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Post by James on Jul 25, 2016 1:45:59 GMT -5
Oh for fuck sake. It was, wasn't it?
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Post by ASGetty ((Zovo)) on Jul 25, 2016 2:58:18 GMT -5
Oh for fuck sake. It was, wasn't it? Yup. |
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Post by James on Aug 2, 2016 18:11:48 GMT -5
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Post by Kaez on Aug 3, 2016 20:51:04 GMT -5
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Post by Matteo ((Taed)) on Aug 8, 2016 22:12:53 GMT -5
I want to have a wordlbuilding conversation with Kaez, but he's probably in Ohio by now.
I don't do much actual writing lately, but I still have 2 main settings that occupy my idle thoughts, and that I feel the itch to build out. One of them is my urban fantasy setting, and one of them is a sci-fi setting that I explored on AWR briefly in the final, 3-part round of one of our contests.
And I'd say that both are actually pretty far removed from what I'd call traditional worldbuilding.
As an example: the central tenet of the sci-fi setting is that it is busy. There are complexities deriving from that, but if I had to boil the feel of the setting down to its simplest level, that is what I'd land on. It takes place in a universe that is crazy big, and there's something going on under every rock.
As a result, one of the soft worldbuilding games I've been playing with that setting recently has just been noodling around with scale, essentially. Arbitrarily estimating population densities, and civilizational lifespans, and things of that nature. If a ringworld has a surface area of 3 million earths, and you assume a non-crowded population is 1 billion people per Earth, then a ringworld could comfortably hold 3 quadrillion residents.
If the Milky Way formed 8 billion years ago, and it took 3.5 billion years for Ring-building cultures to arise (same time as intelligent life on Earth), and together they average an uninterrupted rate of 1 ringworld built per thousand years, then the galaxy should host 4.5 million ringworlds, or 13.5 trillion Earth-areas, or living space for 13.5 sextillion residents galaxy-wide (not counting smaller habitats, or the billions of traditional planets, or computerized living space that should be at least as large as the non-digital environments)
So not only would building out this world to a reasonable level of accuracy be absolutely impossible, I feel like it's also counter-productive. I don't want to get anywhere close to something that feels like a complete, or even semi-complete, encyclopedia of the setting. I feel like it should be possible for someone who lives in this universe to have never even heard of entire, million-year-old civilizations. There needs to be a sense of way more going on than could possibly be documented.
And to bring that back around to an actual, practical, worldbuilding discussion, the problem then becomes what do I focus on? So far what little formal worldbuilding I've done has been pretty much ad hoc; I have a weird idea for an event or a structure or an alien race and I jot it down somewhere.
The setting has a "main" culture that I'd focus on more than others, but even within that slice I want it to feel massive. The basic idea of the whole society is that it's subscription-based and ultra-libertarian. You hold the equivalent of equity or stock options in the meta-civilization, but you're a freely incorporated individual who can subscribe to membership in as many creeds, corporations, and governments as you like. So, again, I want there to be "nations" of millions within this one culture that may have never heard of each other.
I have more to say about some of how I've been thinking about solving this problem (and, to a certain extent, whether it actually is a problem at all) but I've just written a lot and I'm sleepy, so I'm going to trail absently off now and maybe come back to talk more about this later.
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Post by ASGetty ((Zovo)) on Aug 9, 2016 12:25:28 GMT -5
I want to have a wordlbuilding conversation with Kaez, but he's probably in Ohio by now. I don't do much actual writing lately, but I still have 2 main settings that occupy my idle thoughts, and that I feel the itch to build out. One of them is my urban fantasy setting, and one of them is a sci-fi setting that I explored on AWR briefly in the final, 3-part round of one of our contests. And I'd say that both are actually pretty far removed from what I'd call traditional worldbuilding. As an example: the central tenet of the sci-fi setting is that it is busy. There are complexities deriving from that, but if I had to boil the feel of the setting down to its simplest level, that is what I'd land on. It takes place in a universe that is crazy big, and there's something going on under every rock. As a result, one of the soft worldbuilding games I've been playing with that setting recently has just been noodling around with scale, essentially. Arbitrarily estimating population densities, and civilizational lifespans, and things of that nature. If a ringworld has a surface area of 3 million earths, and you assume a non-crowded population is 1 billion people per Earth, then a ringworld could comfortably hold 3 quadrillion residents. If the Milky Way formed 8 billion years ago, and it took 3.5 billion years for Ring-building cultures to arise (same time as intelligent life on Earth), and together they average an uninterrupted rate of 1 ringworld built per thousand years, then the galaxy should host 4.5 million ringworlds, or 13.5 trillion Earth-areas, or living space for 13.5 sextillion residents galaxy-wide (not counting smaller habitats, or the billions of traditional planets, or computerized living space that should be at least as large as the non-digital environments) So not only would building out this world to a reasonable level of accuracy be absolutely impossible, I feel like it's also counter-productive. I don't want to get anywhere close to something that feels like a complete, or even semi-complete, encyclopedia of the setting. I feel like it should be possible for someone who lives in this universe to have never even heard of entire, million-year-old civilizations. There needs to be a sense of way more going on than could possibly be documented. And to bring that back around to an actual, practical, worldbuilding discussion, the problem then becomes what do I focus on? So far what little formal worldbuilding I've done has been pretty much ad hoc; I have a weird idea for an event or a structure or an alien race and I jot it down somewhere. The setting has a "main" culture that I'd focus on more than others, but even within that slice I want it to feel massive. The basic idea of the whole society is that it's subscription-based and ultra-libertarian. You hold the equivalent of equity or stock options in the meta-civilization, but you're a freely incorporated individual who can subscribe to membership in as many creeds, corporations, and governments as you like. So, again, I want there to be "nations" of millions within this one culture that may have never heard of each other. I have more to say about some of how I've been thinking about solving this problem (and, to a certain extent, whether it actually is a problem at all) but I've just written a lot and I'm sleepy, so I'm going to trail absently off now and maybe come back to talk more about this later. I think what happens a lot with world building is the problem of world-building in a vacuum; with a lack of context. It creates a sense of wanting to "flesh-out" ever nook and cranny of the world and makes it difficult to focus. Which makes it so you never actually finish because even small worlds are infinitesimally dense when it comes to "fleshing out" the details. I think, because what you're envisioning is so much larger even than most traditional world building exercises, you're running up against this pretty hard. In order to answer your question of what you should focus on, I'd suggest coming up with a narrative. Create an actual story within your setting and focus on fleshing out the details which are necessary to telling that story. Don't try to build the world and then put a story in it, tell the story and build the world around it. If there are million-year-old cultures that are completely unaware of one another; then there really isn't a lot of point in fleshing them out anyway. Just a hand-waving acknowledgement that they might be out there, somewhere, is enough until one of them actually becomes relevant. Also, I think you're underestimating your sizes. You gave an "Uncrowded Earth" a population of 1 Billion. That's way too few if we're dealing in raw surface area; that's like 1/5 of a square-mile per person. The Earth's current population is over 7 billion now, as I'm sure you're aware, but that only seems crowded because people tend to cluster into habitable areas and we can't live on the ocean. These aren't issues you'd encounter in an artificial Ring World. Something created especially for hosting life, one would think, would be optimized for such a task, eliminating as much uninhabitable area as possible. I might be wrong, you're the sci-fi buff after all, but I don't imagine a ring world as being 75% liquid water with huge swaths of uninhabitable deserts or tundra. Just a thought. |
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Post by Sekot on Aug 9, 2016 14:46:47 GMT -5
If you decide to keep the population as is, think of why that is. Does this race just not procreate as much? Do they prize having large tracts of empty/farmable land? Do they just like to be around machines?
In an ultra-rich libertarian society, the poor are going to be hilariously poor. Where do they live? How do they live their lives? Are they spread out too or are they clustered? How do the ultra rich live? How do these societies keep themselves separate and yet still have to interact economically? Or do they?
There's a whole bunch of stories you can create by answering just a few questions. Like Zovo said, if you don't want to create an encyclopedia then write some stories.
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Post by Matteo ((Taed)) on Aug 9, 2016 18:46:26 GMT -5
I think what happens a lot with world building is the problem of world-building in a vacuum; with a lack of context. It creates a sense of wanting to "flesh-out" ever nook and cranny of the world and makes it difficult to focus. Which makes it so you never actually finish because even small worlds are infinitesimally dense when it comes to "fleshing out" the details. I think, because what you're envisioning is so much larger even than most traditional world building exercises, you're running up against this pretty hard. In order to answer your question of what you should focus on, I'd suggest coming up with a narrative. Create an actual story within your setting and focus on fleshing out the details which are necessary to telling that story. Don't try to build the world and then put a story in it, tell the story and build the world around it. If there are million-year-old cultures that are completely unaware of one another; then there really isn't a lot of point in fleshing them out anyway. Just a hand-waving acknowledgement that they might be out there, somewhere, is enough until one of them actually becomes relevant. Well the interesting thing is that I'm sort of deliberately avoiding the exact approach you're recommending. I don't really have the time to commit to an actual narrative story, so I'm looking at doing some worldbuilding as a fun, lower-impact hobby that still keeps me working on something creative. My whole goal is to do some worldbuilding without needing to come up with a story. And up to this point I actually haven't felt any of the need to flesh things out ad nauseam at all. Quite the opposite: I've got a sheaf of disconnected and potentially useless notes, and I now want to force myself to take a more structured approach as part of the exercise. But I think it's still definitely going to hew away from the more completionist approach that you see someone like Kaez take, building out what amounts to an Atlas or travelogue of details, with a holistic vision and approach. That's actually why I wanted to bring this discussion up. I guess you could ask: is what I want to do even considered "worldbuilding" at all? Also, I think you're underestimating your sizes. You gave an "Uncrowded Earth" a population of 1 Billion. That's way too few if we're dealing in raw surface area; that's like 1/5 of a square-mile per person. The Earth's current population is over 7 billion now, as I'm sure you're aware, but that only seems crowded because people tend to cluster into habitable areas and we can't live on the ocean. These aren't issues you'd encounter in an artificial Ring World. Something created especially for hosting life, one would think, would be optimized for such a task, eliminating as much uninhabitable area as possible. I might be wrong, you're the sci-fi buff after all, but I don't imagine a ring world as being 75% liquid water with huge swaths of uninhabitable deserts or tundra. It's a trope. Tons of classic sci-fi assumes the present Earth is massively overpopulated, and more than a few stories peg the ideal maximum at around a billion. Individual planetary volumes will definitely blip higher in some cases, up into the hundreds of billions range for proper planet-cities, but I wanted the average density to be low. And there would definitely be huge stretches of desert and tundra and ocean included, as well as considerably weirder shit. For variety / authenticity / etc. I'm thinking large percentages of the technically available living space will be given over to nature preserves and art installations and the like. And that will actually tie in with how I want to portray the economy. So many "post-scarcity" settings ignore the fact that even in a society with wealth and power that appears infinite, there is an eventual finite limit. I want to mash together the ideas of a society where nobody needs to work to live, but where there are still necessary limits on what a single person can own or do. Fractions of a square mile per person sounds like a lot, and is, but plenty of people will want way, way more than that. What if some bored wonk decides that his new hobby is building hydraulic circuit boards the size of Nevada? There's only so many people like that your society can support before even a population as low as a billion becomes impossible. So the billion number is partly a fiscal compromise as well. In an ultra-rich libertarian society, the poor are going to be hilariously poor. Where do they live? How do they live their lives? Are they spread out too or are they clustered? How do the ultra rich live? How do these societies keep themselves separate and yet still have to interact economically? Or do they? It's going to be deliberately utopian. No poor people as we'd define them (ie. no poverty), and no consistent definition of wealth, either. There are overlapping economies of currency, fame, karma, etc., that carry different values in different situations. Like that Simpsons episode where Mr. Burns is Lenny's boss at the power plant, but Lenny is Mr. Burns' boss in the Stonecutters. And the civilization's overall productive capacity is immensely high, so their ability to "give away" a living wage is simplified. The rationale for this still being "libertarian" is that it's technically earned income. In the same way that anyone in America can put a few dollars in the bank and earn tenths of a cent in interest, just by joining this society you're investing your brain and your time and your theoretical usefulness in its wellbeing, and your investment generates enough credit towards land, energy, raw materials, and information processing to comfortably support a (to us) high quality of life. I should add that I'm not entirely oblivious: I'm deliberately toeing what I see as a very fine and ironic line between economic libertarianism and socialism in a society of this level. With machines and computers that can handle 99% of all actual "work" for free, the biggest value that a thinking being has is essentially just being alive, and sentient, and sympathetic to a cause. You could essentially argue that they're being paid to be warm bodies. |
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Post by Sekot on Aug 9, 2016 19:44:12 GMT -5
Your society doesn't make any sense. There's no poor people, and yet there are those who would find themselves at a severe disadvantage because your society would still have to promote capitalism and competition. What you're describing is effectively you wanting to have your cake and eat it too. I don't really get what the point would be in this case for having any society whatsoever except as some sort of bizarre dick-waving contest. "I've got more friends in this social group, neener neener nee-ee-ner".
Why give away a living wage? Your coming up with creative word voodoo to make this not-socialism. Why pay anyone at all for anything if I can just have machines do it, therefore giving me more money? I'm richer than God, with more resources than a universe can shake a stick at, who's going to stop me from doing whatever the hell I want? What government is there in a perfect libertarian society? I am the Government.
I see nothing in this society except constant conflict. This conflict may take many shapes, but you're going to have the impoverished as that would just be a fact of life as a "social loser". Unless, those "social losers" can then fuck off and do their own own thing, in which case we come back to the problem of 'why have any social interaction whatsoever?'.
Maybe there's something I'm severely misunderstanding in your description. Your Not-Culture culture sounds far more ridiculous than a perfectly communist one.
edit: I'm probably arguing around you, since I don't necessarily have a problem with your society. I just have a problem with you calling it libertarian utopia when...it isn't. Not really.
edit2: what it really sounds like you're describing is an UltraAmerica, or current American sociopolitics on steroids with a little less misery.
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Post by Matteo ((Taed)) on Aug 9, 2016 21:46:29 GMT -5
So one of the pieces of explanation you're missing is infrastructure. I totally agree that by many definitions there's no need or reasoning for this to be a "society" at all. The defining shared trait in this case is geography: all the 15-million-odd Earth-areas that this society lays claim to are stitched together by a wormhole network into, in effect, one giant continent.
The real-space pieces of that patchwork continent don't need to be contiguous: you could have a star system belonging to society A surrounded on all sides by societies B, C, and D, but as far as the society A residents are concerned, their "neighbours" are entirely made up of other people in society A, as facilitated by the wormhole network.
There's other pieces of shared infrastructure as well. I'm still a little on the fence on exactly how I want to portray this, but essentially the society's material needs would mostly by fulfilled by an automated system called Protocol. The system is self-sustaining and follows a set of pre-ordained rules (protocols), so nobody really runs it or worries about how it works. There are mathematical algorithms on how to keep the sewers working, and the granaries stocked, and the buildings from falling down, and those algorithms are being constantly executed by mindless machines.
In my most extreme version of this portrayal, the citizens aren't really citizens at all, so much as they are parasites who conduct their own petty (and maybe even pointless) commerce entirely within the framework of Protocol. Maybe Protocol wasn't even built by them originally, so they're basically living inside the empty shell of another disappeared civilization. (This is obviously the less utopian portrayal, although the day-to-day lives of the residents would still be pretty damn sweet)
The other aspect of this I haven't fully nailed down yet is what interaction, if any, I want the citizens to have with Protocol. I've bounced around the idea of at least one "currency" being a measure of influence over Protocol. ie. If two guys ask a Protocol robot to perform separate tasks, the guy who pays more gets attended to first.
I've also thought about that control being democratic, with Protocol obeying requests from the largest group. One interesting idea in this version is that I still want the people themselves to be essentially anarchic and self-governing, so the "governments" that they subscribe to might function more like voting collectives. You band together with people of similar ideologies so that you can execute requests of Protocol that carry more weight. This could tie back into the somewhat sketchy economy as well, with people essentially being paid or otherwise incentivized to vote a certain way.
Protocol infrastructure is also where the "living wage" is coming from. The resources those robots produce isn't really public- or privately-owned; it's just sort of there for the taking. I want to portray it in sort of a similar way to how American pioneers could just dip a bucket into the ocean and come up with it full of cod (or, again, how American pioneers basically moved into the dead husk of a Native American civilization, and started using all the infrastructure the Natives had been forced to abandon)
This is also where your question
is kind of missing the point. Having machines do anything for you doesn't result in any financial gain, because there are an endless parade of machines doing things for everyone else too. It essentially cancels out.
All changes in wealth have to occur along the lines where scarcity still exists. There's no market for things that people can produce themselves, or have Protocol produce for them. Most actual payment would have to occur for intellectual property, specialized services, and social favours.
I agree that it's splitting hairs to call this libertarianism, or even capitalism, by labelling welfare as accrued interest, and social security as a vested stock portfolio. The libertarianism frankly comes through more at a social and administrative level, given that this is a society with no central government or indeed any structure to dictate the behaviour of citizens. On a fiscal level, though, that hair-splitting is exactly what I'm riffing on, and it's why I'd be writing a sci-fi novel instead of a sociology textbook.
It's very common within the genre to portray a post-scarcity utopia and say that, because there's "no scarcity," there is also no economy. Star Trek being the worst example of this, since The Federation alleges to be entirely egalitarian and beyond money, even though they still very obviously dole out rewards and privilege asymmetrically.
I want to write a post-scarcity setting that still very obviously includes economics, and if I need to exaggerate the Wall Street vibe to drive that home then so be it.
I only really know one other book that's taken a similar approach: Charles Stross' Accelerando posits an Economics 2.0, where superintelligent AIs have limitless material resources, but still maintain a financial system to mediate the flow of more abstract commodities (creativity, abstract thought, etc.)
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Post by Sekot on Aug 9, 2016 22:10:42 GMT -5
So your Hand of the Free Market is a set of arbitrary rules set by a machine called Protocol?
So really, you've got current day society except there's an actual entity that dictates social behavior. Because, to the people, the distinction between limitless resources and not is pointless. They don't have access to it of their own free will so why does it matter?
Really, this has very little to do with libertarianism and is more a series of tribes as wheel spokes attached to the Protocol which acts as the panoptic center. Its an enslavement to an artificial intelligence.
I'm not sure if I hate it because I want to destroy it, or if its just silly. I'd have to see it in writing, I guess.
edit: its the matrix. wheres muh neo
edit2: its grossly inaccurate to say that the machine controls all social behavior, but it is the driving force to the sociopolitical economy which can have a larger impact on the cultural landscape than anything we have in our current reality.
edit3: this more or less sounds like stalinism. edit4: though it prolly isnt too
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Post by Matteo ((Taed)) on Aug 9, 2016 22:32:02 GMT -5
Protocol is a fancy replicator.
Star Trek replicators are dumb because they make no scientific sense, and because they're supposed to supplant all forms of economics, even though they don't actually address all the other moving parts that a civilization needs to keep moving, like mines, power plants, construction, and maintenance.
The Protocol idea is a way of showing a replicator that does all of that while still making technical sense. But it doesn't have any more influence on the society's living constituents than the replicator does when Picard asks it for a glass of Earl Grey.
It has no intent. It has no goals. It imposes no dictates whatsoever.
There's a set of cold equations that tell it "There are X people we need to keep alive. They each need Y calories to live. Potatoes have Z calories. We need to supply (X * Y) / Z potatoes." And then there's another set of equations that explain the best way to grow potatoes to make that happen ("Deliver X litres of water and Y grams of nitrogen to Z cubic centimetres of soil at a temperature of ...")
All of the actual "Society" happens on top of that.
And you summed up the libertarian aspect yourself when you quipped "I am the Government." The whole point is that every person is basically his own independent nation. Laws unto himself, and not beholden to any social structure he doesn't volunteer for.
The tribal comparison is apt, but only because I think that's how any society is going to organize itself anyway. If you want to be a total loner then that's definitely your choice, but most people will probably choose to join some sort of tribe or social club instead. The point is that you're 100% free to choose either way, and that freedom of choice is being underwritten by a liberation from material pressures provided by an entirely passive and tax-free industrial base.
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Post by Matteo ((Taed)) on Aug 9, 2016 22:49:05 GMT -5
I'm actually leaning towards saying that I don't consider Protocol part of the economy at all. Everything Protocol does is table stakes and equally distributed. Economics only occurs where there's a gradient in the market.
And I'd argue that it still isn't a socialist entity, because it isn't owned by anyone, let alone everyone, and it doesn't need any taxation support to run. If you wished on a magic genie that everyone in the world had enough food and water and a place to live, would we call that socialism.
The real economics all happens entirely separate from that baseline structure, occupying all the markets that Protocol doesn't supply. Art, war, science, and so forth.
EDIT: Marketing too. They'll definitely pay for marketing. And Law, or its equivalent. All of this is a flimsy pretence to explain why James and I will still have jobs in 50,000 years.
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Post by Sekot on Aug 9, 2016 23:10:58 GMT -5
But Protocol is the foundation of the economy. You're saying so yourself. Its rules dictate the very rules the society can play with, it is essentially a god. All things that create Art/War/Science/whatever are bound by whatever algorithms allow Protocol to dispense what it does. If I need a potato, I have to play by whatever rules my society has set. They have to play by whatever rules that dispenses potatoes. Whosoever controls the Protocol, controls reality. Protocol is the essence of whatever liberation the populace believes they have, even though they're arguably more bound to the economic system than we are now.
In this setting, no one person can be their own government unless allowed by the Protocol system. I can only forsee this as being hilariously bloody as everyone attempts to wage whatever wars they can to obtain democratic control. And if they can't obtain democratic control, that just further entrenches the centralized power of the protocol algorithms. The economic system/algorithms/Protocol owns everyone else.
What you've created is a competition-based societal monster.
If competition isn't bound into the system, then again I ask why can't I just create my own protocol and make whatever the hell I want? Isn't that true liberation from material processes?
Or have I misunderstood and everyone has their own protocol?
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Post by Sekot on Aug 9, 2016 23:14:08 GMT -5
Obviously this is an interesting idea or I wouldn't care so much.
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