The frequent arrival, for instance, of new drugs and medical procedures; new tech; or--because sci-fi is about social change, as well as science and tech changes--the arrival in your home town of masked goons working for an insane buffoon.
Doesn't that sound like some dystopian futuristic fantasy?
There's that sense that The Future Is Now,
and it's not what I imagined.
And yet, here we are, and this is the way we live now.
I wanted to round-up a few of the sci-fi elements in my life in the very recent past--like, last week.
1. The masked goon invaders here are pretty low-tech.
Though they're kitted out with all sorts of modern weapons and gadgets, they could be any invading force throughout history.
The sense of vertigo comes not from invasion tech but because this is not what I expected in my own Hometown, USA.
It certainly has been predicted,
I just didn't think it would happen to me.
It's the response to the invasion that is more sci-fi:
It has been a mix of low-tech (whistles) and high-tech (encrypted communication on cell phones). I've seen Rapid Responders running or biking after ICE, blowing whistles and gripping their phones.
Civilian resistors are always going to be more creative, because they have to be. They are defending their home turf, and they use what they have at hand, whether that's snow shovels or phone cameras.
It's definitely an odd and interesting situation.
2. Ozempic and the other GLP1 receptor agonists
These weight-loss drugs are right out of the sci-fi playbook:
Everyone starts taking a drug that changes their bodies, and... Go! Imagine ten different social outcomes.
It took x minutes before I knew people who lost enormous amounts of weight with Ozempic--or small amounts of weight, or who couldn't tolerate it.
Most recently, just last week I saw a former coworker, once plump, now thin.
But it's a problem: She lost 50 lbs in just a few weeks––waaaay too fast––and she has been quite ill inside.
She's gone off the drug now and hopes her system will return to normal. (And that the weight will stay off.)
Who knows?
3. Artificial Intelligence.
AI is already woven into our lives, but the jarring moment when this became intimately weird for me came just a couple weeks ago-- when I got an email from an old blogger pal that was conveying her message, but in ChatGPT's voice.
And then, as I blogged about, I turned to ChatGPT for help to decide how to handle this!
It was an entirely new situation for me.
Should I say something?
(I decided not to, since it was a one-off.)
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II. Looking backward, we've seen a lot, a lot of sci-fi–level changes in our lives, right?
I got my first e-mail account in 1994, thirty-two years ago.
I remember a trainer coming in to the college library where I worked and showing us HOW TO TURN THE COMPUTER ON.
That was freaky and exciting.
My favorite thing is the massive insights of brain sciences.
It's just so interesting! And it's interesting what we can't see--like, how and where does consciousness arise?
The gender revolution.
There are many aspects to this, some are pure idea, internal personal identity. No tech required. This is not so different than, say, feminism, and doesn't seem particularly sci-fi to me, or, not wildly so.
The wild sci-fi element, I think, is the way the ideology is intimately linked to tech---
specifically, the way some trans people are tied to the pharmaceutical industry to deliver drugs (hormones) that sustain their identities, physically.
And so, they rely upon political systems maintaining a supply chain.
And who supplies hormones?
Among other countries, big manufactures and suppliers are ISRAEL and CHINA.
Talk about ethical concerns on a sci-fi level!
Going to work--very low tech-- so all for now.
I'd love to hear your ideas about Sci-Fi Elements in Your Life!
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* Listening this morning to Kim Stanely Robinson, I learned that he doesn't mean that that definition ("science-fiction is realism") is unique to the 21st century, now, but rather that science fiction is always a metaphor for "our times", whenever that is.
It's always reflecting what this moment feels like right now.*
"If you want to know what 1954 felt like," KSR says, "you need to read the science-fiction of 1954."
But...
"We are in a new situation: we have massively changing technological and sociological change, and planetary change as well.
And politically, it's like we're having a Watergate per day.
History has indeed accelerated here.
"I want to say it's unprecedented, but History is always unprecedented. We can say that today is more unprecedented than ever.
And that's an interesting situation to be in."
When you get old you don't need to research what past times were like -- you were there! Nowadays it pays to be open to change because things are coming at us fast. I first used email with Juno, on a disk installed into the computer. Early Juno was only available to other Juno users so I got friends to install it! Then Juno went big, onto the actual www, and we could email anyone who had email. Not many then. I think it was like the early telephone, not many users to call!
ReplyDeleteYes, at first I was only emailing other people at .edu
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