So then. A brand new year to stomp through like kids in an amusement park.
Last year at around about this time, I mused about what I would get up to in the brand new set of days we'd all been presented with. In truth, though, that was actually harder than I let on - mostly because depression turns the certainty of a future into a maybe, especially if it is positive. It becomes quite hard to even consider that there will be a next year, let alone to construct a plan for it.
Which, really, just makes it more important. Makes pushing against the dampening and the dark that much more critical. If we just give in - sitting still whenever the whisper in the ear demands it, tearing down the things we love every time the itching in our fingers gets too much - then we aren't living. We're existing, and I am somewhat familiar with the difference.
So what am I going to do this year that involves living rather than existing?
Well. Aside from the gig - the BIG gig, in three weeks - there should be more live music. I don't know where, I don't know how. I just want to see someone, somewhere else, before the end of the year. Not enough live music in my life. Need to fix that.
Music in general. More of it. I think it has to happen. I've been a salty bastard for too long. Time to fix that.
Nine Worlds. August. Hammersmith. Change of cosplay idea - because frankly Roadhog is going to be an absolute pig to pull off (pun intended), I'm looking into something a little more... final.
...as in Final Fantasy. As in Gladiolus from Final Fantasy XV. Gonna need a mullet for that.
Finish another book. Maybe the sequel to Bridge. Maybe something else. Don't know which. I should really fix up the rewrite of the Star Wars prequels I keep blabbering about too.
Keep up the blog. Got to be done, keep it up. Maybe hit up a few more blog-a-day weeks. That was fun. I think more subjects are required too - as whenever I write politics, it feels like I am dragging my guts through the grinder for very little payback. I know that pushing for public awareness of political reality is an endurance test, but sometimes I just don't have the endurance.
I guess it's just about keeping one's shit together, hmm?
Anyhow. Let's get it on.
Showing posts with label future. Show all posts
Showing posts with label future. Show all posts
Sunday, 1 January 2017
Saturday, 3 December 2016
The Modern Neuromancer
I begin this blog with a definition of the term Cyberpunk:
Interesting, no?
There was a lot of talk about how Back To The Future 2's future never happened, but then actually did happen. The only thing that hasn't shown up is the hoverboard - something I blogged about right here actually.
It's like we wished for the whimsical aspects of that future, and not the more gritty, more day-to-day, more prosaic elements. We were so looking forward to our hoverboard that we forgot to stop Biff Tannen becoming president. At least the two-tie thing never took off...
...but I digress.
It is very possible to sleepwalk into a situation, because in a world wherein information is actually very free and very quick to travel (and misinformation doubly true), people's chosen method to not be overwhelmed is to trim down what they pay attention to.
This can mean that some very big, very important things go unnoticed, because of unequal coverage.
My favourite book is Neuromancer, by William Gibson.
Highly acclaimed as being the inventor of the term and the genre, Gibson is the grandfather of cyberpunk, to the point of a supercomputer in the hokey-but-fun 1995 movie Hackers is named after him. He wasn't hugely on-point with technology and computing at the time of writing Neuromancer - 1984, when I was two years old - and so that made him free to imagine a future based on social aspects, rather than technological. Still, he framed the world in technological terms, because in his eyes, the social - the spiritual and emotional - aspects of the world would be slowly eroded away, like a crack in a tooth.
There are several tell-tale core concepts that are present in most (if not all) examples of cyberpunk. The biggest is simply summed up as High Tech, Low Life; wherein the world's capacity for technological marvels and genius is incredible, but those technologies aren't capable of elevating the majority of the populace from poverty and squalour. Sure, you may have your highly-advanced computer system, and your replacement left arm, but you still need to grind for fifty hours a week to afford food and crappy lodgings - and social and societal mobility is basically a myth, except within your own little clique.
There's more to it than that, obviously.
Privacy and information is a huge part of the world. Information is currency. More important than almost anything, information leads to rep, which gives you anything. Those who possess data guard it jealously. Rather than use it or open it up for other people's use, it is a thing to lock down. Conversely, those who do not possess other data are constantly pushing to acquire it. Contravening the basic privacy of normal people, while defending one's own. Hacker society is predicated on the notion of all information being free, and the idea of sousveillance is a very nice one (observation from below - the opposite of surveillance, observation from above). How that data is used after the fact? Well, that's up to the people harvesting it - harvesting it and dictating how much of it anyone has access to, including themselves.
Sometimes a legal framework is needed to facilitate this kind of thing. Like the Investigatory Powers Bill, let's say.
Part of cyberpunk is the attitude that is almost entirely prevalent in most of its characters. You have to do it for yourself because nobody is going to do it for you. Becoming enclosed, wrapping ourselves up in ourselves. How can we possibly give a shit about X, when we can just about eat OR pay this bill, but not both?
This applies to almost all echelons of society. Not just the most poor and downtrodden, having to threaten others for a bite to eat, but further up the ladder - the corporate and political entities, who can't care about the effect of their actions on a macro scale, because they need to keep up their rep and their bankroll. The life won't fund itself. Who has the time to help anyone else?
That ruthless, headlong drive toward ourselves. Does that sound familiar?
Another key aspect of cyberpunk is the overwhelming presence of corporation, even over politics. Businesses are simply more important. They set the agenda, they do the dance, and the bureaucrats and so-called rulers pretty much run to keep up. Taking a stand against the march of gain is almost suicidal to one's career, because the monoliths of industry are the real fixed points of the world. So the politicians have to buy in, because to do otherwise is to invite certain doom - and hey, we can probably make a tidy profit from it at the same time, right? Why bother putting so much effort into making things different and achieving nothing, when one can put less effort into making a man in a suit happy and retire before the age of sixty?
Again, does that sound familiar?
I suppose the point I am working toward is that, I don't think Nineteen Eighty-Four is the future we have been sleepwalking towards. Not yet, anyway. We're getting there but not yet. Where we are going first, is Neuromancer.
Think about it.
We all have a phone, because phones have been price-pointed to perfection. Put one in every pocket. Make luxury models for the wealthy, and make finance options available for those we can buy debt from. I speak only for "first world" societies of course, but owning a phone in this country in particular is considered the default. If you don't, it is a statement. It's not a lack of availability. Every one of us has access to a portable supercomputer, by Gibson's standards.
We even have access to these things when we are in relative poverty. Even when our social mobility is stifled, and our income goes up so much slower than the cost of living and our average productivity. Even when the cost of owning a house is becoming inescapable to those who actually need one, despite the constant societal pressure from those who already own one to "get on the ladder".
Corporate interests have far greater influence on our lives than any shade of democracy. They also tend to guide scientific development. We don't get what we want. We get what they want, and then we are brought to understand that we wanted it all along. We're also, frankly, not in touch with what they are doing. Nobody cares enough. Everyone is too busy trying to keep their shirts on their backs.
We might not be able to plug data cables into our necks to eperience a virtual world (we have regular old headsets). We might not have built-in endoskeletons that vastly increase our lifting power (we have ever-increasingly complex exoskeletal frames). But we are definitely getting there.
You know the thing about cyberpunk?
It's a dystopia.
But then, nobody cared enough to stop it, and nobody noticed enough to want to care. So I guess I had better get some cybernetic limbs and some mirrorshades.
"A genre of science fiction set in a lawless subculture of an oppressive society dominated by computer technology."
Interesting, no?
There was a lot of talk about how Back To The Future 2's future never happened, but then actually did happen. The only thing that hasn't shown up is the hoverboard - something I blogged about right here actually.
It's like we wished for the whimsical aspects of that future, and not the more gritty, more day-to-day, more prosaic elements. We were so looking forward to our hoverboard that we forgot to stop Biff Tannen becoming president. At least the two-tie thing never took off...
...but I digress.
It is very possible to sleepwalk into a situation, because in a world wherein information is actually very free and very quick to travel (and misinformation doubly true), people's chosen method to not be overwhelmed is to trim down what they pay attention to.
This can mean that some very big, very important things go unnoticed, because of unequal coverage.
My favourite book is Neuromancer, by William Gibson.
Highly acclaimed as being the inventor of the term and the genre, Gibson is the grandfather of cyberpunk, to the point of a supercomputer in the hokey-but-fun 1995 movie Hackers is named after him. He wasn't hugely on-point with technology and computing at the time of writing Neuromancer - 1984, when I was two years old - and so that made him free to imagine a future based on social aspects, rather than technological. Still, he framed the world in technological terms, because in his eyes, the social - the spiritual and emotional - aspects of the world would be slowly eroded away, like a crack in a tooth.
There are several tell-tale core concepts that are present in most (if not all) examples of cyberpunk. The biggest is simply summed up as High Tech, Low Life; wherein the world's capacity for technological marvels and genius is incredible, but those technologies aren't capable of elevating the majority of the populace from poverty and squalour. Sure, you may have your highly-advanced computer system, and your replacement left arm, but you still need to grind for fifty hours a week to afford food and crappy lodgings - and social and societal mobility is basically a myth, except within your own little clique.
There's more to it than that, obviously.
Privacy and information is a huge part of the world. Information is currency. More important than almost anything, information leads to rep, which gives you anything. Those who possess data guard it jealously. Rather than use it or open it up for other people's use, it is a thing to lock down. Conversely, those who do not possess other data are constantly pushing to acquire it. Contravening the basic privacy of normal people, while defending one's own. Hacker society is predicated on the notion of all information being free, and the idea of sousveillance is a very nice one (observation from below - the opposite of surveillance, observation from above). How that data is used after the fact? Well, that's up to the people harvesting it - harvesting it and dictating how much of it anyone has access to, including themselves.
Sometimes a legal framework is needed to facilitate this kind of thing. Like the Investigatory Powers Bill, let's say.
Part of cyberpunk is the attitude that is almost entirely prevalent in most of its characters. You have to do it for yourself because nobody is going to do it for you. Becoming enclosed, wrapping ourselves up in ourselves. How can we possibly give a shit about X, when we can just about eat OR pay this bill, but not both?
This applies to almost all echelons of society. Not just the most poor and downtrodden, having to threaten others for a bite to eat, but further up the ladder - the corporate and political entities, who can't care about the effect of their actions on a macro scale, because they need to keep up their rep and their bankroll. The life won't fund itself. Who has the time to help anyone else?
That ruthless, headlong drive toward ourselves. Does that sound familiar?
Another key aspect of cyberpunk is the overwhelming presence of corporation, even over politics. Businesses are simply more important. They set the agenda, they do the dance, and the bureaucrats and so-called rulers pretty much run to keep up. Taking a stand against the march of gain is almost suicidal to one's career, because the monoliths of industry are the real fixed points of the world. So the politicians have to buy in, because to do otherwise is to invite certain doom - and hey, we can probably make a tidy profit from it at the same time, right? Why bother putting so much effort into making things different and achieving nothing, when one can put less effort into making a man in a suit happy and retire before the age of sixty?
Again, does that sound familiar?
I suppose the point I am working toward is that, I don't think Nineteen Eighty-Four is the future we have been sleepwalking towards. Not yet, anyway. We're getting there but not yet. Where we are going first, is Neuromancer.
Think about it.
We all have a phone, because phones have been price-pointed to perfection. Put one in every pocket. Make luxury models for the wealthy, and make finance options available for those we can buy debt from. I speak only for "first world" societies of course, but owning a phone in this country in particular is considered the default. If you don't, it is a statement. It's not a lack of availability. Every one of us has access to a portable supercomputer, by Gibson's standards.
We even have access to these things when we are in relative poverty. Even when our social mobility is stifled, and our income goes up so much slower than the cost of living and our average productivity. Even when the cost of owning a house is becoming inescapable to those who actually need one, despite the constant societal pressure from those who already own one to "get on the ladder".
Corporate interests have far greater influence on our lives than any shade of democracy. They also tend to guide scientific development. We don't get what we want. We get what they want, and then we are brought to understand that we wanted it all along. We're also, frankly, not in touch with what they are doing. Nobody cares enough. Everyone is too busy trying to keep their shirts on their backs.
We might not be able to plug data cables into our necks to eperience a virtual world (we have regular old headsets). We might not have built-in endoskeletons that vastly increase our lifting power (we have ever-increasingly complex exoskeletal frames). But we are definitely getting there.
You know the thing about cyberpunk?
It's a dystopia.
But then, nobody cared enough to stop it, and nobody noticed enough to want to care. So I guess I had better get some cybernetic limbs and some mirrorshades.
Sunday, 13 November 2016
NaNoWriMo Thoughts - Rewriting The History Books
It is only recently that the common abuse method known as gaslighting has come into the public eye as being as prevalent and controlling as it really is.
If you aren't sure what gaslighting is, then - for a grossly simplified example, and please don't think I am trying to trivialise the effect this has on people - imagine the episode of Star Trek where the Cardassians are trying to mentally break Captain Picard. The constant demand, telling him there are five lights, when there are only four.
(It's from Chain Of Command, a two-parter from Season 6 of Star Trek TNG. You can find a clip of it right here. Warning, it is a bit traumatising.)
The purpose of the method is to try and convince Picard that his senses can't be trusted - that his sanity isn't quite what he thinks it is. The point isn't to make him think that there are five lights. The point is to make him see four lights, but accept without question that there are actually five, because that is what he is being told by the Cardassians responsible.
This is in itself a reference to Nineteen Eighty-Four, a work that every single one of you should be familiar with. If you aren't - go and read it, right now. It is important. George Orwell's writing is vital to understanding how the world works. Anyway. In Nineteen Eighty-Four Winston is given exactly the same treatment, except it is fingers rather than lights, and instead of the evil and bastardly Cardassians, it is a fellow human being - O'Brien - that is ravaging his grip on reality.
Gaslighting is this, except the way it is deployed in an abusive relationship is different. It is subtler, more low-key. Fine details are adjusted, just slightly, by the abuser. (You'll note I am not putting any labels on this relationship. It can happen between most anyone.) Those details are at odds with what actually happened, but after dispute and repetition - eventually, the abused capitulates and accepts the version of events that the abuser is setting forth. Even if they know that it isn't how it happened.
It starts off as, perhaps, being a case of not wanting to argue the point. They just see it differently. We can both be right. That's fine. That isn't often where it stops, though.
It turns into something a lot nastier, because after the first success, the abuser knows that they can do it - and so they turn it to their advantage with confidence. All of those times where you had a valid complaint or greivance, the abuser can turn to make YOU seem to be the one in the wrong. They weren't deserving of your wrath. You're out of control, clearly. You have these terrible temper tantrums. That isn't what happened, why would you make that up? And so it goes. (It actually makes me kind of angry just to type this stuff knowing that it has happened to people I care about. And hell, it may still BE happening to some of them.)
In the end, the goal is the same. It is just achieved under the veneer of care. No Room 101 in this gaslighting, and no Cardassian brig with four lights. Just a place where you are meant to feel safe and welcome, which is being twisted to the ends of the abuser.
Recognising shit like this for what it is, is really important. It's something you can often only pick up through experience, but when you know - you know. It means that at first sign of it happening, you stomp it out quick or you walk away. And if you see it happening to someone you care about, hell, maybe even someone you don't care about at all, you tell them.
How does this tie into my NaNoWriMo project? Well, in this form, it doesn't. I just thought I'd give you a rundown because I love you all and I want you to be safe from this kind of fuckery.
Now from the personal scale, we move into the macro. Cultural hegemony.
It's a bit of Marxist (the political one, not the funny one) philosophy that involves the worldview of those in charge being made to be the worldview of those who aren't, regardless of validity. Cultural hegemony is a massive part of Nineteen Eighty-Four - hell, Winston works for the department that actually goes back and rewrites all the newspapers.
There's a difference between a cultural hegemony and an authoritatian society. The latter doesn't care if you believe it - it is here to make sure you do what you are told. You can think whatever you like, as long as obey the law. It is easier for the powers that be if you DO go along with it, mind - but if you just toe the line, you're one less head they have to crack with a rifle butt.
Often, an authoritarian society with a real view of control and a significant means of achieving it will try and engage in cultural hegemony. Things given a touch, an edge, to make their own particular values and culture primary over all others. It is rarely something that can be made perfect, in this day and age, but it can be made well enough that it sits as a veneer over the everyday information that people absorb as they go about their lives. If nobody has the wherewithall to question it, then it starts to become the truth.
Don't believe it can happen? Well, here's a few examples of exactly why it can.
The Mandela Effect is another trending thing. This has been documented all over the place. The number of people who truly believed, not just kind of thought but truly believed, that Nelson Mandela had died in prison - and were surprised to see that he hadn't - is astonishing. Likewise, the number of people who blot out the K in Chick-Fil-A, or think the Bearenstain Bears were actually the Bearenstein Bears. All of these things are (or were) commonly held misconceptions that people genuinely believed were the absolute truth. Each of them is small in its own way, but an indication that actually, the truth can be bent out of shape.
Here's another experiment. How many states of matter are there? Three, right? Solid, Liquid and Gas - we're all taught that in school, and we're shown the examples with ice-water-vapour. Except - there's four that we can see every day of our lives and a lot more that we know exist. That fourth common one is plasma, and you see it every day if you go out in sunlight, every time there is a lightning storm, and every time you look at a neon sign. You only learn about these later on in one's education - because you can't really absorb the complexity of a lot of things when you start learning about the sciences - but then, what if your education ends there? You spend the rest of your life thinking there are only three states of matter. As the vast majority of the human race do.
I'm not saying that not teaching middle-schoolers about Bose-Einstein condensates is an attempt to cynically manipulate their worldview to make them a more malleable populace. I'm saying that what we are taught in school is often taught in stages of complexity, and that if further complexity isn't reached, then the rest of our lives are spent being convinced that the simplified version is the whole story. That is if we are taught the right thing at all. I was taught that Pluto was a planet, after all. Even if the actual scientific or objective fact of a matter changes, unless that filters out to the perspective of others, it won't change the views of the people.
These are all ways in which people's worldview can be knocked aside from objective truth, but let's face it, they aren't exactly government sponsored - and the actual information available counters the beliefs in question. As a thought experiment, though...
What if, one day, someone tells you they were reading their bible and they had taken great comfort in Jesus feeding the six thousand? And you think, wait, that's meant to be five thousand, surely. And you go and look up the bible passage online, because hey, not everyone actually owns a copy of it anymore. And sure enough, there Jesus is in the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke AND John, feeding the six thousand. You frown. That doesn't sound right. So you go to the library to take out a bible there, to check up. They're awaiting new stock, apparently the last one was recalled. You wait a week, take out the new one, read up on it. Yes. Six thousand. Right there, Luke chapter nine. Oh. You seem to remember your gran's old bible saying something different? But the overwhelming evidence... and sure enough, in ten years, your grandkids are making jokes at Christmas dinner about you making enough food to feed the six thousand.
(As an aside there is a second feeding in the gospels of Matthew and Mark - the four thousand. I bet that's something you didn't know. So depending on who you ask, Jesus fed either five or nine thousand with loose change. In terms of scale, that's almost doubling his efficacy.)
Now imagine that same principle, but applied to history, and applied to every example of the culture of those in power. Imagine the criticism minimised, the failings sidelined or palmed off on something else. Imagine all the strong contentions against the way of life they profess being written out of history. Imagine the aggrandisation of everything that proves they were right all along.
Imagine that taking place over decades, centuries. Imagine it being so prevalent that it is in every schoolbook, in every historical reference. Imagine it being so quiet that nobody questions, and so accepted that nobody fights, nobody even thinks to fight.
I could at this point make a snide point about Capitalism and Communism - about the dirty work done to the term Feminist up until recently, and how the word Patriotism is used to mean Nationalism in certain circles.
But then we don't live in the kind of culture within which the leaders and success stories want us to believe the same things as them, do we?
This blog here is about people validating their life choices by being incredulous when others don't agree with them. This blog here is about why we don't learn about politics in school. This blog here is about how people's general beliefs about money are kinda wrong. This blog here is about how our conception of what success is has been shaped by our monetised society. Finally, this blog here is about how wealthy folks worry that we think like they do, so they defend themselves first, and others second.
Maybe it's just me.
If you aren't sure what gaslighting is, then - for a grossly simplified example, and please don't think I am trying to trivialise the effect this has on people - imagine the episode of Star Trek where the Cardassians are trying to mentally break Captain Picard. The constant demand, telling him there are five lights, when there are only four.
(It's from Chain Of Command, a two-parter from Season 6 of Star Trek TNG. You can find a clip of it right here. Warning, it is a bit traumatising.)
The purpose of the method is to try and convince Picard that his senses can't be trusted - that his sanity isn't quite what he thinks it is. The point isn't to make him think that there are five lights. The point is to make him see four lights, but accept without question that there are actually five, because that is what he is being told by the Cardassians responsible.
This is in itself a reference to Nineteen Eighty-Four, a work that every single one of you should be familiar with. If you aren't - go and read it, right now. It is important. George Orwell's writing is vital to understanding how the world works. Anyway. In Nineteen Eighty-Four Winston is given exactly the same treatment, except it is fingers rather than lights, and instead of the evil and bastardly Cardassians, it is a fellow human being - O'Brien - that is ravaging his grip on reality.
Gaslighting is this, except the way it is deployed in an abusive relationship is different. It is subtler, more low-key. Fine details are adjusted, just slightly, by the abuser. (You'll note I am not putting any labels on this relationship. It can happen between most anyone.) Those details are at odds with what actually happened, but after dispute and repetition - eventually, the abused capitulates and accepts the version of events that the abuser is setting forth. Even if they know that it isn't how it happened.
It starts off as, perhaps, being a case of not wanting to argue the point. They just see it differently. We can both be right. That's fine. That isn't often where it stops, though.
It turns into something a lot nastier, because after the first success, the abuser knows that they can do it - and so they turn it to their advantage with confidence. All of those times where you had a valid complaint or greivance, the abuser can turn to make YOU seem to be the one in the wrong. They weren't deserving of your wrath. You're out of control, clearly. You have these terrible temper tantrums. That isn't what happened, why would you make that up? And so it goes. (It actually makes me kind of angry just to type this stuff knowing that it has happened to people I care about. And hell, it may still BE happening to some of them.)
In the end, the goal is the same. It is just achieved under the veneer of care. No Room 101 in this gaslighting, and no Cardassian brig with four lights. Just a place where you are meant to feel safe and welcome, which is being twisted to the ends of the abuser.
Recognising shit like this for what it is, is really important. It's something you can often only pick up through experience, but when you know - you know. It means that at first sign of it happening, you stomp it out quick or you walk away. And if you see it happening to someone you care about, hell, maybe even someone you don't care about at all, you tell them.
How does this tie into my NaNoWriMo project? Well, in this form, it doesn't. I just thought I'd give you a rundown because I love you all and I want you to be safe from this kind of fuckery.
Now from the personal scale, we move into the macro. Cultural hegemony.
It's a bit of Marxist (the political one, not the funny one) philosophy that involves the worldview of those in charge being made to be the worldview of those who aren't, regardless of validity. Cultural hegemony is a massive part of Nineteen Eighty-Four - hell, Winston works for the department that actually goes back and rewrites all the newspapers.
There's a difference between a cultural hegemony and an authoritatian society. The latter doesn't care if you believe it - it is here to make sure you do what you are told. You can think whatever you like, as long as obey the law. It is easier for the powers that be if you DO go along with it, mind - but if you just toe the line, you're one less head they have to crack with a rifle butt.
Often, an authoritarian society with a real view of control and a significant means of achieving it will try and engage in cultural hegemony. Things given a touch, an edge, to make their own particular values and culture primary over all others. It is rarely something that can be made perfect, in this day and age, but it can be made well enough that it sits as a veneer over the everyday information that people absorb as they go about their lives. If nobody has the wherewithall to question it, then it starts to become the truth.
Don't believe it can happen? Well, here's a few examples of exactly why it can.
The Mandela Effect is another trending thing. This has been documented all over the place. The number of people who truly believed, not just kind of thought but truly believed, that Nelson Mandela had died in prison - and were surprised to see that he hadn't - is astonishing. Likewise, the number of people who blot out the K in Chick-Fil-A, or think the Bearenstain Bears were actually the Bearenstein Bears. All of these things are (or were) commonly held misconceptions that people genuinely believed were the absolute truth. Each of them is small in its own way, but an indication that actually, the truth can be bent out of shape.
Here's another experiment. How many states of matter are there? Three, right? Solid, Liquid and Gas - we're all taught that in school, and we're shown the examples with ice-water-vapour. Except - there's four that we can see every day of our lives and a lot more that we know exist. That fourth common one is plasma, and you see it every day if you go out in sunlight, every time there is a lightning storm, and every time you look at a neon sign. You only learn about these later on in one's education - because you can't really absorb the complexity of a lot of things when you start learning about the sciences - but then, what if your education ends there? You spend the rest of your life thinking there are only three states of matter. As the vast majority of the human race do.
I'm not saying that not teaching middle-schoolers about Bose-Einstein condensates is an attempt to cynically manipulate their worldview to make them a more malleable populace. I'm saying that what we are taught in school is often taught in stages of complexity, and that if further complexity isn't reached, then the rest of our lives are spent being convinced that the simplified version is the whole story. That is if we are taught the right thing at all. I was taught that Pluto was a planet, after all. Even if the actual scientific or objective fact of a matter changes, unless that filters out to the perspective of others, it won't change the views of the people.
These are all ways in which people's worldview can be knocked aside from objective truth, but let's face it, they aren't exactly government sponsored - and the actual information available counters the beliefs in question. As a thought experiment, though...
What if, one day, someone tells you they were reading their bible and they had taken great comfort in Jesus feeding the six thousand? And you think, wait, that's meant to be five thousand, surely. And you go and look up the bible passage online, because hey, not everyone actually owns a copy of it anymore. And sure enough, there Jesus is in the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke AND John, feeding the six thousand. You frown. That doesn't sound right. So you go to the library to take out a bible there, to check up. They're awaiting new stock, apparently the last one was recalled. You wait a week, take out the new one, read up on it. Yes. Six thousand. Right there, Luke chapter nine. Oh. You seem to remember your gran's old bible saying something different? But the overwhelming evidence... and sure enough, in ten years, your grandkids are making jokes at Christmas dinner about you making enough food to feed the six thousand.
(As an aside there is a second feeding in the gospels of Matthew and Mark - the four thousand. I bet that's something you didn't know. So depending on who you ask, Jesus fed either five or nine thousand with loose change. In terms of scale, that's almost doubling his efficacy.)
Now imagine that same principle, but applied to history, and applied to every example of the culture of those in power. Imagine the criticism minimised, the failings sidelined or palmed off on something else. Imagine all the strong contentions against the way of life they profess being written out of history. Imagine the aggrandisation of everything that proves they were right all along.
Imagine that taking place over decades, centuries. Imagine it being so prevalent that it is in every schoolbook, in every historical reference. Imagine it being so quiet that nobody questions, and so accepted that nobody fights, nobody even thinks to fight.
I could at this point make a snide point about Capitalism and Communism - about the dirty work done to the term Feminist up until recently, and how the word Patriotism is used to mean Nationalism in certain circles.
But then we don't live in the kind of culture within which the leaders and success stories want us to believe the same things as them, do we?
This blog here is about people validating their life choices by being incredulous when others don't agree with them. This blog here is about why we don't learn about politics in school. This blog here is about how people's general beliefs about money are kinda wrong. This blog here is about how our conception of what success is has been shaped by our monetised society. Finally, this blog here is about how wealthy folks worry that we think like they do, so they defend themselves first, and others second.
Maybe it's just me.
Saturday, 5 November 2016
NaNoWriMo Thoughts - Power Armour
Hands up if you know me.
Hands up if you know I have a huge crush on the concept of power armour.
Mostly the same amount of hands up, then.
Introduced to us as a concept back in the very early 20th century, power armour is a scifi staple. It runs from the improbable and highly fantastic, through to the more feasible and realistic. In movies, the contrast is visible in The Edge Of Tomorrow (essentially primarily just harnesses that increase lifting power and reduce recoil) and Iron Man (incredibly advanced and packing more bleeding-edge technology than your average Cyberpunk novel).
It's great stuff. A combination of protecting one's own soldiery and also allowing them to carry and manage heavier weapons, it is surely the military hardware of the future. A singular part of war is the capacity of a soldier to carry their equipment, which again would be amplified by power armour - though the commensurate increase in logistics would probably counterbalance their usefulness to a point.
So, why don't we have squads of MJOLNIR-equipped Royal Marines stomping all over the place?
Quite simply, there's bits of the technology that holds us back. We need certain things, certain kinds of technology to be available and widely researched in order to construct true power armour. There's a lot of similar projects in development right now that are similar - just take a look here for some examples, notables include Cyberdyne's HAL-5 and the Honda ex-legs project. Most of them take on the visage of the exoskeletons that are prevalent in the near-future presented in The Edge Of Tomorrow, though are far less advanced than the equipment presented in the book it is based on by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, All You Need Is Kill. (The novel comes highly recommended, by the way. Track it down.)
I'm not a scientist or an engineer. So my opinion, as always, needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. With those cards on the table, what do I think needs to happen to let us get on the board in terms of power armour?
The two primary issues, in my eyes, are power source and control mechanism.
In order for such armour to be useful, it needs to be able to perform with high responsiveness for a short period of time, and with low responsiveness for a long period of time. Military life is often described humourously as "hurry up and wait". It takes less energy to just move from one place to another, to get rom Point A to Point B and carry some things on the way - but far more time is going to be spent doing that, than in the middle of a fracas, which would require a lot of energy.
The idea of a small generator being attached to a fighting suit is less feasible than a suit being fitted with capacitors to be charged from an external source. So what is needed is capacitors, high capacity, quick to charge, and capable of variable output. There's a lot of study going on in this area. It's just a difficult balancing act - capacity and charging efficacy both come at a cost of weight and bulk, and finding the happy medium between them would be the solution. Where to put it on the suit, too, is a consideration - though just for balance purposes, I would think a distributed network of capacitors around the legs and hips.
The existence of the Formula E racing league - fully electrical cars tht can run at 140mph for an entire race and are recharged from glycerine - is proof that there's a lot that can be done with straight electrical power. If it can be monetised, it will be developed. Given that the new Renault electric car's battery is rented to the user rather than sold, let's face it - monetising is already happening.
The control mechanism? ...well that's a little harder.
If you want a suit of armour that can exert several tons of pressure at your command, you need to make sure it is going to go where you want to - that it isn't going to exert that pressure on you or on its own structure, and that there's going to be as little a delay as possible in transmission of command and execution of command.
Having it strapped to you, and reacting to pressure cues, is both simple and risky. The HULC system developed my Lockheed and Ekso Bionics uses footpad sensors that feed back into a microcomputer. This is great if all it is doing is moving at the same time as your legs and holding a backpack. A full body suit? Far more complicated.
Until we can get electronic control systems to the point where they can transfer motion commands from, say, a body suit to a limb possessing at least 8 actuators with accuracy - and allow for subtle variantions of motion, and ALSO allow for tactile and haptic feedback - well, Iron Man is beyond us. It's just not something we can do.
That's not a forever problem, in my opinion. That's a now problem. It just needs work.
In my National Novel Writing Month project, power armour features heavily. Even in the unspecified highly-futuristic time of the novel, it is a relatively new development. That is more down to efficiency of cost and training than anything else - but still, I hope it can demonstrate the complexity of such a system.
Keep dreaming, folks.
Hands up if you know I have a huge crush on the concept of power armour.
Mostly the same amount of hands up, then.
Introduced to us as a concept back in the very early 20th century, power armour is a scifi staple. It runs from the improbable and highly fantastic, through to the more feasible and realistic. In movies, the contrast is visible in The Edge Of Tomorrow (essentially primarily just harnesses that increase lifting power and reduce recoil) and Iron Man (incredibly advanced and packing more bleeding-edge technology than your average Cyberpunk novel).
It's great stuff. A combination of protecting one's own soldiery and also allowing them to carry and manage heavier weapons, it is surely the military hardware of the future. A singular part of war is the capacity of a soldier to carry their equipment, which again would be amplified by power armour - though the commensurate increase in logistics would probably counterbalance their usefulness to a point.
So, why don't we have squads of MJOLNIR-equipped Royal Marines stomping all over the place?
Quite simply, there's bits of the technology that holds us back. We need certain things, certain kinds of technology to be available and widely researched in order to construct true power armour. There's a lot of similar projects in development right now that are similar - just take a look here for some examples, notables include Cyberdyne's HAL-5 and the Honda ex-legs project. Most of them take on the visage of the exoskeletons that are prevalent in the near-future presented in The Edge Of Tomorrow, though are far less advanced than the equipment presented in the book it is based on by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, All You Need Is Kill. (The novel comes highly recommended, by the way. Track it down.)
I'm not a scientist or an engineer. So my opinion, as always, needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. With those cards on the table, what do I think needs to happen to let us get on the board in terms of power armour?
The two primary issues, in my eyes, are power source and control mechanism.
In order for such armour to be useful, it needs to be able to perform with high responsiveness for a short period of time, and with low responsiveness for a long period of time. Military life is often described humourously as "hurry up and wait". It takes less energy to just move from one place to another, to get rom Point A to Point B and carry some things on the way - but far more time is going to be spent doing that, than in the middle of a fracas, which would require a lot of energy.
The idea of a small generator being attached to a fighting suit is less feasible than a suit being fitted with capacitors to be charged from an external source. So what is needed is capacitors, high capacity, quick to charge, and capable of variable output. There's a lot of study going on in this area. It's just a difficult balancing act - capacity and charging efficacy both come at a cost of weight and bulk, and finding the happy medium between them would be the solution. Where to put it on the suit, too, is a consideration - though just for balance purposes, I would think a distributed network of capacitors around the legs and hips.
The existence of the Formula E racing league - fully electrical cars tht can run at 140mph for an entire race and are recharged from glycerine - is proof that there's a lot that can be done with straight electrical power. If it can be monetised, it will be developed. Given that the new Renault electric car's battery is rented to the user rather than sold, let's face it - monetising is already happening.
The control mechanism? ...well that's a little harder.
If you want a suit of armour that can exert several tons of pressure at your command, you need to make sure it is going to go where you want to - that it isn't going to exert that pressure on you or on its own structure, and that there's going to be as little a delay as possible in transmission of command and execution of command.
Having it strapped to you, and reacting to pressure cues, is both simple and risky. The HULC system developed my Lockheed and Ekso Bionics uses footpad sensors that feed back into a microcomputer. This is great if all it is doing is moving at the same time as your legs and holding a backpack. A full body suit? Far more complicated.
Until we can get electronic control systems to the point where they can transfer motion commands from, say, a body suit to a limb possessing at least 8 actuators with accuracy - and allow for subtle variantions of motion, and ALSO allow for tactile and haptic feedback - well, Iron Man is beyond us. It's just not something we can do.
That's not a forever problem, in my opinion. That's a now problem. It just needs work.
In my National Novel Writing Month project, power armour features heavily. Even in the unspecified highly-futuristic time of the novel, it is a relatively new development. That is more down to efficiency of cost and training than anything else - but still, I hope it can demonstrate the complexity of such a system.
Keep dreaming, folks.
Friday, 28 October 2016
Black Swans
Once upon a time, the term Black Swan was used to describe something that didn't exist.
It springs from a saying coined in 82AD by Juvenal, a Roman satirist - rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno. ("A rare bird in the lands, and very like a black swan.") It means, quite simply, something that doesn't exist. For absolutely centuries, this was stated as a bald truth, by those who had a mind to discuss such things. Europe's swans were strictly white.
Imagine the surprise of Europe, then, when in 1697 Dutch explorers in western Australia discovered that very thing: black swans.
So now, the term Black Swan means something that we thought was impossible, but wasn't. It is something that was beyond our field of vision that has just sprung into the light.
The author Iain M. Banks, one of my favoured science fiction writers, described this in the Culture novel Excession as an Outside Context Problem. It is something that we can't possibly have seen coming because our worldview does not include its possibility. To understand how that would work is very difficult - getting outside of our own minds is hard. They're our minds after all.
How we relate to the world, and how we understand it, is always put through a lens of our own experiences. When told to imagine our reaction to something, well, it's just been described to us by someone with a generally similar experience of the world. That's how hard it is to describe an Outside Context Problem, but the example Iain M. Banks uses is this:
Sometimes, though? Sometimes, we're the ones that place the object outside of our context.
See, in a case of a world or society where nobody ever talks or communicates (every kid with a mobile phone, if you ask a certain subsect of a certain generation) - that is next to impossible to imagine. How would anything even work? I'm communicating the idea to you, that is what reinforces how alien that idea is. That isn't a scenario that we made impossible, though; we could only develop into the species we are if we communicated, social evolution being just as important to who and what we are as physical evolution.
Now, though - now imagine a world without any kind of vehicle that isn't horsedrawn or man-powered.
That, we did to ourselves. We made that internal combustion engine, and we put it everywhere, and we made it necessary to our day-to-day lives in certain areas, and we so firmly embedded it into our culture and society that it is actually fairly hard to picture a world without them - or a world in which even the concept of them never existed.
The thing is, there are people alive today for whom that is a reality; people for whom the modern world is outside of context. Five generations ago, the notion of most people in England owning a mobile phone would be a totally alien one. Now place yourself in the shoes of the shocked, and advance the world past you. What lays in wait for us? Can we even predict, outside of speculative fiction?
This, right here, is why so many problems we face - as a race, as a whole - seem impossible to solve.
We've painted ourselves into so many corners, and then thrown away the brushes, and then forgotten that paint actually dries. The problem is A - but the solution B is impossible, because C. We accept all of these points because we just...can't not. That's why solutions are often dismissed as radical, because we just... don't think they can happen. Beyond a certain point it is preprogrammed into us. It's too far a jump, and thus it's not something we can grasp.
Even after having said all that...we still found our black swans. It took over sixteen centuries for us to prove Juvenal wrong, but it still happened. All we can do is keep educating ourselves, keep learning the positive changes that CAN happen - and dreaming of the ones that we don't think can, yet. Total nuclear disarmament - a dismantling of the primary capital-based system - a real and lasting green revolution.
Sooner or later, they may well become a reality.
It springs from a saying coined in 82AD by Juvenal, a Roman satirist - rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno. ("A rare bird in the lands, and very like a black swan.") It means, quite simply, something that doesn't exist. For absolutely centuries, this was stated as a bald truth, by those who had a mind to discuss such things. Europe's swans were strictly white.
Imagine the surprise of Europe, then, when in 1697 Dutch explorers in western Australia discovered that very thing: black swans.
So now, the term Black Swan means something that we thought was impossible, but wasn't. It is something that was beyond our field of vision that has just sprung into the light.
The author Iain M. Banks, one of my favoured science fiction writers, described this in the Culture novel Excession as an Outside Context Problem. It is something that we can't possibly have seen coming because our worldview does not include its possibility. To understand how that would work is very difficult - getting outside of our own minds is hard. They're our minds after all.
How we relate to the world, and how we understand it, is always put through a lens of our own experiences. When told to imagine our reaction to something, well, it's just been described to us by someone with a generally similar experience of the world. That's how hard it is to describe an Outside Context Problem, but the example Iain M. Banks uses is this:
The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you'd tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbors were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass... when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you've just been discovered, you're all subjects of the Emperor now, he's keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.
Sometimes, though? Sometimes, we're the ones that place the object outside of our context.
See, in a case of a world or society where nobody ever talks or communicates (every kid with a mobile phone, if you ask a certain subsect of a certain generation) - that is next to impossible to imagine. How would anything even work? I'm communicating the idea to you, that is what reinforces how alien that idea is. That isn't a scenario that we made impossible, though; we could only develop into the species we are if we communicated, social evolution being just as important to who and what we are as physical evolution.
Now, though - now imagine a world without any kind of vehicle that isn't horsedrawn or man-powered.
That, we did to ourselves. We made that internal combustion engine, and we put it everywhere, and we made it necessary to our day-to-day lives in certain areas, and we so firmly embedded it into our culture and society that it is actually fairly hard to picture a world without them - or a world in which even the concept of them never existed.
The thing is, there are people alive today for whom that is a reality; people for whom the modern world is outside of context. Five generations ago, the notion of most people in England owning a mobile phone would be a totally alien one. Now place yourself in the shoes of the shocked, and advance the world past you. What lays in wait for us? Can we even predict, outside of speculative fiction?
This, right here, is why so many problems we face - as a race, as a whole - seem impossible to solve.
We've painted ourselves into so many corners, and then thrown away the brushes, and then forgotten that paint actually dries. The problem is A - but the solution B is impossible, because C. We accept all of these points because we just...can't not. That's why solutions are often dismissed as radical, because we just... don't think they can happen. Beyond a certain point it is preprogrammed into us. It's too far a jump, and thus it's not something we can grasp.
Even after having said all that...we still found our black swans. It took over sixteen centuries for us to prove Juvenal wrong, but it still happened. All we can do is keep educating ourselves, keep learning the positive changes that CAN happen - and dreaming of the ones that we don't think can, yet. Total nuclear disarmament - a dismantling of the primary capital-based system - a real and lasting green revolution.
Sooner or later, they may well become a reality.
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