Starting in the late 1970s, with the first affordable personal computers, we've gradually shifted our lives from the physical to the virtual. Crime followed us into our computers, generating new variations on old crimes: Identity theft, botnets, the Nigerian scam. The porn industry followed us too, or in many cases actually got to virtual worlds before most of us did. This is some miscellaneous thoughts on where crime and vice goes in an increasingly virtual world.
As the value and variety of the parts of our world that are virtual increase, so do the variety of both crimes and vices. The virtual world already has its powerful addictions. How many teenagers spent more time playing World Of Warcraft than on dates or getting drunk or getting in fights? How many teenage guys didn't get some girl knocked up because they were too busy with their virtual lives? As games and online worlds become richer and people spend more time in them, what else won't happen in the physical world?
As more of the world becomes virtual, bullying has gone virtual. Does it still have the same motives and victims? How will that shift as more of life becomes virtual? Will people still sort themselves into the same categories of race, sex, physical attractiveness when those characteristics are evident in less and less of their interactions? Will the xenophobia still be directed at the same groups of others or will we sort ourselves into new categories?
As more of our value goes virtual, so does the subtlety of the attacks on it. Viruses used to do obvious damage to files or computers. Now they sometimes lurk undetectably and grab a few cycles out of a hundred of a computer's power to do a denial of service attack, or send spam. What happens as computers and minds blend? Would a brain in a brain/computer interface be susceptible to subtle or not so subtle virus attack? Computer viruses that penetrate a brain/computer interface and wipe out or rewrite memories--selectively or universally? Cause a person to stop breathing? Quietly install subroutines that grab an almost unnoticeable fraction of your mind's processing power and use it for their own ends? Viruses that deliberately or accidentally cause mental illness?
If minds become up-loadable to advanced computers, a whole new set of crimes becomes possible. How much is it worth to you not to get that uploaded backup of your mind wiped? If someone wipes out a backup and the person dies before the next backup, is that murder? If so, is it still murder if there is another backup and the person just loses a month of their life experience? What happens if someone steals a backup of your mind and accesses it for blackmail material? For intellectual property? For state secrets?
As virtual sex becomes more realistic, does prostitution become virtual? Does it move toward sexbots or some kind of more direct to the brain mode? At what point (if any) does it become infidelity?
This is kind of a brain-storming session. Feel free to continue it in the comments or in what is for now the privacy of your own head.
- Crimes and Vices of the Future
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dalecoz- May 21st, 23:49
- Politics: Issues Versus The Team
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- dalecoz
- May 20th, 23:51
This is two political posts in a week, which is almost unheard of for me, and will not be repeated.
It seems to me that a lot of people approach politics by choosing a team (a political party or political label) and then adapting their positions to fit uncomfortably into the dominant political philosophy of their team.
Here are some realities:- Almost anybody with much going on in their heads is going to be uncomfortable with some of the actions and positions of their political party. How many liberals were uncomfortable to outraged when too many Democratic Senators and Representatives initially went along with the journey toward war with Iraq or didn't take a determined enough stand against it? How many conservatives were uncomfortable to outraged with Bush junior's budget deficits and uncomfortable with the huge expansion of federal power represented by the rather Orwellian-sounding Patriot Act and Homeland Security? In both cases, a lot. It's not just the headline issues either. Almost everybody interesting that I've talked to have strong beliefs that are odds with those of the leadership and opinion-makers of the party they profess loyalty to.
- Misplaced loyalty to their chosen party often leads people to support or acquiesce to actions they would totally oppose if the other party did them. How many of us really support the current highly militarized drug war? How many of us really support allowing the TSA to perform actions that would land anyone else in jail for sexual assault? How many of us tone down those opinions when 'our' party is in charge, offer excuses for the fact that nothing much changed on those fronts?
- There are people supporting the other party who believe in some of your positions, though often for reasons that will make you feel uncomfortable. For example, much of the liberal side of the political spectrum believes that at least marijuana, if not most drugs, should be legalized or at least decriminalized. A growing number of people on the right also support that position, mainly because they see the drug war as inordinately expanding federal power. Another example: As you travel out to the extremes of liberalism you'll find people who foresee a looming ecological collapse and prepare for it by trying to become self-sufficient--buying solar panels and growing most of their own food. Travel to the extremes of conservatism and you find people who foresee a looming economic collapse and prepare for it by trying to become self-sufficient in almost exactly the same ways. You'll find liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats attacking the bank bailouts of 2008, each on their own grounds and within the context of their own political philosophy.
Would the drug war and the excesses of the Patriot Act and the growing security state go away if the Democrats gained power over the entire federal government? They briefly held the presidency, a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate plus a strong majority in the House, so we know the answer to that. At the very least it wasn't their top priority. Would having the Republican party in that position take care of those issues? Nothing in the Bush presidency, where Republicans held the presidency and both houses of congress for six years suggests it.
It seems to me that the party, the team, shouldn't matter as much as the issues. If we strongly believe in a set of issues, the idea should be to seek out people who agree with us on those specific issues and form arms-length coalitions to get changes made, including people across as much of the political spectrum as we can. Agree to disagree on everything else, but find and use the islands of agreement. If you seriously want an end to the drug war does it really matter that part of the votes that make that happen come from people whose political philosophy you disagree with? If the issue is really important rather than just being a stick to beat the other side, then it shouldn't matter.
What do you think?
- That's What I Should Have Said!
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- dalecoz
- May 19th, 23:52
Dialog is my favorite part of writing. I do it reasonably well and, unfortunately, often try to make it do things I really should be doing with action or description or narrative summary. People who read my writing and then meet me are often disappointed that in person I'm usually quiet and not a particularly good conversationalist. The good stuff, the clever turns of phrase, they don't usually come to me quickly enough to use in a real conversation, so the comeback I should have used at the party comes to me ten minutes too late and gets used at the earliest opportunity in a story. It's a good use for the wasted comeback, though not as satisfying as being able to use it in real-time.
Here is a section of dialog from a Work In Process, a novelette tentatively called New Galveston.
“When the chief dies they send his wives with him to the afterlife.” She grimaced. “I didn’t like the old bastard in this life. I decided not to follow him to the next one. I ran away and after a few adventure came here.”Otho thought about those few words, and his wanderlust flared. "A few adventures, huh? A woman alone. Hundreds of miles to travel on foot. Had to have been a few tribes between here and there who didn't like strangers or liked woman travelers the wrong way."
Wren smiled. "You climbed on the big boats and traveled across the ocean and yet you want to hear my little stories of walking and hiding and being hungry." She had the bartender bring them cool water and a wash cloth and put the wet cloth on his jaw. "Snow would be better, but this will help." She examined the jaw. "Not broken. Relax. Let your body heal a little, and I'll get you home."
"What about your business?"
"I'm done here. Now you're my business. You didn't think this was free did you?"
Otho leaned away from her. "So I'm just business to you?"
"You're business." She smiled. "But I like you. Like a son. I trust you too. For you, my price is a favor I will name later."
"What did I walk into back there?"
"The house you describe is protected by the Fox.”
“Who is the Fox?”
She ignored the question. “Why did they want their conversation to remain secret? I don't know. So many currents flow under the surface here. Your world brought its quarrels here. Your army and navy strive against one another. Your rivals in your old world, the English and Germans and Spanish; they all need or want something here.”
“How do you know about that?”
“I listen. The people you call Karankawas have their own rivalries and on top of them you pile the striving of the new ways against the old, of those who want all of you gone so the deer and fish will be many again against those who love the new ways. The young find freedom in the Wiki-up District, while their parents see only loss and shame there. Those with power in the Wiki-up District fear this part of Jamestown. They fear that the Fox will find ways of making them pay, like the bars and the whores of Jamestown pay." She dipped the wash cloth in the water again and reapplied it. "The waters here are deep and dangerous, but for those who float on the top they are just water. Do your job. Drink your beer. Find a young woman--for a night if you must, for love and forever if you can. Float, and don't worry about what swirls beneath you."
- Of Government Policies & Toy Steering Wheels
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- dalecoz
- May 18th, 23:58
I generally avoid posting political stuff here, because my political beliefs annoy just about everybody who talks politics with me--liberal of conservative, Democrat or Republican. Occasionally I can't resist speaking up though.
Years ago, they used to put little toy plastic steering wheels in the early versions of car seats. The kids would proudly 'drive' along with minimal real interaction with where the car was going. It seems to me that the little kid and his/her steering wheel is usually, though not always a good analogy to the relationship between government and the economy. Before you jump to conclusions, I'm not saying that government is incapable of doing things that help or hurt the economy in a major way. I'm saying that the role governments can play is usually overestimated, and governments and especially presidents, routinely take credit for things that happened while the government was busy elsewhere and often for things that happened in spite of the President that was in power at the time.
Here's an example: A lot of people on the right credit President Reagan's economic policies for the robust growth that followed a deep recession in the early 1980s. I'm not going to argue the economic policies, but I suspect that the boom had far more to do with the personal computer revolution than anything government did or didn't do. We had a long series of years when computers kept getting more useful and people bought new ones every couple of years. As that market started to saturate by the mid-1990s, the power and connectivity of the computer, and the fact that nearly everyone had one led to the dotcom boom, as companies scrambled to grab a share of the e-commerce world. People tossed billions at all kinds of schemes, of which a few paid off. Even the failed dotcoms generated huge amounts of money for someone, and pushed tax revenue high enough that in a few of the later Clinton and early Bush years we sort of arguably balanced the federal budget. After the dotcom boom, computers shrank and became laptops and tablets and cell phones, with gradually decreasing influence at driving the economy. Tablets are a nice market, but they aren't the kind of economic driver computers were.
That suggests that the answer to our current economic problems is finding the next technology capable of driving the economy. What does a baby boomer without enough retirement savings or a kid out of college with thousands of dollars in debt need more than saving money or paying off debt. Until someone figures that out, whoever the president is can turn his/her little plastic steering wheel all day, but nothing much will change.
- Still Accident-Prone Seven Years After He Died
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- dalecoz
- May 17th, 23:46
One of my uncles was accident prone. He worked twelve hour days as a technician at a local aerospace subcontractor, commuted two hours a day and tried to keep up with the demands of a small farm. That left him chronically tired and in a hurry. Around machinery, that's a prescription for accidents. One of my earliest memories was of him driving the front end of a tractor off a four-foot drop-off and jumping for safety. That was the first of many accidents I was aware of over the years.
On Wednesday, over seven years after he died, he reached out from the grave and almost caused another accident, though probably a minor one. I mentioned the 'secret room' a few posts ago. On Wednesday, I used a shop vac to get up the worst of the dust and bat crap, then put on filter mask, goggles and gloves to go in and make sure all of the boxes stacked in the room were empty. A lot of the stuff was sitting on something that looked like a wooden storage unit. I started taking stuff off the shelves and the whole thing collapsed. I grabbed one end of it and managed to keep the pieces from falling on me or shattering the only light bulb in the room.
By this time my goggles were fogged up and I had no idea what had happened, except that what had appeared to be a storage unit was now component pieces of wood that were trying to fall on me. I finally got it sorted out and realized what had happened. In a typical shortcut, my uncle hadn't really built a storage unit. He had taken four short pieces of old ladder and laid boards across them. Then he stacked them full of stuff. That worked fine until someone (me) tried to take stuff out of the end of the shelving. At that point, the lateral force caused the whole thing to collapse like a set of dominoes. To add to the accident-waiting-to-happen aspect, he piled a bunch of fairly heavy boards on the top 'shelf' of this monstrosity. One wrong tug and I was struggling to keep the whole thing from landing on me.
This wasn't life-threatening. I would probably gotten off with a few bruises and having to stumble out of the room when the light-bulb broke. It was a moment of panic, partly because I couldn't see what was going on and partly because I wasn't sure what else he had put on that top shelf.
This kind of quick and dirty improvisation was typical of my uncle. He was tired, busy and he did stuff quickly--made it work most of the time. I got out of it without any injuries, not even a scrape and now have the panic in a secret room emotions down really well if I ever need them for a story, but I can truthfully say that even long after he died my uncle is still accident-prone.
- My Ideal Audience
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- dalecoz
- May 17th, 0:00
I'm sorry to say this, but I write for myself. After a story sits for a while I reread it, and if it's finished and polished it grabs me, even though I know what happens next. I like what I write and would like it whoever wrote it.
What am I going for when I write?
1) Taking an old science fiction concept and giving it a new twist. It's close to impossible to come up with an entirely new science fiction concept, but I try for a major re-purposing. There aren't any totally new concepts in Exchange, but it combines concepts in new ways. Exchanges are essentially the Time Quakes of Sidewise In Time, which dates back over seventy years and spawned a horde of imitators. My twist was to make Exchanges happen only with one other reality, one empty of humans and a tempting target for settlement--essentially traveling to another star, but without the travel time. Then, of course, I gave that empty reality claws.
2) Subtle and unique characters. I don't know how well I succeed at this, but I try to let readers get acquainted gradually with characters. One of my writers' group friends says "Everyone is normal until you get to know them." That's not quite true, but it does say something important: You don't immediately know everything about a real person when you meet them. I try to take readers through somewhat the same getting acquainted process with people in my stories, though the process has to be truncated in a major way.
3) Dialog. I love dialog, maybe too much. I want my dialog to be quirky, original, and hopefully remind you quite a bit of Firefly. I'm not as good at dialog as Joss Whedon, but that's what I'm striving for.
4) Mystery. Every science fiction story I've ever written has at least one mystery in it, and there are usually quite a few--scientific mysteries, whodunnit mysteries and double-dealing.
5) Action. I don't like sit around and angst stories, so I don't write them. Things happen in my stories--chases, explosions and fights, hopefully none of them gratuitous.
6) Tight: If I don't watch it I'm too wordy as a writer. When I write for publication, I do watch it. I do a ruthless editing pass that reduces word count by at least 20% a few weeks after I finish a final draft. That makes the story read much faster.
7) Powerful women. No whiners waiting to be rescued.
So, my ideal audience = science fiction reader who likes mysteries too, who is a Buffy/Angel/Firefly fan, who likes seeing science fiction ideas recombined in new ways and doesn't feel that a character has to drip angst to be multidimensional.
- I Think I Kill Television Series
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- dalecoz
- May 15th, 21:53
I've taken to only watching good shows on TV after they have been on a few years, because me watching them seems to be the eyeball of death. I don't watch Fringe because I'm sure that if I do it will get canceled. I don't watch Breaking Bad. Same reason.
I watched Firefly. Kiss of Death. Dollhouse. Same. Flash Forward. Gone, ending in a never-to-be resolved cliff-hanger. I started watching Buffy and Angel. Dead. Dead.
I watched a harmless bit of fluff called GCB, totally uncharacteristic for me, but I kind of grudgingly liked it, even though it's so not the sort of thing I normally watch. That was enough. It's canceled.
Oh well. Any TV shows you would like me to give the eyeball of death? I don't do reality TV--and I don't think it works if I hate a show.
- How Would People Really React to an Alternate Reality?
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- dalecoz
- May 14th, 14:42
As I've mentioned a couple of times, my novel All Timelines Lead To Rome is due out later this year. It has our world discovering an alternate reality in the near future. In the alternate reality, Rome, and the rest of the civilized parts of the Old World, essentially froze in the political and technical state they were in early in the Christian era. There is still a Roman empire. It, and the rest of the Old World, have never discovered the New World. Indians went on in their own course to the future without European interference. If you have a portal, you can go to a world that has both an all-Indian New World and a Roman empire.
How does that change our society? I don't have the discovery changing things much. Most people pause, say "Oh cool!" and go back to watching reality TV, or following the latest ex-Disney star's decline into cocaine and alcohol dependence. That probably sounds cynical, but I think it's probably as realistic as panic or deep fascination.
I stacked the deck to make it difficult to use resources from the alternate reality. In All Timelines, you can breach the wall between the universes relatively easily in a few places, but most places it takes a LOT of energy to open a portal, and a continuing stream of energy to keep it open. Age and intensity of the differences between the realities seems to determine how much energy it takes to open a portal. That puts areas around our oil wells and gold and silver rushes pretty much off-limits.
Still, people do try to find ways to pursue their agenda in the alternate reality. A few snippets from All Timelines illustrates some of the reactions:The Bureau of Timeline Integrity’s Midwest office stood six stories, a pygmy among the office buildings surrounding Oakbrook Mall in the middle ring of Chicago suburbs. It discreetly bore the bureau’s logo.
Scott barely noticed the handful of demonstrators near BTI’s underground garage, a tiny remnant of the thousands that gathered there when the portals opened seven years ago. As he drove his four-year-old green Chevy past them, they chanted, “Close the Portals! Timeline X for the Indians!” A tall bearded guy brandished a sign that read, “Jesus Died For TimeLine X Too!”
Later, the bartender at a redneck bar gives his vision for the future of the alternate reality, half-facetiously:Bill Dickey brought their drinks. “Did I hear the word scandal?”
“Probably,” Scott said.
“I told you she was trouble. You’ve been here twice, so you’re regulars. Any time you want to get drunk and tell me your darkest secrets, I’m here for you.”
“We’ll keep that in mind,” Scott said. He gestured to the stage. “No ‘UDE’ girls.”
“You’re not drunk enough to appreciate the girls I get here,” Bill said. “Speaking of deep, dark secrets, when are they going to bring oil through the Portals?”
“Hopefully never.”
Bill grinned. “Ah, tree hugger. Leave the Indians alone? Well your money spends as well as anyone's, but remember, screwing over Indians made this country great.”
“That's one way of looking at it.”
Bill stretched his long arms. His shirt rode up, revealing a pot belly. “We're a plague of locusts, all of us, Americans and Europeans, Asians. We eat the land bare. Stop moving and we starve to death. Now we have the portals—a whole new world to ravage. We're a Biblical plague. No use pretending we aren't.” He strolled away, grinning.
What do you think the public reaction would be? What ways would people try make use of access to the new reality? What kind of political pressure would there be?
- Navajo Cops
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- dalecoz
- May 13th, 23:11
I don't usually like reality TV, but I stumbled across a show I find fascinating. National Geographic has a reality show that follows the activities of the fifty or so Navajo policemen who patrol the Navajo reservation, a 27,000+ square mile area that is home to over three hundred thousand Navajo Indians. Very interesting show. The cops ride around in very modern-looking police cars, with guns and radios and all of the accoutrements, busting drug dealers and dealing with the local gangbanger wannabes. Navaho gangbangers. The mind boggles, though I guess it shouldn't. This is a very different culture, with the local tough guys standing there hanging their heads as their tiny grandmother lay into them for bringing shame to the family.
Navajo cops also investigate, in all seriousness, reports of creatures that are apparently out of traditional Navajo beliefs, like Skinwalkers (a kind of shape-shifter, like a werewolf) and Howlers.They have to work around strong Navjho taboos against handling the dead, taboos that may partly account for the fact that Navajo population grew from around 4000 at first European contact to over 300,000 now, a growth that is unique among North American Indian tribes.
This is not a wealthy culture, but it is an interesting one, growing fast and showing few signs of assimilating into one of the American mainstreams. It would be interesting to set a story in a realistic-as-I-could-make-it Navajo country of a hundred years in the future. Of course that would involve building the world that surrounded them to some extent, and it would take a LOT of research on the tribe itself, but it would be interesting to project how much the Navajo future differs from the future of the rest of the country.
To slightly adapt something Kij Johnson said at one of her workshops, too many times when we look at the future we just see white guys. Hopefully there will be quite a few of us around, but I suspect that there will quite a few Navajo around too, and it would be interesting to explore their potential role.
- In Real Life, the Secret Room is Full of Bat Crap and Empty Boxes
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- dalecoz
- May 12th, 14:15
As I mentioned a day or two ago, I'm helping an elderly aunt sort through some of her stuff. As part of that, I discovered a room in her old farmhouse that I never knew existed. I grew up going to that farm every couple of days, stayed overnight there quite a few nights, even played hide and seek there with her son when I was a preteen, yet as I moved boxes out of one of the upstairs rooms I discovered a half-sized door that led to a rather large room under the downslope of the rafters.
Here's where reality diverges from fiction. In fiction, there would have been something cool or scary in that room. In reality, it was full of empty boxes, a couple of very broken appliances, and a heavy coating of animal droppings, either from bats or rodents. I poked my head in and hastily went around opening all of the windows in the upstairs. We already had a high-quality, high-throughput air filter going, but the stale air from the room seemed to push out and overwhelm the air filter. We had to move away from the door. The air from the 'secret' room didn't smell bad. It just didn't seem very breathable after two or three decades of nothing going in or out of the room. I had heard the word 'stifling' and even used it, but this was the first time I really understood deep down what it meant, what it felt like. I've been told that when I go back up there I'll need to wear a heavily-duty filter mask, because bat or rodent droppings like that can harbor seriously nasty bacteria.
The upside: At least I have a better feel for what it's like to open door that's been closed for decades. That'll go into a story somewhere.
