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Comment by mooreds | Hacker News Reader

> Might we see the nation-state get replaced by a web of competing mercenaries, each of which effectively serves as a protection racket for their customers?

Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson, explores this possible future. Great book.

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I think Snowcrash is intentionally campy and satirical?

At any rate I don't think what science fiction writers do is "exploring possible futures" so much as "telling lies for fun and profit" as one author entitled his fiction writing craft book.

Exploring possible futures is exactly what sf writers do as is telling lies for fun and profit. Predicting possible futures is not part of their job description, though sometimes it seems that way.

What the science fiction writers explores doesn't have to be possible futures, it can be impossible ones. And some science fiction, like Stranger Things, is set in the past.

In fact it's been a while since I read Snowcrash but it's set implausibly close to when it was written in 1992. This is presumably intentional.

"Intentionally campy and satirical" and "chillingly predictive" are not mutually exclusive. The movie Idiocracy has probably become the canonical example in that space.

In any case, speculative fiction is usually more about the present than it is about the future. The original Star Trek, for instance, dealt quite a bit with the racial politics of the 1960s, even though it was set in the 2260s. The hypercapitalism in Snow Crash (and other cyberpunk works around that time) reflected the trend of American society in the 1980s and 90s. It was less "telling lies" and more logical extrapolation of the existing trend, which hasn't really been arrested since, either.

It's "telling lies" in the sense that I wouldn't expect the author to think that the plot of the book, or anything like it, is a logical extrapolation of existing trends.

Could hyper corporatization of America continue? Sure. Might the author be commenting on present trends? Absolutely.

Does the book's author actually believe the mafia might hire street samurai to do pizza deliveries? Probably not.

The takeover of government functions by multinational corporations is a cyberpunk trope. See any of William Gibson's fiction from the early 80s.

Yes it's a cyberpunk trope, but it's also based in history. Wealthy nobles of Rome and Medieval times were landowners and, to put it bluntly, warmongers... using armies to make profit by war. They were nothing if not the corporate warlords of their times, holding shares in agriculture, land ownership and armies. Collecting shares of their workers (commonly referred to as share cropping), much like taxation. If that isn't some form of pseudo governmental function, I'm not sure what is =/

Does that make it any less likely?

https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/may/12/industry-...

> For the 81 states for which estimates were available, private security workers appear to outnumber police forces in 44 countries – with a combined population of roughly 4 billion people – or more than half of the world’s total of 7.5 billion.

There's a bit of a difference between a world in which it's common for rich people and big buildings to employ security guards (as it has been for most of history) and Mr Lee's Greater Hong Kong...

WALL-E: entry-level cyberpunk?

One thing about WALL-E that bothers me is: this was a civilization that mastered interstellar travel, to the point where it was trivial enough for vacations. They seriously couldn’t come up with a better plan than burning all the trash? Just send it to the sun lol

We're a civilization that has mastered sea travel. It would take a massive, and likely, impossible, effort to move all our trash into the ocean.

I imagine that same would be true of trying to move trash to the sun.

Fun fact, it takes more fuel to send a mass to the Sun than it does to send it to Pluto[0].

[0] https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/its-surprisingly-h...

Red Mars doesn't go quite as far, but does look at a world in which multinational corporations are competitive with countries in terms of global power.

In many[1] of those countries, private security workers do not have the power of pit, gallows, judicial, or extrajudicial execution. The police, on the other hand, do [2].

[1] Yes, there are parts of the world where the local mining firm's private security will happily intimidate, beat, and murder problem people. It's generally the exception, rather than the rule. Your local mall cop can't do that to you, and is generally held to a far higher standard of conduct and legal accountability than the police.

[2] Yes, if you squint a bunch, stuff like forced arbitration encroaches on the space occupied by the legal system, but it is ultimately subservient to it.

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