#reactionaries

[mostlysignssomeportents]

1900s futurism

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then SAN FRANCISCO (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!

I'm profoundly skeptical of the idea that the future can be predicted, and doubly skeptical that sf writers are any kind of prophet. The former grotesque fatalism (if the future can be predicted, then what we do doesn't matter); the latter is tragicomic hubris.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/07/the-gernsback-continuum/#wheres-my-jetpack

That said, few people have been more consistently useful in understanding and anticipating (and yes, building) the future than my friend and colleague Karl Schroeder, whom I've known since I was 16 years old. Karl was the first person I heard say the world "internet." Also: "fractal," "World Wide Web," "ftp," and numerous other touchstones of the future just over the horizon.

Karl is, in fact, a futurist ("foresight consultant") who approaches the work with the same shrewd insight, wild imagination and humility that he brings to his fiction. In a new essay written with both his futurist and sf writer hats on, he nails down the toxic shadow cast by the 20th century sf, or, as he calls it, "The Science Fiction of the 1900s":

https://kschroeder.substack.com/p/the-science-fiction-of-the-1900s

Karl starts by describing the odd "double vision" of the future of the 1900s. On the one hand, many of us (myself included) were convinced that nuclear armageddon was inevitable. Unlike the unhinged architects of the nuclear arms-race, realists understood that a nuclear war would effectively end the future. As Einstein put it, "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

But the flipside of that certainty that the future would end with the first nuclear strike was the belief that if we could just somehow walk the tightrope over the chasm of nuclear holocaust, we'd emerge in a future worth looking forward to: "a new era of peace and prosperity for all."

Contrast that with the existential dread of today's polycrisis: environmental collapse and political decay up to and including fascism. These aren't the binary proposition of nuclear annihilation vs Utopia – rather, they're a continuum of worse-and-better outcomes of every description. As Karl writes: "It’s not that simple. Our future now is an exhausting spectrum of scenarios, each with its own promise, and its own problems."

For Karl, we have entered a new epoch, but we've dragged in the long-expired way of imagining (and hence creating and navigating) the future with us. What makes this a new epoch? For Karl, it's the kind of future on our horizon. He cites Charles C Mann’s 1491, a superb history of the Americas before Columbus:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/107178/1491-second-edition-by-charles-c-mann/9781400032051/readers-guide/

1491 radically reframes "the patchwork of propaganda and inference" that makes up the received narrative of the so-called "New World." It describes a land of flourishing cities, art, science and culture "in the Americas while Rome was just getting its act together." Contact with colonizing Europeans was a disaster for First Nations people, who call this period "The Invasion." It was an epochal break.

Futurism is an inextricably historical discipline. The willingness of some settler-colonialists states to consider this epochal break forces us to reframe our literal place in history, the story of the land under our feet. At its best, this futuro-historical work can begin the long work of reconciliation, as with the Canadian government's promise of $23b in reparations for the First Nations people who were kidnapped as children and sent to murderous "residential schools" before, during and after the Sixties Scoop.

The sf of the 1900s is no longer fit for purpose, if it ever was. It's a literature that was steered by open fascists like John W Campbell, who explicitly saw the literature as a means of inculcating a societal narrative of the triumph of white, corporate technocracy over all other forms of government:

https://locusmag.com/2019/11/cory-doctorow-jeannette-ng-was-right-john-w-campbell-was-a-fascist/

Karl isn't the first sf writer to try to overturn this orthodoxy – indeed, it was continuously challenged by radicals within the field, as with the New Wave, personified by the likes of Samuel Delany and Judith Merril (who both mentored and introduced Karl and me):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/13/better-to-have-loved/#neofuturians

The cyberpunks took a good hard run at it, too. For plenty of writers (including me), Bruce Sterling and William Gibson's 1981 story "The Gernsback Continuum" was a wake-up call:

http://writing2.richmond.edu/jessid/eng216/gernsback.pdf

Not for nothing, William Gibson has long insisted that his 1984 classic Neuromancer should be read as utopian: after all, it depicts a future in which the inevitable nuclear war only reduces a few cities to radioactive ash, sparing the rest of the planet.

Bruce Sterling once paid me the supreme compliment of describing a 2003 story I wrote about the ways that algorithms will enshittify self-driving cars as "making everybody else in the business look like they live in a dark basement growing on the mulch from old STAR TREK scripts":

https://craphound.com/stories/2005/10/12/human-readable/

Schroeder – along with today's new radical sf writer cohort – wants to fashion a fictional futurism that is fit for this world and its crisis: "in our modern technological society, science fiction tells us what to spend our time and money on." The fact that our mediocre billionaires are mired in the sf of the 1900s means that we're getting some decidedly old-fashioned futures.

For Karl, Musk is a poster-child for this profoundly conservative, backwards-looking vision: "He’s fighting the intellectual battles of the last century, a 1900s hero dropped into the 2000s with an unlimited budget to reshape the future to fit the era he’s from." Musk's obsessions – "Space flight. Settling Mars. Cyberpunk-style brain-computer interfaces. Artificial Intelligence. Self-driving electric cars. Humanoid robots." – are 1900s science fiction.

Ironically, much of this fiction labels itself "hard sf," despite the fact that interstellar travel is utter fantasy – as is mass-scale, near-term interplanetary civilization:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

Karl wants "a future for the 2000s." He points to some efforts to make this happen, like Neal Stephenson's Hieroglyph anthology, edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer:

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/hieroglyph-ed-finnkathryn-cramer

The "Hieroglyph" is Stephenson's shorthand for a recognizable, tangible, meme-able gizmo or other touchstone for a 2000s-era vision of the future – a replacement for jetpacks and flying cars. Karl's story for the anthology, "Degrees of Freedom," focuses on an abstraction (governance: "the single most important thing humanity can focus its creative energies on right now"), and by Karl's own admission, it's not quite the hieroglyph Stephenson was looking for.

But Karl did come up with a hieroglyph in a later work, the "deodands" of 2019's Stealing Worlds – a software agent "that believes it is some natural system, such as a river or forest, and acts in its own self-interest, that being the preservation and thriving of that natural system":

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/06/18/karl-schroeders-stealing-worlds-visionary-science-fiction-of-a-way-through-the-climate-and-inequality-crises/

(My own contribution to Hieroglyph was very gadget heavy – "The Man Who Sold the Moon," about autonomous lunar 3D printers. It won the Sturgeon Award):

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/05/22/the-man-who-sold-the-moon/

I've been impressed with Karl since the day I met him in 1987. There's no one whose thoughts on the future I'm more interested in hearing. I don't think that's a coincidence, either: Karl is an autodidact who was raised by a Mennonite TV repairman – the first TV repair shop in the Canadian prairies. If you want to understand the future, try being raised by someone who takes that kind of deliberate approach to which technology to adopt, and how.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/07/the-gernsback-continuum/#wheres-my-jetpack

#pluralistic #science fiction #futurism #the future #reactionaries #tescreal #retrofuturism #scientifiction #karl schroeder #1491 #genocide

[space-lorde]

Banning trans people from sports will not improve your quality of life.

Banning drag will not improve your quality of life.

Banning books from schools will not improve your quality of life.

Banning abortion will not improve your quality of life.

Your material conditions will not improve. Your rent will still be too damn high. Your car bill, your light bill, your insurance, all of it will continue to be too damn high.

You gain nothing. Instead, you lose integrity.

#drag #banning books #pro choice #pro life #republicans #reactionaries #right wingers #trans rights #books #abortion #politics

[matt0044]

”Go Woke, Go Broke.”

So… “Become more informed about the world still being in dire straits in society’s treaty of minorities, become financially destitute.”

They DO know this is how they sound, right?

#Go woke go broke #woke #status quo warriors #anti-woke crowd #reactionaries #media criticism #in the loosest way possible

[creature-wizard]

This song is a perfect illustration of how moral panics are sown.

Harold Hill wants to sell a product, but there's no market for it. So he creates one by fabricating a problem out of thin air. He proclaims that the pool table is a slippery slope to moral degradation. He claims that ordinary child behavior is proof that their society is already degrading. He presents himself as Just A Concerned Citizen and appeals to people's vanity ("now, I know that all of you folks are the right kind of parents!"). He creates connections that are absolute nonsense ("you got trouble with T and that rhymes with P and that stands for pool!"), but he's so charismatic that everyone just accepts them.

Of course, the pool table isn't a problem, and Harold Hill knows it. He just wants to make a profit. And so he sows a moral panic in order to make what he's offering seem impossible to turn down.

Political reactionaries do the same thing. They find anything and claim it's going to ruin society, that society's already in the process of being ruined, and if you want to stop it, you have to buy into what they're offering: fascism.

#video #the music man #ya got trouble #moral panic #conspiracy theorists #fascism #reactionaries #moral panics #rhetoric #Youtube #critical thinking #discernment

[nando161mando]

#tankies #reactionary politics #reactionary conservatives #conservatives #reactionaries #funny memes #dank memes #best memes #lol memes #memes #meme #dankest memes #dank humor #dank memage #ausgov #politas #auspol #tasgov #taspol #australia #fuck neoliberals #neoliberal capitalism #anthony albanese #albanese government #eat the rich #antiauthoritarian #antifascist #anarchism #anarchist #class war

[in-sufficientdata]

As a parent & former conservative - one who never believed in doing it this way myself - it just blows my mind that so many of them believe the way they should deal with things in the world they don't agree with is to ignore their existence + not even explain to the kids why

Not explaining something to your kids =/= helping them understand your belief system

Ignoring information =/= keeping your kids from wondering

#mine #RyanLEllis@twitter #twitter #conservatives #reactionaries #parenting #kids #children #reposting everything from my twitter feed #i'm about to delete everything so get it while it's hot #tweet: 2022

[whereserpentswalk]

Soo what i got from your essay about radfem is that when a leftist group become reactionaries they are fated to go to the right wing? If is why do they go?

( I not very good at English hope you understand)

Yes. Exactly.

#fuck terfs #leftist #leftism #reactionaries

[craycraybluejay]

Transphobes coming after me for saying don't be transphobic and calling me a pedo and getting me banned on false accusations off a social media is not something that was on my 2023 expected experiences list. Also it was the account I actually *liked.* I feel stupid for calling out mask off transphobia from a popular account.. obviously no one cares.. everyone following this fucker loves that shit

#anoutherposting #small vent #transphobia mention #false accusations #reactionaries #imagine stalking someones account bc they called out ur parasocial love's transphobia #and being like yeah thats some random r34 i can report for being mildly weird

[aronarchy]

https://twitter.com/butchanarchy/status/1485306821741096963

#repost of someone else’s content #twitter repost #butchanarchy #gaslighting #abuse culture #cringe culture #reactionaries #ableism #transphobia

[netscapenavigator-official]

The reactionaries on Tumblr can claim there's no algorithm all they want, but I strongly beg to differ.

It's happened multiple times now where I'll have a single post get really popular, really fast; and then out of the blue, posts that are MONTHS old (that I haven't seen in my activity feed for months, too) will suddenly start gaining notes.

You can't tell me that's a coincidence. That's the Tumblr algorithm going "oh hey, this person makes content people like, just look at this one post that got really popular really fast. Let's show people more of their stuff," and then it shows these random old posts to people on their For You Dash.

I've seen it once. I've seen it twice. I've seen too many times to no longer sit here and pretend like Tumblr is algorithm-free like you people wanna pretend. It isn't, and it hasn't been for a long, long time.

#rambles #algorithm #tumblr algorithm #for you #for you dash #anecdotal #reactionaries

[avita-creator]

Rightwing domestic terrorists just blew up a power substation in Moore County, NC. 40,000 people are now without power...

All because these fucking culture war shitbags freaked out about and wanted to shut down a drag show.

To anyone there in Moore County, please be safe. Lock up, stay inside, and stay together. There's no telling what these terrorists will do now that the power is out, so remain cautious and careful during this time. Keep in contact with your loved ones and friends.

And to all the fuckers that continue to push the religious zealotry and conservative fear mongering, *THIS* is what you've created. *THIS* is the kind of terror your trad-shoving ideology has bred. A sincere fuck you to each and every single person, conservative and terf alike, who has enabled and supported this kind of reactionary evil.

#politics #domestic terrorism #conservatism #terfs #reactionaries #hate #culture war #moore county #North Carolina #power outage #religion #Christianity #evangelicals #trads #transphobia #homophobia #violence #a sincere death wish to every fucker who has amplified the hate that made these terrorists

[scouse1g]

I love how tradcaths hate Pope Francis for being more liberal. Like, isn't he supposed to be God's representative on earth? I guess you think you know better than God? Lmao

#reactionaries #reactionary politics #pope francis #catholic #catholicism #trad catholic #traditionalismiscodeforfascism #leftism #liberalism #socialism #communism #anarchism #marxism #anticapitalism #antifacist #antifa

[matt0044]

"Modern" is a right wing dog whistle in media discourse.

It always tries to be coy about it but we should all know the truth.

#fandom #fandom nonsense #fandom discourse #dog whistle #old vs new #media discourse #media discussion #storytelling #television #movies #cinema #conservatives #reactionaries #youtubers

[bravecrab]

The trans character in Hogwarts Legacy, Sirona Ryan, is probably bait. Something the creators can pass off as being trans inclusive (even though it's tokenism), but also maybe choosing that name was supposed to get you to react, to read into it rather than taking it at face value, so they can give Anti-SJW youtubers something to point at and say "those people are just looking for any excuse to be offended". It undermines the boycott, it makes it look like they tried to make amends and we rejected it, and it creates more discourse content that puts more eyes on their game.

You always have to watch out for the bait.

#hogwarts legacy #fuck jkr #transphobia #reactionaries #framing #sirona ryan #mine

[futurebird]

They don’t care about science: you do

I had what will probably seem like and obvious epiphany this morning:

Reactionaries, right wing extremists and white nationalists do not have any reverence for science or the scientific method.

You will never convince them they are wrong about anything they believe using science. Even if they do the experiment with you. They use science when it helps their goals, see nothing wrong with ignoring it when it doesn’t.

The real problem is that people like you & I do care about science. We do have a reverence for the method, a sincere desire to consider all evidence— especially the evidence that contradicts our expectations and intuitions. So all a right wing extremest needs is a plausible study or some data that calls in to question any of our ideas and we want to comb through it with great care to find out if there is something new to learn.

We shouldn’t be surprised when they don’t do the same.

#bad science #science #reactionaries #right wing extremism #white nationalists

[nitpickrider]

"No, no, no one will be SLAVES...there'll just be a designated class of people who will do all the hard, dangerous labor with no chance for advancement or activity in their own lives. And totally ignore the fact that the only non-white person that you've seen since you walked in was your own reflection." -Neo Reactionaries in a nutshell people. Even in the 70s we knew these people were a cartoon.

#marvel #marvel comics #marvel universe #marvel heroes #superhero #comics #captain america #steve rogers #falcon #sam wilson #reactionary #reactionaries