Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Cory and Charlie, you're both active in writing and speaking about
political, economic and social issues from a geek perspective. Do you
think of yourselves has having a defined or categorizable political
framework? 
  

    
I'm *not* very active in the political/economic fields -- certainly
not compared to Cory! (On the other hand, who is?)

Political framework: I'm British. I am a bit older than Cory, and am 
of the generation from the North of England who matured under Margaret
Thatcher's incredibly destructive decade of misrule -- consequently I
harbour a visceral loathing for that particular form of
devil-take-the-hindmost conservativism. 

By US political standards that makes me a socialist, and I choose to
live in Scotland, a country where there are three left-wing political
parties and barely a rump of conservative voters -- we have more pandas
than conservative members of parliament! 

Having said that, I'm also an anti-authoritarian; I distrust
paternalism and traditionalism alike.
  

    
Someone smart (I don't remember her name) once said "science fiction
is about testing ideas to destruction."

Do you see TROTN in this way? Do you think you have destruction-tested
the singularity enough for now? What's left to take apart?

To me, stories dealing with the singularity always seemed like fun
romps, maybe Lem's Cyberiad fused with 90ties dotcom enthusiasm - but
also more like interesting fables than ernest extrapolation.

(It would make more sense to ask this *after* reading the book, but by
then this conversation might be over ...)
  

    
Martin: Yes, from my PoV (Cory may differ) RoTN was very much about
testing to destruction a bunch of ideas I wrote about rather less
critically in "Accelerando". In fact, if you read those books in the
order written ("Accelerando" from 1998-2004, "Rapture of the Nerds"
from 2003 to 2011) you'll get a fairly good handle on how my attitude
to the singularity evolved over time.
  

    
I think a taxonomy of political ideology should have several axes:

* Authoritarian - anti-authoritarian

* Centralist - de-centralist

* Spirtual - material

* Redistributive - anti-redistributive

On that chart, my sliders would all be at max for anti-authoritarian/de-
centralist/material/redistributive

I think the network changes ideology - not because it bends its participants
to liberarianism (though there's an argument that it bends its strongest
adherents to de-centralism). Rather, it's the ease of group-forming.

I grew up in a left wing context deeply riven by sectarian divisions. From
the outside, this looks stupid ("Judean People's Front"), but I think I
understand why politics -- especially anti-status-quo politics -- have been
so internally divided.

I think it's down to the cost of group-forming. When it costs a lot of time
and energy to constitute a group -- to form/norm it, to constitutonalize it,
to set in place its administrative procedures for calling meetings and
actions, etc -- then group-forming is something you want to do with caution.
What's the point of spending a couple years getting your group up to the
point where it can really DO something if it immediately splits when it gets
there because of some deep, lurking division?

Today, group-forming is nearly free. As we saw with OWS, Tea Party, Anon and
even Arab Spring groups (though I know less about the internals of the last
one), it's now possible to gather under a banner lavelled "Unhappy with how
things are, not committed to a unified vision of how they should be" and do
your activist tasks for some time and see what agendas emerge organically
from the group. You can be fluid, forming and dissolving, making coalition
where the cause is a common cause, splitting it up where you disagree.

Having participated in consensus-driven governance of several institutions
of different sizes, from four people to 1,000, this is familiar to me. It's
a process by which a group of people with a shared task carefully and over
time work out the extent to which their vision is also shared, map out its
boundaries, and declare the commonality to be the task of the group and the
remainder to be the province of its individual members. I think it's a
wholly positive thing.

It's very network shaped. It's a minimum viable ideology. It's TCP: the
least network stack that'll serve the most purposes without being optimized
or any one task. It's late binding of the program to the movement.
  

    
Regarding testing to destruction: I think there's an element of that in
RotN, for sure. It also does reflect my changing views towards
Singularlitarianism, as with Charlie. It also reflects a changing self-
awareness about those views -- IOW, I recognize that my (ongoing!)
enthusiasm for the project of transcendance though technology has a
transcendental dimension, something that should have been obvious all along
(but that's the nature of self-awareness -- its realizations are often
accompanied by a how-did-I-miss-that facepalm).

It's also about being funny about something I take serious. It's a reminder
to myself -- and to my fellow travellers -- that there's something hilarious
about our po-faced Soviet Realist fist-raised March To The Future, and
sometimes it makes sense to stop chanting serious slogans and to start
dancing and laughing. It's a reminder that the chemists who sythesized the
200 supplements you're supposed to take every day if you want to live long
enough to have your head frozen have also created any number of high-grade
psychedelics you can add to the mix if you want to experience transreal
transhuman transcendance today.

Someone should rewrite Joe Hill's "Preacher and the Slave" for the
Singularity.
  

    
In the "spiritual" world, when people talk about something like
transcendance (as in "transreal transhuman transcendance" via
psychedelics), I wonder whether the experience considered is truly
transcendant, or merely delusional. I'm thinking about your
protagonist's experience, when the "god botherers" give him a dose of
transcendotropics, and he has a vision of the transcendant absolute -
is that union with something we could call "god," or just a biochemical
resonance that's ultimately unreal?
  

    
Cory wrote, "It's a reminder
to myself -- and to my fellow travellers -- that there's something
hilarious about our po-faced Soviet Realist fist-raised March To The
Future, and sometimes it makes sense to stop chanting serious slogans
and to start dancing and laughing."

I couldn't agree more!

Humor is a vitally important antidote to errors of thought encoded in
ideology -- it forces the double-take, the re-assessment, the cognitive
dissonance that makes us re-evaluate our beliefs. If you aren't
allowed to laugh at an ideological position, then there's probably
something badly wrong with it, some nagging internal inconsistency that
the authoritarian followers don't want to see attention drawn to.

Jon #57: I'm a materialist and an atheist and I hold that religious
experiences, transcendental visions, and the like all happen within our
own skulls. (Yes, I've had 'em. I know the circumstances that gave
rise to them. In every case, they happened in the absence of the
"sacred".) This is not to say that there's anything wrong with such
delusions, or that we shouldn't treasure them like the memories of
great acid trips ... but we shouldn't set our compass by them. (And
neither should Huw.)
  

    
Charlie, I guess that would also mean the same for any collectively
transcendent or hive mind - that possibility would not necessitate a
'sacred other'? (In your opinion :))
  

    
Ted, I am an atheist. Subtype: Dawkinsite. (I hold that religious
beliefs are errors arising from cognitive biases and theory of mind,
rather than anything useful that tells us about the world around us.)
  

    
Just wanted to block that punt. Some folks might want to be
spiritually hopeful along the transcendent consciousness lines of an
"overmind". That seems to be a theme paralleling the singularity these
days -- a hopeful raising of the planetary consciousness. Not sure I
buy either actually - seems more like wishful thinking to me.

In any case, what is clear is how deeply you both think about a wide
range of subjects. I'm still setting and re-setting Cory's political
sliders within my own views -- a whole new set of lenses for me.

And that makes me wonder, what particular ideas have stopped either or
both of you in your tracks and made you rethink your presuppositions? 
  

    
Ted: "And that makes me wonder, what particular ideas have stopped
either or both of you in your tracks and made you rethink your
presuppositions?"

It happens periodically. Sometimes it takes years: as when the uneasy
realization crept up on me that the extropian/transhumanist
diamond-hard rationalist outview and the singularitarian thing was
*structurally* isomorphic with millenarian christianity (minus the
personality cult of Jesus). At which point I went digging and stumbled
onto the *actual* Christian roots of the creed (some of which get
discussed late in "The Rapture of the Nerds"). 

And sometimes it happens fast. Confession: I voted for the Liberal
Democrats in 2010's general election. Thinking that a liberal
centre-left party would probably end up in coalition with Labour,
taking the edge off their more authoritarian initiatives. Won't make
THAT mistake again, dammit! (The LibDems jumped straight into bed with
the Conservatives, who ... ack, spit.) As a long-term core LibDem voter
going back a couple of decades, that hurt.

But that's a concrete event; I'm trying to think of an equivalent
sudden abstract realization I might have had. And I'm not sure I can
offer one. My beliefs change, but they don't tend to turn on a dime.
  

    
Do you ever discuss UK politics with Ken MacLeod?  I assume you know him.
  

    
That "remote" that Huw was using in the cloud, with the slider to
manage emotional and intellectual modes and processes, was an
interesting device. There are (arguably) non-spiritual schools of
thought (Buddhism, 4th Way) that seem to address similar kinds of
control through modes of practice. I wonder if either of you has delved
into a meditation practice of any kind?
  

    
Jef: actually, Ken and I are founder members of the Scottish Socialist
Science Fiction Writers' Vanguard Party and Drinking Society, which
meets on the second Thursday of every month in --

Actually, no, it's not that formal. But we *do* end up in pubs
together on a fairly regular basis, along with a guy who I believe is
the only native-born Libertarian in Scotland (if he was Texan he'd be a
Maoist) and a few other peeps. Edinburgh has a small-town vibe, such
that most people here who work in the SF/F field know each other.
  

    
Jon: not me, I'm not the meditative type.
  

    
Writing so well about the range and inventory of internal process and
experience suggested a deeper understanding of the human "operating
system." In creating a character and writing about that character's
internals, how much do you draw on the way your own mind and emotions
work? How well do you have to know yourself to create three dimensional
other characters? How do you gain insights into different individual
personalities and how they would "play" in the world, and how they
would think as well as act?
  

    
Jef: I know Ken, but our political discussions regarding the Uk have been
more on the lines of "Holy crap, did you hear about ____" than any specific
critique.

Jonl: I've done a little meditation and a fair bit of clinical hypnosis and
self-hypnosis, so that stuff definitely came from some of those experiences.
  

    
I should also mention my experiences with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as
inspiration for those sequences.
  

    
>>>
Someone should rewrite Joe Hill's "Preacher and the Slave" for the
Singularity.
>>>

There'll be pie in the sky when you don't die.

There's a start.

I've actually used that line several times before in arguments about
transhuman politics.
  

    
I'm thinking of some villainous doggerel about the  "long-haired extropians"
myself!
  

    
Extropian founder Max More is CEO of Alcor Life Extension Foundation
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcor_Life_Extension_Foundation), a
nonprofit cryonics organization. When you die, they'll freeze your body
for possible recovery with better technology that will hopefully be
available in the future. I'm skeptical that puny humans will transcend
physical death, but I know Max, and he's a rational optimist.
  

    
>>

I'm thinking of some villainous doggerel about the  "long-haired
extropians" myself!
>>>

I'd collaborate on that. Or corroborate.  Or both.

Seriously, the transhumanist rock opera satire is waiting to be
written...
  

    
I hope I'm not derailing the conversation.  Back to the book, I found
it hugely entertaining but I thought it would be a bit more savage.  Or
is it just my faulty perception and it actually is really biting?  I
mostly found it to be playful, albeit of course containing
postsingularity creatures deciding to toss the earth bound humans into
the trash icon.
  

    
R. U. Sirius: it started out as a playful exercise in exploring a new
world -- the original novella, "Jury Service", wasn't envisaged as part
of a novel, or a critique of the singularitarian movement. Also, it's
set in a post-singularity "now". It's kind of difficult to savagely
critique today's dreamers from a setting where their dreams have
already come true! So by the time we were thinking along those lines we
were constrained by what we'd already written.

(Not to say that there isn't scope for a serious novel critiquing
transhumanism, but it wouldn't look much like Nerds.)