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Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

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Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#61

Post by yamazakiwi »

thriftwy wrote: post #46
grrdotcloud wrote: post #4

I am not sure when it happened but I discovered that every game I played over the last twenty years, reduced to it's bare minimum functional components, was aligning a pointer on an X/Y axis and pressing the correct button within a time window. The goal of computers, reduction or multiplication of work, is often lost because the output does not last longer that the work required to generate. Computers are tools. They…

> aligning a pointer on an X/Y axis and pressing the correct button within a time window Heroes of Might and Magic III are somewhat older than 20 years but they are super different than that.

Yeah I can think of a few games that this doesn't describe, Disco Elysium for example as it has nothing to do with "timing", as they have described it.

Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#62

Post by jhbadger »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #57
tobr wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine a world where you can just assert any fact as the starting point of speculative fiction. Then imagine that someone would write a piece where computers were inherently old.

This breaks immersion for a lot of people, me included. It's one of the biggest issues I have with lots of sci-fi (moreso than most other types of speculative fiction) novels. Just asserting a fact this fundamental and building your world around it only works if societies, culture, technologies, and history are build around it. Humanity's history with tools and automation are millenia old. To alter this would require…

To some degree I agree with your last point. Before the idea of aliens, writers like Plato and Thomas Moore would posit some undiscovered island where they could imagine a culture unlike their own existing, which like with aliens, gave plausibility as to why that culture would have a different history and traditions than their own. Of course they, like many speculative writers today, were really writing about how they wished their own society worked.

Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#63

Post by jkingsbery »

nh23423fefe wrote: post #3

This kind of speculative fiction doesn't work. Usually the template is described as: take some part of the world and tweak it and then press play and see what the world looks like now. Instead this is just "invert some part of culture" which makes no sense. Culture is the emergent externalized collective intelligence of social creatures. You can't invent a culture which would preserve this property without asserting…

Good speculative fiction at least tries to give some reason why something might come to be the case. This article just says "pretend computers are old; old things are like X today; therefore, computers are going to be just like X," while ignoring all the things that are different.

Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#64

Post by forgetfreeman »

twelvechairs wrote: post #23

Replace 'computers' with 'open source software' and you are something closer to an uncomfortable truth. Open source has been critical to the advancement of our world but people who go out of their way to use and encourage open source past the basics (even fdroid or Firefox not even getting to hardware and full software stacks) are treated as oddballs even by the tech community.

Please enumerate the demonstrable advancements of society attributable to open source software. Edit: lots of downvotes, no credible responses. Guess y'all are stewing in your own cognitive dissonance?

Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#65

Post by code_duck »

andai wrote: post #16
tobr wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine a world where you can just assert any fact as the starting point of speculative fiction. Then imagine that someone would write a piece where computers were inherently old.

Expert prompt crafting!

I got some pretty interesting sci-fi type results for that in Stable Diffusion. It helped to negative-prompt titles, text, words, etc

Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#66

Post by sleepybrett »

nh23423fefe wrote: post #3

This kind of speculative fiction doesn't work. Usually the template is described as: take some part of the world and tweak it and then press play and see what the world looks like now. Instead this is just "invert some part of culture" which makes no sense. Culture is the emergent externalized collective intelligence of social creatures. You can't invent a culture which would preserve this property without asserting…

This is not unlike the speculative future of Anathem.

Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#67

Post by idiotsecant »

andai wrote: post #16
tobr wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine a world where you can just assert any fact as the starting point of speculative fiction. Then imagine that someone would write a piece where computers were inherently old.

Expert prompt crafting!

I'm so mad you made this comment before me.

Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#68

Post by sleepybrett »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #14
nh23423fefe wrote: post #3

This kind of speculative fiction doesn't work. Usually the template is described as: take some part of the world and tweak it and then press play and see what the world looks like now. Instead this is just "invert some part of culture" which makes no sense. Culture is the emergent externalized collective intelligence of social creatures. You can't invent a culture which would preserve this property without asserting…

Step 1: for some reason, the world stops making computers, but keeps the ones that already exist Step 2: 100 years pass Step 3: computers are now an old (and dying) tradition, kept going only by a small group of people who understand how to care for the machines. Was that so hard?

hell the living computer museum in seattle, before it's at least physical closure by the sister of paul allen, is/was a bit like this. They have a bunch of vintage big iron that they have restored to working condition and allow members of the public to use. Some of these are still available on the internet.

https://www.livingcomputers.org/

https://www.livingcomputers.org/Computer-Collection/Online-S...

Hell deep in the chip shortage I talked with more than one person that were buying up electronics at thrift shops and ebay that they knew contained chips they could not source at the time.

Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#69

Post by guhidalg »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #64
twelvechairs wrote: post #23

Replace 'computers' with 'open source software' and you are something closer to an uncomfortable truth. Open source has been critical to the advancement of our world but people who go out of their way to use and encourage open source past the basics (even fdroid or Firefox not even getting to hardware and full software stacks) are treated as oddballs even by the tech community.

Please enumerate the demonstrable advancements of society attributable to open source software. Edit: lots of downvotes, no credible responses. Guess y'all are stewing in your own cognitive dissonance?

Ok so gcc and Linux don’t exist in your world.

Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#70

Post by atleastoptimal »

Computers are, essentially, fast, iterative, extremely useful for automated and communication tasks, and naturally attract young, detail focused minds based on these qualities. Those essential qualities lend themselves to computer culture. Inherent qualities lead to cultural connotations, not the other way around.
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