Science fiction has been drawing our future maps for decades. That’s Asimov’s examination of the ethical confusion about machine intelligence. Gibson’s portrayal of corporate surveillance in the 1980s. The societal dangers of VR uncovered in The Unincorporated Man. Black Mirror dramatizing the impact of social media algorithms on democracy.
I’ve read it, and watched it.
And there are “we live in a cyberpunk dystopia now” memes.
Because we built all of it anyway.
I don’t think the explanation is ignorance or malice. It’s a structural issue.
How to fail a warning
I’ve written before about Conway’s Law - systems reflect the structures that build them. So organizations output what mirrors their own architecture. If your teams don’t talk, your software won’t. If your incentive is engagement, your products will push for that engagement whether it fractures communities or not.
That’s why these speculations and these warnings keep getting created.
Science fiction has always been part predict and part warning. It’s inherent to the genre - it’s what it’s supposed to do. It’s one of the main reasons so many of us love it.
Science fiction isn’t the problem. We are.
We fail to act on the warnings in multiple ways.
The book gets read, or the film gets watched. Everyone talks about it for a week, and then it gets shelved. Our structures absorb the warnings like grass absorbs rain. The system keeps building what it was built to build, and the warning is just background noise.
That holds even when the warning is so blunt as to be a warning against ignoring the warning, like the movie Don’t Look Up.
Alternatively, and even more bizarre...we dive toward the warning.
Sometimes that’s an aesthetic choice. We cosplay, wear dystopia as a costume. Cyberpunk, Fallout, 40k. “We live in a cyberpunk dystopia” is somehow affectionate rather than a protest. We made these dystopias look too cool, and everyone pays attention to the style over the substance.
It can come from a failure to understand (or a willful misunderstanding) of the subject matter. Elon Musk regularly cites The Culture novels as among his favorites. He names his SpaceX ships after those in the novels. But the whole series was written by Iain M. Banks as a critique of Musk’s worldview. Money is poverty. Gender fluidity is a welcome and acceptable part of society. The closest parallel to Musk in any of Banks’ novels is an antagonist, Joiler Veppers, entirely corrupted by money and power.
And sometimes it’s just an outright, deliberate, dive into the warning. The warning provides a spec, so it’s easy to ship.
At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create the Torment Nexus.
It’s a joke that describes actual product decisions. If sci-fi makes a map that says “don’t go here,” well...it’s still a map that can be followed.
Science fiction’s warnings still do their job. But I’m not sure we’re built to act on them at scale.
When the warning works
In 1957 Nevil Shute published On the Beach. It’s a novel about a slow, quiet death of humanity after a nuclear war. There’s no dramatic twist. It’s about waiting. President Eisenhower was apparently a fan.
It’s credited as an influence to shift public opinion enough to help push the 1963 Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
Why did it work?
It broke through some of the failure modes.
It was specific, so it was tough to ignore. And it just wasn’t possible to make it into a meme. There’s nothing to latch onto as an aesthetic. It’s a book about families waiting for the air in the world to kill them.
We’ll never know how much influence it really had. But at a minimum it seems to have effectively captured and reinforced an existing societal fear. A warning that did land.
Can we read our maps differently?
I don’t think this is about redirecting science fiction.
Can we refuse the failure modes when we get the warning? Don’t just meme it.
Can we spread the hopeful futures in our cultural diet - make them as strong as the dystopias? We can use the same channels that spread the warnings to spread the alternatives. There are clear examples - Star Trek is perhaps the most obvious - of science fiction portraying the way things could be, rather than warning against what they shouldn’t.
And, look, I get it. I love dystopian sci-fi. Fallout, Silo, The Walking Dead. Human drama in times of extreme hardship and societal collapse is fascinating. My own Static Drift fiction setting is fairly dystopian.
But we can also choose to read something hopeful from time to time. Maybe this week. Not naïve. But fun, or vivid. Recommend it to someone who needs it. When you talk about a future you’d like to see, get specific enough that another person could picture themselves standing in it. Something by Ursula Le Guin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Andy Weir, or Iain M. Banks.
There are more maps of the wrecks of society. It’s real.
Pay attention to the maps to somewhere else.
Further reading
The system builds what the system builds - on Conway’s law and organizational direction.
What if the machines don’t end us? - an alternative view to the dystopian vision of AI.
Doctorow, C. I’ve Created a Monster! And so can you. Slate, May 2017.
Gray, B. The continuing relevance of “On the Beach”. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Aug 2015.
Banks, I. M. A Few Notes on The Culture.
Article photo by Paul Campbell on Unsplash.