Politics in Media - The Good, the Bad, and the Preachy

The point is that writers treating science and innovation as dangerous things is nothing new. It's not a recent thing at all.

Heck, just look at the classic The Twilight Zone. Though there was at least one episode that took the idea apart. A whole bunch of people die of radiation poisoning because they were upset by the reveal that the wasteland elder telling them which foods were safe to eat was actually a computer.

Or you can just look at the various sci fi movies from the Seventies. It was so common that Family Guy parodied it.

Edited by M84 on Apr 29th 2024 at 4:43:02 PM

Disgusted, but not surprised

Yea worth noting that Asimov absolutely wrote stories about a robot being suicidal from being plugged into the Internet or about corporate overlords hacking robots so they would not comply with the Three Rules. It's why he so strongly believed robots had to be intrinsically three-law compliant (rather than this merely being programming).

A particular issue is that technology is incredibly vague and often the actual implementation of technology is the key element. Like, maintaining a database or using computational proofs as security is nothing new but when you push NFT's, then that is the technology and its also intrinsically tied to its actual purpose (IE digital landlording).

This is a particular issue i have that i have no idea how to deal with, but technology is an incredibly broad concept whereas people often treat it like tech tree unlocks in RTS.

And especially when the technology is being pushed by a specific group of specific people for a specific purpose, the "well i dont oppose the technology, just who designs, makes, implements and benefits from it" just collapses into "yes i do not like the technology".

Edited by devak on Apr 29th 2024 at 11:37:24 AM

And pretty much all of the stories in I, Robot are about how insufficient the Three Laws really are when it comes to preventing all issues with robots.

Disgusted, but not surprised

IIRC (And I've read a whole lot of Asimov, including the forewards and biographies where he talks about his work), he never wanted to make 'evil/bad robot' stories. One reason why he had the Laws in the first place. But it surfaced anyway.

There needs to be conflict in stories, obviously, and I think that's one symptom. Oh, you can think of a cool new invention, let's introduce it to a society and make a story about it! ...Wait, the most obvious story there is how this new thing creates problems.

Edited by PointMaid on Apr 29th 2024 at 4:01:58 AM

The robots aren't evil though. He was very much of the "technology is a tool" persuasion and so robots can be used for bad purposes, just like any other technology. But he didn't just go for "Robots are evil".

Furthermore, their behavior is logical and understandable once they are sufficiently understood, rather than random "it's technology, why wouldn't it be evil" stuff.

That is true. Still.

Of course, the second most obvious story is only slightly less obvious. That would be the "New thing is good, but entrenched interests try to destroy the new thing, or monopolise it for themselves".

I think that's about nine-tenths of cyberpunk stories.

Ah, that reminds me of Deus Ex Human revolution.

Where it had the one good businessman in David Sarif who legit wanted to use human augmentation tech for good and is an idealist.

And this man happens to be in a Cyberpunk setting so uhhh things won’t work out the way he wants.

I'll teach you a lesson about just how cruel the world can be. That's my job, as an adult.

With a lot of pessimistic cyberpunk stories, it's less the technology itself that's bad and more the fact that corporations are using it to fuck people over.

Edited by Kaiseror on Apr 29th 2024 at 8:59:00 AM

Anticapitalism is second nature to the genre. It's punk.

But. Y'know. Cyber.

My Tumblr. Currently liveblogging Haruhi Suzumiya and revisiting Danganronpa V3.

Does it get weird when you are allowed to side with corporations and make sure their plans work out?

Arasaka, the board, and the rich Illuminati in certain Deus Ex games.

I'll teach you a lesson about just how cruel the world can be. That's my job, as an adult.

I guess I was also including 'causes problems by allowing people to use it to exploit', sure. But they are different. (I also subscribe to 'technology is just a tool, it's how it's used')

Integral to cyberpunk is the idea that governments are either ineffectual or actively siding with the corporations. This may or may not be a realistic scenario given current trends in the real world. Snow Crash, for example, portrays most governments as having gone bankrupt and farmed off their operations to for-profit corporations.

If anything, modern society shows governments going in the opposite direction, especially in the EU. (China is a special case.)

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Just to say, that the existence of conflict in a story or someone using "science" for evil, does not mean a story is presenting a cynical view.

Like Star Trek clearly  bode a bright future for humanity, when all nations work together, poverty and inter-humans wars stop, and humans explore the wide universe.

The existence of a Mad Scientist here, an Insane Admiral there, or whatever sketchy actions Section 30 is performing, does not change from that or make the setting less optimistic.

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A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is arguing that monarchy is evil, that the nobility and church of middle ages, abused man, made him ignorant and supertitous, and caused people to live like animals.

Through science, rationality and democracy Mark Twain preachs a golden future when humans can throw away fuedalism and elevate themselves to live in peace like brothers.

The protagonist failed to achieve that with Arthurian England, but it doesn't matter, because the "bright future" is still happening, in 19th-century America, the place from which the enlighted hero come from.

.........................

Hard to Be a God also has a similar message to Yankee (except replace democracy with socialism), and even though the protagonist snap at the end, his efforts did help the medieval world he was working on, and the future Earth he came from, is operating under those principles, so that is optemisic.

..........................

2001: A Space Odyssey (I read only the first book, and not the sequels) is a mixed case.

On the one hand, humans avoided a nuclear war in the future  (something that was feared in 1951 and 1968, when the book and movie were made, respectively), manage to explore the solar system, and had the chance to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence, and explore the universe.

On the other hand, now 38 countries have nuclear weapons, and China is offering to sell those countries that don't, a nuclear arsenal for less than 200 millions.

The last time, aliens helped humans evolve, they dedicated their efforts to creating weapons and killing each other.

So it is a mixed bag, but I will say it leans optimistic.

The existence of a killing computer with psychological problems is irrelevant here.

................................

To make a long post short, the existence of an antagonist or even an ending when the hero fails doesn't make the setting cynical; it is what the story preaches that matters.

On the other hand an After the End story where humans destroy themselves and return to the Stone Age, will present a pessimistic vision for the future, even if there is no antagonist in the story, and even if the protagonist succeeds in his goal (finding water, hunting the big elk, or whatever).

The saying goes, that "Utopia's newspapers would be boring," and a story where nothing bad happens, and no conflict is present will also be boring, so antagonists (either sentient or natural disasters) will always be there to challenge the protagonist.

Edited by jawal on Apr 29th 2024 at 6:46:36 PM

Every Hero has his own way of eating yogurt

I haven't read any of the I, Robot stories myself, so this is a bit second-hand, but:

While many of the stories involve edge cases, I think that the narrative as a whole takes a very positive view of Asimov's laws. In fact, IIRC, there's a subtext that they're akin to the moral ideals humans should try to strive to.

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Deus Ex: Human Revolution is probably about as pro-capitalist as a Cyberpunk story can be while staying within the spirit of the genre.

I do think it actually does fit the themes though. A hypercapitalist dystopia would tend to involve predatory monopolies that would be hostile to other corporations. So it's pretty on-brand.

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@Fighteer

To some extent it's a necessary weasel of the genre. I do actually think it'd be interesting to see a Government-MegaCorp conflict of sorts in something like a sci-fi/cyberpunk setting, though.

Edited by Protagonist506 on Apr 29th 2024 at 10:49:45 AM

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

I did read I Robot, and it is actually very optimistic about the future of humanity with Robots.

In the penultimate story, a robot disguised as a human is elected as president of the world (coordiantor), and this is portrayed as a positive thing.

...................

Speaking of I robot, "There is no master but Master, and QT-1 is His prophet."?

I wonder if Azimov was saying something there .

Edited by jawal on Apr 29th 2024 at 7:09:10 PM

Every Hero has his own way of eating yogurt

This is exactly my point. Saying "we are going to live in a cyberpunk dystopia / we are living in one already" and using William Gibson novels to illustrate one's point is always going to run into the problem that breaks from reality are essential to fiction. Any one-to-one correlation is thus suspect.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Wasn't that never really confirmed in the end? Calvin believes it but she also states that it doesn't really matter anyways since he was a good leader. And besides, in the last chapter, the machines are ruling humanity and it is very much seen as a utopia.

The point of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is that you ultimately can't rush progress. One-Man Industrial Revolution just isn't a thing. If the society is too entrenched in its ways, it will stop it.

It was also making the point that romanticizing the times of King Arthur isn't a good idea.

The book is interesting in that it marks a transition for Twain. It shifts from idealistic whimsy to bloody cynicism and a Downer Ending. You can really tell that the person who wrote this would go on to write The Mysterious Stranger.

Disgusted, but not surprised

I will say Cyberpunk can be taken as an exaggeration or as a worst-case-scenario hypothetical. As such, its criticism isn't necessarily unfair.

You are correct, however, that it's worth noting that the hypothetical political system of a Cyberpunk Dystopia isn't really the system we live under.

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On the other hand, I will also note that the Cyberpunk Dystopia is not a strawman either. I'd say the Gilded Age US is probably the closest historical example to one.

In the modern day, there's a few worrying trends and also some genuinely dangerous political movements.

In particular, I feel there's a worrying trend away from true personal ownership and towards renting and use of services. A sort of digital feudalism, if you will.

In addition, there are Neo-Technocrats and so-called "Anarcho"-Capitalists that effectively view the Cyberpunk Dystopia as desirable. These people think they've outsmarted politics, and seek to replace it. To such people, the ethos of our nation (at least as I have come to understand it) is nothing more than something to be patched out in the next update, similar to how Apple views the headphone jack.

Having said that, they haven't won yet and they probably won't.

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

Things have different meanings to different people as well. For example, I don't miss the headphone jack at all. I've never enjoyed wired earbuds with my phone. The cord always gets snagged on things or wears out. Wireless earbuds have saved me so much frustration since I've started using them... while adding some hassles of their own, I'll admit.

I will concede that Apple's use of proprietary cables over the years has been monopolistic, but it just lost to the EU and will be giving all of its devices USB-C interfaces in a clear win for consumers. So the cyberpunk dystopia ain't here yet, and probably won't be.

The problem is that there is no obvious and axiomatic route from here to there. There are a lot of people grousing about hypotheticals, but it's still a Missing Steps Plan.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 29th 2024 at 3:57:38 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

To clarify my point, the headphone jack line was just a snarky way of saying "remove something".

The point I was making is that there is a type of person who believes that they've vastly outsmarted the need for political systems and the process which created them, and that our institutions and ethos should be replaced with techbro-y solutions.

To give an example: LA once experimented with a privatized police organization you would call via an app. Naturally, problems ensued and the program was eventually shut down. Still, that it even got that far is legitimately cause for some level of concern here.

And of course, it also happened before basically with the Gilded Age. The laws that ended the Gilded Age could theoretically be repealed or subverted.

Of course, as you point out with the EU, their victory is neither assured nor even especially likely. Still something to watch out for, though.

I will also note that we don't need to turn our society into a full-blown cyberpunk dystopia in order to cause damage.

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Incidentally, Jules Verne actually wrote a book that is, in hindsight, a sort of proto-Cyberpunk long before the genre was made (it was one of the first things he wrote but was only published recently). This was at the dawn of the Gilded Age, which is what he was concerned about.

Edited by Protagonist506 on Apr 29th 2024 at 7:28:48 AM

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

For sci fi that isn't all doom and gloom about the future, we have the upcoming film adaptation of Rendezvous with Rama, assuming the movie is faithful to the spirit of the original books.

The books weren't all optimistic either of course, but the emphasis was more about exploring the mystery of an alien ship and grappling with the knowledge that humanity isn't alone.

Edited by M84 on Apr 30th 2024 at 2:38:44 AM

Disgusted, but not surprised

For clarity: the crime-reporting app Citizen partnered with a private security firm in LA to offer subscription-based security services. The security firm made several attempts to get LA to certify its staff to arrest people, but were unsuccessful. The city sent them packing more or less, if I recall correctly.

They should have sent a poet.

Specifically things have different meaning to different classes of people. Wireless headphones are more expensive if you're poorer, need charging which sucks if you have limited access to electricity and if you use an adapter the charging port is a lot less robust so gets damaged easier and holds connection worse especially in heavy and in outdoor use.

In the same way a cyber arm isn't a problem for many people in Deus Ex depending on your class and wealth. Cyberpunk is generally a view from the slums. Nothing wrong with more optimistic Scifi, but I distrust it when it forgets to ask does this future apply to everyone