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Post by helrunar on Apr 24, 2020 17:12:13 GMT
Thanks for these thoughts, Dr Strange. I think a lot about what you are discussing here, and I am in agreement with the approach you suggest. I wish I had any notion of a solution. We used to think that "education" was the answer but I am now no longer at all certain that it is a solution. I think the key is an individual being interested in and willing to make an effort to understand themselves and the world. And I do agree with the Greeks that it all starts with the imperative "Know Thyself."
cheers, H.
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Post by jamesdoig on Apr 24, 2020 21:17:11 GMT
Not sure I'd completely agree with this. The problem "today" (at least in the West) isn't censorship of ideas - maybe, if anything, it's the opposite. I'm not ( definitely not) arguing for censorship (or dictatorship) - just pointing out that (in the West at least) anybody can pretty much publish anything they want, no matter how ridiculous or harmful; and any numpty (e.g. Eamonn Holmes) can read it, believe it, and repeat it. It's a good point, but it's an inevitable outcome of technology, i.e. the digital revolution. Similar things happened in the 19th century with advances in printing technology - and new ideas were probably considered more harmful back then. And like now Victorian writers wrote about the harmful effects of those ideas. People are prone to fear, anxiety, and herd mentality - look at the covid-19 hoarding. The worry is movements that exploit those basic human fears to destructive effect, like Nazism and other forms of extremism.
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Post by Knygathin on Apr 25, 2020 7:59:16 GMT
Part of the dictatorship's propaganda strategy is to fool the people into thinking they have a free will, and a choice of voting in free elections (on opposing parties, but which basically lead in the same global finance political direction. It is what you call controlled opposition).
The Internet is a technical information tool that developed out of their control. But they are working hard to censor it. The dominant giants: Google (steering more and more toward politically selective information), Paypal (politically selective as to who and what transactions be allowed), etc. They have also begun tracking and mapping everything you do on the Internet. I would recommend people to use the search engine DuckDuckGo (so far I believe it has not yet been swallowed up by the giants) instead of Google.
Another factor in this, described in Bradbury's vision, is the Shallow Media Entertainment. In a dictatorship the people must be held under control. This can be done by the use of violence. But also, an important strategy is to keep the people mentally sedated, and satisfied through instant gratification flashy entertainment, focusing on basic instinct needs such as sex, dreams of romantic love, riches, etc. This is a form of subtle brain control stimulation, that people are not aware of that they are being subjected to. And it is used to prevent the risk of wide spreading social frustration, leading to society upheavals, and ultimately breakdown and revolution.
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Post by Dr Strange on Apr 25, 2020 8:45:40 GMT
Another factor in this, described in Bradbury's vision, is the Shallow Media Entertainment. Yes, and I get that. But "shallow entertainment" is nothing new, and it wasn't new when Bradbury was writing. What seemed to aggravate Bradbury most was the growth of TV, and there are obvious parallels now with screen-based technology in general - but my point is that it hasn't led to what Bradbury was suggesting it might. The most obvious way things have diverged from what he envisioned is that the whole idea of books simply disappearing from the world, and what they had to tell us being forgotten forever, now seems rather quaint at a time when it looks like nothing can ever really be "forgotten" once it has gone online. This is a form of subtle brain control, that people are not aware of Apart from a few enlightened individuals, of course. Many of whom might be inclined to a bit of book burning themselves, since they are so confidant in their ability to judge which books people should be reading. I wonder how many of the books we talk about here would make the cut?
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Post by andydecker on Apr 25, 2020 10:19:58 GMT
The most obvious way things have diverged from what he envisioned is that the whole idea of books simply disappearing from the world, and what they had to tell us being forgotten forever, now seems rather quaint at a time when it looks like nothing can ever really be "forgotten" once it has gone online. But that is the problem, isn't it? It can in a blink be forgotten and destroyed, if you cut the power. Books are decentralized and can't be traced, not without at least extraordinary effort. Cut the power to a server, and it is just a dead heap of crap. The difference, that all those digital disciple like to ignore, is maintenance and access. To read or use a print book you don't need a complicated technology, which also is prone to outside manipulation. Just think of Am*z*n's "revised" editions, where you suddenly have a new text without noticing. With a printed book this is not possible. Also the fact that my property is dependent on the good will of some faceless distributor who can pull the plug anytime it want - or can ram his morality down my throat - and I can do absolutly nothing against this gets more revolting every year. So the idea that books can be forgotten has gotten much more plausibe and easy to do instead of less. (Not to mention the inability of access you already have. I still have a lot of old floppies, disks and CDs, I don't have access to any longer, thanks to next generation PCs. Sure, I could buy yet another gimmick to still read them, but the rate of failures especially in old burned CDs is phenomenaly high in my experience. With a hard copy this can't be happening under normal circumstances. Even if you are living under a bridge you can still read a book. Try that with a streaming copy.) These are just a few random thoughts. I am not so sure that Bradbury's pessimism is so far off. The next generation not only doesn't read, it doesn't even need to write. Alexa does it for you. What looked so cool on the Enterprise, "Tea, Earl Black. Hot", is in reality a worrying development.
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Post by Dr Strange on Apr 25, 2020 11:29:08 GMT
Yes, but I was also thinking about how easy it is to make personal copies of materials in electronic format. How little time and effort it takes to download a book. Any book. And how little space a library takes up when it is on a pen drive. Much harder to find, and impossible to know if every last copy has been wiped or not. Maybe this is where Bradbury's imagination met its limits - did he ever write anything about topics like supercomputers or AI? I've not read that much of his SF, so I really don't know.
But (to link this to a different thread), I think PKD had a more accurate view of where things were (are) going than Bradbury. OK, PKD came along a bit later - but Bradbury outlived him by 30 years. And as he got older, Bradbury just seems to have retreated ever further into nostalgia for the 1930s of his childhood. Which, he seemed to forget, wasn't such a great time for everyone (especially those damn "minorities").
That somehow all (or even nearly all) our current digital technology could be wiped out, all at once and everything lost forever, seems unlikely - unless there is some other SF dystopian trope thrown into the mix, like nuclear war or an asteroid strike. And if that happens we are probably all fucked anyway.
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Post by andydecker on Apr 25, 2020 12:51:41 GMT
Yes, but I was also thinking about how easy it is to make personal copies of materials in electronic format. How little time and effort it takes to download a book. Any book. And how little space a library takes up when it is on a pen drive. Much harder to find, and impossible to know if every last copy has been wiped or not. Maybe this is where Bradbury's imagination met its limits - did he ever write anything about topics like supercomputers or AI? I've not read that much of his SF, so I really don't know. You are right in this, of course. The download times are so fast. And a pen drive is easier to hide as a book. I would never ever store something in the cloud, though. Still, I think the artificial barrier to open this kind of book is a huge problem. I never read much of Bradbury. But I can't imagine that he did sonmething about AI. As a concept this is too new for him. Was the idea even used before Clarke and Kubrick? I really don't know. Contemporary essays always mark HAL as an AI, which he of course is, but in my memory this idea was never much explored in SF. We tend to fill in the blanks as readers. Even Asimovs Foundation wouldn't have worked without AIs, I guess, but can't remember if he fleshed this out.
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Post by Dr Strange on Apr 25, 2020 13:20:59 GMT
But Bradbury was still writing in the 1990s and 2000s. I think he just wasn't interested in technology at all, he didn't think it was important, and so he failed to understand it. Nice article here, well worth a read - www.spiked-online.com/2012/06/15/ray-bradbury-prophet-of-nostalgia/Apparently Bradbury "didn’t get on an aeroplane until he was 62 [which would mean 1982!], was scared to take elevators, and described the internet as ‘a waste of time’".
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Post by jamesdoig on Apr 25, 2020 21:18:22 GMT
I never read much of Bradbury. But I can't imagine that he did sonmething about AI. As a concept this is too new for him. He wasn't a technologist, like most of the big sf writers, in fact some would say he didn't write sf at all:
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Post by jamesdoig on Apr 25, 2020 21:32:25 GMT
It can in a blink be forgotten and destroyed, if you cut the power. Books are decentralized and can't be traced, not without at least extraordinary effort. Cut the power to a server, and it is just a dead heap of crap. The difference, that all those digital disciple like to ignore, is maintenance and access. To read or use a print book you don't need a complicated technology, which also is prone to outside manipulation. Just think of Am*z*n's "revised" editions, where you suddenly have a new text without noticing. With a printed book this is not possible. ..... (Not to mention the inability of access you already have. I still have a lot of old floppies, disks and CDs, I don't have access to any longer, thanks to next generation PCs. Sure, I could buy yet another gimmick to still read them, but the rate of failures especially in old burned CDs is phenomenaly high in my experience. With a hard copy this can't be happening under normal circumstances. Even if you are living under a bridge you can still read a book. Try that with a streaming copy.) That's very well said, and it's a big issue for archives, libraries and other collecting institutions that need to keep stuff forever, and keep it accessible to the public (in Australia at least, the big libraries ask for legal deposit copies from publishers in digital format because physical storage is so expensive). No one has solved it - in fact, it's impossible to solve because technology changes so quickly. The latest research and development in storing data is DNA: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_digital_data_storage, which apparently looks promising! But once you're locked into a technology, then you're buggered, because inevitably it will become obsolete.
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Post by Dr Strange on Apr 26, 2020 9:46:36 GMT
some would say he didn't write sf at all There's a quote (from 1999) on wikipedia where Bradbury himself claims he didn't write SF: "I don't write science fiction. I've only done one science fiction book and that's Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. So Martian Chronicles is not science fiction, it's fantasy. It couldn't happen, you see?"
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Post by Knygathin on Apr 26, 2020 10:33:02 GMT
There's a quote (from 1999) on wikipedia where Bradbury himself claims he didn't write SF: "I don't write science fiction. I've only done one science fiction book and that's Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. So Martian Chronicles is not science fiction, it's fantasy. It couldn't happen, you see?" On the other hand fantasy may be a depiction of an inner reality or spiritual truth. So on this particular point I don't quite agree with Mr. Bradbury. He could get a little overexcited when publicly speaking, or in interviews, eager to make a dramatic impression almost at bombastic chock-value, perhaps then a bit thoughtlessly.
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Post by Dr Strange on Apr 26, 2020 14:57:07 GMT
There's a quote (from 1999) on wikipedia where Bradbury himself claims he didn't write SF: "I don't write science fiction. I've only done one science fiction book and that's Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. So Martian Chronicles is not science fiction, it's fantasy. It couldn't happen, you see?" On the other hand fantasy may be a depiction of an inner reality or spiritual truth. So on this particular point I don't quite agree with Mr. Bradbury. Ah, but he might have agreed with you, though he also might have put it a bit differently. SF and fantasy are both about exploring ideas, I think - and all ideas are equally real (or unreal). Genre definitions and conventions aren't really that important, except that readers differ in their preferences for the way that ideas are packaged - so, for a professional writer, they end up taking on more significance than they maybe would want them to.
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