Comment by UweSchmidt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by UweSchmidt | Hacker News Reader

"...but as far as themes go, I’m more inspired by [authors who are] usually clearly anti-capitalist, criticizing scenarios used in Golden Age science fiction — such as building cities on Mars or expanding beyond the Solar System — by portraying them as capitalist hellscapes."

The golden-age optimistic science fiction placed humans on a stage in the future with aliens, and confronted both with challenges on a far greater scale than earth. The implication that today's problems would surely be solved, was not only a nice escapism but also helped to form a fundamental mindset for the solution of said problems. From terraforming other planets to thinking about carbon dioxide globally, from a war with aliens to seeing the futility of wars on earth. From the absense of actual capitalism or communism on that distant colony in space that lived in harmony, to being open minded about new solutions in everyday politics.

It does not seem clear if pessimistic science fiction, from an author not from the "ivory tower" but the trenches of education in community college, written with an educational message front and center, can have the reach and cultural impact as the stories from the past. Will the classroom in space convince where the daytime job didn't?

I think it's a bit ironic that a story that is polemic first and story second is actually less effective as polemic than a story than is story first and polemic second or third or even lower. Classic age science fiction was often polemic, but it works because the stories were prioritized above the polemic and generally decent.

Of course like any genre, "polemic first" has things that occasionally transcend their genre even so, but those are also as always the exceptions, and authors really shouldn't put all their chips on being one of those exceptions. If anything the odds are probably worse than most.

CC: Hollywood, Disney. You'd be better propagandists if you paid more attention, much more attention, to stories.

I read the author's short story from the article, and your comment is by far the better piece of writing.

For good or not capitalism is efficient at incentivizing people to exploit resources. It's easy to project that into guessing that at least our early forays to heavenly bodies will be propelled by that impulse. It's probably the reason that earthly new world cultures are more capitalistic than the old world's. Some ideologies promote exploration more than others. You don't have to like it to predict it.

The point of sci-fi is to lay off the most obvious and current convictions and impulses and to imagine other possibilities.

But still use your medium as a vehicle for a very obvious and current "understanding" of politics... with the completely natural "I love Science^tm" veneer tailor-made for Reddit, nice Hugo award material, I guess?

Oh, just noticed it's nature.com

Can no one in this thread grasp the possiblity a neutral, non-prescriptive way to tell an inspirational story set in the far future that is not a vehicle for anything?

The point is whatever we want it to be. Pulp adventurism and space exploits was as popular as anything else. Even the ideological books are not necessarily tantamount to "space communism" (see: Neal Stephenson).

Neal Stephenson depicted anti-state turbocapitalism as Mafia corpostates in "Snow Crash". Which is what actually would happen if no one regulated business.

Good thing we have regulation.

I actually had Seveneves and Termination Shock in mind, as more "optimistic" novels.

There are way too many kinds of sci-fi to sum up the genre in one convenient statement like that.

Some sci-fi seeks to lay off the most obvious and current convictions and impulses to imagine other possibilities.

Other sci-fi slightly exaggerates the flaws and assumptions of our world, and tries to logically extend them into a future in which they make even less sense, to demonstrate their absurdity.

Still other sci-fi creates a world exactly like ours except with one significant technological advance, and tries to imagine where we'd go with that.

Still other sci-fi takes what we know of how humans behave, puts them in completely unfamiliar settings, and uses those settings to explore the nature of people, rather than focusing on the technology.

And some sci-fi, arguably the most fun, if not necessarily the most educational merely starts "Wouldn't it be cool/weird/fucked up if..." and just keeps going until it runs out of steam.

Space exploration and scientific missions has always been funded by states, so pretty much the inverse of capitalistic impulses. SpaceX does no scientific missions, focusing on the only somewhat profitable part of the space industry: putting satellites in orbit. Also it receives massive grants of public money. There are no economic incentives to colonize Mars.

>There are no economic incentives to colonize Mars. Perhaps, but much has been said about the vast fortunes asteroid mining could unlock.

That is true, and I also believe there really are vast fortunes that could be unlocked with asteroid mining. However, asteroid mining is absolutely nothing like colonizing Mars, aside from the fact that they both involve space travel.

This person has been demoralized, and unknowingly wishes to inflict that fate upon everyone they come into contact with. The frenetic obsession with "capitalism" and the hopelessness of the future is simply the claw of the crab, pulling its victims back down into the bucket.

Funny you say that when capitalism has no morals beyond profit.

Just have a look on what Boeing it's doing.

The market (which I think is what you mean when you say "capitalism," a word devoid of content) is an abstract thing and indeed has no morals. Humans do. They act together to reduce harm, usually, given our arc of history. When humans form totalitarian "anti-capitalist" regimes they usually go about killing a few million other humans. Hurray for their superior morals.

Its very funny how many creatures have convergently evolved into crabs.

Boeing's bad decisions were not based on shareholder votes, but rather a cabal of bad actors. You could have this happen in any economic system. In fact, Boeing planes, even with all the cheating, are statistically safer than those produced by the former USSR.

I would hope that today's planes are safer than 40 years ago!

Who cares about the USSR, a system who basically turned into Soviet (council) based modern era overnight from feudalism without stepping inside Enlightenment. Of course, it didn't end well.

I'm talking about America, with a so-called democracy far older than the USSR. Regulations? New Deal? Wisdom over centuries? What's that? That doesn't make happy my shareholders, so forget that, right?

Said this, Boeing it's a disaster.

> I'm talking about America, with a so-called democracy far older than the USSR

Technically America is not a democracy -- it's a federal republic composed of states with widely differing interpretations of democracy.

Question: where does the idea that democracy and republic are incompatible comes from? I keep hearing this am curious where it started. Is it because the Founding Fathers wanted aristocratic elements to keep popular will at bay?

To me the USA is obviously a (or maybe the) federal democratic republic. There is no contradiction. Sovereignity resides in the people and there's no monarch so it's a republic and elected representatives hold most of the power so it's a (representative) democracy.

Do you think we the people chose the presidential candidates we keep having? There are multiple levels of representation, and all of them are tainted by special interests and partisanship.

The primary system can choose candidates however they wish -- the Constitution does not specify the method [1]. A Democratic challenger to Biden this time was blatantly refused ballot access in many states. Backroom deals can cause good candidates to drop out and support worse candidates (see Buttigieg dropping out in 2020 and supporting Biden, and then Biden appoints him SecTrans). Kamala Harris was among the worst performers in the 2020 Democratic primary, but for some reason she was chosen (not elected, mind you, but chosen by Biden's team) as Biden's running mate, so now the Democrats have no good choices.

The Electoral College is winner-take-all in many places and the congressional districts are often gerrymandered to completely eliminate representation of the minority party. For example, Nashville had a Democrat representative, but after redistricting the city was split like a pizza among three mostly rural GOP districts to completely eliminate its member of Congress [2]. It is the capital of the state and largest city but has no member of Congress now.

I'm glad you have such a positive view of US democracy, but many of us living here are extremely worried about our trajectory.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_pri...

2. https://www.usnews.com/news/elections/articles/2022-11-04/na...

> Question: where does the idea that democracy and republic are incompatible comes from?

It’s just a retort that American conservatives like to say whenever American liberals mention how undemocratic/unfair the electoral college or the senate is. There’s no real historical substance to the phrase. It only became common to hear after the 2000 and 2016 elections where republicans won the presidency but received fewer total votes, the same scenario which almsot happened in 2020 and could very well happen in 2024.

>Sovereignity resides in the people and there's no monarch so it's a republic

Sovereignty residing in the people is not a feature of a republic. The only thing that defines a republic is that it isn't a monarchy.

If it's a republic and the government is elected by a democratic process, then it's a "democratic republic". And you don't need a republic to have a democratic state either: the UK and Japan are examples of this (both are monarchies).

The US system is a mini-monarchy .. as recognised by the founders from the outset, a number opposing the notion.

https://csac.history.wisc.edu/document-collections/constitut...

Coming from a post US "Washminister* system (Australia) the US "Little King" looks very much a daft arrangement as exemplified by the inability to fire a POTUS for poor performance | losing support, etc.

We retained a symbolic monarch as a "nominal" head of State to bind the notion of a country over the transient seatings of Government but seeded very little in the way of real effective power to that monarch.

As a country we've swapped Prime Ministers (politically equivilant here to a US President) on a dime wothout skipping a beat in managing the country.

>The US system is a mini-monarchy

Think what you like about the effectiveness of the US system, but it's not a monarchy in any way, shape, or form. A monarchy requires power (or at least a position that's supposed to have power, as most modern monarchies are really just figureheads) to be inherited. Sure, once in a while US presidents get to that position partly because of family connections (FDR, GWB), but that's nothing like the way an actual monarchy operates.

What I think is irrelevant, I'm not even USAian, I paraphrased an opinion held by the anti-Federalist founders held during the (US) constitutional debates.

Clearly these were crazy people far divorced from reality as we know it modern times:

    During the ratification debates, Antifederalists charged that the President would become an elected monarch, that cabals would develop to ensure his reelection, and that the presidential veto power would be abused. They further feared that presidential power to grant pardons would allow the president to conspire with others in treasonable activities with impunity.

I mean, really? Can you even imagine anything like that happening?

I'm not sure what your point is here. The US President is not a monarch, and even if some antifederalists used the term "elected monarch", they were obviously using it as a sort of hyperbole, rather than the normal and accepted definition of the word "monarch". Even if he somehow managed to subvert the normal checks and balances and use his power to turn himself into a dictator, that doesn't make him a monarch. Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, and Hussein were dictators too, but they were never monarchs. Monarchy is an institution where the head of state is an inherited position; anything that doesn't meet this definition is not a monarchy.

You're so hung up on the heredity angle you've missed the complaint inherent in the point being made during the drawing up of the US Constitution and implicit in my use of the phrase mini-Monarch .. states in which supreme authority is vested in an individual ruler and veer towards succession being tightly controlled.

Surely those bad actors were motivated by profits? The shareholders might not have voted for a "profits over safety" motion but the entire system created the incentives that led to bad actors acquiring their positions and doing bad stuff. And the system here is shareholder focused capitalism.

Although I agree this could happen in other economic system too, in a communist system it could be simply an order from above for example.

> capitalism has no morals beyond profit.

Liberalism does, to the extent the goal is human flourishing. Denigrating Capitalism for not being about morals makes as much sense as denigrating a tractor for not being about morals. Capitalism is merely what is employed as a tool (in part, as we used mixed-market economy) for the economic branch of our system.

That's just trading goods for valuables. Not capitalism. Every system in the world since the Neolithic used tokens to interchange goods.

"That", i.e. the economic branch of Liberalism, is Capitalist, which is a combination of the right to private profit and property + market economy.

> Every system in the world since the Neolithic used tokens to interchange goods.

They used a bartering system. Price signaling came later. Coinage was technically existent rather early but did not see widespread use.

Systems devoid of price-signaling a) don't scale, b) are irredeemably terrible.

I guess you agree that it ought to have nothing to do with morality because this appears to be a non-sequitur.

Boeing is a good example of capitalism working.

Go and look at their financial statements. Look at their stock over the past half decade.

It's all deep in the red. They're still alive because their past achievements are significant enough to carry them through this and they will probably still be salvaged.

Otherwise they'd be long bankrupt, freeing up immense human, physical, and financial capital to go do something else.

In other words, the system is built to allocate resources to companies based on performance - of course that doesn't mean each company always works perfectly.

Pointing to a bad company as an example of capitalism failing is like pointing to a lazy civil servant and saying we should abolish all government.

But Boeing is the only remaining US-based manufacturer of airliners (among other things). This didn't used to be the case, but through mergers and acquisitions it's true today. There is just no way the US government would ever let Boeing go under and let the Europeans or Chinese dominate airliners. Like the banks in 2008, Boeing is just "too big to fail".

That's true but it's hardly a failure of the market. Airliners are big, complex products that are apparently best managed by big, complex companies (not my opinion, just an observation).

If the government decides airliners are a strategic priority and decides to interfere with the market, the cost of that decision is that tax money is going to be used to prop up the incumbent, instead of funding for the poor.

I think a little bit of industrial policy can be a good thing.

I don't really find such science fiction pessimistic. In the way this "golden age optimism" is arguably just coddling humans with lies about the harm that they do, science fiction that critically examines the systems being built and suggests ways to repair. Ways to empower. Ways to unify against systemic harms in a way that includes all people. We have the entire solarpunk genre specifically for how humans can build a more unified, equal future.

I also disagree with this depiction of Golden Age science fiction. Ursula Le Guin and Marge Piercy were doing this well during this period.

I do think post-war Scifi was optimistic as it reflected the general sentiment of the times, with increasing prosperity, scientific and social progress, and tangible examples of the ability to unite for a common cause and accomplish megaprojects in general. Environmental issues were beyond the horizon, and today's societal divisiveness even further out. Civilization succumbing to technological addiction and stagnating scientific progress were considered as disappointing and unlikely timelines.

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