Culture

Science Fiction As Vision

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Astronaut

Over at the Atlantic (and later in Mashable), Robinson Meyer made the interesting – indeed challenging statement – that the idea of making things in Science Fiction a reality was limiting. He was specifically discussing the Google X lab, which was profiled by John Gertner of Fast Company – and there they want every project to have a a component that resembled Science Fiction.

Which frankly, sounds pretty cool, but Robinson had issues with this idea:

  • SF means we tend think in whole, complete systems as opposed to the assembled work of many actors and influences.
  • We miss that some change – such as social – is incremental, and SF’s inheritance includes some limited and reactionary elements.
  • There is virtue in incrementalization.

So this got me thinking about the role of SF in envisioning and building the future. I think he has a point in that thinking about things “Science Fictionally” can be limiting. But I don’t think the problem is Science Fictional thinking per se – it’s the state of SF today and in our culture.

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Geek As Citizen: Hashtag, Crashtag

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I assume that you heard about the #CancelColbert hashtag on Twitter. I’m going to assume you did but the rough summary is:

  1. Colbert did a skit mocking racism in the name of the Washington Redskins.
  2. Part of the joke was retweeted, including his mockery of racism towards Asians.
  3. The joke on its own looked hideously racist (it was removed).
  4. Hashtag activist Suey Park tweeted the #CancelColbert hashtag.
  5. The internet had an intelligent discussion of racism, parody, and society.

I’m joking about #5 of course. I’d say the conversation degenerated, but the conversation never really generated. I watched a lot of the back and forth, which took on the air of a tennis game with grenades instead of balls. Eventually it got bizarre, snipy, weird, and in fine internet debate tradition, people directed racist and sexist comments at Suey Park and others.

As you may have guessed nothing good came out of this that I can find.

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Geek As Citizen: What We Don’t Know

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Wrong Way Sign

A few weeks ago there was a story bouncing around the internet about a Google employee who had started a petition to replace the US government, basically, with Google CEO Eric Schmidt.  This was apparently not done with any form of approval from Mr. Schmidt, and you can read more about the person behind this at Quartz.  If you heard about this, it’ll give you some idea of the person behind the petition, Justine Turney.

To put it politely, I find Ms. Turney’s idea to be ill-thought out and lacking a sense of the larger picture, as well as impolite about Mr. Schmidt’s lack of free time.  It felt like a Deep Geek idea, to reference my previous theories, disconnected from reality.

As I discussed it among the gang, something came to the surface  how many times we run into political theorizing that doesn’t seem to involve an understanding of how the world actually works?  It’s a problem whose distribution may vary among people, political groups, and such, but it’s a problem you find everywhere.

We don’t know what we don’t know.  Which may qualify you if your career is to be “random pundit who yells a lot,” but really doesn’t help solve problems.  It is, in fact quite good for creating them, as anyone who has ever worked on a project that was poorly defined without repercussions knows.  I’m guessing that’s all of us.

Now as much as I’d like to see a lot more people address this lack of knowledge about lack of knowledge, it’s something we geek citizens should also address in ourselves.

In fact, I’d say we need to be extra responsible.

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