Unpacking the Zeitgeist
I'm trying to work out how I'd go about explaining this news item from WOWinsider to someone thirty years ago, in 1977, and it is making my head hurt because there are too many prior assumptions nested recursively inside it to unpack easily. (Unless the person in 1977 who I'm trying to explain it to is John Brunner, who I think would get it first time.)
Okay, let's take it from the top:
There exists a vast, global data network for exchanging information between computers. It's called the internet. It's used by corporations and governments and other groups such as people who like to dress up as furry animals to keep tabs on us.
These computers aren't just big mainframes; most of them are small brightly coloured consumer items. Some of them are disguised as pocket radio telephones that play music and double as television cameras. (Yes, TV cameras the size of a pocket calculator.)
People use their personal computers for playing games. (Some people have more than one computer.) Many of the games run over this "internet" and let people play against, or with, each other in teams in imaginary cartoonish worlds where they can take on the character of mighty-thewed barbarian heroes or dress up as furry animals. (Yes, the personal computers have flat colour television screens to display data. Why do you ask?) They can also chat to each other by typing on their computer keyboards.
One of the more popular multi-person internet games is called "World of Warcraft". When you join, you start out with limited resources, and you need to collect gold and magic weapons and kill monsters and go on quests to acquire loot and gain higher levels (which come with whizzy new abilities). A bit like that new-fangled Dungeons and Dragons game everyone's talking about, except using a computer instead of dice and rule books and lead figurines. (Yes, there are several million people doing this right now. This isn't rocket science.)
Grinding your way up to higher levels is boring, so some enterprising eastern sweat-shop owners have come up with a new business scheme; they fill offices with low-paid staff sitting at computers who go on quests, acquire loot and gold, and then sell these for real-world money to impatient gamers. This practice is known as "gold farming" and is frowned upon because it takes a lot of the fun out of the game for those people who're playing it as a game.
Gold farmers need to advertise where potential customers can see them.
There is a common practice on this "internet" called spamming — sending out huge volumes of advertisements via electronic mail and other media. Because the cost of delivering electronic mail is nearly zero, and the recipient pays the fees, spammers can deluge mailboxes and send out millions of junk messages. Indeed, ninety percent of the electronic mail conveyed over the vast intercontinental data network consists of offers of pornography, drugs for erectile dysfunction, and attempts to con recipients out of their bank account details.
Advertisers in a game world annoy the players; it's a form of spamming. So the corporation who run World of Warcraft have built robot filters that destroy spam messages in chat sessions.
So ...
Being unable to stand on a soap box using a megaphone to yell "buy our gold!" one particular gold farming company decided that to get their message across, they'd create hundreds of new characters in the game — all gnomes, all identically outfitted — place them at precise locations, and drop them from a very great height, so that their splattered corpses would spell out the address of the firm's shop front on the internet.
Got that? Good!
Your question: at which step in this narrative would my 1977-era audience first say "you've got to be shitting me!" ... and when would they start moaning and holding their head in their hands?
There are thirty years' worth of future shock condensed into this one news item. And the reason I'm writing about it is that I don't think I could get away with putting such an conceptually overloaded incident into one of my novels; it would take too much set-up and require so much infodumping that many readers would lose interest. This Russian doll of a news item contains some rather scary pointers to where we're going, and a harsh warning about the difficulty of accurately portraying plausible futures in literature.
(In the meantime, just one warning: I'm going to slam the comment thread on this posting shut after no more than seven days because it is going to draw the WOWgold spammers like flies to a honeypot.)
Comments
I was 1 in 1977, so I'm imagining explaining this to my mum, who still knows as much about the Internet and computers as she did in 1977.
I think framing the WOW backstory is the issue.
I think they would ask some money related questions, then some social ones.
First, are these machines expensive? (Relatively of course). Can anyone have them, do they require much education to play the game, like a degree or something similar?
Are the gnomes 'alive', are they 'hurt' in any way? Seeing as the economies are different, 'eastern sweat-shop owners' might need explaining.
I think the big question would be, has this replaced 'normal life', do most people play this, or a minority, or one particular segment of society, like white English speaking males?
Seeing as many people I know now (not all) who were adults in 1977 see WOW and related MMORPGS as stunning wastes of money, time & opportunity(and the player's life), I think convincing the listener that people would voluntarily spend so much time just grinding away till they got to play the game in a serious way. It might be like telling them you are only allowed play kick-about in the park with your mates if you first run a marathon to show you are fit and committed.
Posted by: Stephen | July 6, 2007 12:23 PM
Finally! Someone's explained this stuff to me in words I can understand... ;-)
Posted by: Dave Hutchinson | July 6, 2007 12:32 PM
I love your articles like this... it's so easy to take for granted all the spiffy gizmos and gadgets without realizing just how far we've really come.
(frog, pot of boiling water...)
Posted by: R.K. Ussery | July 6, 2007 12:35 PM
This way of explaining technology (go back 30 years and explain the present) might be used to explain it to those who have been left out of it, people who have never touched a computer before. But then again it would get boring for them probably.
I like it, though!
PS: I was 10 in 1977.
Posted by: Marco Palombi | July 6, 2007 12:43 PM
As a 9yo at the time, I'd have been most baffled about the furry animals people and the erectile disfunction...
When discussing how much the world changes, they forget that people change hugely over time as they pass throught the 7 ages of man. You need to ask this question of 55+ people who were knowledgeable adults in 1977, the rest of us have too much difficulty differentiating how the world was then and how we were then.
Posted by: John Bray | July 6, 2007 1:15 PM
I think I can hear Phil Dick laughing even now. Or is it Kurt Vonnegut?
The problem with intelligent people writing about the future is they forget how dumb most of their fellow human beings are.
Posted by: Martyn Taylor | July 6, 2007 1:15 PM
I wonder what would happen if a computer user in 1977 had some sort of magical modem that connected him to the present-day internet? What would the internet look like to someone using a 1977 computer?
Posted by: Akiyama | July 6, 2007 1:16 PM
I don't know, have you ever read Keith Laumer's short stories from the sixties? I think he had all of this stuff. His question then would have been "what? it's not immersive? lame!"
He had a really good run of short stories for a while - I don't know if you can even get them anymore. I don't think he had any idea what the technology would look like, but he had fully immersive virtual reality, with humans as lab subjects. He had reality TV. He nearly had the Truman show, only he missed the part about the character who wasn't on TV. Or did he? It's been a long time. And of course he had the purple, carnivorous, sexy space aliens with four breasts (they just don't *make* acid like that anymore).
I don't know if you can even get any of these short stories anymore - it looks like a few of them are available on webscriptions, but I don't see most of it even in the amazon used books list. Which is too bad - if you judged him by what you see on Amazon, you'd think he was a hack.
Anyway, the point is that there were easily two or three thousand science fiction fans to whom you would have had no trouble conveying the zeitgeist of 2007 in 1977. And that point probably extrapolates to modern fandom. Trust us - we're quicker on the uptake than you imagine.
Posted by: Ted Lemon | July 6, 2007 1:43 PM
I was -1 in 1977, so it's difficult for me to imagine their mindset regarding computers. :)
I think the key would be who you were telling this to. If you told it to come Electrical Engineering grads, or folks doing homebrew computers they'd just get excited.
If you were writing about it in Time Magazine, a deluge of confused and angry mail calling for better editorial work to keep out the "kooks" would be the result.
I think the hardest thing for people to swallow would be that there are low cost personal computers that are very powerful and cheap enough that most families have more than one. Cost would probably be the part that's hardest to believe. If they could get past that, they'd dismiss the rest about WoW as "kid's stuff".
Now, if you did it 5 years later it would be much different. They'd see it as something like TRON, most likely. The late 70s were a cusp in our worldview about computers and IT.
Posted by: Andrew G. | July 6, 2007 1:52 PM
I think that a hail of gnomes may have been mentioned in the Book of Revelations. In a way, though, it's strangely beautiful.
Posted by: Adam | July 6, 2007 2:04 PM
This sounds like a case of my latest favorite phrase, a "Time Abyss". Unfortunately the definition only exists in a book called "The Encyclopedia of Fantasy" -- I haven't found a webified definition of it yet.
My sister summarized a Time Abyss thusly: "a moment where you're almost outside of yourself, and have a larger perception of the passing of time." Her example was googling for an image of a Nantes cathedral in France. She suddenly realized that fifteen years ago the same task would have required a great deal more effort, possibly a trip to the library.
People become accustomed to the future very quickly. One year it's "information superhighway!", and the next it's "worthless porn-drenched spam-clogged hell-hole!" At the same, they still have utopian dreams about the next product, the next step up.
I think the moment a 1977 person would stop you would be the part where you mention personal computers and a global network, and then treat it like it's inconsequential. What they would say is, "wait a minute, millions of people have machines thousands of times better than our supercomputers, and they're all connected together... and people use them to play Dungeons and Dragons???? The future must be ruled by nerds!"
Posted by: Owen Williams | July 6, 2007 2:06 PM
Owen @ 11:
"The future must be ruled by nerds!"
They wouldn't be far wrong. Who hasn't felt the power of the dark side running through them as they fix aunty's PC while normal people just stare in awe at your keyboard skilz?
Posted by: Stephen | July 6, 2007 2:14 PM
I think all you really need to do is list the specs for the video iPod and -- a device that fits in your pocket with more memory capacity than all the computers in the US at the time ... used as a portable jukebox? C'mon, surely you can come up with a better use for the technology. A good sci-fi writer would construct an entire story around the device, not give it some mundane purpose as a background deal. Sheesh.
Posted by: Sean O'Hara | July 6, 2007 2:14 PM
Actually, it's a good point. There may be things lurking thirty years down the pike that we just don't have a vocabulary for yet, but as a writer you have to extrapolate and write about them in terms readers today will understand. It would be really interesting to see what kind of science fiction was being written in 2084; I have a feeling some of it would be almost unintelligible.
Posted by: Dave Hutchinson | July 6, 2007 2:28 PM
I'm glad I'm not the only one who plays this game. Er, not WoW (I don't play, too many people I know have become WoWZombies) -- the game of trying to explain the modern world to someone from the past, reexamining both the facts and assumptions and trying not to explode on fractally-recursive backstory.
Admittedly, I usually find myself doing this (while doing the washing-up or something equally trivial, and when my mind's burned out on more pressing issues) with someone from way earlier -- the Enlightenment, perhaps, or just around the development of flight.
I usually get bogged down around the mid-twen-cen. I try and at least get something in about Turing before it all goes pear-shaped, just for form's sake.
PS I couldn't help but predict the "infodump" Wikipedia link would point to Neal Stephenson's entry... I guess it's true that too much "suck.com"-style facetious linking is bad for the soul :P
Posted by: Canis | July 6, 2007 2:30 PM
Akiyama @7: The text-heavy internet of the early '90s would be comprehensible enough. The main thing is that it was very texty compared to information services of the 300 bps modem era. I suppose a very efficient program could be written to filter out the unintelligible content from a modern webpage, though what's left might not be much in a lot of cases. (The process would be interminable, but so was loading programs off of audio cassette tapes.)
To the questions, the "shitting me" would be no later than the portable communicator and information can opener stage -- not necessarily the concept (as Ted notes @8) so much as the "they will be cheap enough that university students and not-necessarily-rich people from LDCs will own them in large numbers" part (yet there will not be a single supersonic airplane in civilian service).
The moaning stage would likely vary a lot with the audience. There are economists who would take the "eastern gold-farming sweatshops" news and say, "Cool! Markets in everything!!" (In fact, it would say something about the level of development in countries where labor is cheap enough to make gold farming profitable.)
You'd probably need to explain that the "electronic mail" will have killed off the postal letter, that indeed the mail will consist largely of solicitations for credit cards and credit-card bills (and that many people will have several, not carry cash or use checks, and often owe the equivalent of hundreds or thousands of dollars at usurious interest rates), which will probably be disappointing.
Quantifying the volume of spam e-mail would probably do it for the moaning, if nothing else, though there would be reassurance that there were also computer programs that will automatically get rid of most of it while rarely also throwing away letters from your mom.
Posted by: Tom Bozzo | July 6, 2007 2:39 PM
To be fair, if you tried to explain role playing to today's uninitiated, you'd have a hell of a challenge on your hands. I don't believe there've been enough WoW-related news bytes in the mass media to create an osmosis effect, which is how most of us find out about stuff outside our immediate circle of interest.
Posted by: Dan | July 6, 2007 3:04 PM
I think a 1977 audience would have accepted the story well enough as science fiction; Vinge didn't have all that much trouble selling a crime-infested, globe-spanning MMORPG in True Names (1980)...
Posted by: "Charles Dodgson" | July 6, 2007 3:10 PM
I think it was 1978, when I was 12 or 13, when I first sat down at a computer and tapped out a 10-line BASIC program my math teacher had written on the blackboard. This was on a DEC PDP-11 time-sharing system, so the idea of locally-connected computers, at least, wouldn't have been too much of a stretch for my flexible young mind to take in.
But I have future-shock when I think about gold-farming and all the attendant behaviors even today. Apparently the gold farmers pay thugs to protect them from getting offed before their characters are fully ripe, and when they do sell the character, the buyer can go in-game and kill the character in a canned hunt, Cheney-style.
The technology is interesting and not entirely surprising. But the social and economic ramifications are, well, too ramified to fully appreciate when surrounded by it, much less to predict.
Posted by: Adam Rice | July 6, 2007 3:44 PM
I would remind everyone that the Internet was invented back in the late sixties. I would also remind everyone that the Apple ][ existed back in 1977 as well. I believe there were a few networked computer games back then, text based. Graphical games existed as well. Spam did not exist, but conventional junk mail did.
Now for the average person, it would have been hard, but for me back in 1977 (when I was ten) I don't believe that it would have been that hard as I was fooling around with personal computers then.
Posted by: Martin Terman | July 6, 2007 3:58 PM
I wonder how much people knew about Play-By-Mail games in 1977.
Start with postal chess: what the internet does it take out the postal delays. What the computers do is allow games with more than two players, and the mix of cooperation and competition that the new D&D thingy allows. (The first issue of White Dwarf has just appeared.) It's a postal game and penfriend club all in one.
But "The Adventure Game" on TV didn't start until 1980. Pity, it's what you could point at to show the general idea.
I would say that the early Eighties are the time when role-playing games had enough clout to be appearing in some ordinary shops: not just the side-street nerd-traps with trains and tanks and planes and things.
And I think you got a little diverted from the core of the story: you don't need mobile phones and flat-screen TV to explain this. I think you maybe need more space given to the idea of computer graphics.
Posted by: Dave Bell | July 6, 2007 4:02 PM
"There's a game that people all over the world can play together. Some people like to amass lots of play money in the game and then try to sell it to other players for real money. One group of them pulled an advertising stunt where they killed off a bunch of their game characters so the pictures of their bodies spelled out the name of the group."
You don't need to explain *all* the details. Just enough to make things make sense.
Posted by: Jota | July 6, 2007 4:54 PM
I think I discovered D&D in 1977 or early 1978, back when I was 13 years old -- a bunch of us at school were doing table-top wargaming when the Basic D&D rulebook showed up in the local games shop, and then the original D&D manuals and then bits of AD&D 1st edition.
I first got my hands on a computer at school in, um, 1980? When they acquired a lab with three Apple IIs and a Systime-505 Concurrent-CP/M box. A year later I got to buy my first computer, a Sinclair ZX-81.
I first met the internet in 1985 (although I'd been hearing about it before then), first logged onto a MUD in 1986, and first got my own account (via Bradford University CS department) in 1989. Since which time I've been on the net ever since, except for a nine-month outage in 1990/91.
I first saw spam back in, um, 1994? Or was in 1993? When Canter & Siegal spewed the first ever Green Card spam all over usenet.
Explaining the news item to someone who was computer literate back in 1997 would be a no-brainer. Explaining it to someone back in 1987 -- most computer literate folks would get it. 1977 seems to me to be the cusp, as only a very few people had personal computers back then, connectivity via dialup modem at 300 baud was still pretty rare. (IIRC the WELL was up and running by then, but it was the very dawn of the BBS era -- Hayes weren't in business yet and hadn't standardized modem control codes -- and many of the mainframe networks that later glommed together into the early pre-TCP/IP internet were still being developed. Hmm ...)
The ingredients to extrapolate a future and predict this incident were all there by 1977, and indeed arguably by 1967 (if you were a serious visionary who read papers by Ivan Sutherland and were keeping an eye on ARPAs research projects), but the probability of nailing it dead centre would be quite low ... there are too many branchpoints where different design/tech choices, not all of which have obvious advantages, might divert you one way or another. (For example, why is email effectively free? Why is it possible to transfer in-game objects? Why are networks not centralized so we can simply block off spammers? And so on.)
Posted by: Charlie Stross | July 6, 2007 4:59 PM
Well, you could explain the cell-phone-with-camera as being something a Star Trek communicator, only better. *That* people could get.
Small computers were becoming noticeable in 1976 - Altair and Imsai advertised in Scientific American, and I met an IBM cassette-based machine at a bicentennial festival at my junior college (they had it playing - what else? - Star Trek).
I still have a DOS-based machine from 1991. (I need to pull it out and run it, because it has the 5-inch floppy drive. (Copy from the 5-inch to the 3-inch, then from the 3-inch to CD/DVD. Archives. I'm glad I don't have to deal with 8-inch, because then I'd have to find another machine.))
Posted by: P J Evans | July 6, 2007 5:08 PM
As a lot of others have noted, the news isn't that the technology is here, it's that it didn't get completed. All the 60's, 70's, and 80's sci fi assumes full immersion environments, which haven't even come close to happening outside of the occasional university or military base. Assistive HUDs are more common, but have no application in personal computing. Hardly anyone even uses voice control, despite it being at a workable stage of technology (at least as good as predictive text, which people put up with).
That sort of gap in the technology is a hallmark of good sci fi -- realizing that the stuff is built by people in societies, and they don't build what they don't want. The Iain M. Banks Culture novels are a good example; sure, ships and drones could plug straight into your brain, but they don't because it's nasty and slow in there, so voice and visual interfaces are used. In those novels again, or the Vernor Vinge book A Fire Upon The Deep, long-distance communication is constrained to text-only email instead of magical full-immersion space where the avatars meet to discuss Matters of Importance (as in Justina Robson's Natural History).
I'm also reminded of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, in which video phones inspire an unintended sub-industry of "professionally interested and composed" masks to wear during calls. There are several other interesting accidents of social technology in there, but even writing in the mid-90's, the killer video of the title isn't transmitted nearly as quickly as a youtube meme travels now.
Posted by: Jack Coates | July 6, 2007 5:12 PM
Charlie, I ran your post past my 82-year-old father. He snorted and replied, "Bullshit. Another f--kin' kid. Coulda told me that story in 1948 and I woulda f--kin' gotten it." He went on to discuss a putative early-1960s article on the social implications of miniature cameras and his own late-Seventies work on early attempts to use computers in film animation, before the conversation turned to his analysis of my experiences in the Army and just what a pain-in-the-ass it is to plan a wedding.
Now, it is very possible that my father's attempt to simulate the reaction of his 24-year-old self is an impossible enterprise. But I would also state that my own opinion is that you are greatly exaggerating the degree of future shock encapsulated in that story. The only moaning that I can see would come in when the audience realizes that the technological wonder that is the Internet is mostly used for the utterly banal purpose of separating people from their money without provided a corresponding service.
Or pornography.
Which isn't unpredictable as much as it's depressing.
In short, I must say that I am in agreement with most of the above posters on this thread. While I am very open to being persuaded otherwise, I think you hit a foul ball with this one.
Posted by: Noel Maurer | July 6, 2007 5:12 PM
Charlie,
And this is a relatively simple MMO story. Trying to sell the story of, say, Goonfleet would fill a reasonable-sized book on its own.
Thing is, 30 years ago...yes, it'd be a problem. 29 years ago, MUD1 was written. The modern MMO is, in essence, a graphical MUD.
For myself, I had my first real PC in 1991. 386 SX/40, 2 MB RAM, 41MB hard disk. I had a spectrum +2 before that, but didn't use it much. It was '93 before I found what a modem did, and '95 before I used it for more than a local BBS.
Posted by: Andrew Crystall | July 6, 2007 5:16 PM
Free email would have gone unquestioned in 1977 -- every single electronic communication system researchers built had free, global, easy communications built in. Think of the "wall" command in Unix; that's a vestigial remnant of the default 70s attitude. Spam came as a real shock to a lot of people -- remember the giant flamewars about the green card spam on Usenet? The expectation of malicious communication on the network is only newly-entered into the design zeitgeist.
Posted by: Neel Krishnaswami | July 6, 2007 5:34 PM
Noel, my gripe is not so much about telling the 2007 story to someone in 1977, as about writing a story today about events in 2037 and getting it in the ball-park.
As a conceit, it defies plausibility.
Posted by: Charlie Stross | July 6, 2007 5:53 PM
at which step in this narrative would my 1977-era audience first say "you've got to be shitting me!"
"Yes, the personal computers have flat colour television screens to display data."
Color televisions circa 1977 were big and expensive - a new one was a major event for a middle-class family and it came complete with a technician or two to roll the thing in and get it setup correctly.
Sorry for the history lesson but it's been my experience that if you have not experienced mundane stuff like this it's hard to believe.
... and when would they start moaning and holding their head in their hands?
"yes, there are several million people doing this right now. This isn't rocket science."
C'mon, Stross (says the hypothetical me in 1977). In your average high school there are - maybe - a half-dozen kids who play with computers. If the high-school has access to a mainframe. Where are millions of people going to come from to play the jumped up D&D game?
Posted by: Brian Dunbar | July 6, 2007 6:05 PM
@7 - Akiyama
What would the internet look like to someone using a 1977 computer?
I do not think you could see much of what we think of 'the internet': No web browser.
Email you could get.
Posted by: Brian Dunbar | July 6, 2007 6:10 PM
I think a lot of the posters above are assuming that you're at least talking to a science-fiction fan. I think the average person would probably lose suspension of disbelief at "These computers aren't just big mainframes; most of them are small brightly coloured consumer items."
Posted by: Bjorn Townsend | July 6, 2007 6:33 PM
I generally imagine just the opposite. Someone like Isaac Asimov in the 1960s getting a vision of World of Warcraft and trying to translate it into terms he could pass on to his readers:
Lije Borkon was an ether cop. He reached for his datalink and jacked into the ethersphere. His first stop was a game world called World of Warcraft. His data link connected with the Computron 850, the only computer powerful enough to host Warcraft and its thousands of players.
The world materialized on the datalink’s screen. When Borkon saw the dead gnomes he knew he’d be putting in some overtime.
Posted by: Kevin Meehan | July 6, 2007 6:42 PM
Bjorn gets it.
Bluntly, the majority of people are not on the bleeding edge. They're not even a couple of years behind it. To most people, PCs were invented some time around 1990 and the world wide web showed up around 1998-99. (My parents didn't even have colour TV until 1986 and cellphones until 2002.)
Posted by: Charlie Stross | July 6, 2007 6:44 PM
Stephen, do you think you'd also have trouble convincing people that there are folks who are willing to commit hundreds of hours to learning how to throw, catch, and hit before they can play baseball in "a serious way"?
Posted by: Kevin | July 6, 2007 6:44 PM
My Dad constructed his own colour TV from a Heathkit box in 1967 or so... he was always big into new technology, an early adapter I guess. I remember he bought a "handheld" calculator when they were hefty $75 thingies with four functions and red numbers.
Anyway, I was 14 in 1978 when I saw my first computer, a TRS-80 from Radio Shack owned by my uncle. I remember being fascinated by what it could do, but also dissatisfied. I think most people I knew then would not have had much trouble digesting the story above - most of us were thinking well this is cool, but how come the resolution is so low? Why is it so slow/crashy/complicated? Why is the hardware so big and heavy? Hrmph! And so on.
My lingering feeling of disgruntlement that computers were not yet up to snuff was only recently dispelled when I converted from PC to Mac and got their latest and greatest. *Sigh of relief*
Posted by: Susan Bridges McKay | July 6, 2007 7:20 PM
Bjorn: I don't think most people put any thought at all into computers. There was an assumption that they were big and clunk (as in 2001 or any other SF movie). But at the same time they had robots with small computers built in that gave human level or above human level intelligence (Star Wars, Buck Rogers, Forbidden Planet).
Often the same source would have computers that were both room sized monstrosities and tiny devices that can run a human-analog.
Bluntly, most people in 1977 had no idea what a computer really was or what it was capable of.
Posted by: Andrew G. | July 6, 2007 8:01 PM
My family got our first computer in 1984, an Apple IIc with a 12" monochrome monitor. My dad tended to upgrade every few years though, so that by 1991 I got my first PC - a beige box 286 handed down from my dad.
So for me, it's a pretty much built in part of my life that computers are there and they get more powerful every year. What I would find hard to believe is if someone from 2037 came and told me that computers weren't much more powerful than they are now and no one used them much but that most of our automation and IT was replaced by engineered monkeys.
Posted by: Andrew G. | July 6, 2007 8:07 PM
Thanks for making me feel aweful young for a change. ;-) In 1977 I still had 6 years of blissful nonexistence ahead of me.
The point in the story that I would find - with a detached mind - most inconsistent would be using keyboards to chat with each other.
With all that great technology, why don't they just *talk* to each other?
Your explaination would be too much of a stretch for me. "Oh, well, they could, but for the most part it is too much of a hassle." "Why?" "People couldn't quite agree on just one standard that would make voice transmission easy to implement for everyone. And anyway, people don't like to have their voice heard by all the other guys." No, that would be too much of a stretch for me.
Posted by: tp1024 | July 6, 2007 8:35 PM
Charlie@28: ah, now I understand. Still, for the uninitiated --- I may be the only non-fan who regularly reads your blog --- it was entirely unclear that you were taking the point of view of a man from 1977 being asked to predict the future, rather than the POV of a man from 1977 trying to understand an account of the future.
The comment @32, with which you agreed @34, implies the former, not the latter.
Few people in 1977 would have turned around and said, "I don't believe that computers will ever be that small," which is what Bjorn and you imply in your comments. Susan Bridges McKay is right: your average Joe didn't know enough about how computers worked to demonstrate any such disbelief. They might not have been able to predict that computers would become pocket size, and they certainly would not have been able to predict the consequences that would flow from that, but you are both quite wrong about the ability of the average person in 1977 to believe that they would grow that small, or fail to appreciate the attractiveness the of the videogames and portable phones that such shrinkage would make possible.
To make this more concrete, an average person would be a Puerto Rican immigrant living in Brooklyn and working as a runner on Wall Street or as an auto mechanic.
While Charlie's correct that most people like to avoid sharp blood-drawing edges, the implied inference that they cannot therefore imagine or understand future technological change is both unwarranted and contrary to my own experience.
I'm not sure that either of you intended to disparage the imaginative capacity of the average person --- I'm pretty sure, in fact, that Charlie didn't --- but that is what you both did.
Brian@30: you exaggerate quite a bit. A technician to install? A major event for a middle-class family? The average price of a color television in 1977 was $1,073 in 2006 dollars. Pricey, yes, but we shouldn't exaggerate. I watched cartoons on a color television in 1977, and my family income at the time came from AFDC.
If you're not American I completely withdraw the above comment, with appropriate contrition.
Posted by: Noel Maurer | July 6, 2007 8:39 PM
As I was a Dungeons & Dragons player in 1977, was already aware of power gamers and had also written computer programs (games) on networked computers (OK it was a teletype with a 30bps link to the local university, but the principle is the same). I think the only thing that would have been startling to me was the "people who like to dress up as furry animals" - I would strongly suspect you of making that bit up.
Other than that I think I might have been disappointed there were no significant scientific breakthroughs in the scenario (such as holographic displays which were common enough SF). In fact that might have made me suspicious of the overall story.
Posted by: JohnBStone | July 6, 2007 9:00 PM
Noel Maurer @ 40
Brian@30: you exaggerate quite a bit. A technician to install? A major event for a middle-class family? The average price of a color television in 1977 was $1,073 in 2006 dollars. Pricey, yes, but we shouldn't exaggerate. I watched cartoons on a color television in 1977, and my family income at the time came from AFDC.
I grew up in Oklahoma, my parents are middle-class. Spending $1,000 at a throw was a big deal, at least for for my dad (who is an old-school geek) and my mom (who is frugal). They spent a few weeks shopping for the thing, and this involved some schlepping back and forth between retailers. The technicians were the guys who brought it in from the truck and plugged it in to the antenna.
It seemed like a major event - big truck in the drive, strange guys rolling in this huge console.
This was 1978, and it repalced a set they had bought when they were first married, a decade plus before.
I exagerated a bit, yes. My apologies.
And I didn't get to watch cartoons on it, or not very often. Cartoons - well kids TV viewing - was only for the portable B+W TV in the rumpus room.
Posted by: Brian Dunbar | July 6, 2007 9:28 PM
Noel: I'm reminded of a story, circa 1985, of an American academic visiting Moscow. Who went to a dinner party, where one of the other guests took him to task for a magazine article (may not have been his) saying that Russians didn't have personal computers. "Of course we have personal computers in USSR!" He exclaimed. "Look! Here is my personal computer!" ... At which point he shoved his pocket calculator under his guest's nose.
Rewind to 1981 and my first school vacation job, in a pharmaceutical laboratory. They had a programmable desktop computer for running statistical regression tests on samples they were working on. The machine -- a Wang lab box of some description -- had 1024 bytes of programmable memory (in machine code), a paper take printer, a magnetic card reader for programs, and a display consisting of 24 nixie tubes. It had cost them £2500 about four years earlier. It already looked long in the tooth to me (having seen Commodore PETs and Apple IIs by then) but until about 1980 it was what most people associated with the term "personal computer" -- a machine for doing mathematical and statistical analysis like a jumped-up desktop calculator.
Posted by: Charlie Stross | July 6, 2007 9:48 PM
When I took a sliderule to school in 1979-82ish, rather than an electronic calculator, I _knew_ I was being retro.
I think that the WoW VR stuff is probably easy to explain to yr '77er. The difficult bit is why it isn't all organised like Prestel.
Posted by: Chris Williams | July 6, 2007 9:58 PM
I had my first brush with computers in the mid-70s when our school got a terminal connected to the mainframe at Sheffield University. This thing filled a small room (and it was only the terminal, remember) and didn't even have a monitor - it communicated using an IBM golfball printer the size of a steamer trunk. And now I think about it, even then all we used it for was playing games.
Incidentally, I have no idea why I said 2084 earlier. I meant 2037.
Posted by: Dave Hutchinson | July 6, 2007 10:15 PM
I was born in 1973. When I played my first computer game in 1979/1980 I started asking questions and dreaming of things that would turn out to be the evolution of what Role Playing Gaming would be.
See, I played D&D too and waited for the first games of D&D to come out. But when I played, it lacked the fun of the games with my friends. I knew someday someone was going to make that possible - when modems because mass marketed, I knew it was coming.
I played The Realm. I played AC. I played EQ. I played them all into the evolution of what is now WoW. And it's only going to get better or worse depending on how you view it.
Eventually, it won't be a nerd-fad. Eventually, it will be something more immersive. Eventually, it will be more portable. Eventually....
Well, eventually, if we don't blow ourselves up, I have every reason to believe that either through intra-gaming (biotech based) or extra-gaming (hologram based) we will get more and more immersed. Look at the Wii. Look at games like DDR and Guitar Hero. These are the first pioneers into those arenas.
It's your imagination made reality. What will an article in 30 years from NOW read like?
Posted by: John Rundell | July 6, 2007 10:25 PM
So THAT'S what George W. Bush means when he says that Coalition troops are sending a message to terrorists everywhere. He's trying to ensure that "splattered corpses would spell out" a message, and he just hasn't quite perfected his calligraphy.
On the other hand, that's what Sunni and Shiite and other groups are also trying to do.
As the mathematician Serge Lang puts it:
“Papers should also be required to be neat and legible. They should not look as if a stoned fly has just crawled out of an inkwell.”
Tigris, Tigris, Burning Bright
by
Jonathan Vos Post
Come sail with me
to the coast of the Pentagon
our epiphany
whatever it meant is gone
Sail across the sea
to the coast of the Pentagon
escape to ecstasy
mounting the mastadon
Come sail away
to the coast of the Pentagon
beyond the Beltway
failure's not im my lexicon
The tide is going out
to the coast of the Pentagon
ride the waterspout
to the kingdom of Prester John
There's a chance we're lost
on the coast of the Pentagon
pentacost, holocaust
crossing the Rubicon
Sail with me
sick of the cyclotron
weep with me
on the coast of the Pentagon
fallen is Babylon
whatever it meant is gone
1130-1158
4 July 2007
Posted by: Jonathan Vos Post | July 6, 2007 11:44 PM
(The Well was founded in 1985, but the software it ran (& still runs) was based on other social-software systems from the 70s.)
Now this has me thinking of Life on Mars again - since I was born in 1977, I don't really remember anything until the 80s were well underway. But to me, when I look at media from (or set in) the 70s, it seems like the 70s were more like the 60s than they were like the 80s, at least in terms of technological progress apparent to the average person. Maybe someone who lived through them both can say better than I can what it was like, though.
On the other hand, miniaturization was already a well-known trend by 1977, the global telephone (and telex) network existed and were quite visible, and things like Star Trek had probably already put expectations for miniature communications devices into the popular imagination. So I don't think - in broad terms - the technology would be such a surprise. TVs were giant appliances then, but I don't think anyone doubted that they were going to get smaller and cheaper and better.
And by 1982 Tron was out, and that wasn't a million miles from WoW. Now, the gold farmers, and other things related to virtual assets, that might have taken a little longer to explain, but for anyone who'd played D&D I think it'd come naturally.
Posted by: Jacob Davies | July 7, 2007 12:54 AM
As a number of people have pointed out, the answer largely depends on who you are talking to. I wonder how many people today would have trouble understanding this? Now extrapolate that forward thirty years...
Sitting here in the 21st century, the social implications seem more unbelievable than the technological gadgets. Gosh-whiz gizmos would be fairly comprehensible, I think. The social aspects would not be.
Posted by: Isaac | July 7, 2007 1:27 AM
Regarding the reason we aren't using voice technology:
Text is better. Well, it's better for most cases of remote communication involving computers. One reason it's taking so long for telephone and computer network technology to integrate effectively is that the two paradigms of communication solve distinctly different purposes, solve distinctly different problems.
The reason something like Teamspeak is better than text for dungeon crawls in WoW is that communication is mostly emoting -- you exclaim "I'm getting creamed! Heal me!" -- while much of Internet communication outside of gaming and similarly "unimportant" (speaking as a WoW player here) leisure/entertainment venues has a much higher signal-to-noise ratio. People use the Internet, for instance, to convey business information, argue about politics (with all the attendant sourcing and supporting argumentation that implies), and provide help with gnarly technical problems. Such purposes are far more suited to text than voice communication.
Imagine trying to write a search utility for skimming through voice archives to find a specific factoid, heuristically doing fuzzy comparisons of sound waveforms to word comparison templates (which would themselves have to be a form of algorithm). Now compare that with the relative ease of writing a program that allows you to do plain-text searches in your text-based communication archives (which are, by the way, less than one hundredth the size of equivalent voice archives), using standardized character sets that always look the same to your search software regardless of the font used for display. It's even easier to code your way around typos than variations in tonal patterns and other hairy problems of voice archive searching.
That's not all, though. Even given "perfect" searchability for voice, text has its advantages. For instance, you don't say "um" and "err" unless you want to, you can correct glaring errors in what you say before hitting "send", you don't look like some weird obsessive that doesn't understand etiquette if you pause in the middle of composing a reply to research something, it's easier when reading to skim back a sentence or two if you're trying to figure out what someone said, interruption isn't really an issue the way it is with voice, and so on. More people can have a conversation in the same channel, room, whatever, without losing all ability to communicate effectively: compare a busy IRC channel with the idea of thirty people (a fraction of what constitutes "busy" in IRC) all talking on the same telephone line (or in the same Yahoo! voice chat) at the same time.
Much of what makes voice communication valuable is actually lost in transit when done remotely. Context is lost; facial expressions and gestures are lost entirely, or rendered problematic by low-quality webcams; et cetera. It's easier to attach context hints to text-based communication with full knowledge of what's missing than to voice communication. While a one-on-one discussion may be higher-bandwidth in some ways with voice (in terms of conveying information to the person at the other end), in most others its bandwidth is far lower. For quick alerts, a sound is more grabbing and can make your point faster (thus the value of Teamspeak in WoW), but for longer discussions -- actual "conversations" -- you're much better off with text, generally.
I could go on in this vein for hours. The point, ultimately, is that people often find it difficult to predict the future with regard to technology and its uses not because the technology is unpredictable, but because people try to predict based on what technology they think is easily achieved as an expected development path. They don't think as much about what people will want out of it, or how useful it actually is. Text is, for the most part, still far more useful for network communications than voice -- thus, it's still king, regardless of the fact that we had the basis of networked voice communication in the days of Alexander Graham Bell.
Posted by: apotheon | July 7, 2007 1:30 AM
I remember playing on my Spectrum in the mid 80's. You'd insert a tape cassette and then sit there for about 30 minutes as horizontal bars of lurid colors danced up and down your TV screen while the speakers shrieked at you. Then, finally, you would get to play Frogger for a bit.
30 minutes of maniacal banshee shrieking to play Frogger, and I thought it was the very bleeding edge of computer cool. If you had told me about a virtual realm depicted with gorgeous graphics, a world with its own economy, millions of players across the globe playing at any time, all the time, I would have scoffed.
And then gone back to watching my shrieking TV set for another 20 minutes.
Posted by: Philip Tucker | July 7, 2007 1:50 AM
You forgot that 30 years ago, "erectile disfunction" was called "impotence" and all the "drugs" for it were called "spanish fly".
Posted by: losthawk | July 7, 2007 2:12 AM
This might be easier to explain from the other direction-- "A free-enterprise organization resorted to unusual advertising to attempt to break the gold-trade monopoly of another organization. But it all happened on computers."
Just replace Spain with Blizzard and Sir Francis Drake with some kid in Myanmar.
Posted by: C | July 7, 2007 3:48 AM
Apotheon,
I'd point out that in WoW the raiding guilds to tend to use voice. Regardless, the emphasis is largely on "learning" encounters. That is, to know how to react on a rote basis to the things a boss does without the need for more coordernation than calling off stages.
If you take a MMO with far more fluid content like Eve-Online, voice in combat tends to be far more critical and used in different ways, to react to unexpected changes because of the ability to hear and react in-game without taking your focus off the controls.
And most of the long-time guilds I've been in, for various games, do indeed use voice as a chat medium. When you're playing, especially when you're playing differnt games, it can still forge a community.
Voice is used in multiple ways :)
Posted by: Andrew Crystall | July 7, 2007 4:16 AM
Apotheon gets it right, I think, and in a similar vein, I predict the iPhone will be a flop. Yes, it would be nice if all the features worked as advertised, but the fact of that matter is that for humans, a certain minimum screen size is, well, not necessary, perhaps, but desired. The same with the keyboard feature. The work-around is clever and incites my admiration, but in the end . . . it's just not good enough. Anyone have any good info on the latest in chording keyboards?
And another retrodiction: these same denizens of 1977 after hearing all of that WoW stuff as background would find it hard to believe that videophones were never a serious retail item.
Posted by: ScentOfViolets | July 7, 2007 4:17 AM
Philip@51, c'mon. I don't believe that you would have scoffed, any more than I would have scoffed. I believe that you would have been jealous. At least I hope so ... you're talking about the 1980s, for crying out loud.
But that brings up a question that will be ignored, I'm sure, because it's such a village idiot question. So here goes.
What exactly are the social aspects of computer technology that we're talking about here?
Seriously. Sure, it's easier for fuzzies to find each other ... but when I go looking around for mainstream social changes that I can unambiguously pin to the Internet, I have trouble finding them.
Campaign finance, maybe. But other than that?
Myspace, cool and all that, but what are 17-year-olds really doing differently? Terrorism, you'd think, easier to network, but have we seen anything not entirely explicable or imaginable in the pre-Internet days? Commerce? Sure, but what's not glorified mail-order? Pornography? Well, yes, but it wasn't exactly unavailable before the Web, and have we really seen any changes in sexual behavior as a result?
There have been lots of behind-the-scenes changes that have added up to a productivity revolution in myriad industries, of course, but that's not what I'm asking about. I'm asking about social changes. I don't mean anecdotes and I don't mean subcultures (which, believe it or not, existed about as much in America circa 1990 as they do now) --- I mean major quantifiable social changes that can truly be pinned on computer technology. What's out there?
Posted by: Noel Maurer | July 7, 2007 5:40 AM
Charlie, I think trying to write something _realistic_ set in 2037, particularly if you're dealing with cutting-edge tech, is somewhere between impossible and hubristic.
It can't be done and you'll drive yourself mad trying, and no matter how well you do it it'll still look silly in 2037, or even 2027. That's why I don't write in-this-timeline near-future SF.
OTOH, if you avoid the high-tech stuff, it wouldn't be too hard -- most everyday technology (subways, elevators, cars, bathtubs and showers, airplanes, guns) won't be all that different from what we have today, just as 1977's tech isn't much different from 2007's at that level.
What'll really getcha is the politics and social trends. I mean, you can do _some_ large-scale prediction with a reasonable degree of confidence -- I'll bet any money you care to name that China will be in deep do-do in 2037, and Japan and Italy will be even worse -- but the details... gevalt.
1977... I bought my first computer with the advance for selling my first book, in the early 1980's. Even early word processing beat manual typewriters all to hell; cut and past meant _cut and paste_.
I think I'd have followed a description of WoW fairly easily. I'd have thought "wow, that would be boring compared to reading a book or structured daydreaming", but then, I think that now... 8-). I tried D&D at the time, but it was just too limited compared to what I could do in my own head.
Posted by: S.M. Stirling | July 7, 2007 6:44 AM
Jacob@48:
I think War Games might also be important - while it is not about VR or RPG, it shows a teenager owning a PC (oK, Home Computer) and doing things on a computer network. Both movies are from 1982, probably no accident.
At least that was when I learned about such things. Only three years later, owning a C64 myself, I had no problems at all to imagine something like WoW.
And a friend of mine was using his VIC20 (3.5 kb RAM) for online games.
Posted by: Andreas Morlok | July 7, 2007 6:49 AM
If you look at the hierarchy of boggle on the part of the person you're trying to explain this stuff to, I think you'll find that the tech is relatively easy, especially if you're talking to a technical professional or an SF reader. But the social changes and the implications for the way the average life is lived are much harder to explain and much less believable because that's where most of the visible change has taken place. The number of people who own more than one computer is much more evident to the proverbial observer from Mars than the number of electronic devices on a chip in the current IC generation.
And I think a lot of people are overestimating the imaginative reach of the average person, even the average engineer. In 1977 I was working in Silicon Valley. I had just spent some time at one of the companies that invented the personal computer, and was working at Intel, which invented and developed the technology that made the internet at its current scale possible. I think I could see some of what was happening then (it helped that I had read "Shockwave Rider"); it's one of the reasons I chose to be working there: I wanted to help create it. And I'd been playing with computer graphics for several years at that point. But from the conversations I had with my colleagues at the time, I think I can be pretty confident that very few of them, even there at the heart of the engine of change, could even get their heads around the kind of technical and social changes we talking about here; and few of those who could would believe in them ever happening.
In terms of writing SF, Charlie, I'd say that you can fulfill you obligation to your story and your reader if you can see past the obvious application of new technology to the way things are done now, and produce some reasonable speculation about things that aren't done now, but could be. Not as prediction, but as a way to make concrete the magnitude of the kinds of change we face. Even today, a lot of people who give lip service to the notion of exponential change don't really believe or understand that this means that the way we live will be drastically different.
Posted by: Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers) | July 7, 2007 7:17 AM
Noel @56: the key behavioural changes are subtle.
One example: geographically dispersed interest groups can network now. If you're into some weird hobby that only one in half a million people share, the odds are good that you're the only guy in your town who's into it. There might be a small magazine for it in an area the size of the USA, and monthly meet-ups in a bar in New York, but that's about it. But with the internet, you can seek out your fellow freaks and communicate. So we find that marginal, weird, outre interests are suddenly out there and dragged into public view because hundreds of people suddenly get together and start talking about them for the first time even.
And then there's the delocalization effect of mobile phons. Mobile phones don't like addresses, they link people. This is clearest when you look at young folks who've grown up with them; they do ad-hoc social networking, agreeing to converge on a given location, without prior planning, because they can.
David Brin, in Earth, predicted the near-death of the snail mail postal service in, um, 1994? ... But I thought he was going a bit far. Now I turn around and discover that I haven't actually written anyone a letter on paper (other than a covering note for business purposes) in over a decade.
These things creep up on us, and they're like the (apocryphal) frog-boiling process: you don't notice them because they're a gradual progression.
Posted by: Charlie Stross | July 7, 2007 10:44 AM
Charlie, @60, and businesses are a long way behind people. Unless you're in a high-tech industry, they're still wedded to paper mail.
And for some things, seeing how good their security is, that's probably still the best choice.
Posted by: Dave Bell | July 7, 2007 1:03 PM
I am seriously astonished at the posters here who assume that most people in 1977 wuld have expected the miniaturised & networked computers that we have now. I certainly didn't. I remember a BBC Horizon programme in the late 1970's that predicted that computers would get small, cheap and *useful* enough that everyone would have one at work - I was sceptical. And yes, I read sci-fi, I had learnt to program at school - via an accoustic coupler linked to *the* computer at our local polytechnic - and I watched Tomorrow's World, Horizon, etc.
As far as I recall, computers in sci-fi were still large, expensive things. The characters often used them, but the assumptions about the technology were completely wrong. Apart from "The Shockwave Rider", I hadn't read any book with a computing infrastructure even remotely like today's. The future then was full of flying cars and personal jet packs, not Treos and iPhones.(FWIW, I went on to study maths and computer science at Cambridge & Warwick universities).
Charlie, looking through your article, I notice that you didn't explain "electronic mail" - I didn't encounter that until 1981, my second year at university. Also, the phrase "robot filter" wouldn't have made any sense , back then, the word "robot" always meant machines. The only question I'd have about the article is whether WoW really requires all the technology you mention. After all, it is basically hosted on a few big central "computers" (= server farms).
Posted by: Dave Berry | July 7, 2007 2:05 PM
Steve @ 57: You raise an interesting point -- for many people in 1977 technology might be the easiest thing to swallow.
But tell people in 1977 that the USSR collapsed peacefully without a fight, that much of the former Warsaw Pact nations are now part of a Supranational EU with western Europe, that Communist China is a major player in international capitalism and produced most of the world's high tech consumer products along with South Korea. Then tell them that the US's main enemies are ill-defined terrorists in multiple nations, and that some people are pushing for war with the *Islamic Republic* of Iran. Tell them that most industrial nations are starting to worry about underpopulation and that pollution is mostly a solved problem in the the first world -- the big pollutant people are upset about is C02.
And to top it off, there have been no major advancements in space travel -- we haven't been back to the moon or gone to mars. We have a space station but it's not that much better than Skylab, that we still use the Space Shuttle and are thinking of replacing it with something based on Apollo.
See how much of that they believe. Then think what might have happened by 2037...
Posted by: Andrew G | July 7, 2007 2:11 PM
Dave @ 62: I think it would be possible for a game like WoW to be created even if we didn't have personal computers. Some sort of multi-million dollar mainframe running the game, with people connecting from home terminals.
The technology certain could have gone that way, if there had been something preventing the development of personal computers. (National Security concerns?)
Posted by: Andrew G | July 7, 2007 2:41 PM
My boss was telling me yesterday that the one area where Ireland has an advantage over say, India or China, was the ability of Irish to understand idiomatic American English, which would allow an Irish software engineer to communicate over the telephone (the first virtual environment, and one that had been around since the early 1900s, perhaps?) for business purposes with his/her American counterpart in a way the other lot couldn't. That's a social change that was utterly unpredictable from the standpoint of the Ireland of 1977, yet also strangely predictable - if you had factored into the equation not only an Irish economic advance from the conditions of the 1970s (when in some rural areas there were still landless agricultural labourers who had to sleep in barns with animals) to those of today (where a high-tech urbanised society is sustained by a brittle property boom) but also the retention of Irish cultural links with its diaspora, not only in the neighbouring island but also across the Atlantic. I'm not sure what (if anything) this might mean for the original post, but give me a moment and maybe something will come to me.
Posted by: D,O'Kane | July 7, 2007 4:34 PM
Dave Berry wrote: 'I am seriously astonished at the posters here who assume that most people in 1977 would have expected the miniaturised & networked computers that we have now....Apart from "The Shockwave Rider", I hadn't read any book with a computing infrastructure even remotely like today's.'
You should have read more. MICHAELMAS by Algis Budrys got it all in 1977 -- and Budrys wrote much of the first draft in the late 1960s. Aside from his novel's predictive aspects, Budrys was a better writer -- in terms of literary style -- than 99 percent of SF authors then or now.
Posted by: Mark Pontin | July 7, 2007 5:25 PM
I'm with those who would expect that people wouldn't have a problem with the idea of smaller computers. Miniaturization of electric gizmos in fiction goes back far beyond 1977 (look at dick tracy's wrist radio and the already-shrinking size of calculators), and to most people, a computer was an electric gizmo. The Apple II was introduced in 1977, and "minicomputers" had existed before that.
I doubt that explaining that people play games on them would really be THAT much more difficult, considering that 1977 was the very year that Atari released its first console, and if I recall correctly, the Apple II was a pretty nifty little gaming system in its own right.
The hardest part might be explaining online gaming, but even there, it's not that tricky. You just tell people that everybody plays a D&D-style game online, together, and that you amass money in the game in order to buy new weapons and armor for your little in-game knight. It's against the rules to buy or sell in-game money for real money, but people do it anyway. One seller pulled a stunt where a lot of the little knights died in an arrangement advertising his wares.
AndrewG at #63 called it: the hard part would be explaining geopolitics nowadays.
Posted by: Demosthenes | July 7, 2007 6:27 PM
Andrew G,
Certainly. The ideal MMO client *is* a dumb terminal. All the computer on your side does, ideally, is the interface and graphics. As Raph Koster put it;
"The client is in the hands of the enemy"
For that matter, look at something like Runescape which is precisely that - you run it in a browser...
Posted by: Andrew Crystall | July 7, 2007 7:21 PM
Re social networking, there was a 19th century magazine that in many ways operated similarly to a modern discussion board.
I think the moral of that story is not to overvalue the big trends of history. The past must be full of strange, forgotten subcultures, which didn't make it into the history books, but which prefigured trends that technological and cultural circumstances have made more viable today. Or maybe not even subcultures, just lone individuals with no outlet for their strange ideas. If you were born into 19th century London with the mind of what today would be a programmer, how would that affect your choice (if any) of work, interests, hobbies, social circles? If we could look at all the unpublished novels of the past, would we find any that are eerily prescient, and just too weird to be appreciated in its time?
Correspondingly, think of the social experiences and dynamics one could have a few hundred years ago, that have become unviable today, (for instance the experience of reading in a mostly illiterate world with few and expensive books). I imagine some of these experiences would sound as strange to us today as WOW to someone from the past, (which is where historical fiction comes in, to make the forgotten real).
Posted by: Bjørn Stærk | July 7, 2007 8:57 PM
Bjørn: and then there were APAs, back in the pre-BBS pre-weblog day. Been there, did that in the eighties and early nineties; some of 'em are still going.
The key point is that the message response time in an APA was typically a month, and the scope for discussion was limited -- usually to no more than fifty or sixty people, max, for logistical reasons. Printing off fifty copies of your monthly contribution and mailing them to a coordinator who'd collate them and mail them out again was hard work, especially before cheap photocopying: I harbour a number of unfond memories of the insides of a Gestetner stencil duplicator.
Basically, the investment of time and effort it took to participate, and the limitations on the scope and scale and speed of debate, meant that it was simply inaccessible to most people. A web board (like this very blog!) compares with a such pre-computer communications media like a printing press with a scriptorum full of clerks copying books in long-hand.
Sometimes adding a new technology to a pre-existing task results in a qualitative change, rather than merely a quantitative one.
Posted by: Charlie Stross | July 7, 2007 9:09 PM
For those of you who are interested in the "email from the future", Michael Swanwick recently received an email from his future self of 2107. This communication was published in a recent issue of Asimov's magazine.
Swanwick's future self didn't go into much detail about the technological advances of the future, but he did mention that Charlie was turned into a giant blue lobster in the year 2076. How ironic...!
Posted by: James Reynolds | July 7, 2007 9:15 PM
57: Actually, I bet cars will have radically different social effects in 2037. For one thing, people won't drive them -- they'll drive themselves. This will radically alter how cars interact with urban centers, because now you don't need to put parking within a short walk of where the people want to go -- parking only needs to be within a short drive of where people want to go, because a car can drop you off where you want to go, and then drive itself to a parking spot than can be up to several miles away. This pretty much reverses most of the deurbanizing effects of the 20th century automobile.
Posted by: Neel Krishnaswami | July 7, 2007 10:00 PM
Neel: see also HALTING STATE (when it comes out).
Interesting statistic: at peak rush hour on a weekday, about 95% of the UK's car fleet is ... parked. In fact, the load factor of the automobile industry, if compared directly to the airline industry -- or any other form of public transport -- is desperately bad.
I suspect that a lot of the attraction of the personal automobile comes from two factors, plus marketing: the two factors being (a) territoriality (people don't like sharing space with strangers) and (b) convenience (it's at your beck and call). These feed into the industry's use of aspirational values like freedom and independence as marketing tools. But imagine for a moment that you've got a magic taxi account. Want to go somewhere? A taxi will pull up and take you there within three minutes, guaranteed or your money back. Any distance, no problem -- you pay by the mile. No human driver in the front seat to listen in on your conversation, and no worries about servicing and maintaining and cleaning and refueling the vehicle: it's all part of the service.
Would you use such a service? I sure would. (But then again, I don't enjoy driving; nor do I ride a horse or fly a light plane.)
Posted by: Charlie Stross | July 7, 2007 10:10 PM
In my neck of what once were Live Oak woods, mostly chopped down, replaced by ostrich farms and orange groves and dairy farms, it would seem that cars have the vote, and humans do not. Cars and coyotes and cacti and rats and mountain lions and bears, all of whom show open contempt (or, at best, indifference) for people. But, then, Ray Bradbury wrote about that a long time ago in his short story "The Pedestrian" (1951).
I wrote myself a poem from my future, but it makes me somewhat unhappy to read now, due to it being uncomfortably accurate.
A decade or two from now, many critics will evaluate your stories for predictive accuracy, which was not (I suspect) really your point.
"If this goes on..." as Robert Heinlein wrote (Happy 100th birthday, Bob!) is a basic SF story approach. The trend is shown, not for prediction, as such, but to attract or repel, and perhaps allow us to choose utopia over dystopia.
Happy Heinlein Day!
Posted by: Jonathan Vos Post | July 7, 2007 10:25 PM
Andrew Crystall @54:
I think you missed the fact that I pointed out MMORPGs constitute an exception to the general rule. Raids and the like, as I clearly stated, rely more on emoting than on intellectual discourse. There's little actual conversation going on -- it's just a quick and easy way to alert others to changes in circumstances within a quick-paced, highly variable circumstance. When you're not calling for a healer or warning about an approaching level sixty elite bearing down on the group, and when there are a great many people in a single channel or "room", text is by far the more effective option.
Quoting myself, I said: "something like Teamspeak is better than text for dungeon crawls in WoW". Thus, your statement doesn't disagree with me -- it just uses a single, limited example of where an exception is true to imply that voice is better in general.
ScentOfViolets @55:
It's interesting that you bring up chording keyboards. That and HUD-type technology are more in line with the direction things need to go if you want truly improved portability and miniaturization for general-purpose, network-capable computers. Until we can get keyboard-equivalent functionality with one hand (or using some kind of direct mental input) and a wearable "screen" of some sort, laptops are going to continue to be irreplaceable.
Well . . . there's another option, but it basically requires that everybody stop touch-typing and become far less productive in their habitual use of computers. When we all become unskilled hunt-and-peck typists, maybe then something like a stylus-based PDA interface will prove more popular for "serious" computer use, or those atrocious little miniature keyboards that just beg to be used for fat-fingering typos every third word at a rate of six words per minute.
The real win for touch-typing, and the thing we need for greater miniaturization and portability to catch on, is the fact that full-size keyboards can be used without having to stare at the input device, and without having to think about every single letter we want to input. This is the same reason that those optical keyboards, really shallow keystroke keyboards whose key action is too mushy, and keyboards miniaturized to the point where you have to very carefully pick out every single letter visually, all tend to fail as replacements for a full-size keyboard. It's also the reason that despite the best efforts of Apple in the '90s and Microsoft this century the mouse has not ever replaced the keyboard and, with luck, will not do so either. It's also the reason that "multi-touch" interfaces like the iPhone's will never replace something with real tactile feedback and a clear, standardized arrangement like a QWERTY keyboard.
I think the single biggest problem with the iPhone's design is that it cannot be efficiently operated without looking at it.
Posted by: apotheon | July 7, 2007 11:51 PM
You can use stranger futures in humorous stories, I think. See Murray Leinster's 1946 "A Logic Named Joe," which got a fair amount right about the Net. (He didn't foresee how decentralized it would be, though.) Also William Tenn's 1957 "Winthrop Was Stubborn"/"Time Waits for Winthrop" in which the future includes such obviously-absurd things as women shaving their heads.
Posted by: Dan Goodman | July 8, 2007 12:53 AM
Charlie@73: I'm on record as being willing to bet large sums of money that most people will still be driving their cars manually in 2037. Let's say $10,000, adjusted for inflation. Any takers?
Posted by: Noel Maurer | July 8, 2007 1:30 AM
Avedon pointed at this set of local reactions to terrorism in Scotland.
You don't think you might have made the characters in "Halting State" a little bit wimpish?
Posted by: Dave Bell | July 8, 2007 5:33 AM
There are still agricultural laborers in Ireland who sleep in barns with the livestock.
The difference between 1977 and 2007 is that now they're Polish.
Try telling someone in 1977 that in 2007 6% of the population of Ireland would be Slavic migrant workers. _That_ would boggle the mind.
For that matter, tell him that... oh, that in 2007 France would have a higher birth-rate than Algeria or Iran (which it does, incidentally).
Or that British troops would be fighting Pathans in Afghanistan again.
Or that apartheid would be dismantled peacefully and largely voluntarily -- _I_ wouldn't have believed that.
OTOH, some things wouldn't be surprising. Eg., the changes in gender roles we've seen since 1977 were fairly predictable then.
Posted by: S.M. Stirling | July 8, 2007 6:04 AM
Charlie@73: I'm on record as being willing to bet large sums of money that most people will still be driving their cars manually in 2037. Let's say $10,000, adjusted for inflation. Any takers?
-- no, you're probably right about that.
I'd be willing to bet that the average speed of air travel will be within 10% of the 2007 level, too.
Posted by: S.M. Stirling | July 8, 2007 6:07 AM
This is a great article, I love WOW. Gratuitous mass Gnomeslaughter is always funnny.
Posted by: Chris D. | July 8, 2007 6:16 AM
Future of automobiles: a very large majority of cars in the US drive less than 60 miles a day.
60 miles is well within the range of an electric car, even with current battery technology.
The problem is that you need to be able to drive much further, and you can't have a separate IC-engined car just for that.
That's why I think plug-in hybrids are the answer in the short to medium term.
They have a whole range of good features; you don't need the huge battery pack you do for an attempt at a serious all-electric car; they charge mostly at night (which evens out load on power stations and reduces costs); you don't have to kick in the IC engine for most of your ordinary daily travel; but you can seamlessly transition to ordinary hybrid operation when you need to.
And they don't need an expensive new infrastructure; they use the power lines and system of liquid fuel distribution and marketing that we already have. No tech breakthroughs needed, either, and mass-production models would be only slightly more expensive than a conventional hybrid.
MPG of liquid fuel is very high for an ordinary urban car; in the 250 mpg range, ten times the current average.
Make the IC engine flex-fuel, in the Brazilian manner, and you can painlessly feed in ethanol as cellulosic conversion becomes available.
That would mean we could have ten times the number of cars with the current input of liquid fuel, or the same number of cars with only one tenth the petroleum.
Posted by: S.M. Stirling | July 8, 2007 6:17 AM
I think there's still some stuff that needs explained; for example, the concept of URLs. Obviously you attempted to simplify the idea by saying "the store front's address," but that might just lead to further confusion as they might draw some unforeseen parallel between the Internet and a physical store's address. Also you might need to mention something about the input devices used on personal computers and how that allows characters in the game world to be manipulated directly and such.
Posted by: Agentstinky | July 8, 2007 6:46 AM