The Greatest City in the World
January 17, 2018 2:26 PM Subscribe
The Minnesota Diet A new short story from the author of the Nebula Award–winning All the Birds in the Sky.
This short story was commissioned and edited jointly by Future Tense and ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination. Each month in 2018, Future Tense Fiction—a series of short stories from Future Tense and CSI about how technology and science will change our lives—will publish a story on a new theme. The theme for January–March 2018: Home.
(SLSlate)
This short story was commissioned and edited jointly by Future Tense and ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination. Each month in 2018, Future Tense Fiction—a series of short stories from Future Tense and CSI about how technology and science will change our lives—will publish a story on a new theme. The theme for January–March 2018: Home.
(SLSlate)
I was giggling about telephone sanitizers before the story got to that bit.
posted by Ickster at 5:17 PM on January 17, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by Ickster at 5:17 PM on January 17, 2018 [1 favorite]
The Minnesota Diet
Is that the one where you eat your feelings and unrealized dreams under a veneer of amiability?
posted by leotrotsky at 5:20 PM on January 17, 2018 [22 favorites]
Is that the one where you eat your feelings and unrealized dreams under a veneer of amiability?
posted by leotrotsky at 5:20 PM on January 17, 2018 [22 favorites]
This is a pretty devastating read. We are already living in times where political solutions to our problems seem out of reach. What if the capitalist systems we depend on decide we don't matter? This is already happening to so many people.
posted by mai at 5:27 PM on January 17, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by mai at 5:27 PM on January 17, 2018 [3 favorites]
Charlie Jane Anders, co-founder of the great site-downgraded-to-a-subsite io9, which just celebrated its tenth anniversary.
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:50 PM on January 17, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:50 PM on January 17, 2018 [1 favorite]
He based the responses of the characters on the information garnered from the original Minnesota Diet experiment. The Great Starvation Experiment 1944-1945
Weird
posted by BlueHorse at 6:46 PM on January 17, 2018 [5 favorites]
Weird
posted by BlueHorse at 6:46 PM on January 17, 2018 [5 favorites]
She
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 6:50 PM on January 17, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 6:50 PM on January 17, 2018 [3 favorites]
Wow. Great read!
posted by supermedusa at 6:58 PM on January 17, 2018
posted by supermedusa at 6:58 PM on January 17, 2018
Charlie Jane Anders makes science fiction great.
posted by RakDaddy at 7:00 PM on January 17, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by RakDaddy at 7:00 PM on January 17, 2018 [1 favorite]
“I’d like a half dozen Tide pods and a city to go, please.”
posted by octobersurprise at 7:07 PM on January 17, 2018
posted by octobersurprise at 7:07 PM on January 17, 2018
Charlie Jane Anders make everything great!
This is another great story that has that casual authorial voice she manages that can toss off world building bits here and there without feeling at all like an infodump.
posted by rmd1023 at 7:11 PM on January 17, 2018 [2 favorites]
This is another great story that has that casual authorial voice she manages that can toss off world building bits here and there without feeling at all like an infodump.
posted by rmd1023 at 7:11 PM on January 17, 2018 [2 favorites]
This is another great story that has that casual authorial voice she manages that can toss off world building bits here and there without feeling at all like an infodump.
This is a skill I yearn to have. I've been writing and rewriting something for about a year now and I wish I could just huff something magical to give me this skill. I think reading more and writing more is the only way to gain it, alas.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 7:37 PM on January 17, 2018
This is a skill I yearn to have. I've been writing and rewriting something for about a year now and I wish I could just huff something magical to give me this skill. I think reading more and writing more is the only way to gain it, alas.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 7:37 PM on January 17, 2018
Is that the one where you eat your feelings and unrealized dreams under a veneer of amiability?
If you can come to terms with the realization that everybody feels this way, and find an accommodation with the world, it doesn't have to be a veneer. (Re-)watch Fargo to see characters with many different ways of embodying stereotypes about my home.
posted by traveler_ at 9:27 PM on January 17, 2018
If you can come to terms with the realization that everybody feels this way, and find an accommodation with the world, it doesn't have to be a veneer. (Re-)watch Fargo to see characters with many different ways of embodying stereotypes about my home.
posted by traveler_ at 9:27 PM on January 17, 2018
The only unrealistic thing about the story is that we would have the resources or will to make a planned city from scratch. It's so much easier for tech colonies to parasitize existing cities.
But yeah, slow death by uncaring algorithm? Yeah, I can see that.
posted by happyroach at 9:58 PM on January 17, 2018 [2 favorites]
But yeah, slow death by uncaring algorithm? Yeah, I can see that.
posted by happyroach at 9:58 PM on January 17, 2018 [2 favorites]
if the building insulation is self-renewing, it's getting energy and material from somewhere. Possibly those fields of plasticky corn nearby. Arcology!
posted by clew at 11:13 PM on January 17, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by clew at 11:13 PM on January 17, 2018 [1 favorite]
I love CJA’s work, and this one just kept getting better as it went on, piling unsavory current trend upon unsavory current trend to make a completely believable yet unbelievable horrible future.
Samanthor would do well to remember that the telephone sanitizers survived and populated a planet, while the people in the other two space arks died from a disease caused by an unsanitary telephone. But I suppose those days were millions of years before the invention of the algorithm.
posted by ejs at 11:40 PM on January 17, 2018 [5 favorites]
Samanthor would do well to remember that the telephone sanitizers survived and populated a planet, while the people in the other two space arks died from a disease caused by an unsanitary telephone. But I suppose those days were millions of years before the invention of the algorithm.
posted by ejs at 11:40 PM on January 17, 2018 [5 favorites]
First, more fiction from CJA. Yay! I favorited this post even before I clicked the link and was not disappointed. The story was terrifying and I really love the "we're telephone sanitizers" bit. Read the follow up, which just confirms that the story is not that far fetched and the problem that we have with small vs. industrial agriculture in terms of feeding cities vs. having buy in. I immediately thought of feed corn when they talked about the fields of inedible agriculture, but it turns out, that while it may be unpleasant, feed corn is edible by humans.
posted by Hactar at 7:12 AM on January 18, 2018
posted by Hactar at 7:12 AM on January 18, 2018
Oh huh, I just wrote something about this. It points out the conditions that are leading to this point. I grew up in rural America, on a dairy farm. My father and mother raise me doing the work our family had done since time immemorial, and I don't do that work anymore. I'm not alone in leaving.
In 1970 we had 640,000 dairy farms.
As of today we have 51,000 dairy farms.
In the US as of 2012, 110,000 primary operators of the farms are under 34.
There are 257,000 primary operators over 75.
The average age is 58.3, with most of the primary operators in the 55-64 age range.
There are 19% less new farmers operating for 10 years or more.
There are 23.3% less new farmers operating for 5 years or more.
In 1910, the highest numbers of our Western style of farming were recorded. There were 32,077,000 farmers. Percentage wise there were higher numbers, like in 1840 with 69% of the nation being farmers.
There were, in the 1970's, 9,712,000 farmers. 4.6%
There were, in 2012, 3,180,000 farmers. 1.01%
There were, in 2009, 2,105,000 unauthorized immigrant farmers, fishers and foresters. (My language reflects that of the page I pulled this from. Pardon if it is inappropriate.)
In 2012 there were 2,100,000 farms. 96% were family owned.
This does not accurately represent farms that have huge properties, livestock counts or economic weight.
These numbers are alarming. We do not have new farmers being born at a rate to replace the ones we had. As with any culture or tradition, this knowledge will be lost and will not come back again.
I know a lot of people, kids and adults, who would be fine staying on the farm if it paid well. It can be deeply satisfying work.
The farmers still farming are growing older and having a harder time staying at a small scale, year by year. These days starting a farming business is at a scale that can hardly be called farming, but it does save on labor. For dairy farming you have to start at 3000 cows for it to be funded by a bank.
But it is farming, it is increasingly robots, it is increasingly AI driven and it is called Family Farming. It has half of its workers being unauthorized immigrants. The only thing wrong with this half of the work force, who do thankless and hard work, is that they are being paid frequently horrible wages in awful conditions.
That will not last as people begin to create the technology to delicately handle produce. So for those who don't want unauthorized migrant workers being farmers, don't worry. Inevitably your farming products will only be touched by robots from beginning to end. Because automated trucking will lead to the end of trucks and warehouse workers touching your produce either.
So, my question becomes, who owns the AI/robots? What happens if they, an incredibly small number of people, decide to do things like what this story is describing?
And do we call them Farmers?
Citations:
http://smallfarms.cornell.edu/contact/statistics-and-information-resources/
https://www.agclassroom.org/gan/timeline/farmers_land.htm
https://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2012/Online_Resources/Highlights/Farm_Demographics/
https://www.farmaid.org/blog/dairy-family-farmers-in-crisis/
http://www.pewhispanic.org/2015/03/26/share-of-unauthorized-immigrant-workers-in-production-construction-jobs-falls-since-2007/#fn-22190-2
posted by burntbook at 7:07 AM on January 19, 2018 [7 favorites]
In 1970 we had 640,000 dairy farms.
As of today we have 51,000 dairy farms.
In the US as of 2012, 110,000 primary operators of the farms are under 34.
There are 257,000 primary operators over 75.
The average age is 58.3, with most of the primary operators in the 55-64 age range.
There are 19% less new farmers operating for 10 years or more.
There are 23.3% less new farmers operating for 5 years or more.
In 1910, the highest numbers of our Western style of farming were recorded. There were 32,077,000 farmers. Percentage wise there were higher numbers, like in 1840 with 69% of the nation being farmers.
There were, in the 1970's, 9,712,000 farmers. 4.6%
There were, in 2012, 3,180,000 farmers. 1.01%
There were, in 2009, 2,105,000 unauthorized immigrant farmers, fishers and foresters. (My language reflects that of the page I pulled this from. Pardon if it is inappropriate.)
In 2012 there were 2,100,000 farms. 96% were family owned.
This does not accurately represent farms that have huge properties, livestock counts or economic weight.
These numbers are alarming. We do not have new farmers being born at a rate to replace the ones we had. As with any culture or tradition, this knowledge will be lost and will not come back again.
I know a lot of people, kids and adults, who would be fine staying on the farm if it paid well. It can be deeply satisfying work.
The farmers still farming are growing older and having a harder time staying at a small scale, year by year. These days starting a farming business is at a scale that can hardly be called farming, but it does save on labor. For dairy farming you have to start at 3000 cows for it to be funded by a bank.
But it is farming, it is increasingly robots, it is increasingly AI driven and it is called Family Farming. It has half of its workers being unauthorized immigrants. The only thing wrong with this half of the work force, who do thankless and hard work, is that they are being paid frequently horrible wages in awful conditions.
That will not last as people begin to create the technology to delicately handle produce. So for those who don't want unauthorized migrant workers being farmers, don't worry. Inevitably your farming products will only be touched by robots from beginning to end. Because automated trucking will lead to the end of trucks and warehouse workers touching your produce either.
So, my question becomes, who owns the AI/robots? What happens if they, an incredibly small number of people, decide to do things like what this story is describing?
And do we call them Farmers?
Citations:
http://smallfarms.cornell.edu/contact/statistics-and-information-resources/
https://www.agclassroom.org/gan/timeline/farmers_land.htm
https://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2012/Online_Resources/Highlights/Farm_Demographics/
https://www.farmaid.org/blog/dairy-family-farmers-in-crisis/
http://www.pewhispanic.org/2015/03/26/share-of-unauthorized-immigrant-workers-in-production-construction-jobs-falls-since-2007/#fn-22190-2
posted by burntbook at 7:07 AM on January 19, 2018 [7 favorites]
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Story by Charlie Jane Anders (Wikipedia)
posted by filthy light thief at 2:45 PM on January 17, 2018