The Horror of Space-Brainworms, or, Someone's Wrong On The Internet Again
--but only partly, which makes it all the worse
This is what I was doing this morning when I should have been a) getting ready for work, b) catching up on the eternally-undone housework, c) finishing serious posts. Not an excuse, just a statement of fact.
For some reason, I'm not sure why, astronaut emeritus Buzz Aldrin decided to jump on the genre-bashing bandwagon, blaming SF for the lack of public enthusiasm for real space exploration these days. And, as you'd expect, SF authors and fans took umbrage at this accusation of harm-doing, but also took it seriously enough to ask if, and to what extent, and how it might be true in some ways. Which makes for an interesting, but largely predictable thread, except when you get somebody wildly oscillating between common-sense statements about the practicality of space exploration, and knee-jerk genuflections to old-tyme conservative dogmas, as John C. Wright (a writer whose work I am not familiar with) does, thusly:
What no science fiction writer before the moonshot anticipated was that the Space Race would start out as a contest between two military powers for ascendancy in the 'high ground' of outer space, which then devolved into a prestige project, whose prohibitive costs were bourn for such imponderable goals such as national bragging rights. [...] With the end of the Cold War, the military reasons for exploiting space grew sharply less pressing. A prestige project, like building an Egyptian pyramid, which gathers no grain and mines no gold, simply peters out once no more prestige is to be had.
Ayup, I don't recall any early SF writer describing a "space race" taking place after the manner of Italian merchant-princes building towers crossed with that of Regency fops tying cravats, so while I wouldn't go so far as to say that no writer anticipated it, it certainly wasn't a part of the pop-cultural fannish consciousness. And indeed, impractical vanity projects often become follies. All in agreement there!
But then we get:
Second, society degenerated from the 'greatest generation' boldness needed for the venture.
What no science fiction writer anticipated was the rise of a 'Back-to-Nature' neo-Luddite mood in the Western populace, which dismissed space travel as an expensive luxury, not to be indulged while poverty and social problems remained unsolved back earthside.
The reason for this blind spot? There was no such thing in any of the models. During the Winning of the West, the Eastern states did not cry out that the Wagon Trains were too expensive to spend money on. No one said we cannot colonize the wilderness of Kentucky or the Northwest Territory while poverty remains a problem in Massachusetts Bay Colony. Isabel of Spain was not criticized for funding the expedition of Columbus on the grounds that the Spanish Crown still had the poor to feed.
No one anticipated this change of the public mood for two reasons: one reason is, science fiction writers are naturally technophiliac: we love that space stuff, and can't grok how anyone could find it threatening or wasteful. It's the future. How can you be afraid of tomorrow? What is the point? It is not as if the calendar is equipped with a handbrake.
Another reason is that we use past models to anticipate future conditions. The technophobia was something unique in history, based on a number of odd political and economic or even psychological and sociological coincidences. Even Hari Seldon could not have seen that one coming.
The American dream is no longer to own land, build a house, raise a family, start a trade, to stand or fall by one's own gumption and effort, with no leave asked of any man. The new American dream is to be given free health care, and to police the language to censor occurrences of the word 'niggardly.' Such concerns have grayed our hairs before our time. Were we a society thrilled by the idea and the romance of exploration, if we were, in other words, a young and vital society rather than a society prematurely senile and cynical and risk-averse, we would have the spirit of pioneers. We would not be waiting for NASA, but demanding that it get out of the way.
So much stupid, in so few lines! And then, without even a moment wasted, we are back to the original theme:
Third, and paramount, space travel is prohibitively expensive and offers no economic incentive to exploit it: there are no Aztecs on the Moon to loot for gold, and the icy sands of Mars are less inviting than the snows of Antarctica or the Marianas Trench to any potential Johnny Appleseed or Daniel Boone heading out with a mule to find his forty acres.
Manned exploration as a vanity project that has no practical reason for existing, nothing that would attract pioneers with an ounce of sanity between them -- Woohoo, what a ride! Whiplash? What whiplash?
--This, folks, is what it looks like when someone has one of those mind-controlling parasites like you see on Star Trek or read about in cyberpunk novels like Snow Crash: the uncontrolled part of Wright's mind is still able to perceive reality, and respond, and articulate those responses - but unable to prevent the brainworm from inserting an entirely contradictory statement in the middle of them, one filled with prefab memes, plunked in like pieces of virus DNA, and only loosely-connected to each other, all of which bear no resemblance to the extramental reality that the other side of his brain inhabits along with the rest of us.
I wanted to post about it there, and then I got the mod queue message, and then I remembered things I should have said like how actually scholars any more these days say that the pyramids (and other massive monuments of ancient Egypt) were more in the line of a WPA thing, the governments of Egypt using tax money to pay people to work in the off season when farming wasn't possible, which makes it even more interesting.
And how I've had some heated arguments in past years on Daily Kos where I've tried to get across the essence of Wright's split point about economic practicality to wild-eyed space enthusiasts - yea, and liberally-liberals, no less! - who seemed to think that just because they were all about the idea of being cryogenically frozen and fired off for centuries to explore distant galaxies, somebody ought to be willing to foot the bill of freezing them and firing them off, and all the impossibly-at-present-high-tech required to do so. (WAAAAAH! but i WANT my flying car and i want NOW! GIMME GIMME GIMME!!!) to which I would rejoin "trade routes" and plug hyperdrive innovation as the solution...
And in doing so, I was simply boiling down to comment length some of the points I made in Sept. 2003, on my prototypical blogging venture Orrery, in "Fixing the Widgets", which, upon rereading, still all sounds about right to me. (This is a rant related to the discovery of astroturf and the right-wing noise machine on my part, via the bit of disinformation out there claiming entirely mendaciously that environmental regulations were to blame for the Shuttle disasters (those Ebol Leftists!) which as an old reader of Air & Space magazine I knew perfectly well was false, even before the after-accident report on Columbia was released.
But tracking down so far as I might the manufacturers and purveyors of this fiction - which included World Net Daily, the propaganda site run partly by Vox Day's dad to bring it full circle reminded me of the article I'd read in a conservative Catholic newspaper years back that had had me throwing it aside in disgust, since I knew it was false - the claim that DDT didn't do any harm to birds at all, and when the relevant info about the Four Sisters came out in the blogosphere, I was able to put together the fact that the author of said article had been an Olin Chair somewhere, and the fact that Olin as a chemical manufacturer had once profited from through a subsidiary, and thus lost big by the banning of, that very DDT. --Pure coincidence, I'm sure. Just like the way that John Lott aka Mary Rosh was paid for writing gun-fetishizing texts by the Olin Foundation as well, and Olin just happens to make gunpowder, too--
Brainworms: we can fool you wholesale...
(and you'll LOVE it!)
This is what I was doing this morning when I should have been a) getting ready for work, b) catching up on the eternally-undone housework, c) finishing serious posts. Not an excuse, just a statement of fact.
For some reason, I'm not sure why, astronaut emeritus Buzz Aldrin decided to jump on the genre-bashing bandwagon, blaming SF for the lack of public enthusiasm for real space exploration these days. And, as you'd expect, SF authors and fans took umbrage at this accusation of harm-doing, but also took it seriously enough to ask if, and to what extent, and how it might be true in some ways. Which makes for an interesting, but largely predictable thread, except when you get somebody wildly oscillating between common-sense statements about the practicality of space exploration, and knee-jerk genuflections to old-tyme conservative dogmas, as John C. Wright (a writer whose work I am not familiar with) does, thusly:
What no science fiction writer before the moonshot anticipated was that the Space Race would start out as a contest between two military powers for ascendancy in the 'high ground' of outer space, which then devolved into a prestige project, whose prohibitive costs were bourn for such imponderable goals such as national bragging rights. [...] With the end of the Cold War, the military reasons for exploiting space grew sharply less pressing. A prestige project, like building an Egyptian pyramid, which gathers no grain and mines no gold, simply peters out once no more prestige is to be had.
Ayup, I don't recall any early SF writer describing a "space race" taking place after the manner of Italian merchant-princes building towers crossed with that of Regency fops tying cravats, so while I wouldn't go so far as to say that no writer anticipated it, it certainly wasn't a part of the pop-cultural fannish consciousness. And indeed, impractical vanity projects often become follies. All in agreement there!
But then we get:
Second, society degenerated from the 'greatest generation' boldness needed for the venture.
What no science fiction writer anticipated was the rise of a 'Back-to-Nature' neo-Luddite mood in the Western populace, which dismissed space travel as an expensive luxury, not to be indulged while poverty and social problems remained unsolved back earthside.
The reason for this blind spot? There was no such thing in any of the models. During the Winning of the West, the Eastern states did not cry out that the Wagon Trains were too expensive to spend money on. No one said we cannot colonize the wilderness of Kentucky or the Northwest Territory while poverty remains a problem in Massachusetts Bay Colony. Isabel of Spain was not criticized for funding the expedition of Columbus on the grounds that the Spanish Crown still had the poor to feed.
No one anticipated this change of the public mood for two reasons: one reason is, science fiction writers are naturally technophiliac: we love that space stuff, and can't grok how anyone could find it threatening or wasteful. It's the future. How can you be afraid of tomorrow? What is the point? It is not as if the calendar is equipped with a handbrake.
Another reason is that we use past models to anticipate future conditions. The technophobia was something unique in history, based on a number of odd political and economic or even psychological and sociological coincidences. Even Hari Seldon could not have seen that one coming.
The American dream is no longer to own land, build a house, raise a family, start a trade, to stand or fall by one's own gumption and effort, with no leave asked of any man. The new American dream is to be given free health care, and to police the language to censor occurrences of the word 'niggardly.' Such concerns have grayed our hairs before our time. Were we a society thrilled by the idea and the romance of exploration, if we were, in other words, a young and vital society rather than a society prematurely senile and cynical and risk-averse, we would have the spirit of pioneers. We would not be waiting for NASA, but demanding that it get out of the way.
So much stupid, in so few lines! And then, without even a moment wasted, we are back to the original theme:
Third, and paramount, space travel is prohibitively expensive and offers no economic incentive to exploit it: there are no Aztecs on the Moon to loot for gold, and the icy sands of Mars are less inviting than the snows of Antarctica or the Marianas Trench to any potential Johnny Appleseed or Daniel Boone heading out with a mule to find his forty acres.
Manned exploration as a vanity project that has no practical reason for existing, nothing that would attract pioneers with an ounce of sanity between them -- Woohoo, what a ride! Whiplash? What whiplash?
--This, folks, is what it looks like when someone has one of those mind-controlling parasites like you see on Star Trek or read about in cyberpunk novels like Snow Crash: the uncontrolled part of Wright's mind is still able to perceive reality, and respond, and articulate those responses - but unable to prevent the brainworm from inserting an entirely contradictory statement in the middle of them, one filled with prefab memes, plunked in like pieces of virus DNA, and only loosely-connected to each other, all of which bear no resemblance to the extramental reality that the other side of his brain inhabits along with the rest of us.
I wanted to post about it there, and then I got the mod queue message, and then I remembered things I should have said like how actually scholars any more these days say that the pyramids (and other massive monuments of ancient Egypt) were more in the line of a WPA thing, the governments of Egypt using tax money to pay people to work in the off season when farming wasn't possible, which makes it even more interesting.
And how I've had some heated arguments in past years on Daily Kos where I've tried to get across the essence of Wright's split point about economic practicality to wild-eyed space enthusiasts - yea, and liberally-liberals, no less! - who seemed to think that just because they were all about the idea of being cryogenically frozen and fired off for centuries to explore distant galaxies, somebody ought to be willing to foot the bill of freezing them and firing them off, and all the impossibly-at-present-high-tech required to do so. (WAAAAAH! but i WANT my flying car and i want NOW! GIMME GIMME GIMME!!!) to which I would rejoin "trade routes" and plug hyperdrive innovation as the solution...
And in doing so, I was simply boiling down to comment length some of the points I made in Sept. 2003, on my prototypical blogging venture Orrery, in "Fixing the Widgets", which, upon rereading, still all sounds about right to me. (This is a rant related to the discovery of astroturf and the right-wing noise machine on my part, via the bit of disinformation out there claiming entirely mendaciously that environmental regulations were to blame for the Shuttle disasters (those Ebol Leftists!) which as an old reader of Air & Space magazine I knew perfectly well was false, even before the after-accident report on Columbia was released.
But tracking down so far as I might the manufacturers and purveyors of this fiction - which included World Net Daily, the propaganda site run partly by Vox Day's dad to bring it full circle reminded me of the article I'd read in a conservative Catholic newspaper years back that had had me throwing it aside in disgust, since I knew it was false - the claim that DDT didn't do any harm to birds at all, and when the relevant info about the Four Sisters came out in the blogosphere, I was able to put together the fact that the author of said article had been an Olin Chair somewhere, and the fact that Olin as a chemical manufacturer had once profited from through a subsidiary, and thus lost big by the banning of, that very DDT. --Pure coincidence, I'm sure. Just like the way that John Lott aka Mary Rosh was paid for writing gun-fetishizing texts by the Olin Foundation as well, and Olin just happens to make gunpowder, too--
Brainworms: we can fool you wholesale...
(and you'll LOVE it!)