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What sci-fi can tell us about the future
- jasonvorhe 7y agoPaywalled, unfortunately.
- SalimoS 7y agoHere you go https://outline.com/pWXZNv https://outline.com/pWXZNv
- JohnJamesRambo 7y agoThat's the future they are trying to tell us about.
- bryanrasmussen 7y agoThe door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.” He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.” “I think otherwise,” the door said.
- formercoder 7y agoIsn’t there a contradiction between the constant complaining about paywalls by the HN crowd and the same crowd’s dislike of ad driven platforms? Someone wrote this - don’t they need to get paid for it?
- scottLobster 7y agoOnly if it's the same people complaining about each. Also most people don't care so much about ads as they do the malware and tracking that often comes with them. It's possible to do ads right, there's just zero economic incentive to do so at present.
- pytester 7y agoIf the it's neoliberal journalism surely the market, rather than ideology, should decide how it should be paid for? Currently, the market seems more keen on ads. Personally, I'd be happy to pay for investigative journalism (e.g. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/investigations https://www.buzzfeednews.com/investigations)... but not the kind of journalism which cites "tweets" as research and doesn't think enough of its journalists to give them a byline.
- formercoder 7y agoIndeed, publications can choose to survive on ads or subscriptions. The market will dictate who’s successful.
- visarga 7y agoNot if we stop posting paywalled content. There's plenty of great content that is not restricted.
- bryanrasmussen 7y agoI for one don't have a problem with ads, I do use my GDPR privileges to turn off ad based tracking when I come to a new site and I feel it's good enough to warrant staying (if they don't let me turn it off I generally leave, if the experience is really bad sometimes I make a complaint)
- wruza 7y agoIt is only 5 paragraphs more, mostly enumerating cases of scifi->reality adoption. Imo, not worth 5 cents requested, thinks the door so or not.
- apocalypstyx 7y agoClaims such as these always make me think of the opening paragraphs of Stanislaw Lem's essay Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans[1]. No one in his right mind seeks the psychological truth about crime in detective stories. Whoever seeks such truth will turn rather to Crime and Punishment. In relation to Agatha Christie, Dostoevsky constitutes a higher court of appeal, yet no one in his right mind will condemn the English author's stories on this account. They have a right to be treated as the entertaining thrillers they are, and the tasks Dostoevsky set himself are foreign to them. If anyone is dissatisfied with SF in its role as an examiner of the future and of civilization, there is no way to make an analogous move from literary oversimplifications to full-fledged art, because there is no court of appeal from this genre. There would be no harm in this, save that American SF, exploiting its exceptional status, lays claim to occupy the pinnacles of art and thought. One is annoyed by the pretentiousness of a genre which fends off accusations of primitivism by pleading its entertainment character and then, once such accusations have been silenced, renews its overweening claims. By being one thing and purporting to be another, SF promotes a mystification which, moreover, goes on with the tacit consent of readers and public. [1] https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm
- platz 7y agoWhat exactly is the "court of appeal" that higher art is predicated upon? What does this phrase mean apart from concrete examples?
- nine_k 7y agoI think the idea is like that: if you think that the murderer in a A. Christie's story is shown unrealistically, you can write it off as a literary device to create an entertaining puzzle, and not expect a serious treatise on the criminal's psychology, motives, etc. If you need a deep(er) view of a murderer's soul, you open Crime and Punishment, also a literary work and not a piece of academic research, and find it there. For SF in 1970s, there was no such higher tier; there was no literary futurology. Lem himself was one of the biggest figures in the field of literary futurology, framed as SF. "Hard SF", like the works of Peter Watts or Greg Egan, did not yet exist.
- spectramax 7y agoSci-fi depictions of everything bothers me. Everything just looks like Tron. Why? Because sci-fi authors are obsessed with shallow aesthetics and design - the "futuristic" look, functionality and objectivity take a back seat. The sad thing is that people like Elon Musk embrace the sci-fi look and that has influenced the new dragon capsule design, the spacesuit design, just because it looks "cool". How about ignoring how something appears, and focusing on functionality, maintainability, operability, serviceability, legibility, etc. Let's replace all buttons and knobs with touchscreens everywhere in a space cockpit because it fits Elon's taste of aesthetics inspired by sci-fi movies. Ugh... this stuff bothers me.
- balfirevic 7y agoYou can always start your own rocket company and design the suits and buttons the way you want.
- spectramax 7y agoSpaceX has done extraordinary things and criticizing Elon's design taste shouldn't be conflated with the rest of the efforts.
- m463 7y agoI think you have to separate out the origins of each thing here. Scifi ideas come from authors, and come primarily from text. Scifi book covers come from artists, and create a sort of "look and feel" that is at best loosely related to the book, but generally unrelated and may not be chosed by the author. And then there's Hollywood. By now we're several minds removed from the scifi author and the sausage for public consumption has little resemblance to the original beast. But it definitely has a look and feel. Think of the early scifi pulp, and although the ideas may be timeless and strong, people picture bug eyed monsters holding damsels wearing brass clothing, and spaceships that stand upright on fins with a ladder leading down the side. Similarly scifi of the 70's might conjure up images of planetscapes with multiple moons and floating islands in the sky. I suspect the Tron look is a period theme derived from the state of computer graphics when the movie was authored.
- 7y ago
- somishere 7y agoLooked at this while at uni over a couple of papers, tho not entirely fresh in the mind 15 years later. But would suggest that Scifi, like the western and other escapist genres, are surely more about promoting complex reasoning than embedding any kind of explicit ideology or aesthetic. Yes popular themes may also find themselves thoughtfully resurrected / enshrined in the creative output of the faithful, but is it the wonder and drive, engendered through the source material, distilled into future/present realities, that shoulder a more convincing burden?
- imvetri 7y agoSamething which "the past-sci-fi told us about the preset".