You know, it’s not like science has fucking stopped entirely. So why the hell do none of these sci-fi shows seems to have any vision? It’s like ideas for sci-fi stopped being created in the 80s and they can’t use anything that wasn’t written about before 1990.
Because Eclipse Phase is too unrelatable to general audiences.
We even got a live action Ghost in the Shell movie, and it really missed tons of opportunities in trying to dumb itself down for general audiences. Perhaps the worst part of it is that Standalone Complex was really quite prescient about the power of memeforce!
Though really, I also think that many Hollywood writers are mostly not of the sci-fi visionary caliber to go from “what if some dude became part robot?” to “what if every dude became part robot?”
The latter includes all sorts of cascading changes throughout society, seen in shows like Standalone Complex, with ordinary people becoming vulnerable to cyberbrain crime and reserving organs to be grown in pigs. Psycho-Pass is really the spiritual successor here in that it will probably seem really prescient about the use of big data to analyze people for criminality in about 10-20 years, the way Standalone Complex seems prescient about crimes-as-memes.
But even then, those are what, two shows in a foreign country, where most of the shows are either not of that type, or not of that caliber.
How would American audiences have responded if Standalone Complex were a live-action TV show?
You know, it’s not like science has fucking stopped entirely. So why the hell do none of these sci-fi shows seems to have any vision? It’s like ideas for sci-fi stopped being created in the 80s and they can’t use anything that wasn’t written about before 1990.
Because Eclipse Phase is too unrelatable to general audiences.
We even got a live action Ghost in the Shell movie, and it really missed tons of opportunities in trying to dumb itself down for general audiences. Perhaps the worst part of it is that Standalone Complex was really quite prescient about the power of memeforce!
You know, it’s not like science has fucking stopped entirely. So why the hell do none of these sci-fi shows seems to have any vision? It’s like ideas for sci-fi stopped being created in the 80s and they can’t use anything that wasn’t written about before 1990.
In some cases I think it’s just “near-future shows are cheap”, but with Spaceship Shows, I think there’s actually a retro-futurism thing going on. Spaceship Shows are so rare now that they’re wedded to a particular era and symbology in the popular consciousness, so there’s an element of pastiche.
Star Trek always had the particular problem that it wanted to be seen as serious scientific space thinking, but also didn’t want to threaten the Motherhood Statement in any way, which leads to this weird situation where it has to scrupulously avoid all the implications of its own tech. Obviously that just gets worse the more of it there is!
You don’t have to dive deep into sci-fi vision to be good, necessarily. Battlestar doesn’t and (IMO) it was great. But we never feel as though their technology is used radically out of sync with its implications, precisely because all their tech is fairly nerfed and there are in-story reasons about the issues with artificial intelligence.
@femmenietzscheDoes anyone have vision anymore?
Fk man, are you saying you aren’t going to greenlight my series about a retired white nationalist becoming a Pseudo-Han Chinese cyborg through genetic and surgical modification and working as a detective for a series of corporate-run faux ethnonationalist city-states on the Asia-Pacific rim?
I think e3 is over and I hope that means I never hear about whatever that cyber punk drama was about again
I learned more about the origins of a genre I’ve never read than I ever cared to know
Thankfully, as we know, people really quickly drop culture war stuff as far as videogames go
“-and now, President Highever has ordered deployment of additional troops to fight GamerGate-sponsored insurgents as the Montana crisis continues. The troops, who are expected to arrive on Wednes-”
Just so you know, we haven’t hit the weirdest part of the timeline yet, where brain scanning technology is used to download tulpas from people’s brains into waiting android bodies.
That is, of course, before they start going insane and homicidal, but the brief moment between culture shock and sci-fi horror is interesting to say the least.
“Dude, how many layers of Weird Near-Future Sci-Fi Politics are you on right now?”
“I dunno, let me go consult the chart.”
“Dude, how many layers of Weird Near-Future Sci-Fi Politics are you on right now?”
“I dunno, let me go consult the chart.”
@kissingerandpals: what?
Me: hey me, you know what would be hilarious?
* completely sober at 3 in the morning *
Also me: what fam?
Me: aight, so we like, do the expanding brain meme, but for national technocr- i mean uh expanding the search space of solutions to near-modern political problems, and the punchline is ~nuclear moon base~
Also me: hahahaha politics amirite?
The central thesis of this blog is that we won’t find the solutions to the challenges of the 21st century by re-fighting the battles of the 20th century. We are doing current politics and it’s having the current results, but we all want something better, and that necessarily means something different.
The current political ideologies are mostly unaware of the future and the ways in which it will likely dramatically upend them. Not only are they not prepared for its problems, but they aren’t prepared to take advantage of new potential solutions, either. And without acknowledging those solutions, they often pretend that the problems don’t exist, for ideological reasons.
Some of the proposals on here some fake, but each could be a real policy with more detail.
@mitigatedchaos how about this sci-fi take on gendpol:
“Men are indeed worse than women in various ways, more antisocial, violent etc…
And we have egg-combining technology so we can make a Lesbian Utopia…
HOWEVER, we should still keep the population at approximately 50:50… For the long-term psychological benefits of romantic interaction, given most women are straight.”
You say this, but I already once did a fake nation writeup where they created a single-sex and it turned out terrible - not because they weren’t gay enough, but rather, because they embraced the worst aspects of both masculinity and femininity simultaneously. (And also, they would have been less bad off if they had just a few teaspoons of Feminism, but that wasn’t going to happen, for Reasons.)
Actually, have other people noticed that taking ideologies to weird extremes is a Thing among thirteen to fifteen-year-olds? Because that’s definitely something I’ve noticed. Like, I once new a thirteen-year-old girl who claimed to be uncomfortable watching two women dance together because it “promotes lesbianism,” which is…not something most Catholics believe, I’m pretty sure? (They weren’t even, like, slow-dancing, it was some kind of Scandinavian Traditional Cultural Dance that only women did).
Has anyone else observed this among The Youths?
I think age tends to make ideas more nuanced, because you get more experience and the real world is complicated.
13-15 is when people develop something like an adult political consciousness, and you know what they say about new converts being the most fervent believers.
Heck, I totally did that in my youth. I boycotted LL Bean for promoting lesbianism and objected to CCM for having a beat when I was 13 or so *embarrassed emoji*
I got better, in some cases pretty quickly, but that was my nadir.
Haha, I never had ideological extreme phase, and was contrarian against arbitrary non-conformist teenage rebellion aesthetic as a teenager.
I’m probably at my most ideologically extreme right now, even though it’s orthogonal to the existing factions.
tbh I believe in soulmates I just think the public has been sold a very shallow image of what soulmates are.
sometimes you love someone but you can’t be with them for reasons that are beyond the control of either of you.
