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Oct 30, 2011 / 10:02am

Utopia is creepy

I've noticed the arrival recently of a new genre of futuristic YouTube videos. They're created by tech companies for marketing or brand-burnishing purposes. With the flawless production values that only a cash-engorged balance sheet can buy you, they portray a not-too-distant future populated by exceedingly well-groomed people who spend their hyperproductive days going from one screen to the next. (As seems always to be the case with utopias, the atmosphere is very post-sexual.) The productions are intended to present us with visions of technological Edens, but they end up doing the exact opposite: portraying a future world that feels cold, mechanical, and repellent.

Innovation Starvation

Most people who work in corporations or academia have witnessed something like the following: A number of engineers are sitting together in a room, bouncing ideas off each other. Out of the discussion emerges a new concept that seems promising. Then some laptop-wielding person in the corner, having performed a quick Google search, announces that this “new” idea is, in fact, an old one—or at least vaguely similar—and has already been tried. Either it failed, or it succeeded. If it failed, then no manager who wants to keep his or her job will approve spending money trying to revive it. If it succeeded, then it’s patented and entry to the market is presumed to be unattainable, since the first people who thought of it will have “first-mover advantage” and will have created “barriers to entry.” The number of seemingly promising ideas that have been crushed in this way must number in the millions.

Given our current technology and with the proper training, would it be possible for someone to become Batman?

By your second week, you are getting unhappy that 90% of the crimes you've even seen up-close are just pathetic junkies buying crack from another pathetic junkie selling drugs to support his/her own habit. And nothing makes you feel LESS like Batman than scaring sad homeless crackheads. You tried to chase down a kid who you saw punch a lady and take her purse, but you can't really pursue that kind of think by running on rooftops, you gotta do it the hard way by chasing him on foot down the sidewalk... in your full Batman costume, where everybody can see you. People are taking photos on cell-phones, and yep there's a cop car at the intersection and he saw you, and now he has his lights on and it's YOU he's after.

Orson Scott Card: How 'Friend' Became a Verb

When the Internet was first opened to the general public in 1992, I was unimpressed. What I saw was exactly as interesting as the brochure rack in the grocery store. Hadn't people read my sci-fi novel "Ender's Game" (1985), where a couple of anonymous kids used something like the Internet to pass for experts and influence public opinion; or "The Worthing Saga" (1978), where millions of people watched superstars play computer games?

Well, probably not. But I was impatient for others to catch on to how much potential there was for public networks to change politics and entertainment.

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What is the minimum number of people you need in order to maintain (not necessarily to extend) our current level of technological civilization?

The Most Influential SF Movie Never Made

Pink Floyd doing the soundtrack. Jean Giraurd the art. Orson Wells as the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen and Salvador Dali as the Emperor of the Known Universe. It was simply too grand, too ambitious. Too many wishes were coming true for it to all hold together. Jodorowsky must have sensed even from the beginning that this movie could only exist as an ideal.

Krzysztof Szafranek's link blog

science fiction

Utopia is creepy

Innovation Starvation

Given our current technology and with the proper training, would it be possible for someone to become Batman?

Orson Scott Card: How 'Friend' Became a Verb

Insufficient data

The Most Influential SF Movie Never Made

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