Fuck, terrible news. His essays on there were always worth a read.
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The origins of Jaywalking go to the lobbying of the car industry in the early 20th century to make their vehicles more palatable. In the early days car accidents were seen as a failure of the car and driving in cities. It took a dedicated campaign to make roads the realm of cars. Once you remove the modern support for the system (moving people and goods quickly for commerce) it is unlikely to look the same. https://i.pinimg.com/736x/aa/61/ec/aa61eceac2668777808d146060951184--the-modern-crime.jpg
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Apologies if I get a little digressive here.
I’ve read the Lord of the Rings before, read extensive background on the setting, heard the BBC radio play many times, and seen the movies. And I’ve heard the books alternately praised and torn apart by both well read and amateur critics. But now, reading the series to my daughter, I feel like I’m seeing certain things about it with new eyes.
Having read quite a bit of other fantasy work, LotR may not be the end-all-and-be-all of fantasy storytelling. Among other “failings”, it drags along in spots, dwells unnecessarily on portions of the journey, throws in unnecessary side adventures, and appends tangential bits of poetry and music.
On the face of it, and what a lot of imitators seem to portray, is a pretty typical story about magical items, a quest to save the world, single-minded hoards of enemies, elves, dwarves, undead, adventure and fighting, etc. But my impression is that Tolkien treats these aspects as only the barest bones of the story: Important, but not more important than the skin and other flesh of the narrative.
I’m almost coming to think of the series as “maximalist” fantasy, giving individual attention to broad range of contrasting impressions and experience regarding the world:
Horror and wonder, disgust and simple delight, hunger for control and distrust of the same impulse, anger and compassion even for enemies, beauty in nature and nature as a dangerous obstacle, fears of futility yet perseverance, personal smallness before the vastness of history, current events, and future irrelevance, coupled with the vital importance of one’s own actions in the here and now.
Meandering though it may be, and bound to the author’s cultural lens, I really feel the story conveys an authentic sense of experience and love for every aspect of the world. By comparison, later “Tolkienesque” works generally seem shallower, or at least much more narrowly focused in attention.
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That was the closest one that I could think of, but…wasn’t it inevitable?
Even in a world without scarcity, people will still want to travel places quickly, because personal time is still a commodity for any mortal creature. Car travel would still be a thing. In our current world it would just persist as a grown-in habit, but if you posit a world that goes post-scarcity before cars are invented, I still see them being invented and I still see laws about walking into roads because of the damage to both drivers and pedestrians.
I guess I’ll just go down the rest of the list on why I think this is a silly article.
“trophy wife” - In any society, there will be status and beauty, and that’s all you need for a trophy wife to exist - someone with status who marries a beautiful woman.
“passport” - nations are extensions of societies. I suppose this one actually could be rather silly in a world without capitalism, so I guess I can include this? But I wouldn’t be surprised; a passport is essentially a way for societies to say ‘yes this person can travel’ and tracking who enters and exits.
“police” - The idea that crime wouldn’t exist in a post-scarcity society is a shockingly naive point. Infinite easy resources wouldn’t prevent the theft of sentimental items, or violence, or subjugation of others. Even simple mental health problems would result in some small portion of the population being a danger to others. A police force in a post-scarcity world would be dramatically different, but there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t exist.
“television” - art, transmitted wirelessly.
“teen-ager” - again, unless we count post-scarcity to be post-mortality, we’d still have some age of majority to dictate when people are able to be responsible for themselves/etc.
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Belters everywhere, and not a sub-economy that deals with odd wastes and negotiating 'round the M&Ms and Float that need to be around for them to throw in the following week’s Conference Guest appearance; not that doesn’t fit in exactly one character’s app.
Speaking of which, I’ve neglected to select a notebook just for rating ep. of Star Trek (the DirecTV is politely reminding me I would surely not be interested in The Orwell by rather not recording it) or that other spacer show that did 2 seasons a bit ago (The Panglossverse? Bah.) or Apps which did or did not pass muster for reasons (e.g. why Telegram is or was trash compared to Signal…) or Altcoins I have not run a node for. It’s just org mode I suppose.
Police…yeah, try security gadget arbitrage. No passport (och, left it in me oth’r El Al pod) please.
Television…advertising narrative and cache as a local customer, pirated by traveling girl bands (cough.)
Teen-ager…those who redevelop bodies every 28 years like it or not. Or who swap with spirit animals of a sort.
“Trophy Wife”…marriage, really! Only back to Haupsberg Lineage and separation of function through a Mandarin reverse-lottery. And whatever replaces ‘wine’ as far as fine crystal drink…uh, ware. Like RTIC or IGLOO or whatever keeps Avacados Domingogogos fresh.
Jaywalking…Was it ever important in Cowboy Bebop that Casino Orbit parking was 23,002 M Won (and dynamic!) other than to prove that they were skunk poor at the beginning of every Ep? But surely casual death and its apologists cursor where changes when legs and sepsis can be fixed quite more easily than cancer (which still comes early from living downwind of a gas station IRL…until they’re all gone?)
It seems to me that for an unfortunate number of would-be Tolkiens, their take-away from his books was that to imitate him, they needed to have long world histories with Biblical-level of genealogies, detailed (but nonsensical) maps and constructed languages, etc. I.e. they focused on all the wrong things. (This is especially egregious in video game writing, where there’s a cliché of games that hit players with info-dumps of world backstory that has fuck-all to do with anything that’s going on in the game.)
I’m afraid you’re entirely missing the point here. You might try reading the actual essay, because that’s not what it was about, and even that particular paragraph wasn’t suggesting that none of these things would exist, but just that they wouldn’t be the same. You’re thinking about them too superficially - television for instance. It originated and developed in the US as a means of broadcasting commercials. The content, form - even the minute-to-minute narrative structure - were all dictated by the needs of commercials and appealing to an audience of a particular size required to fund programs in that model. (If you’re unaware of this history and construction of commercial television shows, you might read up on it. It is fascinating.) Television in countries that didn’t follow that model started out very, very different (as did community television, “video art” and other forms of video outside the commercial broadcast space) - although many of those differences went away due to the American cultural influence, if not the impact of local commercial television. To say that television is and always would be “art, transmitted wirelessly” is to ignore its specific historical forms and its potential to be something else - it’s basically a tautology that ignores that the definition of “art” is entirely culturally dependent.
As for the rest of the list: none of the current, Western forms of these things were inevitable. For example, the term and concept of “teenager” is less than a century old, and the specific connotations of the word are younger still. (And that’s the US - it’s a younger concept yet in other countries, assuming they even have it.) I’m afraid you’re dismissing strawmen that literally no one is advocating and missing out on the actual discussion, which is a far more complex and interesting one.
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Post scarcity is so old and broken anyway
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If you want a stonking original SF read, Children of Time would be my pick.
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I agree. I remember back in 1996, there was a lot of excitement in (some) legal academic circles about how the internet was going to radically change the law in all sorts of ways, especially defamation law.
No one wanted to hear then that existing laws could perfectly easily be updated and amended to fit the new equivalents of marketplace gossip and libellous pamphlets and plenty of people don’t like to hear it now. See Uber for a classic example.
The fundamental things people do don’t tend to change that much. When, where and how they do them can change fundamentally. How many people get to do them is also a big change.
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Fair enough; I hadn’t read the article it was replying to, so I probably had the context all wrong; which is why I asked originally for context before going on my big list. 
I’ll own up to it.
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I wouldn’t worry about it.
The discussion on Charlie’s blog has also gone down that rabbithole with a vengeance
I’m sorry to hear of the recent death of your friend and colleague, Charlie. I know how horrible a shock sudden deaths like that can be.
Forgive me for disagreeing with you below so deeply, but I must.
<< I’d pick late-period capitalism, the piss-polluted sea we fish are doomed to swim in. >>
This is deeply confused. First we don’t swim in a piss-polluted sea. This is almost certainly the best time ever to have been alive.
Second, there’s no such thing as < capitalism >.
People who use this term might mean < trade for profit > which is tens of thousands of years old and exists in every culture to a greater or lesser degree. Even isolated hunter-gatherer tribes trade whenever they get the chance, and only do it if they think it’s a good exchange for them.
<< It seems inevitable but it’s a relatively recent development in historic terms, and it’s clearly not sustainable in the long term. >>
It’s not a recent development at all. It’s as ancient as cooking, possibly older.
It doesn’t seem inevitable to anyone who’s read some history. It’s just a bright idea and a useful social custom. There have been societies without wheeled transport or even without clothes, and trying to imagine a society without “capitalism” is like trying to imagine a society without clothes, without cooking, or without wheels. So the lack of it is both less important than anyone thinks, and vastly rarer than they can imagine.
As for sustainability, it’s clear to anyone who thinks about this that trade without profit is what’s unsustainable. Anyone who has ever tried to set up an innovative social or creative structure that retains no profits has found this out for themselves.
Trade for profit is in reality one of the most sustainable social ideas ever created.
It’s the very model of life itself - every creature, plant, organism must retain something like profits (for example, vitamins) with which to rebuild, grow, and renew.
He can’t hear you/read your post (well probably won’t - almost certainly won’t reply here).
Try over here instead:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/02/why-i-barely-read-sf-these-day.html
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Soooo, what you’re saying is that Karl Marx is the most cutting-edge scifi writer out there? Clever take, I’ll buy it.
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No, you must share “free” community copy with rest of us, Comrade.
In Post-scarcity Future, book borrows you.
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Perhaps, HMSGoose!
We could consider Marx was a sci-fi writer since Charlie’s article comes close to saying that to reimagine the future is always also to reimagine the past, even if it didn’t quite spell that thought out.
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To be fair, though, there is very little on HOW we get to that utopia.
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