Is your fictional future stupid enough to account for stonks?
The daunting challenge of writing science fiction as idiotic as our present
So. GameStop.
I’m writing this on Friday, Jan. 29, as Robinhood has loosened trading restrictions and GameStop’s stonks (stonks, Jesus Christ) have shot up past $300 again as the Redditors on r/WallStreetBets try to stick it to short sellers and also make a ton of money for themselves.
2021 is the year we all learned that a pump-and-dump stock scheme is legal if you do it in public, for the lulz.
It’ll all end in tears (or possibly in GameStop buying, I dunno, General Motors, why not?) if it hasn’t by the time you read this. But it might also end in fundamental stock market reforms, and it’s further undermined the already extremely tenuous faith anyone might have had that the stock market is driven by, y’know, rational investors making decisions about the long-term profit-making potential of companies.
The story has, of course, looped in Elon Musk, a man who demonstrates that if any actual James Bond villains appeared in the real world, they would immediately gain a legion of screaming fans who would furiously invest their life savings in his latest volcano lair or space laser scheme, and probably dox poor James on Twitter, too.
Who knew memes and jokes and general idiocy could be so consequential for the course of history? Who knew the future would be this… stupid.
A few more examples:
When I was a wee nerd, there was a deeply dumb, probably quite offensive anime called Tank Police, which was considered very silly because, if you haven’t guessed from the name, it was about an entire police unit that used tanks to fight crime.
Anyway.
I could probably gesture vaguely in the direction of the late presidency, but there are plenty of other political examples I could invoke.
Remember this guy? I know you’ve seen him a whole bunch, but take a good long look. Really let the stupid wash over you. This picture is going to be in the history books a century from now. He’s the emblem of our era.
I don’t think I’m capable of making any grand statements about how the present is uniquely stupid. (The 1920s had goldfish swallowing and the stock market crash, and the 1950s had phone booth stuffing and McCarthyism, so there’s an argument to be made that every era gets its own flavour of stupid.) It still feels like the stupid’s gone fractal somehow, but maybe that’s a feeling that strikes everyone who lives much past thirty years old, y’know? Maybe everyone facing the breakneck social and technological change of the post-industrial era just stares out at the endless superhighway of future shock, eyeballs peeled open by the unrelenting acceleration, and all we can do is mutter phrases like “TikTok sea shanties” and “Tide Pod challenge” and “vagina-scented candles” until we crumble to dust, and our places are taken by the next generation. I don’t know what’s going to freak out the kids raised on TikTok, but there’s something coming, and it’s going to be dumb as a box of rocks.
So maybe, just maybe there’s a sort of background level of stupidity and silliness and weirdness to the world, and it just changes over time, and you have to account for that.
But it could also be getting worse. The future could be getting actively stupider, and no, I do not mean in some kind of Idiocracy way (note to self: see that movie someday, maybe) where everyone gets dumber, I mean it’s possible for the general level of sensibleness (totally a word) to remain the same while this… weirdness, this wilful idiocy, grows by leaps and bounds.
I argued a while back about how technological change causes crises of abundance, the old “quantity has a quality all its own” thing. Frictionless communication makes it possible to share ideas easier than every before, and dumb ideas travel faster than smart ideas? Ideas like “Let’s all buy the stock of a failing games retailer to mess with hedge funds lolololololol!!!”
Safe to say the baseline for the future is at least as stupid as today, forecast could include greater levels of stupidity.
So… if we’re in the science fiction game, how the hell do we deal with that?
SF writers routinely predict the future wrong technologically, and tech is the easy part of the guesswork! It’s culture that’s impossible to predict, which is why all those novels written in the 1950s that imagined crew-cut men doing manly outer space things and women wearing crinolines and vacuuming in high heels circa 2050 look so fucking weird now, and have for decades. Guesses at our cultural future come with an expiration date only slightly farther into tomorrow than dairy products.
But there are a few stories that, if not predictive, have the texture of a future that includes the stupid, the weird, the faddish, the ineffably human.
One of my favourite minor details in an SF novel is in Bruce Sterling’s Islands In The Net. One of the characters mentions that he saw a sort of doppelganger of himself in a dream, his Optimal Persona, and this is treated as a common occurrence. There’s a widespread if far from universal belief in this future that people can see glimpses sometimes of a kind of better version of themselves.
“I felt this huge sense of total elation. Like I’d discovered some pure element of soul.”
“You don’t really believe that crap, do you?”
I love this because it’s so rare to see an author look at the world and say “People see Bigfoot, and UFOs, and they go to get faith healed by slimy TV preachers, they’re going to believe in different weird stuff tomorrow.” And Sterling manufactures a reasonably convincing future belief.
Honestly though, right now I worry that the problem with the Optimal Persona is that it has too much dignity and hasn’t been monetized. It would have more verisimilitude if there were a host of pitchmen with YouTube channels trying to sell you ionized bracelets or raw water or Faraday-cage hats (William Gibson did that one, actually) that would help you see/manifest your Optimal Persona.
There are a few authors who manage to incorporate actual stupidity into their worlds – perhaps none better than Connie Willis, particularly in her satirical stories from the 1980s and 1990s, where she sets characters bouncing around academia and research labs and church choirs, romantic or cross-generational misunderstandings providing the bulk of the plot. Willis often has the furor of stupidity and chaos come to a full boil, at which point the protagonist finally has some necessary epiphany – even if not everyone else does.
There are other writers who have touched on these themes, or whose works are so damn weird their satire now feels prophetic – Rudy Rucker and Alexander Jablokov (deeply underrated) come to mind.
I’m sure there are some I’ve not read, but they’re too rare! Stupidity is not a muse we call upon when sitting down at the keyboard, is she? She’s an emergent property of the world, one which bursts forth, like Athena from the head of Zeus, clad in clown shoes and bearing the spear of Stonks, and the shield of Chicken Tendies.
Self Promotion Corner
Hey, did you know I have a story out in the March/April edition of Analog Science Fiction and Fact! Did you know it’s called The Acheulean Gift! Did you know it’s about kids modified with palaeolithic DNA, going to summer camp? Well, now you do! Read it, or don’t, there’s lots of stuff worth reading and your life will not be materially better or worse if you read this or a different story!