
Denying Dystopia: The Hope Police in Fact and Fiction - jseliger
http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=7809
======
avivo
Stories of dystopia are valuable because they help us build threat models.

Stories of utopia are valuable because they give us a vision to aim at.

Stories that assume new technology will lead to a better world are _anti-
valuable_. Those stories are the concrete truck of good intentions. The truck
used to pave the route to hell. The stories inspire people — into creating
things without any awareness of negative impacts. These inspired "builders"
are often even oblivious to the idea that there might possibly _be_ negative
impacts! I've seen this play out with social media, with ML, and blockchain
just to name a few HN relevant examples.

A good dystopia story seriously acknowledges some threat, and shows what it is
viscerally like to live in that world, and perhaps how it came to be and what
we might do about it.

A good utopia story seriously acknowledges some system problem or threat, and
shows a way in which it is overcome on a large scale.

~~~
llamataboot
I think this is a great comment as it implicitly acknowledges that /stories/
are at the heart of everything we do. Every action we take expecting a
reaction is based on a story we are telling ourself about causality.

I would argue that we need a healthy balance of dystopian and utopian stories
but we also desperately need more complex stories. The human brain is already
primed towards very basic linear cause and effect, when in fact we are
embedded within very complex systems (social, economic, etc) that have very
non-linear cause and effect loops.

The blindness you mention here is one that I often see as trying to create
change with a very very limited set of causes and effects in the implicit
theory behind it. I also think that much of the polarization towards "good
actors" versus "bad actors" is a result of overly simplistic stories.

I'm not exactly sure how to create stories that help us build the capacity for
understanding and appreciating how complex systems operate, but I think we
desperately need them.

~~~
opportune
You hit the nail on the head about how we need more complex stories. I'm not
sure if this is a result of me getting older but I think people in general are
getting more prone to black vs. white thinking over time (which I suspect is
due to becoming bombarded with ads which are always either very
positive/funny/nice or vitriolic, or an increasingly polarizing and histrionic
media, but I digress). Even movies made for adults usually have some fixed,
obvious good guys vs. bad guys these days.

I don't think it's that nobody _can_ understand things anymore, or even that
people don't _want_ to, I think people simply don't want to limit their
potential sales by making things too difficult to understand. Big studios
don't make movies like The Hateful Eight (which I thought was great because it
_didn 't_ have good guys) because they don't appeal to enough people, and
writers don't write with nuance anymore because you get the most impressions
if you simply pander to a specific political camp.

~~~
zxcmx
There is also the issue of marketability, focus grouping, age group bracketing
and the crafting of narratives that will appeal commercially across cultural
boundaries.

We have these massive "story engines" but only the simplest stories can have
_predictable_ universal appeal.

~~~
opportune
Very true. I hope one day we can have a better premium media market than we
have currently so that businesses feel less pressured to appeal to everyone. I
don't think you could pay me to sit through a Transformers movie but I would
have paid $25 to see the Hateful Eight in theaters.

------
btrask
A while back I saw some comments on HN arguing that dystopic fiction writers
are literally evil and a threat to humanity. That made me slightly but
genuinely scared. When people start outright attacking _caution_ , that is
when the bubble is about to burst (sorry, been thinking about Bitcoin lately).

For some reason some people seem to take dystopia and cynicism as meaning we
should give up on technology altogether and go back to living in caves. That
is a false dichotomy. Please, hold some nuance. It's true that corporations
and governments have shown themselves eager to abuse technology. The blame for
that lies with those organizations, not with writers who merely notice the
trend.

I think we can come up with some technical solutions to align the incentives
of these organizations with the people they should be serving. To me, most
dystopian fiction is pointing out the gap between that and internet
refrigerators. Utopia is hard, let's go shopping.

------
mgnn
The writer is Peter Watts. He writes science fiction, with arguably dystopic
aspects. One of his books, Blindsight, is available to read for free on his
website:
[http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm](http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm)

In fact, it was HN that introduced me to this writer.

~~~
taneq
He's got quite a following here. :)

As for dystopic, I'd describe his works as... ananthropic. There are no people
in his books, just collections of matter ambulating around according to their
phenotype and the laws of physics. It's stark realism taken to its depressing
conclusion. Fascinating stuff, though.

Edit: Fixed some broken causality.

~~~
andyjohnson0
Stark realism indeed.

 _" Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts."_
— James Nicoll

------
659087
> She praises algorithms that analyze your behavior and autonomously order
> retail goods on your behalf, just in case you’re not consuming enough on
> your own: “We’ll be giving up our privacy, but gaining the surprise and
> delight that comes with something new always waiting for us at the door” she
> gushes

That has to be intended as a joke, right?

~~~
ACow_Adonis
Possibly because I just finished reading "player piano" last night, but it's
like someone took the main ideology of the engineers and managers in that book
and said: "but what if we pretended it was a blueprint rather than dystopian
satire...?"

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MBlume
I mostly agree with this, but the digression about carbon pricing in the
middle makes absolutely no sense. As long as you auction a fixed pool of
carbon credits, the prices will go up the more people are willing to spend to
pollute. This is basically the simplest, most straightforward way to force
capitalism to produce the amount of carbon you want.

~~~
saas_co_de
I think the concern is that selling pollution credits is kind of like selling
indulgences. If you offer the wealthy a fixed price for which they can destroy
the entire planet then what else is not for sale? And since money is just
created out of thin air, you can always make enough money to pay the price.

~~~
scatters
This enviromnentalism as religion attitude is hugely counterproductive. It
might help motivate the believers, but it also contributes to the culture war
that sees conservatives denying climate science.

Everyone pollutes; when we breathe, when we shit, let alone when we drive or
fly, so there is no hard boundary between normal and "sinful" activities. The
rest of your comment is simply wrong; Pigovian taxes and auctions are dynamic,
so can adjust to any change in price levels, and in any case money supply is
governed by central banks, not by polluters.

------
Noos
I don't think his point is limited to SF. It seems to be a thing where if you
criticize any sufficiently popular view, you get the hammer down much harder
than before. The only things that can be criticized are unpopular things,
because they are safe to do so.

Like in SF, no one says "oh, you need to show hope in dealing with religion!"
That's because among that crowd, religion is beyond the pale and doesn't need
to be appeased. There are other things, but there's an awful lot of true
groupthink today, and since the culture is so connected, its easier to shout
down or tire contrarians.

------
randallsquared
> Run like hell, even though it means abandoning your giant flatscreen TV

In this analogy, a steady diet of disaster shows has already convinced you
that running like hell is pie-in-the-sky thinking and quite impractical, so
anything you hope to do has to be prefaced with the acknowledgement that you
can only manage a slow walk, and even then you can only expect to move a
maximum of 15 meters.

~~~
mirimir
The funniest part is that it's the rich folk up on the hill who pushed the
boulder ;)

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DoreenMichele
_The Hope Police_ are typically fragile people. My favorite philosophical take
on perspective and attitude is found in _Jake Long American Dragon:_

[http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/Sara_and_Kara](http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/Sara_and_Kara)

------
bootsz
> _The problem is not that we are paralyzed with despair; the problem, more
> likely, is that we haven’t really internalized what’s in store for us. The
> problem is that our species is already delusionally optimistic by nature._

> _Not all of us, mind you. Some folks perceive their contextual status with
> relative accuracy: they’re better than the rest of us at figuring out how
> much control they really have over local events, for example. They’re better
> at assessing their own performance at assigned tasks. Most of us tend to
> take credit for the good things that happen to us, while blaming something
> else for the bad. But some folks, faced with the same scenarios, apportion
> blame and credit without that self-serving bias._

> _We call these people “clinically depressed”._

------
unobtaniumstool
Seriously? He thinks people are being _too optimistic_?

All I ever read anymore is how the dark forces of technology are coming to
steal my private information and break into my house via my IOT.

Now I want to go buy Terri Favro's book, just because she's apparently not a
total downer.

~~~
andrewflnr
He's not talking about the noise people make to get clicks, he's talking about
our actual decisions. And yes, in that domain people are outrageously
optimistic.

------
draw_down
Not sure if other industries are the same but I find this sense of forced
optimism almost oppressive in SV tech companies. The place where I work holds
optimism as an explicit value. So when they cut a perk or change things in a
way that makes everyone’s job more difficult, etc, there is a low-level
pressure to talk about how it’s actually good. That type of thing.

Of course optimism goes out the window when we need to figure out how people
will defraud the company, or when a change that would make employees’ lives
better is considered. Very conditional optimism, you know.

------
jpindar
>your giant flatscreen TV?

Yeah, I'm not taking advice about the future from someone who still thinks a
flatscreen TV is somehow different from a plain TV.

~~~
mrob
Which is more likely: 1\. Peter Watts added "flatscreen" because he believes
CRTs are still popular. 2\. Peter Watts added "flatscreen" because it makes
the sentence flow better. ?

~~~
andyjohnson0
I read it as parodying the person in the scenario by implying that _they_
think that flat-screen TVs are somehow particularly desirable.

