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North Korean science fiction

arstechnica.com

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Re: North Korean science fiction

#51

Post by atdrummond »

philwelch wrote: post #42
narrator wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jules Verne is fun to read in this regard because the people who organized to go to the moon in "From Earth To The Moon" were simply part of a gun club that chose to fund the effort privately, not the government. It reflects how people had a different relationship with the government in the 19th century. Before the income tax, people like Rockefeller would just bail companies out during panics from their personal ban…

> Before the income tax, people like Rockefeller would just bail companies out during panics from their personal bank accounts, much to the consternation of bankers like J.P Morgan. To my understanding it was Morgan and not Rockefeller who engaged in these kinds of bailouts.

I think OP’s point was that JP Morgan wanted to see that role supplanted by the government, even if he was forced to sometimes play guarantor himself.

Re: North Korean science fiction

#52

Post by perardi »

philwelch wrote: post #41
1shot37291007 wrote: post #9

> "Stories often touch on topics like space travel, benevolent robots, disease-curing nanobots, and deep-sea exploration. They lack aliens and beings with superpowers. Instead, the real superheroes are the exceptional North Korean scientists and technologists who carry the weight of the world on their shoulders." Here is an interesting symmetry as reflected by ideological mirrors. In NK, the state sanctioned imaginal…

> And no, you can't just become one of the special superheroes. Two of the most iconic superheroes, Batman and Iron Man, are normal human beings who became superheroes from hard work.

“Normal” human beings, as in, the rich scions of super-genius hyper-capitalists who have a functionally unlimited amount of inherited capital to fall back on as they create their own super-hero enterprises.

Re: North Korean science fiction

#53

Post by c_crank »

dotnet00 wrote: post #38
sdsd wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You're too absorbed in your own cynicisim to see the obvious. There is hundreds of thousands of hours of all sorts of content added to the internet every day from all over the world. Western governments have nowhere near the sort of control over what their people can see to pull off anything anywhere near comparable to NK's attempts at controlling their people's entertainment.

The whims of the morally aggressive Western elite substitute for heavy handed regulation from top down. Although recent moves have been made to try and institute a CCP style bureau of misinformation even in America.

Re: North Korean science fiction

#54

Post by c_crank »

mcpackieh wrote: post #18
1shot37291007 wrote: post #9

> "Stories often touch on topics like space travel, benevolent robots, disease-curing nanobots, and deep-sea exploration. They lack aliens and beings with superpowers. Instead, the real superheroes are the exceptional North Korean scientists and technologists who carry the weight of the world on their shoulders." Here is an interesting symmetry as reflected by ideological mirrors. In NK, the state sanctioned imaginal…

> And no, you can't just become one of the special superheroes. Both are aiming to pacify the target society. Worse: You aren't such a superhero, but by random chance you might be chosen to become one and you are invited to imagine yourself in that situation. Any common person who might want to limit your hypothetical powers is an awful bigot and many of the stories revolve around tension between those with powers wh…

Reality: Americans have not been ruled by the superhero-like ultra rich for decades, and are starting to notice that little is improving and much is getting worse.

Re: North Korean science fiction

#55

Post by mcpackieh »

dotnet00 wrote: post #23
mcpackieh wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What conspiracies are you talking about? You should read Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chompsky. Most of what seems to be a conspiracy in western media is not actually organized as a conspiracy, but is emergent behavior in a system in which individual actors have aligned incentives. Acting individually without coordination, people hire and promote people who think like them, and ape then adopt the beliefs of their su…

The conspiracies being your attempt to argue that the superhero movie fad is some absurd attempt at making billionaires look good. If you look for a conspiracy in everything, you're going to find it in everything. Entertainment is generally just entertainment and this sort of overanalysis of things to push an agenda has been part of what has made so much of modern entertainment so cookie cutter.

I just told you it's not a conspiracy, you're tilting at windmills.

I have not proposed a conspiracy to create movies like this, I don't think there's a cabal of billionaires who dreamed up and coordinate this as a deliberate propaganda campaign. I assert that the Hollywood system creates movies like this because because of the way it is structured and the nature of making movies. People who fit the mold and are naturally inclined to make movies like this get promoted and given opportunities by like-minded people. People who don't jive with the crowd never have the opportunity to make movies of their own, because making movies (particularly blockbusters) requires access to a system with lots of capital and manpower.

I'm not the one looking for conspiracies. You're looking for a conspiracy in what I'm saying so that you can dismiss it. Read Manufacturing Consent.

Re: North Korean science fiction

#56

Post by philistine »

dotnet00 wrote: post #23
mcpackieh wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What conspiracies are you talking about? You should read Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chompsky. Most of what seems to be a conspiracy in western media is not actually organized as a conspiracy, but is emergent behavior in a system in which individual actors have aligned incentives. Acting individually without coordination, people hire and promote people who think like them, and ape then adopt the beliefs of their su…

The conspiracies being your attempt to argue that the superhero movie fad is some absurd attempt at making billionaires look good. If you look for a conspiracy in everything, you're going to find it in everything. Entertainment is generally just entertainment and this sort of overanalysis of things to push an agenda has been part of what has made so much of modern entertainment so cookie cutter.

It’s not complicated: are superheroes movies made to make billionaires look good?

Yes, indirectly.

Is the government the one dictating that?

Absolutely not.

Re: North Korean science fiction

#57

Post by judge2020 »

narrator wrote: post #31
1shot37291007 wrote: post #9

> "Stories often touch on topics like space travel, benevolent robots, disease-curing nanobots, and deep-sea exploration. They lack aliens and beings with superpowers. Instead, the real superheroes are the exceptional North Korean scientists and technologists who carry the weight of the world on their shoulders." Here is an interesting symmetry as reflected by ideological mirrors. In NK, the state sanctioned imaginal…

Jules Verne is fun to read in this regard because the people who organized to go to the moon in "From Earth To The Moon" were simply part of a gun club that chose to fund the effort privately, not the government. It reflects how people had a different relationship with the government in the 19th century. Before the income tax, people like Rockefeller would just bail companies out during panics from their personal ban…

While Elon is the only one with the intuition to bail out a company as large as Twitter, there probably are a few dozen Rockefeller CEOs of various SV/tech-adjacent companies that can and do use their power to command acquisitions of medium size startups that have promising tech but suffer from issues of cash flow or business strategy.

Re: North Korean science fiction

#58

Post by dotnet00 »

philistine wrote: post #56
dotnet00 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The conspiracies being your attempt to argue that the superhero movie fad is some absurd attempt at making billionaires look good. If you look for a conspiracy in everything, you're going to find it in everything. Entertainment is generally just entertainment and this sort of overanalysis of things to push an agenda has been part of what has made so much of modern entertainment so cookie cutter.

It’s not complicated: are superheroes movies made to make billionaires look good? Yes, indirectly. Is the government the one dictating that? Absolutely not.

Asserting something does not make it true.

Re: North Korean science fiction

#59

Post by dotnet00 »

mcpackieh wrote: post #55
dotnet00 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The conspiracies being your attempt to argue that the superhero movie fad is some absurd attempt at making billionaires look good. If you look for a conspiracy in everything, you're going to find it in everything. Entertainment is generally just entertainment and this sort of overanalysis of things to push an agenda has been part of what has made so much of modern entertainment so cookie cutter.

I just told you it's not a conspiracy, you're tilting at windmills. I have not proposed a conspiracy to create movies like this, I don't think there's a cabal of billionaires who dreamed up and coordinate this as a deliberate propaganda campaign. I assert that the Hollywood system creates movies like this because because of the way it is structured and the nature of making movies. People who fit the mold and are natu…

I'm calling it a conspiracy not because I think you're saying there's a cabal of billionaires doing this. I get that you're trying to pull the popular claim these days about things being "systemic".

My fundamental disagreement is that I don't care about what an obviously biased guy has to say about the media, I think a superhero movie is just a superhero movie and that of course Chomsky sees propaganda in everything, it'd be like expecting a politician anywhere in the world to not try to imply that all things wrong in the world are their opponent's fault.

To bring in a lighthearted example of the impression I have, regarding the sexualized outfit worn by characters in Nier Automata, there's been tons of analysis and whining, and mocking all that and to the satisfaction of most fans of the game, the author, when asked about the decision, pretended to be giving some complex reasoning before just straight up saying that he just likes girls.

It's the same with superhero stuff, the biggest takeaway from Iron Man isn't that irl billionaires are good guys, it's that an exoskeleton that can fly and shoot lasers is really fucking cool.

Re: North Korean science fiction

#60

Post by rexpop »

gumby wrote: post #2

I look forward to reading some of this. SF is pretty much always about the current day. Soviet SF was quite illuminating to me (back when anybody cared about the USSR). I’ve always wanted to read a couple of the Soviet equivalent of the James Bond novels.

> SF is pretty much always about the current day.

I can't comprehend this. Scifi is famously occupied with the future, and not the current day. Space travel, advanced technologies, artificial intelligences, and generally things that don't yet exist are par for the course. Most of SF is literally not about the present.

Do you mean to say that SF's subtext reflects the zeitgeist at the time/place of its writing?

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