marginal tax rate of 1M dollars to 100%, including for company revenues, and redistributing that money to the poor greatly increases the Gini coefficient. That's just increasing a number that is widely agreed to be a "sensible definition of better", can't get more "rational" than that. You can write a bulletproof proposal that can't be rationally argued against.

Ideology is not just a series of individual policies, it's a lens through which you can evaluate every possible policy proposal.

Re: How Dystopian Fiction Shapes Political Attitudes

#120

Post by JetSpiegel » Sat, Dec 01, 2018, 1:09 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #61

AstralStorm wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that this future was never delivered. Pessimism is expected after that. Worse, showing how obstacles are overcome and not seeing it applied in real world is soul crushing. This is often because politics turned from initially being a way of solving problems to a popularity ascend machismo contest - and it infects everything.

But fiction is about setting expectation. If popular works start to show that it is possible for political organizations to not be full of shit, people will expect that, and exert extra pressure. This beats the current attitude of "politics is a shitshow, news at 11; I don't care about this anymore".

It's not so clear cut. If fiction veers too much into "politics is great!" while "the real world" shows otherwise, it can be dismissed as asskissing.

Fiction can only nudge the public opinion.