[tt] The Progressive Apocalypse and Other Futurismic Delights

[Eugen Leitl]

http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2007/07/cory-doctorow-progressive-apocalypse.html

Cory Doctorow: The Progressive Apocalypse and Other Futurismic Delights

from Locus Magazine, July 2007

Of course, science fiction is a literature of the present. Many's the science
fiction writer who uses the future as a warped mirror for reflecting back the
present day, angled to illustrate the hidden strangeness buried by our
invisible assumptions: Orwell turned 1948 into Nineteen Eighty-Four. But even
when the fictional future isn't a parable about the present day, it is
necessarily a creation of the present day, since it reflects the present day
biases that infuse the author. Hence Asimov's Foundation, a New Deal-esque
project to think humanity out of its tribulations though social
interventionism.

Bold SF writers eschew the future altogether, embracing a futuristic account
of the present day. William Gibson's forthcoming Spook Country is an act of
"speculative presentism," a book so futuristic it could only have been set in
2006, a book that exploits retrospective historical distance to let us
glimpse just how alien and futuristic our present day is.

Science fiction writers aren't the only people in the business of predicting
the future. Futurists — consultants, technology columnists, analysts, venture
capitalists, and entrepreneurial pitchmen — spill a lot of ink, phosphors,
and caffeinated hot air in describing a vision for a future where we'll get
more and more of whatever it is they want to sell us or warn us away from.
Tomorrow will feature faster, cheaper processors, more Internet users,
ubiquitous RFID tags, radically democratic political processes dominated by
bloggers, massively multiplayer games whose virtual economies dwarf the
physical economy.

There's a lovely neologism to describe these visions: "futurismic."
Futurismic media is that which depicts futurism, not the future. It is often
self-serving — think of the antigrav Nikes in Back to the Future III — and it
generally doesn't hold up well to scrutiny.

SF films and TV are great fonts of futurismic imagery: R2D2 is a fully
conscious AI, can hack the firewall of the Death Star, and is equipped with a
range of holographic projectors and antipersonnel devices — but no one has
installed a $15 sound card and some text-to-speech software on him, so he has
to whistle like Harpo Marx. Or take the Starship Enterprise, with a
transporter capable of constituting matter from digitally stored plans, and
radios that can breach the speed of light.

The non-futurismic version of NCC-1701 would be the size of a softball (or
whatever the minimum size for a warp drive, transporter, and subspace radio
would be). It would zip around the galaxy at FTL speeds under remote control.
When it reached an interesting planet, it would beam a stored copy of a
landing party onto the surface, and when their mission was over, it would
beam them back into storage, annihilating their physical selves until they
reached the next stopping point. If a member of the landing party were eaten
by a green-skinned interspatial hippie or giant toga-wearing galactic tyrant,
that member would be recovered from backup by the transporter beam. Hell, the
entire landing party could consist of multiple copies of the most effective
crewmember onboard: no redshirts, just a half-dozen instances of Kirk
operating in clonal harmony.

Futurism has a psychological explanation, as recounted in Harvard clinical
psych prof Daniel Gilbert's 2006 book, Stumbling on Happiness. Our memories
and our projections of the future are necessarily imperfect. Our memories
consist of those observations our brains have bothered to keep records of,
woven together with inference and whatever else is lying around handy when we
try to remember something. Ask someone who's eating a great lunch how
breakfast was, and odds are she'll tell you it was delicious. Ask the same
question of someone eating rubbery airplane food, and he'll tell you his
breakfast was awful. We weave the past out of our imperfect memories and our
observable present.

We make the future in much the same way: we use reasoning and evidence to
predict what we can, and whenever we bump up against uncertainty, we fill the
void with the present day. Hence the injunction on women soldiers in the
future of Starship Troopers, or the bizarre, glassed-over "Progressland" city
diorama at the end of the 1964 World's Fair exhibit The Carousel of Progress,
which Disney built for GE.

Lapsarianism — the idea of a paradise lost, a fall from grace that makes each
year worse than the last — is the predominant future feeling for many people.
It's easy to see why: an imperfectly remembered golden childhood gives way to
the worries of adulthood and physical senescence. Surely the world is getting
worse: nothing tastes as good as it did when we were six, everything hurts
all the time, and our matured gonads drive us into frenzies of bizarre,
self-destructive behavior.

Lapsarianism dominates the Abrahamic faiths. I have an Orthodox Jewish friend
whose tradition holds that each generation of rabbis is necessarily less
perfect than the rabbis that came before, since each generation is more
removed from the perfection of the Garden. Therefore, no rabbi is allowed to
overturn any of his forebears' wisdom, since they are all, by definition,
smarter than him.

The natural endpoint of Lapsarianism is apocalypse. If things get worse, and
worse, and worse, eventually they'll just run out of worseness. Eventually,
they'll bottom out, a kind of rotten death of the universe when Lapsarian
entropy hits the nadir and takes us all with it.

Running counter to Lapsarianism is progressivism: the Enlightenment ideal of
a world of great people standing on the shoulders of giants. Each of us
contributes to improving the world's storehouse of knowledge (and thus its
capacity for bringing joy to all of us), and our descendants and proteges
take our work and improve on it. The very idea of "progress" runs counter to
the idea of Lapsarianism and the fall: it is the idea that we, as a species,
are falling in reverse, combing back the wild tangle of entropy into a neat,
tidy braid.

Of course, progress must also have a boundary condition — if only because we
eventually run out of imaginary ways that the human condition can improve.
And science fiction has a name for the upper bound of progress, a name for
the progressive apocalypse:

We call it the Singularity.

Vernor Vinge's Singularity takes place when our technology reaches a stage
that allows us to "upload" our minds into software, run them at faster,
hotter speeds than our neurological wetware substrate allows for, and create
multiple, parallel instances of ourselves. After the Singularity, nothing is
predictable because everything is possible. We will cease to be human and
become (as the title of Rudy Rucker's next novel would have it) Postsingular.

The Singularity is what happens when we have so much progress that we run out
of progress. It's the apocalypse that ends the human race in rapture and joy.
Indeed, Ken MacLeod calls the Singularity "the rapture of the nerds," an apt
description for the mirror-world progressive version of the Lapsarian
apocalypse.

At the end of the day, both progress and the fall from grace are illusions.
The central thesis of Stumbling on Happiness is that human beings are
remarkably bad at predicting what will make us happy. Our predictions are
skewed by our imperfect memories and our capacity for filling the future with
the present day.

The future is gnarlier than futurism. NCC-1701 probably wouldn't send out
transporter-equipped drones — instead, it would likely find itself on
missions whose ethos, mores, and rationale are largely incomprehensible to
us, and so obvious to its crew that they couldn't hope to explain them.

Science fiction is the literature of the present, and the present is the only
era that we can hope to understand, because it's the only era that lets us
check our observations and predictions against reality.