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Stross answers his own question - he just doesn't want to go there. Turn your back on the Enlightenment's ideological values. Until the 21st century can accom

• stcredzero 14y ago
  Turn your back on the Enlightenment's ideological values. I think that would make for some interesting stories. I could imagine the adventures of, say, a Bayesian Conspiracy surrounded by a burgeoning idiocracy that was largely sexting in class while the Enlightenment was being covered in history. (So it's not so much that society turns their back, they just don't get it in the first place.) This would be kind of an update of Larry Niven's Fallen Angels. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_Angels_(science_fiction_novel) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_Angels_(science_fiction_... You certainly won't find any Cabrini-Greens in, say, Louis XIV's France... Are you really claiming that slums entirely arose in the 3 to 4 generations prior to the revolution? Was there a huge pre-industrial revolution shift of population from rural to urban accompanied by huge sovereign debt? (This could be, I just don't remember enough about demographics.) I would point out that he presided over a country where slavery was legal. (Though in his attempt at reform, he mandated that only Roman Catholics could own them and that slaves should be baptized.)
  • moldbug 14y ago
    Concentration camps and gulags excluded, I don't think there has ever been a human society - anywhen, anywhere - as degraded as the 20th-century tower block/project, a pure product of Enlightenment thought. It's useful to go back and compare apples to apples when we compare the 19th-century "slum" to the 20th-century slum. You can read Robert Roberts on the Edwardian slum, for instance - a world which he grew up in: http://www.julielorenzen.net/slum.html http://www.julielorenzen.net/slum.html Roberts: However, approximately sixty years after Engels wrote his book, Roberts described the working class as almost being obsessed with cleanliness. A dirty home or even a front step meant lower social status. Roberts wrote “Most people kept what they possessed clean in spite of squalor and ever-invading dirt. Some houses sparkled.” Or read Riis' How The Other Half Lives: http://archive.org/details/howotherhalfliv00riisgoog http://archive.org/details/howotherhalfliv00riisgoog You can even find an unbiased view of Southern slavery (admittedly milder than Louis XIV's Caribbean version): http://books.google.com/books/about/A_south_side_view_of_slavery.html?id=rXMFAAAAQAAJ http://books.google.com/books/about/A_south_side_view_of_sla... You won't find anything like: It never ceased to amaze me how the people could live like that~dirty diapers & sanitary napkins in the hallways, urine & feces everywhere, cockroaches scurrying from one apartment to the other and when you had the unfortunate luck of answering a call on the 11th floor of one of these hell-holes was horrifying! Just going in to see the "moving walls" and the chicken bones on the floor, the stove on for heat even though it was already 140 degrees in there and the stained couches & dirty mattresses on the floor where at least three or four little kids were napping with the roaches! Good times... Lack of nice material things is one thing. Even in Cabrini-Green they had PlayStations. Louis XIV didn't have no PlayStation. Human degradation is another - and Enlightenment experiments hold the prize. (Especially if you count the "Soviet experiment" to its credit.)
    • stcredzero 14y ago
      Human degradation is another - and Enlightenment experiments hold the prize. (Especially if you count the "Soviet experiment" to its credit.) I see where you're coming from. That's hardly a reason to throw out all of the >values< of the Enlightenment, however. I doubt Catherine the Great would've approved of Cabrini Green, and none of the Enlightenment experiments would've been conducted the same way had people in the past known what we know now about economics and game theory. On the other hand, we know these things. We have decades additional history about the pitfalls of unintended consequences. In any case, I think this is a bit underhanded, if unintentionally so. First comes the implicit assumption of a not-widely understood interpretation of "Enlightenment" followed by the attachment of horrors of unintended consequences to the term. It's fallacy to attach unintended consequences a set of values, absent an analysis of implementation. Is this going to turn into another Libertarian flame-fest?
• ChuckMcM 14y ago
  I think Stross misses the ability to draw inspiration from 'good' stuff happening. I've challenged my SF writing friends on occasion to start with some change that really flips the bit. Two interesting starting points are; Unlimited energy - Lets say Fusion or something like it finally comes around and now using a couple of hundred megawatts for a an individual a month isn't out of the ordinary. How does that change things? Imagine that you can install giant chillers in the ocean and regulate its temperature regardless of surface air temperature. Unlimited Biology - lets say we actually figure out how cells work, right down to every single chemical, its role, its action, its reaction. We gain the ability to arbitrarily rewrite every cell in our bodies, ok so perfect health for everyone, no more 'genetic disease', no more 'aging'. What is the world like in that scenario? Do we stay human formed? Do we keep our emotions? Things that we evolved for use as cave people, do they still serve us? Fight or flight instinct? Its 'easier' in some ways to start from 'now' and delete things and write about their loss than to add new things. Its the latter stuff we don't see as much in SF.
  • stcredzero 14y ago
    I think Stross misses the ability to draw inspiration from 'good' stuff happening. I've challenged my SF writing friends on occasion to start with some change that really flips the bit. Two interesting starting points are; - Unlimited energy - Unlimited Biology These both have big potentials for bad thing happening as well. I think Unlimited Biology has already been done a lot, however. I think it's so prone to weirdness that it tends toward dystopian visions. Also, a lot of this territory was covered in the 20th century. Perhaps there's inspiration to be drawn from good stuff happening despite the tremendous potential for bad?
    • pjscott 14y ago
      If you have nigh-unlimited energy -- and crazy people do too -- then planets become remarkably big targets. And space habitats become a practical alternative. That could be an interesting setting, and remarkably non-dystopian.
      • 14y ago