We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus

November 10, 2023 5:29 AM

We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus. By Mefi's own Charles Stross

...rather than giving the usual cheerleader talk making predictions about technology and society, I'd like to explain why I—and other SF authors—are terrible guides to the future. Which wouldn't matter, except a whole bunch of billionaires are in the headlines right now because they pay too much attention to people like me. Because we invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale and they took it at face value and decided to implement it for real.

posted by TheophileEscargot (68 comments total)

Remember, the storytellers who talked about colonizing the moon were the same people who told us we have nuclear-power cars.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 6:05 AM on November 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Supporting Charlie's point, reading this creepy interview in The Atlantic, I think that the interview subject has already demonstrated personal transhumanism.
posted by aeshnid at 6:14 AM on November 10, 2023

Previously a few days ago Mefi covered the, uh, meeting of great minds that had Elon Musk and Rishi Sunak discussing AI.

This is a great article. I knew that Musk and Zuckerberg were regurgitating the sci-fi stories of their teenage years (the Cybertruck is a knockoff of the Cassette Futurism 80s design of the Aston Martin Bulldog and Zuck didn't even bother changing the name of the Metaverse), but I had no idea that this rich-people-using-sci-fi-as-substitute-for-a-real-imagination went back at least a century. Though I shouldn't be surprised.

This is a great article that highlights and extends a number of things I knew the periphery of, and I'm glad I stuck through the first several paragraphs. When Stross started talking about early radio and how it a similar effect on popular imagination (and how it all ties in with western frontier tropes, the celebration of what would become fascist ideology, and the timelessness of Scott Adams-style reactionary pseudo-nerd.)

I'm going to read through this again.
posted by AlSweigart at 6:53 AM on November 10, 2023 [4 favorites]

Apologies aren't enough.

How about some science fiction about societies getting fed up of capitalism and getting rid of their oligarchs and billionaires.

Imagine that future for us, Charlie!
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:07 AM on November 10, 2023 [15 favorites]

the Cybertruck is a knockoff of the Cassette Futurism 80s design of the Aston Martin Bulldog

To me, it will always be "unused Battlezone enemy design".
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:10 AM on November 10, 2023 [31 favorites]

I am fascinated by the idea that God is waiting for us to resurrect the dead, that we are supposed to figure this out. It makes a kind of sense in a "god created the world with specific physical laws which god cannot break, we are god's agents in the world and if his will be done, it must be done by us working within the laws of the universe" way.

Out of all of the people Stross writes about, he's the only one that seems at all likeable, because "remembering people isn't the same as having them be alive, I wish I could bring back my family" is a normal human reaction. Granted, most people don't go necromancer, but it's not inexplicable.

I won't even waste time on the rest of them.

It's not really the science fiction, though; if there weren't science fiction around to prop up their garbage selfishness, they'd turn to another ideology. It's not that science fiction made Musk, Thiel, et al into selfish, spoiled people; it's that they are selfish, spoiled people who sometimes have to explain to others why they are right to be so.
posted by Frowner at 7:13 AM on November 10, 2023 [11 favorites]

> How about some science fiction about societies getting fed up of capitalism and getting rid of their oligarchs and billionaires.

Might I recommend the works of Ursula K. Le Guin
posted by I-Write-Essays at 7:14 AM on November 10, 2023 [45 favorites]

Also Iain Banks and the entirety of Star Trek
posted by rhymedirective at 7:21 AM on November 10, 2023 [25 favorites]

I swear up and down... when I first saw the Cybertruck, I thought it was someone's spoof.
posted by SoberHighland at 7:23 AM on November 10, 2023 [7 favorites]

When I first saw the Cybertruck, I thought it was a poor imitation of the Landmaster from Damnation Alley: a prop from a late-70's post-disaster film.
posted by SPrintF at 7:33 AM on November 10, 2023 [11 favorites]

See also Timothy Leary's S.M.I2.L.E. Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, Life Extension.

A snarky person, possibly R A Wilson, pointed out that it was Catholicism-- go to hearve, be transformed, live forever.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 7:36 AM on November 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

I mean, have you ever noticed that mass market fiction these days never approaches the idea of getting rid of capitalism in a nuts-and-bolts kind of way? Hell, there's not even movies about unions any more (remember Norma Rae? That was 40 years ago).

Maybe capitalists, billionaires and oligarchs shouldn't be in charge of our media. We're not being allowed to dream of a world without them.

You say Star Trek and The Culture exist, but those are post-transition fictions; look-at-this-utopia fictions. Give us transition fiction. Lots of it. Write us a path to peace and prosperity, to fully automated sexuality-of-your-choice space communism, from the hellscape we're in now.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:36 AM on November 10, 2023 [45 favorites]

Not sure it's the fault of authors that publishers don't want that; also, if people *do* want that, they can seek it out - see the love KSR gets here, for example. But I really don't see how it's relevant to this article at all.
posted by sagc at 7:43 AM on November 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

I mean, have you ever noticed that mass market fiction these days never approaches the idea of getting rid of capitalism in a nuts-and-bolts kind of way? Hell, there's not even movies about unions any more (remember Norma Rae? That was 40 years ago).

Maybe capitalists, billionaires and oligarchs shouldn't be in charge of our media. We're not being allowed to dream of a world without them.

Not that it's mass market in any way at all, but I've been writing a series* about the systematic destruction and eventual obliteration of our capitalistic overlords (contains robots, violence, occasional penguins).

*(part 3 coming soon)
posted by dng at 7:49 AM on November 10, 2023 [9 favorites]

We joke about eating the rich, but what if that's the only way to survive?
posted by tommasz at 7:56 AM on November 10, 2023 [7 favorites]

look folks humanity won't be complete until we've achieved immortality, and also resurrected all the past dead, and also ensured that the last unpleasant experience is a precisely dateable event. and we must do all this via sinister superscience, because no one should ever trust a god they didn't build themselves.

this has been yr bombastic lowercase pronouncement for the day
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:00 AM on November 10, 2023 [11 favorites]

Somebody here recently pointed out that science fiction isn’t about the future. It’s about the present. So doesn’t this mean that science fiction doesn’t present a future to look forward to, but a present that we have to change?
posted by njohnson23 at 8:05 AM on November 10, 2023 [7 favorites]

In the part of the essay in which cstross talks about the connections between futurism and fascism, my mind immediately went to Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream, a book-within-a-book set in an alternate reality in which Hitler, turfed out of Germany by the success of a communist revolution there, finds a welcome home writing SF in America; his magnum opus, Lord of the Swastika, is basically Mein Kampf in a postapocalyptic world, and I've always imagined the author-insert character "Feric Jaggar" as being very much like Dolph Lundgren at his 1980s peak.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:09 AM on November 10, 2023 [4 favorites]

I think this year saw the live fire deployment of actual autonomous killbots.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 8:10 AM on November 10, 2023

Hell, there's not even movies about unions any more (remember Norma Rae? That was 40 years ago

Any more? Be fair. There have never been “movies about unions” as any sort of regular genre. Before Norma Rae, there was what? On the Waterfront, at least tangentially?
posted by Thorzdad at 8:30 AM on November 10, 2023

Before Norma Rae, there was what? On the Waterfront, at least tangentially?

I always liked Blue Collar.

The most recent one I can think of is Sorry To Bother You. If you include British films, there's been Made In Dagenham, Pride (plus Ken Loach's entire filmography to certian extents, and various other pretty popular British films, use unions and th alabour movement as setting and backdrop, at least - Brassed Off, Billy Elliot, Fully Monty, etc).
posted by dng at 8:42 AM on November 10, 2023 [9 favorites]

we have nuclear-power cars.
I live close enough to Seabrook that mine probably is some of the time.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 9:08 AM on November 10, 2023 [5 favorites]

Toynbee Idea
in Kubrick's '2001
Resurrect Dead
on Planet Jupiter
posted by Navelgazer at 9:21 AM on November 10, 2023 [25 favorites]

I often think of Simone Giertz's reaction to seeing the Cybertruck revealed.
posted by Eddie Mars at 9:26 AM on November 10, 2023 [19 favorites]

Matewan was an excellent labor/union film. Stars a young Will Oldham, long before he was Bonnie Prince Billy. The whole cast is amazing.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 9:38 AM on November 10, 2023 [13 favorites]

Just as a supplement to the tangent here, the Hugo Book Club Blog maintains a great list of "Organized labour in science fiction." They also had a recent post about Chan Davis, "The Un-American Treatment of a Leftist Science Fiction Fan" (see also Gautam Bhatia's "Across Fracture Lines: An Interview with Chan Davis" at Strange Horizons, which touches on unions in SF as well).
posted by Wobbuffet at 10:04 AM on November 10, 2023 [17 favorites]

Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders' podcast Out Opinions Are Correct has been exploring some of these themes.

As for fiction as roadmap, I see the dichotomy between a Trek-like utopian future and the lack of explanation of how to get there.

Where I find some sort of path forward is for fiction to help us imagine and try out new ways of being in our now and new ways of thinking/framing where we've been and how we might move forward. One place I've encountered this is in the Expanse novels, where there are moments of humanistic insight interspersed between the conflict.

The one that moment that sticks in my mind is when Chrisjen Avasarala witnesses the Laconian ship lay waste to the Sol system's defenses in yet another page in humanity's long history of us-vs.-them conflict. Instead of seeing something fundamentally Other in the people of Laconia, Avasarala remarks, “They are all our people.”

adrienne maree brown's Emergent Strategy begins with her memory of watching a post-racism future of Star Trek while living in a society fraught with racism. Throughout the book, she draws inspiration from Octavia Butler's fiction to shape change, seeking a "strategy for building complex patterns and systems of change through relatively small interactions."
posted by audi alteram partem at 10:05 AM on November 10, 2023 [9 favorites]

Might I recommend the works of Ursula K. Le Guin
...
Also Iain Banks and the entirety of Star Trek

Also KS Robinson
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 10:37 AM on November 10, 2023 [10 favorites]

Metafilter: contains robots, violence, occasional penguins
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:50 AM on November 10, 2023 [10 favorites]

It's ok Charlie, you're not responsible for Suella's lifestyle choices, and at least you gave us the cheerily fluffy escapism of the UK being governed by an avatar of Nyarlathotep.
posted by protorp at 11:07 AM on November 10, 2023 [7 favorites]

For those (like me) unfamiliar with the expression: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus
posted by splitpeasoup at 11:35 AM on November 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

There ought to be a less horrible parallel genealogy of SFF descended from Swedenborg, also experiencing adaptive radiation* in 20th c California through the Theosophists, etc. I guess that’s Star Trek vs Wars.

*not what it sounds like when primed by the pulps
posted by clew at 12:05 PM on November 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

the dichotomy between a Trek-like utopian future and the lack of explanation of how to get there.

I mean, different Star Trek series go into this in varying detail, but the explanation in Star Trek of "how they got there" is "after a global thermonuclear WW3 and after Eugenics Wars". You want to read that story?
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 12:18 PM on November 10, 2023 [13 favorites]

I'm trying to think of SF I consider to be inspiring/optimistic and what I got is For All Mankind (at least they've progressed farther than us in a lot of ways on that show) and a movie I thought needed much more love, Tomorrowland.
posted by jenfullmoon at 12:18 PM on November 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

That was an excellent essay, Mr. Stross. Thank you for creating and sharing it.
posted by hoodrich at 12:21 PM on November 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

one thing that i think is true — unfortunately true, since it constrains the field of available expression for writers, musicians, and other artists — is that the tendency among rich, powerful technonarcissists to treat cautionary warning scifi as aspirational goal scifi means that we absolutely must not write any more cautionary warning scifi until after the rich, powerful technonarcissists are neutered. Metaphorically speaking, of course, though i wouldn’t have objections to anyone who wants to carry out the literal interpretation as well.

but anyway, all neuterings aside, maximizing hopepunk/solarpunk and minimizing misinterpretable downers is an unfortunate necessity at our current historical juncture.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 12:36 PM on November 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

Still mid-reading the post but so much recognition! When I see all this Musk-Land Longtermist hype those lines from that David Byrne song keep coming back to me:

My baby saw the future
She doesn't want to live there any more
It's lousy science fiction
Gets on your skin and seeps into your bones

posted by Schmucko at 12:41 PM on November 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

TESCREAL stands for "transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism (in a very specific context), Effective Altruism, and longtermism."

None of that is useful. Not the acronym, the explanation for the acronym, nor the mid-explanation in the midst of the explanation of the acronym. It is hardly holding on to language that sentence.

All of that is so meta-meta-met that it is transmogrified into the shape of a bean.
posted by MonsieurPEB at 12:52 PM on November 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

‘Started as a joke,’ said Pa. ‘Well you see right after the war everything seemed like a joke. Listen, during the war they had these cookies with chocolate on them, only they couldn't get any chocolate so they started putting brown wax on them. That seemed like a joke, you know? Here were millions of people killing each other, and they still managed to find somebody to sit painting brown wax on cookies. … okay maybe it's not funny but you gotta admit it's kind of strange.’

‘And after the war it kept getting stranger. If anybody had a dream, no matter how stupid or futile it was, they went right out and tried to live that dream. It's as if the whole world just sat down with some crummy old pulp science fiction magazine, read it cover to cover, and then tried to live it. On the cover of that old magazine you'll see a picture of this city of the future: big glass towers, surrounded by tapeworm roads, coil after coil wound up over and under each other. And on the roads are strange-looking things that must be high-powered cars. And in the air above them, a few helicopters, and maybe the blast of a silver rocket taking off for the moon. And if you see any people they're wearing plastic clothes, and you know they live on vitamin pills and special artificial foods. Inside the magazine you find out how they live: watching television, killing their enemies with death-rays, running everything with big computers, robot servants, millions of household gadgets doing all the work, atomic power harnessed to turn the wheels of industry, jet planes zipping passengers New York to Paris in a few hours — I probably left out a lot of stuff, but — but just look around you. We got it, all of it. Every glass tower, every tapeworm road, every moon rocket and computer and nuclear power station — everything in the magazine. A joke, by God, and now it's beyond a joke!’

‘Well I still don't see —’

‘Because just think back to the guy who wrote all this crap. Here he is, back in the forties, some poor broken-down science fiction hack. Here he sits at his broken-down L. C. Smith, cracking out his crap for a penny a word — a cheap dream, you agree? So he hammers out maybe a hundred stories a year, maybe six novels too, all just to eat and pay the rent. No and he doesn't even have enough ideas of his own to fill the quota; has to ask his wife for another giant electronic brain, another moon rocket. This guy, I mean he probably has dandruff, he's overweight, he can hardly drag himself to that oilcloth-covered kitchen table to face the L. C. Smith every day.’

‘And he created our world! We have to wear the damn plastic, eat the ice-cream substitutes, live and work in the glass towers. Just because he happened to write it down — imagine! What if the poor slob, what if one day he wrote brass instead of glass, would we all be living in brass towers now? It's a joke all right.’

Roderick shifted his weight to his other foot. ‘I don't see how that explains —’

‘Las Vegas? Disneyland? The Muse-suck in this factory? Episode Ten Thousand of Dorinda's Destiny? Supermarkets selling Upboy, a special food for geriatric dogs? Electric acupuncture? Talking gingerbread? Believe me, it explains everything. Every blessed damned thing. …’

 — from chapter 23 of Roderick, by John Sladek (1980).
posted by scruss at 12:52 PM on November 10, 2023 [37 favorites]

Titan is labor sci fi
posted by eustatic at 12:58 PM on November 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

Ooh, if this is turning into a revolutionary sci-fi recommendation post then I'll suggest Ken Macleod's Fall Revolution trilogy (in four parts) - he was a close friend of Iain Banks, more-or-less shares his politics, and several of his novels features various flavours of revolutions, and how they play/played out.
posted by Luddite at 1:10 PM on November 10, 2023 [8 favorites]

But but... what about the 3D printer Robot Revolution that brings us into Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism Utopia?
posted by sammyo at 1:33 PM on November 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Also Iain Banks and the entirety of Star Trek

As a millennial, original Trek predates me. Decided to finally watch the series on DVD and I gotta say, so far the show is way hornier than I remember TNG. And not nearly as fully automated space communist. Rather, it's kind of closer in spirit to libertarian and fascist principles:
- There is a strict military hierarchy with Kirk on top, inspired heavily by the navy
- Lithium miners out there trying to make it rich or die tryin'
- People die left and right and the lead characters mostly shrug it off as the price of progress
- the 5 year mission to explore the frontier mostly supports human settlements, and people's quarters are often filled with (looted?) artifacts

TNG is far more explicitly post scarcity, AFIACT.
posted by pwnguin at 1:40 PM on November 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

As I said last month, if there is to be a future, the TESCREAL cretins must be opposed at all costs by any means necessary.
posted by ob1quixote at 1:54 PM on November 10, 2023

the Cybertruck is a knockoff of the Cassette Futurism 80s design of the Aston Martin Bulldog

I sure hope this wasn't the inspiration, but the Cybertruck looks a lot like the land cruiser driven by George Peppard, roaming the post-nuclear wasteland in the 1977 cheesy sci-fi movie Damnation Alley.
posted by jonp72 at 2:08 PM on November 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

When I first saw the Cybertruck, I thought it was a poor imitation of the Landmaster from Damnation Alley: a prop from a late-70's post-disaster film.

posted by SPrintF

Jinx! Buy me a Torment Nexus!
posted by jonp72 at 2:11 PM on November 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

The completely dorky visual design and name of the Cybertruck may be the only thing I actually like about Musk.
posted by brundlefly at 2:42 PM on November 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

look folks humanity won't be complete until we've achieved immortality, and also resurrected all the past dead, and also ensured that the last unpleasant experience is a precisely dateable event. and we must do all this via sinister superscience, because no one should ever trust a god they didn't build themselves[,] and finally get around to the damned hoverboards and moon colonies. TFIFY
posted by mule98J at 3:19 PM on November 10, 2023

I brought Tribbles...
posted by clavdivs at 3:30 PM on November 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

> and finally get around to the damned hoverboards and moon colonies. TFIFY

outer space is a distraction from the really important stuff and we should kessler low earth orbit to keep people from distracting themselves with moon colonies and the like. duh.

i have no opinions about hoverboards other than that they seem unsafe.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 4:00 PM on November 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

"Damnation Alley"? I was thinking more along the lines of "hardware drawing in the 'Morrow Project' game manual."
posted by wenestvedt at 5:11 PM on November 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

Titan is labor sci fi

I thought you meant John Varley's _Titan_ and was oooooookaaaaaaaay for some values of labor I guess. I mean _Wizard_ and _Demon_ I can absolutely see being about labor relations buuuuuuuut....
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 5:19 PM on November 10, 2023 [4 favorites]

I thought you meant John Varley's _Titan_

That was my first thought as well!
posted by notoriety public at 6:01 PM on November 10, 2023

In the billionaires get got genre, I would recommend
Firewalkers - Adrian Tchaikovsky
or maybe
Incorruptible - Peter Watts
short story here
posted by Iax at 6:12 PM on November 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

i linked it, but to clarify, Vigneault's Titan is a comic about space mining
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Titan/Francois-Vigneault/9781620107799
posted by eustatic at 7:12 PM on November 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

And another one I couldn't find earlier
The Last of the Redmond Billionaires also by Peter Watts
posted by Iax at 7:34 PM on November 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

But but... what about the 3D printer Robot Revolution

Z-wobble pains you
Nylon gets damp
Warping strains you
And you're missing a clamp
Resin is brittle
PLA gives
CAD is a riddle
You might as well live
posted by clawsoon at 7:55 PM on November 10, 2023 [24 favorites]

The Cybertruck is clearly modelled on a British design classic.
posted by reynir at 11:17 AM on November 11, 2023

Reynir, I thought that would link to an Aga.
posted by wenestvedt at 12:11 PM on November 11, 2023

soberingly, cosma shalizi reads clay shirky's Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age:

Reading a 2010 book about the promise of the Internet for cooperation, especially for intellectual collaboration, in 2023 is, well, rather melancholy. Instead of carpooling, we have giant illegal taxi companies; instead of safe couch-surfing, we have giant illegal hotel chains; instead of sharing information about political violence, we have organizing political violence; and instead of sharing information about rare medical conditions, we have created multiple new forms of contagious hysteria.

One conclusion I draw from this is that Shirky was fundamentally right about how the Internet would unleash new forms of collective creativity, but far, far too optimistic about the value of that creativity. ("After all, to any rational mind, the greater part of the history of ideas is a history of freaks.")

The other conclusion --- one I've been tending to for a while --- is that as a teenager, I got caught up in a Utopian milieu, which somehow thought that integrating the Internet, and especially the Web, into civilized life would make things better. I spent my adult life in this environment, it was very good to me (and I daresay to Shirky). But, thirty years later... Well, I often find myself thinking on a passage from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, reflecting on another such hangover:

There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...

And that, I think, was the handle --- that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting --- on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark --- that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Shirky was offering a view from the crest of the wave. This one didn't exactly break and roll back; it just left the same old rubbish as before in its wake, only sodden and salt-rimed. This is, perhaps, the best a utopia can hope to achieve.

so maybe time (again) to reconsider alec nove?

Nove was (as these titles might suggest) a British economist, the child of exiled Mensheviks, who made a specialty of studying the Soviet economy, and of advocating market socialism. He's best known for two works: The Economics of Feasible Socialism and An Economic History of the USSR. The former is a personal touchstone which shaped me deeply; the later is merely very good. Looking up something else, I happened to discover that a bunch of his books are now available through our library electronically, so I plunged in.

I'll start with the most important book first. The point of Feasible Socialism is to advocate for, and sketch, a socialist economy "which might be achieved within the lifetime of a child already conceived", i.e., not in some distant post-scarcity future. The first chapter explains why Marxism offers absolutely no useful ideas about how to actually run a socialist economy. (Here Nove summarizes Soviet debates on this matter in the early 1920s --- debates which have been little known since, and so often, in effect, re-run from scratch.) The second chapter looks at the entirely-negative lessons to be drawn from the Soviet experience, and the third at the mostly-negative lessons to be drawn from Cold War-era Hungary, Yugoslavia, Poland and China. The last two chapters lay out Nove's attractive vision of a market socialism, with lots of public provision of many goods, and workplace democracy where sensible and feasible. (He is sound on seeing that there is a tension between democratic control of an enterprise by its workers, and democratic control of that enterprise by the people-as-a-whole.)

On re-reading, I am relieved, chagrined, and exasperated. Relieved, because I still think this book holds up, and has not been visited by the Suck Fairy. Chagrined, because I've written a lot about socialism and planning over the years, some of it well-received, and on examination I have just been channeling a book I first read as a teenager. Exasperated, because we keep having the same conversations about the same bad ideas, without actually being able to retain and build on the better ones, like Nove's. (I have been making this complaint on this blog for nineteen years now.)

also btw...
Is Finland the best place in the world to be a parent? - "Finland is a world leader when it comes to early years education. Childcare is affordable and nursery places are universally available in a system that puts children's rights at the centre of decision-making. Now the country is applying the same child-first thinking to paternity-leave policies in an attempt to tackle gender inequality in parenting."*
posted by kliuless at 12:45 PM on November 11, 2023 [15 favorites]

How about some science fiction about societies getting fed up of capitalism and getting rid of their oligarchs and billionaires.
Imagine that future for us, Charlie!

Be careful what you wish for from Charlie. No spoilers, but even oligarchs and billionaires look like they're not going to survive the Lovecraftian New Management. Pretty sure "A Colder War" also qualifies, no matter how you interpret the ending. Accellerando has a unique pov on the whole process. Saturn's Children might also want a word about capitalism and oligarchs, as might a certain set of Merchant Princesses, even if they're not particularly interested in throwing out the baby with the bathwater yet.
posted by Blackanvil at 1:50 PM on November 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

The most recent [movie about unions/organized labor],one I can think of is Sorry To Bother You.

Which, if you have Amazon Prime, you can right now watch for free. Amazon produced a whole-ass TV show by the same director. I bring this up not because Amazon is a utopian company that believes in strong labor unions, but because Amazon is a union-busting den of scum and villainy. Big media companies absolutely do not care about the underlying message of any film, if they even have the critical acuity to perceive it.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 3:40 PM on November 11, 2023

I mean, have you ever noticed that mass market fiction these days never approaches the idea of getting rid of capitalism in a nuts-and-bolts kind of way? Hell, there's not even movies about unions any more (remember Norma Rae? That was 40 years ago).

Part of the problem is that, culturally, the English language fiction milieu tends toward writing about individual people, but this kind of change just isn't something a single person or even a small number of people can make happen on their own. Systemic problems require collective solutions.

There are ways to write this, such as using individual characters as insight into larger movements, but it's much more difficult to juggle the challenges and solutions across wide swaths of society as compared to handing the proverbial farmkid a sword. Also, sweeping vistas and epic battles tend to be more exciting than things like adjusting tax policies and incremental political shifts at local levels. There are some good examples, as folks have shared above, but it's definitely a challenge.
posted by past unusual at 8:00 PM on November 11, 2023 [3 favorites]

None of that is useful. Not the acronym, [...]

My anagram-adept partner suggests CLEAREST as at least being memorable.
posted by ver at 9:27 AM on November 12, 2023

How about some science fiction about societies getting fed up of capitalism and getting rid of their oligarchs and billionaires.

Catching up with this thread: science fiction has a varied political history, with a range of ideologies at play and being explored.

You can see this clearly in one example, opposed petitions about the US war in Vietnam, posted in Galaxy magazine. I used to use this in teaching sf history, because are there a lot of different writers on those two pages! So many strands.

Go further back to grandmother Mary Shelley, whose Frankenstein is such a cultural touchstone about ways of approaching science or technology. Think of Olaf Stapledon who zooms out to multiple civilizations, allowing for a range of ideologies every chapter.

For explicitly left wing sf, there's a long tradition, especially if you want to include Soviet and eastern bloc sf. Think of Mack Reynolds, the British and American New Waves, Ursula LeGuin (already cited), etc.

In short, I don't think it's accurate to say sf invented a Torment Nexus and folks made it real. Sf imagined (and imagines) a whole range of stuff *and* multiple ways to view them.
posted by doctornemo at 3:08 PM on November 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

... There's an XKCD about this from 8 years ago #1613...

It isn't enough just to have ideas and drive to space. We have to take the time to understand the implications of our ideas. The difference between utopia and killbot hellscape is a very thin line, and sometimes it is what order someone decides to implement things in. I'm not sure I'd trust the current lot of billionaires to really think through their order of operations.
posted by Nanukthedog at 6:03 PM on November 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

Folks who want some transitional fiction or an alternative to what's described in this post might enjoy the latest story by Naomi Kritzer.
posted by kristi at 7:50 PM on November 12, 2023

"It isn't enough just to have ideas and drive to space. We have to take the time to understand the implications of our ideas."

Hence Frankenstein...
posted by doctornemo at 4:59 AM on November 13, 2023