Luddites and SF

The term "Luddite" is typically applied to people who oppose technological advances. That's basically what I've always assumed the word to mean. Well, Cory Doctorow's latest LOCUS column corrects that misconception:

Science Fiction Is a Luddite Literature

Luddites were textile workers belonging to a secret society in England in the early nineteenth century, best known for destroying the newfangled equipment in textile mills. According to Doctorow, however, their primary objective wasn't the destruction of machinery. That was "their tactic, not their goal." Rather, their goal was "to challenge not the technology itself, but rather the social relations that governed its use." Doctorow details some of the local and global changes that resulted from mechanization of the textile industry. Factory owners could have used the new-model looms to improve employment conditions for skilled craftspersons. Instead, employers chose to hire fewer workers at lower wages. The Luddites imagined and agitated in favor of a different path for the industrial revolution. Doctorow gives several examples of how we, today, "are contesting the social relations surrounding our technologies."

New technology always generates social change, often with unanticipated consequences. Robert Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll" is one story that pioneered the type of science fiction focusing not on aspects such as the technical details of how automated roads work, but on how their existence affects the society that uses them. An obvious real-world example, the automobile, had easily predicted effects on individuals' freedom of movement and the decline of passenger railroads, but few people probably foresaw the impact on courtship customs and sexual mores. With cars, the balance of power in courtship shifted from the girl, who invited the boy to "call on" her in her parents' home, to the boy, who invited the girl on a "date" outside her parents' control. And of course the automobile gave young couples more freedom for sexual experimentation than they had under the old system. Consider the telephone: In his final novel, TO SAIL BEYOND THE SUNSET, Heinlein has the narrator's father, a doctor, predict at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century that telephones in the home would mean the end of house calls. When the only way to get a home doctor visit was to send someone in person to summon him, patients expected house calls only in emergencies. Once they could contact their family physician by picking up the phone, they would call for less and less urgent reasons, and doctors would soon refuse to cooperate. (This decline probably happened more slowly than Heinlein anticipated; I have a dim memory of the doctor's visiting me at home when I had measles around age five, the only time I've personally encountered a doctor's house call.)

Like the mechanical looms in the early stage of the industrial revolution, most if not all new technologies benefit some people while disadvantaging others. The ease of paying bills and performing other transactions online provides great convenience for most while disadvantaging those who can't afford a computer and internet connection or, like my ninety-year-old aunt, simply decline to adopt those "conveniences." Businesses now routinely expect customers to have internet access and hence make transactions more difficult for those who don't. Cell phones have made fast connections everywhere all the time routine, so that people are often expected to be instantly available whether they want to be or not. Moreover, as pay telephones have been used less and less, they've tended to disappear, so when anybody does need one—whether because he or she doesn't have a mobile phone or because the battery has run down or they're in a dead zone with no cell service—a phone booth is almost impossible to find. I actually "met" a person nagging me for contact information on Goodreads who accused me of lying when I said I didn't own a smart phone. (Yes, I have a cell phone for urgent or otherwise time-sensitive communication away from home, but it's a plain old "dumb" flip model.)

According to Doctorow, science fiction is a Luddite genre because both the historical movement and the fiction "concern themselves with the same questions: not merely what the technology does, but who it does it for and who it does it to."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

What Futurologists Do Part 2 - Futuristic Conflict In Romance

What Futurologists Do

Part 2

Futuristic Conflict In Romance

by

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

In What Futurologists Do Part 1, 

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2017/10/what-futurologists-do-part-1.html

I presented the meme-quote from Carl Sagan's 1996 book The Demon-Haunted World.

He encapsulated a vision we must ponder because it is so close to the world we are currently living in and plunging beyond.

Sagan was known for his non-fiction, and certainly not for writing Romance novels.  But Science Fiction Romance -- romance between human and alien, or just plain Relationship between human and non-human -- is the main topic on this blog.  To blend the Science Fiction genre with the Romance genre, we have to know a little science, yes, but also a lot more about how scientists think.

Not, mind you, a lot more about WHAT scientists think, but rather about HOW the thinking is done.  Where do the conclusions we read in popular science articles come from?

One of the first things to consider, to habitually ask yourself, is, "What do they know that I don't know?"

And second most important habit for a writer tackling alien dialogue creation is, "What do I know that they don't know?"

What the writer knows that the aliens don't know is precisely what the reader knows that the Alien Characters don't know.

The results of focusing on these questions can be seen very clearly in the film, STARMAN.  The 1984 version starring Jeff Bridges is the one I'm talking about here.

With the B&W very early THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL film, you have the beginnings of Science Fiction Romance in the video industry.

The captivating, moving and eternally memorable aspect of these Alien Romance stories is the "learning curve" -- the encounter with something utterly alien yet somehow familiar.

Futurologists do this kind of thinking along the time-line rather than between planets.

But the question the writer is asking inside their own mind is the same whether it is catapulting a self-image into some future world or bringing an "alien" (from the future such as The Terminator, from the past such as Iceman, or from another planet such as Starman, osr both such as DOCTOR WHO) into the reader/viewer's present reality is always the same.

"What do I know that this (alien/time-traveler) does not know?"

This key question has an answer that lies in the reader/viewer's blind spot -- the psychological black hole that forms the center of consciousness.

A newborn baby comes into this world knowing nothing, learning a million things a second.  The votex at the center of our being from which our sense of "reality" comes, our sense of "right and wrong" and everything we judge acceptable or which must be exterminated is rooted in that big blind-spot at the center of consciousness.

Exploring that big, dark, churning mass of experience is often the main occupation of adulthood, especially for artists of all sorts.

But audiences are composed mostly of people who don't want to explore how they know what they know -- and in many cases, want to avoid knowing what they know that convinces them of the validity of their current opinions.

Challenging current opinions, boring into the black hole at the center of consciousness is the function of fiction in general, but especially of science fiction.

Fiction is an artistic, selective representation of reality.  Science is the organization of our tested knowledge about reality.

There is a contradiction between those two mental processes -- organizing facts and testing them vs. depicting the truth we associate with what we know.

Science vs. Art -- many assume they are mutually exclusive and one must necessarily be superior to the other.

Science Fiction is about the seamless blend, the harmonious unity of these two modes of thinking so that the reader is treated to a vision of how the world works when science and art blend perfectly.

Nowhere in the Literature of science fiction is this blend better illustrated than in the First Contact story.

That is the category that Starman belongs to.

There are many classic stories in this First Contact category -- one of my favorites is In Value Decieved by H. B. Fyfe, November 1950 Astounding.
http://www.unz.org/Pub/AnalogSF-1950nov-00038

It has the flavor of a Gordon R. Dickson story -- or one such as Lulungomeena
https://youtu.be/P5KSmPHqKcQ  -- YouTube audio of a Galaxy Magazine story done for Radio - X-Minus One.

Notice I'm citing items that have lived in memory of thousands of people for many decades.  Do you want to write a Classic science fiction romance?  Study the classics of the field that is just barely old enough to have classics!

These are all-time classics because they explore with a delicate probe and half-smile the sensitive depths of that black-hole at the center of the audience's mind, the one place we are most loath to explore.

Put it "out there" as "alien" and certain people will look at it willingly, and perhaps like and remember it because it allows them to access the depths of their own minds without shuddering.

What you know that the Alien does not know, and how the Alien reacts to learning what you know, teaches you about what what you know that you didn't know you knew and didn't want to know you knew!

Literature Professors often refer to the sensations this causes as Cognitive Dissonance.

In fiction, in Art, it can be induced in mild forms and be examined in a pleasurable context.

But in everyday reality, as Carl Sagan has indicated ...

-----------quote---------
...when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority;
-------------end quote-------

... factions are chipped off the social whole, the social fabric frays, or whatever metaphore makes sense to you -- when communication FAILS, and individuals have "lost the ability to set their own agendas" then emotion erupts.

It is incomprehensible how a member of society, how a citizen of the country you consider yourself a citizen of -- how the OTHERS you have always thought were "like me" can possibly think what they (seem to) think!

Such thoughts, and such thinking is so evil, so anti-life, so apallingly counter-survival that it is necessary to eradicate the thinker of such thoughts, to expunge the pollution from the social fabric.

The rejection of the "Other" is visceral, and the more virulent because at some point that person or people like them were considered "us."

It is the seminal Horror trope -- that which is killing you is inside you, eating your guts.  Yes, like cancer.

Sagan is talking about (what was to him) the future in which society is fractured by an inability to communicate about the highest levels in technology (Artificial Intelligence was purely fictional concept back then!), and the most abstract issues of social cohesiveness (such as race relations, gender pay-equality, and the proper role of government in civilization).

Each faction "knows" something with absolute certainty that the other factions don't know or could never believe (or don't want to believe).

This "knowledge" resides in that black hole at the center of being which gains its content in the first, pre-verbal years of life.

As Sagan notes, something drastic has changed and it is reflected in the media now relying on brief sound-bytes to "inform" the general public.

It is clear there is a "they" who knows things the "we" don't know.

Transmission of that knowledge from they to we -- or from we to they -- is just not happening.

All the factions seem to be talking different languages, chattering on about different topics, and when no listening is happening, the conclusion is reached that the "Other" must be irradicated.  At all costs.

This is the situation readers now live in -- the futurologist writer has to leap over this maelstrom and depict the situation that will prevail 30 or 50 years from now, perhaps a thousand or two years from now.

Science Fiction does not have to be futuristic.  It has to blend Science (the study and organization of our knowledge of physical reality) with Fiction (the study and organization of our knowledge of emotiional reality).

The classics of science fiction romance will be about "What do I know that this one does not know?"
And with the Romance genre angle completely blended in, the classics of our genre will be about, "How Do I Transmit What I Know?"

You can transmit what you know without knowing you know it -- all parents do that with their infants -- but you can't recognize successful transmission unless you actually know what you know.  Parents are always shocked when their three year old behaves the exact way the parents have behaved.

Children learn at a stupendous rate, but adults depend on what they have learned.

What do you know that your readers do not know? 

Your readers are adults -- so they learn more slowly.  Can you transmit your knowledge of human emotional reality to your readers by using agreed upon scientific facts?

Carl Sagan has pinpointed the crux of the conflict that drives all Romance, particularly science fiction romance in this modern era.

-----quote----
The plain lesson is that study and learning - not just of science, but of anything - are avoidable, even undesirable.
-----end quote--------

There is such a thing as "The Battle of the Sexes" -- and the battle is over "I know better than you!"

Put another way, the Battle is over whether what men "know" is true, or not.

Today, this is played out on the public stage by Conservative vs. Liberal -- "What I know is true is really true but what you blieve is true is actually false."

That is the core conflict of all Battle of the Sexes Romance novels - what I know is true but what you know is actually false.

As Sagan wrote, we don't want to study or learn what OTHERS think is true because that might call into question what we know.

Do we even know what we know?  And how do we know it?

In his non-fiction work, FUTURE SHOCK, Alvin Toffler explained as of the 1970's how the acceleration of acceleration of "change" in society was making change run so fast that the basic human organism can NOT adjust fast enough.

Humans are adaptable and adjustable as infants -- our genetics and epigenetics discoveries are showing how individualistic and adaptable humans are, and later how very slow to adapt in elder years.

Even in the 1970's, what older people knew (from the content of their Black Holes) had already become false or irrelevant in that decade.  Look how many who were adults in the 1970's did not adapt to the computer revolution of the 1980's.

What you KNOW is the enemy of your survival in a fast evolving world.

Even younger people are subject to this as their "black hole" was filled by yet older people.

There is a trend among Millennials to have their children later in life -- those children are being filled with OLDER truths.  The rate of change of this society may slow down because of that.

This human limit is the essential source of all Romantic Conflict.

Can "Love" conquer this aversion to study and learning?

That is an important question to explore in fiction, using all the social science and brain studies you can find because  studying and learning your spouse is the key to the Happily Ever After.

You can not agree to disagree -- therein lies misery ever after as the gulf of knowlege unshared grows ever wider with our accelerating rate of change.

Men must learn to look at the world through their woman's knowledge of truth, while women must understand the world through their man's understanding of facts.

Truth and facts should coincide, but due to black-hole-programing, they don't always quite make it.

The truth/fact dichotomy is the "All" that love must "Conquer."

Now the question is: "Does Conquering Actually Work?"

Does winning a war cause war to end?  If so, how come we still have wars?

With all our change, have we "progressed" or have we "regressed?"

Ponder the Battle of the Sexes.  Does the winner have a survival advantage?

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

What Futurologists Do Part 1

What Futurologists Do

Part 1

by

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

I found this highlighted image post on Twitter, posted by Brandon Morse ( @TheBrandonMorse) 

It is a quote from a book by Carl Sagan, titled The Demon-Haunted World and the post had amassed over 27,000 Likes.

Would you like to sell another 27,000 copies of your latest novel?

Study this quote, and note it was written before 1996 - travel back into history and study the previous 10 years Sagan had just lived through.

Think about what his world and the younger people in it seemed like, what they wanted and what they were willing to do to get what they wanted.

One more consideration -- think about what actions the 20-somethings of 1996 believed would cause the result they wanted.

Sagan is talking about a mis-match between how the currently emerging into power generation thinks the world works, and how it actually does work.

And by "the world" I mean physics-math-chemistry-spirituality.  Notice his disparaging remark about mysticism, which you might expect of Sagan.

By "the world" today most people mean politics, social justice, what the majority have the right to take from the rich minority - the 1%, and the loss of a distinction between a right and a privelege.

Now, sitting in the head of a futurist in 1996, look at 2016 -- a nice 20 year generational shift.

Note what information he had to work with, and what conclusions he drew.

Match his conclusions to the actual reality of 2017 (and pretty soon, 2018).

Now you are sitting in 2018 -- what does 2038 look like to you?

What can you write today that will be quoted on Twitter (or its successor) in 2039?

We are convinced Love Conquers All -- but we rarely consider what "all" there is to conquer.

We hear politicians adamantly affirming they "fight for you" -- for your rights, for the betterment of your life -- but they never say who they are fighting against or define precisely why that enemy of yours is out to destroy you, and why you can't defend yourself without their help.

And we continue to read novels about Love Conquers All -- most often without actually defining what there is that has to be conquered.

Write THE definitive novel about "the all" that must be conquered, define it, nail it, name it, and show its weakness, show how it can be conquered by Love.

Consider whether you are the enemy that must be conquered by love.

Look at what Sagan wrote -- he sketched an "all" that needs conquering by Love.  Consider how that can be done.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Trazzles and Tweedlers

While re-shelving our books in our newly redecorated basement "library," I came across WHICH WAY TO THE FUTURE? (2001), a collection of essays from ANALOG by the long-time editor of the magazine, Stanley Schmidt. While most of the stories in ANALOG don't excite me, because I don't really get into "hard science fiction" (a term Schmidt doesn't like; he maintains that rigorously science-based SF should be called simply "science fiction"), I've always loved the editorials. My favorite article in WHICH WAY TO THE FUTURE?, "Bold and Timid Prophets," contemplates how visions of the future (in both factual predictive writings and fiction) typically measure up to the actual development of culture and technology. Often a story set in the future imagines the technology as a perfected version of the cutting-edge inventions of the present day. For example, a nineteenth-century speculative novel might envision the twentieth century as powered by highly advanced steam engines. Making an imaginative leap into a world filled with devices that do things impossible in the current state of knowledge is much harder.

Schmidt illustrates this problem by starting the essay with an ordinary letter written in the late 1990s as it would appear to a reader in the 1860s. He substitutes a nonsense word for every term that didn't exist then (or combines familiar words in ways that would have made no sense in the mid-nineteenth century, such as "answering machine"). (I think he cheated a bit with "pilot." Boats had pilots for a very long time before airplanes began to need them.) "Plane" becomes "trazzle"; "computer" becomes "tweedler." "Fooba" substitutes for "e-mail" and "zilp" for "fax." Even where the nineteenth-century reader could recognize all the words, many of the sentences would appear to express impossibilities. How could parents know the sex of a baby in utero? How could a person travel a total of 20,000 miles in only one month? How could a human heart be transplanted? How could a transatlantic trip take "just a few hours"?

Doubtless the distant future will include inventions and achievements we can't currently imagine because they'll depend on discoveries and technologies unknown to us, just as the nineteenth century couldn't predict the practical applications of electromagnetic theory and quantum mechanics. Even the boldest and best of classic SF writers get things amusingly wrong when writing about the not-so-distant future. "Where's my flying car?" illustrates one well-known unfulfilled prediction. Personally, I shudder at the thought of flying cars being anything other than toys for the rich. Autonomous ground cars, which now seem just over the horizon, sound much more desirable. What I really want, however, is my housecleaning robot, which Heinlein in THE DOOR INTO SUMMER expected by 1970. Also, in HAVE SPACE SUIT, WILL TRAVEL, Heinlein envisioned a near future with a moon colony—and slide rules. The social structures portrayed in some of his juvenile novels are even less "bold" than the concept of slide rules on the moon—the families of the twenty-first century look like suburban American households of the 1950s—but, in light of his posthumously published first novel, FOR US, THE LIVING, that absence of innovation probably wasn't his fault. I suspect editors of books for teenagers in the 1950s wouldn't have accepted anything unconventional in that area.

Schmidt concludes that "well-balanced science fiction" needs "both extrapolation—things you can clearly see are possible—and innovation—the things you can't see how to do, but also can't prove impossible." That's one thing I like about J. D. Robb's Eve Dallas mysteries; their vision of the 2060s strikes me as convincingly futuristic but also plausible in terms of current technological and social trends.

WHICH WAY TO THE FUTURE? addresses a variety of other intriguing topics, such as the definitions of "intelligence" and "human," why we haven't been contacted by aliens (the Fermi Paradox), the proliferation of unrealistically exaggerated fears of marginal hazards, etc. Fortunately, Amazon offers numerous used copies of this fascinating collection.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Romance Futurology Part 1 - How Will Security Work in the Future

Romance Futurology

Part 1

How Will Security Work in the Future? 

There is a genre of Romance called simply Futuristic.  For the most part, formerly, setting a story in "the" future qualified that story as science fiction. Today, the futuristic romance is a growing genre.

We've been discussing genre at length and depth, and have noted how, over generations, "genre" of all types has very fluid definitions.

My take on "genre" definitions is that the genre identification is more about what is left out than about what is included.

Readers look for another novel to give them the same "feeling" that a previous one did -- and often look for the same setting or time period as a signal that this novel is like that one.

"The" future is another such setting clue often used by readers to choose which book to spend money on.  If you are "in the future" then you are not in Regency England or Imperial Rome.  Thing is, with futuristic worldbuilding, a writer can indeed include time travel visits to ancient times, and modern interstellar versions of government by aristocracy.  So "futuristic" may be as difficult to identify as all science fiction has been.

In science fiction, we worldbuild "a" future for a story by extrapolating trends, either straight line "if this goes on" or in a curve "if only" or "what if?"

But we can't expect to write about "the" future -- only "a" future.  The future we choose to create either generates a story, or is generated by a story you want to tell.

Last week, we looked at trends in publishing, and how they swing back and forth regularly.  Your story, the story you were born to tell, will fit into a trend somewhere -- your problem as a commercial writer is to identify the current trends and watch carefully, preparing a manuscript to present right when the trend that supports it begins to gather force.

Some trends are so big that we can't see them while sitting inside them.

The Internet and email were such a trend.  Everything changed when the concept "browser" was deployed by envisioning the World Wide Web.  Before that, Universities were pouring thousands of hours into creating electronic records, books, facts, images, accessible by special and very idiosyncratic decoding software.  They even gave such software a woman's name, as Librarians were mainly female.

Then came the idea of standardizing all that coding and accessing it with a piece of software that could read "the" markup language we know today as html (hypertext markup language).

To look behind a web page, right-click your mouse on a blank spot on a web page and choose "view page source" -- the "page source" now includes little program call-outs that tell the server on the machine where the page resides to run a little program to deliver "interactivity" -- so much of the "page source" you can access is just instructions to do things, and you can't see what those things are.

Where will this be in 20 years from now -- a hundred years?

We're already doing a lot of this by voice command.  Artificial Intelligence is now considered the next big disruptor and it is ready to rock-n-roll big time.

This year, UPS is testing using drones parked on top of their delivery vans to distribute packages in a neighborhood.  The FAA thinks this is a fine idea.  Those drones couldn't work without A.I. and other advanced tools that will soon bring you autonomous driving cars.

For maybe 80 years, we've had science fiction stories about A.I. Characters that humans fall in love with.  It is starting to seem less grotesque, less of something to resist.

But a lot of folks working on the bleeding edge of A.I. are sounding notes of alarm.  A.I. can now be projected to take over most of the jobs work-a-day people make a living at.  The only jobs left will require genius level intelligence, and creativity -- and even those are within reach of Artificial Intelligence that can learn and keep learning.

Recently, there was an article about Artificial Intelligence learning to become aggressive, initiating attacks not just responding.

So far, nobody has identified something artificial intelligence can't do that humans can.  Every time some human function is defined as uniquely human, some human genius teaches A.I. to do that (or even do it better.)

That is a trend!

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2017/05/trends-and-counter-trends-part-1.html

We love A.I., we adore artificial intelligence, -- we create artificial intelligence and nurture and adore it as we do our children.

What is really going on here?

How will the human/A.I. interface develop?  Will artificial intelligence become a legal person (Heinlein explored that at length, and Star Trek's Character Data gives us many new facets to consider)?

What about Artificial Intelligence Refugees washing ashore, fleeing some sort of cyberwar?

A.I. is being discussed as the solution to cyber-security, being able to sift vast Big Data pools and sort out the one or two major trouble spots (terrorists).

Right now, the entire security industry may be taking itself too seriously (Romantic Comedy is a fabulous genre for tackling this).  The I.T. folks at work keep making you change passwords, and berate people for opening emails or plugging in a thumb drive.

Mobile Devices and services now require two-step authentication -- you have to have a smartphone to read your news feed on Yahoo. (well, there is a work-around right now, but that won't last).

The attitude behind the policies of cyber-security gurus is that if you get hacked, it is YOUR FAULT (not the fault of the attacker. Only the victim is to blame in cyber-warfare).  You did something wrong.  You breached protocol. You opened an email.  You visited a website.  You put in your personal data (but of course I.T. forces you to identify yourself!)

We are all tangled up in a ball of twine and quite ludicrous about it because we have (in a cultural panic) set aside several time-tested principles of life.

We have done this because the benefits of online communications are bigger than the threats and costs (so far).

Since we can't stop people in other countries attacking us for profit, our "security" folks attack US.  They blame the victim of the sucker-punch rather than the immorality of the sucker-puncher, and our own defense (our immune system!) attacks us, forcing us to change our way of doing things because of something someone we don't know did to us.

"Security" works differently if your Identity is known to the Security Officer.

Ask yourself:  When was the last time Donald Trump was strip searched for the egregious crime of attempting to enter the White House?

Does Presidential Security torture, torment and beat up on the President?

Then why do the cyber-security I.T. department folks beat up on YOU when you try to access your Cloud account with this or that company?  Stop what you're doing (you can't enter the white house)! Identify Yourself!  (like they don't know what they are responsible for knowing?)  Papers Please! ACCESS DENIED!  You have to wait three days to try again.

Where did this come from?  What is really going on here? What trends produced this deplorable state of business?

The principles we have abandoned are "don't blame the victim" and "innocent until proven guilty" and "I am who I say I am; if I lie, I will be removed from society, maybe forever."

You shouldn't blame a victim because next thing you know, you will be a victim.

Quality of life is severely infringed on, productivity sliced in half, and happiness beyond reach if you live an entirely DEFENSIVE life in a defensive (curled inward) posture.  The H.E.A. ending as we currently envision it can not happen inside a "secure" defense perimeter that punishes you for the deeds of those outside your defense perimeter who are guilty of life destroying behavior.

Logic and reality have long established you can not prove innocence, but you can prove guilt.  So we must presume people innocent until we can prove guilt.

Identity is sovereignty -- personal sovereignty is the bedrock of Western Civilization.  This dates back to the Magna Carta, probably farther.  There's a Biblical quote: "how goodly are your tents, O Jacob."  This refers to the camping habit while wandering in the desert where tents were set up so that the entry ways did not face into each other -- giving PRIVACY to the neighbors.

Privacy is the bedrock of personal sovereignty.

You can't DEFEND privacy or security or innocence or Identity, and thus the net result of all these elements, FREEDOM.

Once you surround these elements with "defense" walls, they no longer exist!  The very act of DEFENDING obliterates what is to be preserved.

So our entire cyber-security industry is set up backwards.

The ancient Chinese knew this. The best defense is a good offense.

You don't punish your employer (the voters are the employer) for having been attacked by an outsider (non-citizen).

The trend for Romance Futurologists to follow and extrapolate is, "How can we use A.I. to rectify our errors in cyber-security and every other sort of security, national and personal?"  How can we use A.I. to reverse the entire I.T. Industry's take on how to "secure" us, given A.I. has now learned to be aggressive.  (OK, we "shouldn't" -- but will we? And what if we did?)

What will we try first?  What will we try last that actually works?  (and who will fall in love with their A.I. protector?  What fruit would such a union produce?)

Do we love to do the protecting -- or to be protected?

What's sexy about protection?

"Security" seems to be a word that refers to an absence of risk.  Futurologists have to ask whether risk is, itself, sexy?

How much "security" do we need and when do we need it?  At what price in productivity?  If all human jobs will be un-invented by A.I. servants, do humans have to be "productive" any more?

Will life be one long orgy?  Or will we all pick up and move to the stars, letting A.I. have Earth?

What price Freedom?

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Thorium - The Real Hope For E-books?

Thorium

The Real Hope For E-books

by

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Green's the thing.

This blog entry originally published in December 2009, is still valid in 2019.  Much work has been done with Thorium, and in 2018, the BBC did a story on India mining beaches for Thorium.  And, in 2018, I'm seeing comments by owners of all-electric cars (LEAF in particular) saying they pay less per mile than with gasoline.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181016-why-india-wants-to-turn-its-beaches-into-nuclear-fuel
Notice the black background on this blog?  Black with white letters takes less electricity to render on your monitor than white with black letters. Read green!

The problem of e-books vs traditional publishing isn't just a green issue -- it's a writer's worldbuilding paradise!

Devon Monk, the author I raved about last week got me thinking about electricity, magic, technology and worldbuilding.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/12/recommending-devon-monk.html

And before that I pointed you to a twitter-based worldbuilding exercise by a group of writers and a publisher creating an anthology.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/12/worldbuilding-by-committee.html

Then I ran into an article I will point you to at the end here. It crystalized a vision of "the" future for me, and I think you can use this to build backgrounds for your own fiction.

My blog entries on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com give glimpses into the mechanism of a writer's mind, so let's retrace my reasoning a step at a time to look at the whole seething, bursting phenomenon of the e-book infrastructure and its ecological sense.

This applies to all the information available via the internet and to it's "green" component and a thousand questions SF/Romance has not yet addressed that I know of (please drop references to great SF/Romance on the comments here!).

It's still very problematic whether the budding trend toward e-books, e-music downloads, feature film downloads, the indie film makers distributing free downloads on the internet ( http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20091226/wl_time/08599195000500 is a Yahoo news story about this phenomenon) the whole web 2.0, cloud computing direction and the changing business model of writers which I've written about here ...

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/06/crumbling-business-model-of-writers.html

...along with the "paperless office" writers and publishers are adopting, is actually greener than the old fashioned method of hauling paper around the world.

On Cloud Computing, see this page (in an article on failing to succeed) which shows graphically how the business decision making process can go awry (look at the table under the picture of the black box):

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/fail_oracle/3/

And remember as I indict government decision making below, I'm NOT advocating the decision making system used by bussiness either. Focus your mind on the decision making processes used in our world, and how any little change in those processes might change the world you set stories within. This is basic sociological science fiction using futurology.

In the Worldbuilding By Committee article linked above, the Twitter group kept coming back to the idea of replacing government with a corporation, i.e. a Company Town for the venue for these stories. That has been done, and well done, so here, I'm trying to get writers to think outside the box we normally don't even know we're inside of.

Ask the next question. That was Theodore Sturgeon's motto when it came to SF writing (he wrote the Star Trek episode Amok Time that started the whole Spock phenomenon). He was a good friend of mine and an influence on my SF writing. Here's where I discussed that.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/theodore-sturgeon-ask-next-question.html

So when doing futurology, you need to "ask the next question" not just find an answer and stop thinking. E-books and green tech are fraught with next questions to ask because both are driven by government decision making (e-books and copyright; green tech and our power supply).

If not government as we know it, or corporations as we know them, then what? To find "then what" take a close look at what has gone on in this world since 1950 and the rise of the buzzword ecology (yes, the SF magazines of the 1950's obssessed on "ecology").

The problem with all "green" tech is electricity and what it takes to get enough of it to make the products that are supposed to be greener. E-book reader screens are very dirty to make. Batteries are worse! (you gotta read Devon Monk's novels)

The carbon footprint of say a KWH of electricity produced by a solar panel has to include what it took to make the solar panel array, transport and install it and maintain it (every time the service guys come out, it costs gas for their truck, etc) PLUS how fast the panel wears out (like lightbulbs, a solar panel only lasts the time the manufacturer builds into it on purpose).

I found out a shocking thing when shopping for additional attic insulation.

The solar panels they sell in the USA (as of 2009) are (by Fed law) not allowed to be as efficient and long-lasting as the ones sold in Europe.

The ones sold in the USA lose (I think it was) 20% of their ability to produce electricty in (I think) 10 years but are rated to last a longer than 10 years. Whatever the figures were, they're different in 2010. The exact figures are unimportant. The point here is that government makes these decisions and shapes our world in ways that most people don't know about. (that insulation salesman wasn't supposed to tell me that fact because he also sells solar panels).

In other words, you'll be thrilled the year you install a solar panel and probably won't notice the gradual fall-off of production of electricty you can sell back to your utility (if your local utility is set up to buy it back) over time. But the good deal you got on install turns into a real bad deal with time, and you never know that if you lived elsewhere you could have gotten a better deal.

You never see the carbon footprint (or any of the other exotic and seriously toxic pollutants) generated when the panel and its components are created, assembled, transported to a warehouse, sent to another distribution point, etc etc until it's installed on your property. Then of course there's the gasoline needed to tote it away when it dies. Then landfill problems. Recycle doesn't always recover as much as is expended doing the recycle; it depends what you include when you calculate.

The whole idea of plug-in commuter cars depends on CHEAP electricity that's cleaner to produce than what we have now.

At the moment it costs more for enough electricity to commute to work than it costs for enough gasoline to commute to work, and running cars by plug-in electricity is dirtier than gasoline.

The Obama initiative to create the "smart grid" and replace our electrical distribution system is really great, and I'm all for it no matter what it costs (frankly been irked that it wasn't done 20 years ago, but we have better computer controllers now).

That smart grid will reduce the cost of electricity, but Big Brother will be able to deny you electricity if you misbehave (brown-out a single house that's over-using, and nevermind that they have someone on hospice life-support equipment).

But we do need to rebuild the grid, and smart-grid is the way to go.

If you read Devon Monk's novels, you see why I'm thinking about the grid! You have no idea how romantic this grid-tech stuff can be if you don't read novels like Monk's!

But which way to build a "smart grid" is a decision that will be made by the same government process that gave us the decision to disallow U.S. residents from having the same high efficiency solar panels Europeans can buy. Will our grid be as smart as other countries? (build that world, don't argue for or against my assuptions here. Don't get distracted by your opinions. Ask The Next Question and build a fictional world from those questions.)

Yet smart grid is not enough. We need to be able to feed that grid with a lower pollution footprint. (Yay, Magic!)

Next Question: Do we really need a cleaner power source? What if we don't find one?

Well, 2010 is (in the USA) a census year, but population actually grows every year.

And that's what's been happening. Population has out-grown our energy production capacity, not just because each individual pulls more from the grid but because there are more of us. Substantially more! (some undocumented; some with pirating taps into the grid too -- smart grid will find them and cut them off).

The 2010 census may find 330 million of us in the USA. In 1960, there were just over 179 million in the USA.
http://www.censusscope.org/us/chart_popl.html

I haven't tried to hunt down the stat on how many KWH/year each USA person used in 1960, but just looking at my own life, it was a LOT less than today, however frugal I attempt to be. I use an electric toothbrush that's got a rechargable battery. An unthinkable concept (even in SF novels) in the 1960's. And back then, I had a manual typewriter.

I have seen stats bandied about that indicate how our gasoline and electricity use per person has risen over these decades. The USA is really shamefully profligate in usage.

But what do we use, and what do we get for it? Is our usage worth it? Do we produce a profit from all this convenience? And how do we reduce our total footprint in absolute terms while still increasing our population at this rate? Because the world can't support this current world population (nevermind the growth) if we all use power the way the USA folks currently do.

I saw a TV feature retrospective last week showing that the world population will reach a full 7 billion by 2012 and rise to 8 billion only 16 years later. That's a 1 Billion population increase in 16 years. Population increase is geometric, you know. The interval it takes to produce a billion more people will get shorter and shorter.

In the 1950's collapse of the entire world ecology was predicted by 2050, due to overpopulation and that was without the intense rise in usage of gasoline and electricity.

Today the boogey man is Global Warming. Tomorrow it will be something else, food crop fungus, the extinction of the bees, -- remember acid rain?

With more people, "human activity" will have greater and greater effect on ecology.

It doesn't matter (for a worldbuilding writer) what aspect of global resources maxes out first - collapse is collapse and our population growth and increasing technology has us headed right for total collapse because of our primate-based habit of tossing our trash (pollution from energy use, non-biodegredable packaging, or even just sewage) aside and expecting it not to come back to haunt us (like dropping a bananna peel from a tree and forgetting about it).

I've seen bragging statistics about how much manufacturing has increased the efficiency of gadgets and cars so they do the same but use less electricity. Oh we are so good! But, there are so many more of us that the total amount of oil and electricity we use is still growing at a rate that will reach a maximum and not be able to grow any more even though the population still grows.

We either have to drastically reduce population or reduce our standard of living.

SFF/R writers find neither alternative acceptable. Love is. And the less time we spend working, the more time there is for love.

So since Love Conquers All, it better get conquering real fast.

We need a cheap, abundant, non-polluting, non-nuclear waste-to-store-forever, non-weapons grade Uranium producing, non-fetus-mutating, source of POWER.

And the astonishing fact is that we have indeed had that magical source of POWER since the 1950's and have turned away from implementing that magical technology for political reasons (according to the article I found).

Maybe this article nails the causes for that turn-away from the "real" solution, maybe not. Maybe this scientific article is actually pure fantasy. I don't know and for the purposes of this worldbuilding excerise it doesn't matter.

But I do vaguely remember reading probably in the 1970's that the Thorium nuclear power plant technology had failed, and it would be impossible to use.

According to this article that I just found last week, that was not true. According to this article the choice to fuel atomic power plants with Uranium was made because the government wanted to make war not love in the 1960's, and that statement itself could be politically slanted. It doesn't matter. We're thinking SFR here.

Personally, I enjoy love more than war, even in fiction. I do know there are those who don't feel that way, and huge lucrative industries (such as video games) are founded on feeding the lust for destruction. But maybe there's marketing room for another industry based on SFR?

If this article explains what happened in the 1950's to the 1970's correctly, the huge power-crunch we are in right now could have been avoided if government hadn't meddled in the business decisions of the power industry.

Here's the article for you to judge for yourself (there are some other articles you might want to look at linked on that page too), and while you're reading think about the the consequences of allowing government to decide the direction of the health care delivery system by the same mechanism used to decide the direction of the power-delivery-system's development. Remember, conflict is the essence of story.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes/

And a prior ABC News story on the topic of using Thorium instead of Uranium in nuclear power plants:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200604/s1616391.htm

See? It doesn't matter which party or which politicians are in charge. It's the decision mechanism that needs a "next question," more than politics or ideology.

As a voter, would knowing about the law against you having an efficient solar panel installed on your house, or about forcing you to use nuclear power from Uranium rather than from Thorium to power your house or car, make a difference in what you say to your congressman at town hall meetings? Conflict is the essence of story. Marriages are made and broken by these kinds of conflicts involving larger world-girdling issues (population explosion; pollution; political ascendancy).

The worldbuilding writer can slice and dice that decision mechanism and create whole new political systems. Devon Monk just used the usual, ho-hum corporate structure and barely acknowledged the government structure that supports the corporation's rights to patents and profits.

The only innovative thinking in the Allie Beckstrom universe is the idea of conduits of magic akin to the electrical grid, and the magic grid isn't even "smart."

The SF of the 1960's would not have accepted worldbuilding that was so rudimentary.

I'm still searching for writers of today who will not stop short of asking the next question like that. When you build a "world" you can't just change ONE thing about our current world and call it Fantasy or SF.

Why? You saw how there's a connection between the kind of solar panel you can buy, the health care system, and nuclear war potential connected to power generation. That's our real world. Any fantasy world must have that property too -- connections. If one thing changes (magical conduits beneath certain neighborhoods in the city), that will change everything else a little bit.

Devon Monk hit on a lot of the changes that her magic-technology would bring about, but left out other things that would be impacted. In defense of her work, I have to say that she is less than a generation into the new technology. However, if you think back only 20 years to 1990, and the attitude of publishers toward the field of e-books then as compared to now, the attitude of retailers toward amazon and online merchandising then as compared to now, you see that the changes created by a single technological innovation come faster, and are more pervasive than depicted in the Allie Beckstrom novels.

When you're building your world, don't stop thinking. Ask The Next Question.

Understand the links between apparently disconnected trends and forces in our real world, and create a pattern of links just like our real world pattern among the postulates of your constructed world.

Revealing those hidden connections and patterns of links is what Art is all about. Show don't tell how the real world is connected by building your world to reveal that pattern.

Here's an exercise, just for fun.

Delve into the issues of human nature that produce the kinds of people who end up in charge of those government and business decisions, and the kinds of motivations that drive people into politics. Create a character with 6 problems to solve.

Now postulate an alternate universe where the Thorium - Uranium choice was made by a different mechanism toward a different objective from different motives than the articles I've mentioned show in our everyday world.

Postulate a world where there's no pollution, and no real difference in energy usage and convenience gadgets between USA and the poorest tribal regions of Afghanistan. What happens when everyone in China can freely access the internet and all the opinions rampant around the world?

Would we have a drug and slave trade grossing enough cash to buy governments if thorium power plants were the standard around the world?

Would human population have exploded even faster and be at just as great a risk of destroying the world as we are now? What resource would we max out instead of energy? Space to live? Oxygen? A lot of people today are worried about the drinking water supply. Do we drink enough water to keep our kidneys healthy or grow plants to ward off vitamin deficiency?

Do this exercise a few times. You have plenty of time. You can do it in the shower.

I think there's a feature film script here for a political historian writer, tracing the decision making process that went on between 1950 and 1970 (McCarthy Hearings; Korean War; Viet Nam War; Feminism (talk about genies and bottles, but your constructed world needs a set of macro-issues and trends like that).)

In that atmosphere of the '50's to '70's, the road of human history forked in a sharp V, and we went down the Uranium branch of that V.

Remember the fabulous film about Madam Curie, a woman physicist with a real, original discovery, and how politics buried that discovery for so long? How could it be that Weinberg's life so focused on the technology of thorium use hasn't been made into a similar movie?

Why did Al Gore win the Nobel prize for An Inconvenient Truth? Shouldn't that inconvenient truth be that this global warming issue could have been avoided had the Thorium - Uranium decision gone for Thorium?
Wouldn't a movie about Weinberg's life have been a Nobel type subject? Who better than a politician to implement the creation of such a deep expose of the political decision making process?

How did that Uranium - Thorium engineering decision happen in the political arena?

And of course the real burning question: Is It Too Late?

Can we rescue the world by going Thorium now?

Can love conquer political decision making?

Is it enough to "win" on the thorium issue? Don't we need to win on the issue of the kind of decision making process we rely on?

Just look what happened this past weekend with an attempt to bring down another passenger plane. After the attempt nearly succeeded, then (and only then) the authorities "decide" to increase security for the homebound holiday travelers. Talk about locking the barn door!

The terrorist objective is to wear the larger enemy down by luring them into wasting resources. One lone person making a single bold move, with the effluvium of an organization behind him, costs him a few hundred dollars and his life -- but costs the larger enemy millions of dollars. That's a successful terrorist move.

There's a 1950's novel with the same title that Marion Zimmer Bradley used, TWO TO CONQUER. It was by Eric Frank Russell and postulated an imaginary terrorist organization that cost a planetary government (of aliens who didn't know much about humans) enough to almost bankrupt it. In actuality it was only one human man cleverly planting "evidence" of a "movement" by spreading slogans around. When caught and imprisoned he invented whole cloth out of pure imagination a non-material partner with nearly magical powers, and sold himself to his jailers as a powerful threat. It bought him enough time to get rescued.

The novel (written by an author with real world experience in these matters) explained the tactics of the terrorist as clearly as several currently popular (and old classic) TV shows explain the confidence rackets so you can armor yourself against being taken as a mark. (Mission: Impossible, Remmington Steele, and today White Collar).

Why is it that government's decision making mechanism leads us to increase security after a terrorist feint, rather than before an actual move?

------------
Here is a quote from a comment posted on a Newsweek article about the US Terrorist Databases at
http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/declassified/archive/2009/12/28/what-u-s-intelligence-knew-about-the-underpants-bomber.aspxHere's the comment:
I invented a holistic semantic system that is far superior to what the U.S. Government is using -- in the words of many of their own specialists, and leading scientists in CS, but to date we have had no luck in overcoming the adoption barriers facing small and emerging technology companies attempting to resolve serious problems. One recent blog post of mine might be of interest:
How to prevent the Fort Hood tragedy, by design.
http://kyield.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/preventing-the-next-fort-hood-tragedy-by-design/">http://kyield.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/preventing-the-next-fort-hood-tragedy-by-design/
Another paper written in laymen's language is a use case scenario developed specifically for the DHS:
http://www.kyield.com/images/SCENARIO_3-_Roger_the_maintenance_man_at_the_hydro_dam.pdf">http://www.kyield.com/images/SCENARIO_3-_Roger_the_maintenance_man_at_the_hydro_dam.pdf
We've invented the solution, but it has yet to be adopted, despite a significant amount of direct communications at decision levels in the past three admins.
Mark Montgomery
Founder - Kyield
http://www.kyield.com
http://kyield.wordpress.com
---------------

See what I mean about worldbuilding from the patterns available in our real world?  Keep asking the next question.

Why is it that government's decision making mechanism leads us to focus and expend resources on a failed attempt to bring an aircraft down rather than watching for a real thrust coming from the other direction? (haven't they ever read any classic romances where the pretty girl or a thrown stone distracts the castle guards and the miscreant sneaks right into the castle past the distracted guard? I loved the TV show, Zorro!)

The worldbuilder needs to look at the pattern of these breaking-news Events and analyze the forces causing the behavior of large institutions (government, corporations, or non-profits) just as the writers of those old TV shows make the behavior of individual guards clear.

So ask the next question. What does it take to go greener and accommodate a larger population? What happens if we don't go all-e-book paperless office? Why is there such resistance? What would have to change to melt that resistance? Why doesn't government trick us into going all e-book the way it tricked us into going all-Uranium?  Where is the glitch in government decision making?  Corporate decision making?  Find it. Change it. Change everything in your universe to match.  Write a story in that universe. Win the Nobel Prize for PNR! 

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
6 arguably greener e-book titles; 4 on Kindle

The New CB Radio: "Come on back!"

Let's do a little futurology today, always a good exercise for SF/F/R writers.

Patric Michael pointed me to this YouTube video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN2HAroA12w&feature=dir

It's a high-production-values animated satire about addiction to twitter.com and tweeting. The theme seems to be that the practice of tweeting is pointless.

The piece is worth seeing just for the production itself, not the message.

The message is populist but I think way off base. However, it's worth listening to carefully because it does express accurately and with an appropriate amount of tasteful humor what non-tweeters see tweeters doing.

This is a viewpoint I've seen expressed variously about golfers, runners, skiers, gamers, bird watchers, dogshow competitors, and hobbyists of all sorts. Tweeting is much cheaper than most social activities.

But frankly, because of the social barrier to social networking highlighted in this video, I am not at all sure twitter.com will survive this economic downturn. It was heavily funded at startup and is still striving to deal with that debt.

I've been on twitter.com (as http://www.twitter.com/JLichtenberg so you can follow me there easily once you set up a free account) for only a few months. I'm just beginning to discover some of the off-twitter.com tweeting tools that have built up around this communication device.

There are endless blogs and pages full of tutorials on how to social network, and I've read only a sparse few of those. Lately, there have been tutorials circulated for how to use twitter to advertise your wares -- any product you want to sell. Those tutorials are of interest to writers because we have books to hawk. People with something to sell see a market (word of mouth is the best advertising) and greed ignites the hearts and minds. The smoke from that inner fire of greed makes your tweets reek.

Veteran tweeters shun the commercial push, and other tutorials advise strictly against making your tweets about you and what you want or are offering. The advice is to make your tweets about other people, not yourself or your wares. Tweet about a well defined subject, and give real information -- that's the kernal of the advice I've seen. The key is to GIVE.

And when you give real value for your reader's time, you tend to get "retweeted" (which is like a good online review for a book - word spreads).

Here is an article on getting retweeted (seriously, people are studying twitter.com member behaviors this closely). The article gives this advice: typically, people want to pass your Tweet on for one of three reasons: they found it useful, funny, or informative

http://www.mediabistro.com/prnewser/social_networks/how_to_get_retweeted_advice_from_three_pr_pros_110370.asp
I've seen the exact same advice and admonitions in several articles. Apparently there is an audience on the web that thirsts for advice on how to relate to new people you've just met. Or maybe there are just a lot of people with nothing of their own to say who are repeating to you what you already know. This might be considered in the category of a useless waste of time.

However, I see something going on here that apparently a lot of people don't.

Place the micro-blog or tweet (a 140 character message useful because it will auto-shrink a long URL into a micro-URL -- a service available at some websites directly) against the background of the macro-trends of the world over the last few decades. (Good futurology starts in the past, you see.)

Blogs are the equivalent of the snailmail letters and letter-zines and APAzines (all SF fanines used to be non-fiction until Star Trek fanfic hit a voracious market). Fans used to exchange these longer more involved essays on the subject of the moment, the latest book, movie or TV show on paper, or (again with the advent of Star Trek fandom) by telephone.

Twitter and micro-blogs on social networks are the equivalent of the post cards we used to exchange. The phone calls tended to be midnight low rates, and last for hours apiece, so they were more like conversational blogs with lots of comments.

What you can fit on a post card, taken out of the context of the 'zine or round robin letters, is utterly meaningless. Yet for those to whom it is addressed, it holds great, deep, and consequential meaning.

Likewise microblogging -- any single message is meaningless. Taken in context of "who" this person is, what comments they've left on Yahoo News blogs, in their own blog, comments on other people's blogs -- in context, the microtweet "Had pizza for lunch" gains GREAT meaning (knowing this person is allergic to milk products but addicted to pizza).

The odd thing is, I never (ever) saw any tutorial on how to use letters and post cards, or even how to publish a paper 'zine. People just knew how to social network despite the week or more between sending and receiving. Even us nerds who were considered so socially undeveloped in those days hit the ground running once connected with someone who had something to say we wanted to hear! No tutorial necessary. Pure instinct. The instinct of a social creature finally finding another member of our own society -- people who read.

I recently saw an item that the post office is closing several more distribution plants and firing a huge percentage of the postal workers in layoffs and attrition. Nobody snails anything they can e anymore.

The snailmail fan network generation raised their children on Sesame Street. That show reduced attention spans. Children grew to adulthood without the ability to sit still and concentrate on one thing long enough to read a book. Parents used the fascinating TV screen as a baby sitter while they snail-mailed and many have lived to regret that.

In the 1970's the biggest topic in macro-trends was the information explosion and how would we ever deal with so much data. SF writers doing the futurology never got the results of the information explosion right.

Then AOL gave the average American online access with dialup. That business model collapsed as cable provided broadband. Now it's wireless everywhere. 3G networks. More information, faster eventually meant music, video and TV shows on your computer or cell phone.

Google emerged with an innovative algorithm to conquer a lot of that deluge of information. You can now find what you want when you want it. Spam exploded, forcing the development of closed and monitored associations which we now call social networks or Web 2.0.

LiveJournal started the blogosphere, I think -- though there were individual web-log keepers among the geek community long before that. The blogosphere exploded, expecially after Google bought blogspot.com and blogger.com, although it was huge before that.

Meanwhile, in the 1980's and 1990's, CB Radio grew prominent. CB has limited range and frequencies reserved. When TV goes digital, more frequencies will be available for emergency first responders, but we can't have better civil defense response because a couple million out of 310 million didn't get their coupons.

Many cars had to had CB radio to talk to cops, truckers, other motorists. I've had several, and found them a lifesaver when driving interstate, when I needed to ask for help. But mostly I just listened to what engaged and interested truckers. Marvelous research tool. That trend is gone now because we have cell phones and sat phones for safety driving interstate.

With the phones came text messaging your friends. Texting is a form of microblog -- you are limited to tiny snatches of text so small people invented shorthand to squeeze something sensible into the space. Now many have forgotten there is a thing called SPELLING, not to mention capitalization conventions.

Connect the dots I've mentioned, and maybe you'll see the pattern I see.

More and more communication tools, fast, accurate, easy to use, being placed into the hands of people who have nothing to communicate except the fact that they exist and think they should be paid attention to, counted.

Check out who blogs and what they talk about in what style on this survey page:
http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/who-are-the-bloggers/

That's so similar to what drove the craze for the original CB Radio in cars, though Ham Radio operators are a different breed than the general public. The old fasioned Ham Radio operators were geekish techies and journalists who covered a world-girdling beat and kept each other informed of what was happening that the media was averse to covering. But they are a social network, too.

Occasionally, those socially driven Ham operators saved thousand of lives when mass communication went down during a disaster. They were bloggers! And today Twitter has been used exactly like that - to save lives in wildfire situations, and eventually I'm sure in earthquake and tsunami if they can keep the cell towers functioning. That is, when someone has something important to say, people pick it up and "re-tweet" it until everyone in the world knows it.

Why does twitter.com deserve the flak it gets in this animated indictment?

After all, the folks who behave in the insanely addicted fashion shown in the animation get quickly shunned on twitter (and in the old paper-based fandoms too). On twitter.com they stand out because they may be following more than a thousand people, but maybe 20 follow them. Twitter has recently instituted curbs to prevent that kind of abuse of the system, both by individuals and by salesmen and businesses.

Those individuals who can't "get it" as higlighted in the video, sign on and then never come back. So the two animation characters and their argument in this video is irrelevant to tweeters. Why do both these things happen to these kinds of people?

What is twitter.com , really about? And why did futurologists miss this potential since they were SF writers fully conversant with on-paper fandom? What are WE missing that would make a terrific novel? Movie?

The advertising and sign-in pages for most micro-blogs invite you to post something by posing you the question: What are you doing now?

And that's where the whole thing goes wrong. Many tutorials on how to use twitter advise against answering that question because it's the wrong question.

Way back when my mother was a kid, they taught things in grammar school like penmanship, ellocution, and how to write a personal letter (on paper, with a pen you dip into the ink.)

They still taught penmanship when I was in grammar school all the way to 7th grade. (I flunked.) I took to the typer the instant my Dad bought one when I was in 8th grade! But I had learned to compose the personal letter. Typing was easy.

The very first thing I typed on that typewriter was a letter to the editor of IF MAGAZINE lambasting them for the lousy artwork illustrating the stories -- they never got the image correct according to the text. I had an urgent and firey need to communicate this simple point - DRAW IT CORRECTLY. Given the high tech communications tool of the day, I did just what new tweeters do - expressed myself without even knowing the person I was yelling at, and not caring. I just had to get this message OUT. It was personal.

They published it and that changed my life. Years later, my first story was published in IF -- and had a grossly inaccurate illustration! It's as if illustrators can't read English. (Thank G-d, Patric Michael isn't one of those!)

Today, the best language courses and learning systems rely on what became known as the Ulpan system, invented by the Israelis when they had to take in more refugees than the total population of their country and somehow get them all able to speak, read and write a language in common.

The Ulpan system relies on a basic human need that is being fed by the microblogs like twitter.

The Ulpan relies on the ultimate, life-or-death, very primal (that's a word Blake Snyder uses a lot, and I'm using it in the sense he does -- as a fictional element that must be present in order to make a story happen) -- a primal human need illustrated by my need to write that first typed letter.

More primal than sex, a little less primal than the need to breathe air or to eat. But it's right in that level of primal. It is a survival necessity.

The very first thing a newborn does after taking a first breath is SCREAM.

It isn't "crying" in the sense of being driven by emotional pain.

It's more driven by physical shock. It's a scream. And that primal scream of the newborn is the first action taken by a human being. It's a reflex, clears the airways, and announces Need.

Newborns need to be cared for. They are nothing but need. Way before they have any awareness that "others" even exist, they communicate that need.

Those that don't cry, don't live.

Think about newborns abandoned in dumpsters -- that tiny little cry pierces the cold steel and sometimes rescue happens.

The CRY is uttered -- and something happens. The newborn doesn't have the brain cells to connect cause and effect at that point, but the CRY IS ANSWERED.

Way before we ever say anything on purpose to get a response, the first thing that ever happens (and this might not be true for other species out in the galaxy!) is we RECEIVE a response to something we don't even know we did.

NOTE THAT WORD RECEIVE -- it's crucial to some of the more esoteric and abtusely philosophical writer's block breakers I talk about. RECEIVE has vast mystical significance.

Receiving is simply that primal. Cry and receive. That's how we learn to communicate, and we learn it in that life-or-death circumstance and the NEED TO COMMUNICATE is engraved on every braincell with the warning SURVIVAL NECESSITY.

Using that innate need to communicate, the Ulpan method of language learning deprives the student of all other means of communication besides the language to be learned. It's often called the immersion method, but it's far more than that. The technique isn't so much the presence of the new language as the total absense of any and all other languages or methods of communication.

You don't learn by translating. You learn by acquisition (even if you're an adult). Nobody tells you what words mean. You have to figure it out.

The need to communicate is so primal that even adults end up thinking in the new language, even to the extent of forgetting how to speak their native language!

The need to communicate is that powerful.

The need to communicate can re-arrange your brain cells to use whatever channel is open. Any response that comes in will ignite the greed to communicate.

Now if you haven't watched that little animated video, watch it now with this need to communicate concept in mind. (and if you're an Alien Romance writer, watch carefully the communication gulf between these aliens from different planets in the video). Yes, even though they are both human from Earth and work in adjacent cubicles, the gulf between them is interstellar.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN2HAroA12w&feature=dir

What the one man can't grasp is that the other's need to communicate is totally independent of content - of having something to say that is selected to be of interest to those you are talking to.

A baby's first cry isn't aimed AT someone, saying "HELP ME" -- there's not yet any sense of "me" in contrast to "you." Where there's no "you" there can't be any "me." It's just SCREAM.

Placing these communication tools such as twitter into the hands of people who have nothing to say and nobody to say it to is like attending a birth, clearing an airway, and listening to that first CRY.

It's a SCREAM. It has no content. It says OUCH. It says HELP but not HELP ME, for there is no "you" to be summoned. No awareness of the identity of "other" is in that scream.

It is a SCREAM FOR ATTENTION -- a continual, hour by hour all day whimper for attention, just like a baby's fretting and learning how to fret to get results as the twitter-ites are searching the web for tutorials on social networking.

Is that SCREAM contemptible?

Think about it a bit more. If we looked at all newborns as contemptible because they can't do anything but cry, whimper, and scream, how many of us would there be?

Do these neo-tweeters need to be held in contempt? Or do they need to be nurtured until they have something to communicate, someone to communicate it to, as well as the means to do so?

Recently, a number of domains have sprung up to index twitter.com's membership so people can find like-minded people -- people who have similar interests are being drawn into circles. They then discover they do have something to say that someone else wants to hear. Eavesdrop on them and you'll hear gibberish.

So, with the advent of mass-personal communication media, Earth is girdled with a tweet-o-sphere.

What do you suppose this might look like to the Aliens Who Watch?

Do all species throughout the galaxy go through this phase of infancy in communication?

In the 1950's and 1960's, Science Fiction glibly predicted that we were being watched and that Earth was embargoed because of our SCIENTIFIC infancy. We wouldn't be admitted to the galaxy civilization until we had conquered War and made our own space ships.

Well, in the 50's and 60's -- WWII was the big shame and blot on human conscience. And Science was leading the charge to a better life for all.

What's our problem today? We have space ships and a space station, and so much orbital junk there are accidents. But the aliens haven't invited us to the galaxy picnic yet.

We still have war, and it's brewing up to be bigger than WWII unless - unless what?

UNLESS WE CAN COMMUNICATE!!!

Nope.

We can communicate -- with a fury and a vengeance. Both combatant sides in the ideological war are using these communication tools, blogs, tweets, whatever, SCREAMING their messages. But they aren't all talking about the same thing at the same time. So (like overheard tweets) their messages are incomprehensible.

We aren't in two-way communication even at the level of scratchy, static-ridden CB Radio. (Have you seen TV "news" where the interviewees and the anchor all are shouting at once? What does that imply about their audience?)

As tweeters mature, and the blogosphere evolves, perhaps we will pass some galactic agency's test in communication skills and be allowed into kindergarten for new planets -- providing we can nurture the neo-tweeters to begin to inject content into their utterances.

At the moment, though, far too great a portion of our population has nothing to say. You can generally tell who they are by the number of meaningless words they interject into their utterances. The more rage they feel, the more driven to get your attention, the more meaningless expletives pepper their sentences, and the more their posts seem like primal screams rather than messages.

Maybe our urge to communicate, primal as it is, just isn't galactic class?

What can we do to attract "their" attention? What's the primal scream of a newborn civilization? What do we have to say that anyone "out there" would want to hear? Respond to?

Think again about how the social impact of the internet and the web were missed by SF futurologists, though they predicted A.I. robots which we almost have now. Think about the bemoaning of the information explosion and how it would be a destructive force because we had no means of taming it. Now think about Google Search, Web 2.0 and social network sites like facebook and myspace.

Futurologists are as overwhelmed by the implications of twitter and blogs as their predecessors were in 1960 by the information explosion and photocopiers in every library busting copyright to smitherines.

I got an email today mobilizing blog combat targeting the blog of a Florida newspaper about an issue local to New York but with national implications for air traffic controllers. That's also going on with the Yahoo news blogs -- huge organized groups of ordinary people are swarming into combat zones on the web.

What does the popularity of twitter.com mean for the future of world society?

Please drop a note on this blog to demonstrate that you have something to say, someone to say it to other than yourself, and know how to say it. Maybe someone "out there" will notice us inside this dumpster? Maybe that won't be such a good thing? Or maybe we'll learn to talk if someone comes to teach us?

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.slantedconcept.com/