When not to forget about Buffy the Vampire Slayer

This post is a response to this brilliant, BRILLIANT article in the New Statesman about Strong Female Characters. I agree with every word in that article, but I also have problems with large sections of it.

To summarise, the author of the New Statesman piece points out that many female characters these days are apparently “strong”, in that they know kung fu and don't need to be rescued that often, but are nevertheless much more simple, one-dimensional and boring than their male lead character counterparts. Moreover, there are still many fewer female characters of all kinds, including lead characters, villains and smaller parts, and they tend to represent a much smaller segment of possible character traits and are generally less interesting overall. Just having a few token “strong” characters is no substitute for proper equality. Plus, to even establish their “strength” in the first place, they often have to do crazy stuff that a man would never have to do (a point made with reference to the Captain America movie).

I couldn't agree more. It's so frustrating to watch film after film where the token love interest has a scene at the start where she beats up a few bad guys to establish her “strength” and then does nothing else for the rest of the film other than serve the plot requirements of a story entirely about the male lead. Take the new Wolverine film, where that happens with both the female leads. Or Pacific Rim. Or Despicable Me 2. Or Now You See Me. Or the latest Star Trek. I'm literally just naming the last films I've seen in the cinema (other than Alpha Papa and The World's End, which are both about men), and they all fit that mould.

Still, I couldn't help feeling like the New Statesman article was aimed at these mainstream films more than at pop culture spheres where anyone actually cares about concepts like Strong Female Characters. The SFC term itself is most closely associated – at least in my mind – with the works of a certain J Whedon, who has created dozens of brilliant and multi-dimensional women characters. It was a little irksome, truth be told, that the New Statesman piece used one of them – Buffy Summers – as its accompanying image, when it could easily have chosen a much more apt faux-strong character. Buffy is genuinely strong - not just in that she knows kung-fu and has super-strength. She's also strong in every other aspect of her character, including in her weaknesses and vulnerabilities, which are manifold. She's a cult hero not because she kicks ass, but because her fans have followed her for seven series (nine if you read the comics) and are deeply invested in her epic and fascinating character development and story arc. Unlike the useless kung-fu princesses of the big screen, Buffy is the main character in her show – she defines the world she lives in rather than vice versa.

My point is not to disprove the rule with a rare exception, but rather to suggest that the New Statesman piece has perhaps redefined the Strong Female Character concept in order to make a different – if completely valid and useful – point. The redefinition is useful for making this point, but it's perhaps unintentionally counterproductive in other regards. “Strong Female Character” was a term that Whedon fans adopted in order to rave about Buffy Summers (and Willow. And Cordelia. And Fred, Zoe, River, Echo and everyone else from the Whedonverse) – it was a term used to express the radical and exciting idea that female characters could be just as awesome and amenable to fan-obsession as male ones. It was never supposed to be used to praise the simple, one-dimensional "strength" discussed in the New Statesman.

And this Buffy-inspired SFC idea has had a lot of success. In the geek circles in which it has currency, it has had a huge amount of influence. Writers inspired by Buffy and similar characters have gone on to create a proliferation of *real* SFCs – each as wonderful as Buffy. Take comic books. To read post-Whedon X-men comics, for example, is to dive into a magical utopian parallel universe where character gender parity has been utterly achieved. Leads, supports, minor characters, villains and everything in between are just as likely to be female as male. The current cast includes heroes such as Storm, Kitty Pryde, Rogue, Husk, Psyloche, Emma Frost, Danger, Danni Moonstar, Magma, Wolfsbane, Karma, Magik, Jubilee, Polaris, Domino, Armour, X-23, Mercury, Dust, Surge, Hope and Rachel Summers and more (to just scratch the surface) – every one of whom represents an extremely well-developed and unique SFC who fits into an important part of the X-men story. Together they cover the whole spectrum of possible character traits. Christ, there's even one X-men title that's an entirely female line-up, and it doesn't feel weird at all!

Proper SFCs have appeared in all kinds of (mostly nerdy) media, from TV to webseries to videogames to novels, and they are beloved by fans at comic cons across the world. The problem is not that SFCs don't work, or that they inherently represent inequality. The problem, as the New Statesman piece shows, is that they aren't yet in Hollywood. Marvel's cinematic universe is still completely SFC-free, which is insane considering the range of characters it could draw on. DC almost made it with Anne Hathaway's Cat Woman, but lost it again with a rubbish Lois Lane.

What's needed is not a dismissal of or hatred towards SFCs, but a call for mainstream films to embrace them  and to properly understand what they entail. Yes, we must hammer home the point that knowledge of kung fu alone does not qualify. “Strength” in a female (or any) character was never about physical power, it was always about the depth of a character and how much the film made us care about them. It's time to take the Buffy revolution to a wider audience.

For a law against meanness

The other day, I realised there was a massive contradiction in my worldview. On the one hand, I'm generally opposed to mindless free speech or tolerating other kinds of behaviour that are detrimental to people and to society. I've written about that elsewhere on this blog.

On the other hand, I believe that people should be able to try to become the kinds of people they would like to be, and pursue the interests and kinds of behaviour that seems most appealing to them - free from any interference from society. I think free speech in excess is a bad thing, yet the idea that social interference in people being who they want to be is anathema to me.

For about 50 seconds after I realised this I plummeted into a mental crisis. Then I worked out the solution, which is one of those things that to start with seems exciting but which you soon realise is relatively straightforward. My dilemma can be restated in terms of two different ways in which "freedom" (and I hate using the word like this) can be restricted:

1. Freedom restricted by a democratic government.

2. Freedom restricted by ephemeral or unspoken social conventions and disapproval.

What is the key difference here? For me, the key difference is that when a government restricts your actions, they tell you specifically and in detail exactly how they are doing so. And they take a long time with much careful deliberation before they pass the laws that restrict you. To me, this seems entirely fair. It's still an individual being restricted by society (after all, the government is technically supposed to enact the will of society), but it's restriction in a clear way that everyone has agreed one via the democratic process. If the people vote for a government which then declares that it's not OK to make a speech inciting violence, then this is a perfectly valid limitation on freedom of speech. Right?

At the other extreme, we have peer pressure. And I don't mean 16-year-olds explicitly taunting each other into smoking. I'm taking about the deeply entrenched conventions and widely held opinions of society that prevent people from doing things they like and being their own person. Sexism and racism are largely enacted via such restrictions. No (modern western) government would explicitly forbid women from, say, wearing gender a-typical clothes or pursuing a-typical careers. Society does this, mostly unconsciously, by the way it treats the different sexes. Or by the way it treats other sub-sections of itself.

For me, this kind of restriction on freedom is entirely unfair, because no one has actually agreed to it. And when prompted, most people may even disagree with it. It's never made clear exactly what is forbidden (or rather, it's rarely made explicit - it's often made clear to those who suffer), nor why it is forbidden, because in most cases there is no reasonable justification.

But there's no reason why such social restrictions couldn't become just laws, if the government passed them. After all, there are plenty of unspoken social conventions that do a great deal of good. The codes of politeness being some of my favourite. Doing things that are mean and unkind to other people is normally met with social disapproval - such actions are forbidden in the kind of way I've described above. But these are actions that should be forbidden, because there's a very good reason to forbid them. The world is a better place without them.

So why doesn't the government pass a law against meanness?

I'm serious. The government should be used as a tool for improving people's lives. If democratic, it does and should have every right to restrict the freedoms of the people it governs by passing laws to prohibit or encourage certain actions.

But we've been too unimaginative in the kinds of things we target with our laws. Consider theft. We have a law against theft because when someone steals your stuff, it makes your life a bit worse. The bigger the theft, the worse your life suffers from it, and the bigger the penalty under the law. This is a sensible system, surely, and very just. So why don't we have a similar system for other actions that also make your life worse.

Consider bullying. Years of psychological abuse, often much more harmful than any burglary, can be met with discipline from school teachers or disapproval from peers - but not the police or the courts. Why doesn't the government ban bullying explicitly in a law? After all, it bans physical bullying, in that beating people up is illegal. But emotional bullying is usually much worse and longer lasting. There should be a law against it, so we can all be clear about where the line is between something that we've all openly agreed to prohibit for good reasons, and those things that we implicitly forbid with no good reason. The clearer this line is, the more people will feel confidant about defying the implicit side while abiding by the explicit side.

Of course, many of the laws against meanness that you might want to pass would be woefully hard to enforce. But that's a poor reason not to try. We have laws against other things that are very hard to enforce (rape being a tragic example), because we all believe that these things are bad enough that they deserve laws, so we can all be clear that they're not OK. It's time to do the same for everything else that's not OK but that doesn't yet have a law.

People may argue against me by saying it's a bit harsh to get a criminal record and a sentence for just being a little bit mean once or twice - but I reply that the law doesn't have to be a harsh one! It just has to exist, to encode our disapproval. The penalty for meanness can be as small as we deem appropriate. I suggest a light tap on the knuckles with a ruler would be fine, or perhaps a sternly worded letter from the Queen.

Who's with me?

A green and pleasant land.

George Monbiot wants to rewild Britain (and everywhere else). As Caitlan Moran just pointed out: what's not to love about this plan? You just deregulate the green bits and let nature transform conservations into wildernesses. With elephants. And mastodons. Hell yes.

This is all well and good if you care about this sort of thing, but for those of us who never go anywhere that's not within 20 minutes walk of a Sainsbury's, the thought of real wilderness right here in the UK is actually a bit scary. I mean, the whole point of England is that you don't have to worry about this kind of thing - we got rid of any creature capable of more than a light scratching centuries ago, so we don't have to ever stay up at night with dreams of being trampled by buffalo or bitten by toxic critters with more than four legs. This is one of the best things about Britain, and it makes the prospect of going abroad all the more exciting. In other lands, according to our imagination, you can hardly move for vicious reptiles and unpredictable large mammals. They're there to visit if you're ever curious. Thank god.

Indeed, if such beasts were to return to our shores, the populace would be so unprepared to deal with them that mass panic would surely ensue. 99% of headlines would instantly become something like "baby dragged from crib by giant sloth, found badly licked" or "elk beaten to death by confused mob". Unlike those of America or Australia, British children are not raised with a working knowledge of how to react to bear or crocodile sightings. The presence of these creatures would only make us a danger to ourselves.

The other thing that concerns me about the rewilding idea is that it implicitly attacks the kind of nature we already have in the UK. Personally, I love Britain's nature - it's boring enough to be a) not remotely dangerous and b) not something you feel you have to visit very often, and when you do visit, it's the perfect kind of nature for brooding and feeling cynical - a vital part of maintaining our national psyche. The British idea of a good bit of countryside is a featureless expanse of moorland with nothing but ugly, gnarled heather bushes across some scraggy contours. Maybe throw in a few large boulders if you're feeling excitable. Either that or some featureless rolling hills with short, wispy grass and a nice view over a bleak grey sea and biting, gale-force winds assaulting you from every direction. This is the kind of nature we all know and love. So it's distressing to see Monbiot's followers explicitly attacking it, or Monbiot himself insisting that it needs to go.

While elephants and sabre tooth tigers are undoubtedly awesome, so are giant death robots. My point is, some awesome stuff is better experienced at a distance, preferably from another continent. Keep Britain tame and miserable, please: that's the way I like it.

On privacy

I have a confession, something embarrassing in the context of the nominally liberal intelligentsia-type thinkers with whom people like me are supposed to identify.

I don't understand what's so great about privacy.

I've just been forwarded yet another article about how the internet is taking away this ephemeral sense of personal secrecy and isolation that we worship under the holy name of privacy. In this case, it's the glorious Julian Assange himself who bemoans the obliteration of our cherished right to inscrutability - something I found a tad ironic given that he's (allegedly) wanted by various governments for infringing this exact thing.

The argument appears to be that a supposed conspiratorial conglomeration comprising military-industrial tycoons, evil government bureaucrats, Guy Fawkes-cultist hackers and Mark Zuckerberg (and his attendant harem of social media demonspawn) is scheming to learn the most intimate details about you - yes, you - and use them to... well... you know. They're scheming to do something pretty nasty, obviously, because they're faceless goons who we fear purely because we don't know anything about them and we always fear what we don't understand because exploiting me - yes, me - in horrible ways will clearly bring them vast personal gain and untold power with which they can further secure their vice-like grip on world domination.

Call me new-fangled, but I simply can't see how if you experience more than mild concern over the issue of privacy, you are not basically just engaging in conspiracy theory.

I realise that the picture above is petty and facetious, so let's be serious: can we answer the following questions in any sensible, properly researched way that doesn't rely on pandering to our primal fears more than it relies on actual facts?

• Why would any massive, power-obsessed government or corporation care about you? And if they do care about you, why would they want to do you harm?
• Given that the rule of law still pertains (I imagine) - what exactly are governments and corporations going to be able to do to you based on any private information they ruthlessly prise from you?
• How will more targeted advertising affect you and your quality of life?

You'll notice that none of these questions ask about whether online data-mining (spying, panoptic micro-disciplines of the self, "parasitical surveillance state" - whatever you want to call it) is really going on, nor do they doubt such practices' extraordinary scope. These things I am happy, for the sake of argument, to admit. It's not beyond the realm of belief that everything Assange claims about the extent of domestic cyber-spying is true.

The scaremongering articles on this topic, appear, indeed, extremely well researched on the minute details of all the operations and technologies being deployed to achieve such spying. These articles are rich, nay, saturated with juicy facts on this subject. But often the shock and awe they attempt to arouse by barraging the reader with these amazing data is used to mask their extreme deficiency in similarly well-researched facts when it comes to showing what the government or other such agencies really plan to do with the illicitly-acquired information they amass by invading our privacy so dramatically. The article linked above doesn't even say what's so bad about all this spying, it just takes it for granted that if  spying is happening, something awful will follow. (If anything, surely our detailed knowledge of all the spying methods and facilities is comforting. I for one think it's awesome that the NSA is so open and accountable.)

Honestly: what are these agencies going to do to harm you once they've taken your private info? What actual negative consequences have occurred through loss of privacy?

As far as I can see - barring a few very rare exceptions - these faceless agencies of which we live terror have only ever wanted, and could only ever want private info for one of two reasons: making money via personalised advertising, and preventing crime.

To be sure - undermining personal privacy to achieve either of these goals is a major ethical issue which is worthy of much public debate. What it is not, however, is a cause for panic. It is not a "threat to humanity", as Assange would have it, nor is it a good reason to complain that the internet is in any sense a bad thing. At worst, it's a moral conundrum on the level of political correctness or health and safety - to what extent are we willing to give up privacy for better services and increased safety? The answer is debatable, but it's not the end of the world if it's decided either way.

That is, unless you hold privacy itself to be something which is - fundamentally - a massive deal.

Just as a libertarian might say freedom is simply important in and of itself, no matter whether it brings any actual benefits to our life, many people argue that privacy is simply important to maintain no matter what.

To these people I say: you are deluded, unthinking followers of Enlightenment dogma who are equally as guilty of pandering to irrational fears and ideological blindness as the conspiracy theorists. But then, you're entitled to your beliefs, same as anyone else.

As a culture, we desperately need to move beyond the Enlightenment if we're going to make the most of the technologies of the future. Seriously, guys - things can't just be bad or good for no reason.

This whole obsession with privacy and freedom, started by all those celebrated 18th century fops, has been super-super-super-reentrenched by continuous years of cultural and academic concern with governmental and political systems that expired around 1916. I love Foucault (and Hollywood) to pieces but guys - even he got bored of prattling about panopticons and discipline by 1966, probably because he realised those things don't exist. Orwell was dead by 1950, so at least he had the excuse of the Nazis for his deranged belief in dystopia that has fuelled Western culture ever since.

What I'm trying to say is: governments don't want to hurt people these days. No one has any desire to see harm done to Average Joe. It's in nobody's best interests to initiate dystopia.

Look into your heart. What is the actual worst that could happen if people knew private facts about you? Once you acknowledge that the realistic answer is "basically nothing", the machine has won. your life will become so much less stressful and the future so much more exciting.

On Wikipedia

At uni I wrote my final-year dissertation on Wikipedia - by which I mean I wrote it about Wikipedia (on a word processor), and not that I wrote an unrelated thesis using the self-publishing medium of Wikipedia.

The idea for my subject matter had evolved in the previous years as I had become acquainted with the processes involved in editing Wikipedia. I had noticed that when I explained these processes to others who were unfamiliar to them, they normally elicited extreme interest and amazement, so I thought it would be cool to explain them formally in a thesis and hopefully provoke the same fascination in the examiners (it didn't work, if you're wondering). As one does for such tasks, I wrapped my explanation in thick layers of academic bluster, quoting a range of social scientists and over-complicated theories to support my ideas.

Several months after leaving uni, knowing that there was a considerable amount of research being conducted in similar areas, I decided to stick my dissertation online, in case anyone fancied reading it. It was subsequently picked up by a few bored souls, including one of the academics who the paper itself critiqued. Since I feel that some of the points I made in the paper are in fact quite interesting, albeit written in a "tedious and jejune" fashion, as someone rightly pointed out, I thought I would take a moment to explain them briefly in a more straightforward fashion.

Firstly (and this isn't actually in the thesis), it's very easy to edit Wikipedia. Most non-editors are scared of doing so, but this is because they forget that everyone else on Wikipedia is just as underqualified and moronic as they are. Thus you have just as much right as they do to edit. My advice is to take one of Wikipedia's most quoted (and misquoted) maxims to heart: Be Bold. Make any and all edits you see fit. If anyone removes or disputes your edits, then you must argue with them to convince them that your version is right. You can do this either by stating your argument in the "edit summary" box just above where you click "save page", or if you need more than one sentence, then make your case in the talk page for the article concerned, which you can access via a tab in the top left which says "talk". When making a case, use references and links that support your argument to prove scientifically that you are right, and also show how your version meets the standards of Wikipedia's policies and guidelines, which you can find by searching for policies and guidelines.

On Wikipedia, regular editors are constantly defending their actions and attacking those of others. Everybody thinks that they have the right version and that everyone else is in the wrong. As xkcd just pointed out the other day, Wikipedians are perfectly capable of using over 40,000 words in debate over the capitalisation of Star Trek: (i/I)nto Darkness (and I've seen more pedantic discussions go on much longer than that). Of course, most arguments concern more substantial changes, so editors try to show that their versions adhere closer to the key, eternally worshipped Wikipedian values of neutrality and verifiability than their opponents'. If you can do this, then the much-proclaimed power of consensus would side in your favour, or more likely, a visiting admin would be more likely to rule that your version should be instated.

In my thesis, I showed how Wikipedians used certain discursive tactics to try and make themselves appear more neutral and right. They would use language that was calm and terse to seem like they were academic, detached and generally wise. If they were provoked or challenged by others, their language would become even more emotionless, in order to make their opponent appear opinionated and rash.

This is the bit where I made a fairly obvious but academically "insightful" (ie over-dramatised) point. In  order to know how to use the right kind of language to make themselves appear neutral and verifiable and thus more "Wikipedian" and thus more right, editors had to have experience. They had to be familiar with the way other experienced editors talked. They had to know the forms to take and facades to present that would bring them the greatest success. They had to develop this kind of familiarity and experience in the same way that one becomes familiar or experienced in any community of interacting humans. You simply learn it over time. (In sociology, there's a fancy word for this: habitus).

This helps to explain the point that is always made about Wikipedia - it is hostile to newcomers. This isn't because newcomers are picked on, it's just because they don't know how to operate in a way that allows them to make successful edits. With their work constantly deleted or altered, and their arguments always failing to gain support or consensus because they are presented in the wrong way, new editors often become disillusioned and stop editing.

This picture of how Wikipedia works is admittedly a little bleak. It's kind of like the way economists stereotypically view human motivation as entirely profit-oriented. This is unfair, and if I were doing the dissertation again, I would try to make it more balanced. In fact, Wikipedian culture is rich, collaborative and mostly not at all self-serving.

The reason I gave a lot of space in my paper to explaining the more combative side of Wikipedia was that I wanted to dispel certain myths that have surrounded the site. Many regard the site as a utopian paragon of human collaboration - everyone working together to achieve great things. Some also see it as an absolutely astonishing and unprecedented social configuration - 1) there's no central leadership or coordination (people are just working at random!), 2) everyone's a volunteer (why would they bother?!) and 3) abuse of the free-editing policy hasn't lead to anarchy and collapse (how do they beat the vandals?!).

So I wanted to point out that actually, all these things are perfectly normal, and are common to most societies around the world. On point 1: most of us aren't lead or coordinated in our daily activities, but together we participate in and generate vast and successful economies and nation-states. That's simply what a society is - leadership has never been required. On point 2 - if you're participating in any old community, let alone a communal project that's making a difference to the world, you don't need to be directly motivated by things like money or success - you participate merely because it's your community, and that's where you feel comfortable.

Thirdly, vandals and other evil-doers on Wikipedia are easily defeated, mainly because the software is built so that any destructive edits can be removed basically instantaneously. In fact, I argued in the paper that there was just enough destructive editing on Wikipedia for it actually to be a good thing - it was serious enough that the community noticed it and rallied around it as a common enemy, giving themselves much-needed self-definition as a group, but it wasn't serious enough to actually harm the process in any significant way.

So: there's nothing wonderful or visionary about Wikipedia that isn't already present in most normal real-world communities. People don't magically work together. They argue and insult each other and use tactics and appearances to their advantage - it's a political system, just like any other.

This doesn't mean Wikipedia is flawed, however. It is still the amazing achievement that many say it is - they've created a database of all of human knowledge, for christ's sake. In fact if anything, my argument is even more uplifting and optimistic than those who merely say Wikipedia is a utopian dream-come-true, an anomaly that can never be repeated. In my version, the glory of Wikipedia is entirely to be expected - creating vast common enterprises that benefit everyone is what human societies have done for the last 6,000 years and what they will continue to do for the foreseeable future. This doesn't mean humans are nice or inherently good - it just means that society is wired so that out of the bickering and the infighting, the personal attacks and the demented vandalism, amazing things can still be built.

So it was a little ironic to be congratulated on my thesis by a couple of anti-Wikipedia groups - Wikipediocracy and  Wikibuster, who are among the many who feel that Wikipedia's systems are too elitist (hostile to newcomers), too anti-elitist (hostile to experts) and too easily abused. While of course there are improvements to be made, and genuine issues to worry about, there is no call to criticise the project as a whole. It basically works extremely well. And Wikipedians themselves are the first to agree that there are problems to be fixed - they're their own harshest critics, constantly debating with each other about how to improve things and voting on new measures.

Wikipedia has had its doubters from the start, and every day more people proclaim that the whole thing is doomed to wither away in a matter or months. But in truth there are no signs that it is likely to fail any time soon. The community of editors is too robust. And what they've achieved is too awesome.

What if? Thoughts on a world of plenty

In his recent lecture, "Admiral Shovel and the Toilet Roll", (which you really must listen to, seriously, it'll blow your mind), James Burke encourages us to think about the perhaps unexpected consequences of potential technological innovations - we need to think about unforeseen results that spiral out of technological progress. The most arresting example that forms the centerpiece for Burke's lecture is the possibilities of nanotechnology in the future. It will not be too long, he points out, before someone invents what are today called Personal NanoFactories - desktop machines capable of creating literally anything out of the atoms contained in just dirt and water. They could even create more of themselves - thus even if they are initially expensive and copyrighted, they would swiftly become accessible to everyone on the planet.

And not just this - in our nano future, there would be, according to Burke, "virtually free energy, delivery of medication to specific individual cells in the body, clean drinking water planet-wide, a pollution-free global environment, non-wasteful bottom-up manufacture, food for everybody delivered in intelligent packaging, silent, clean transportation systems, ubiquitous zeta-bite computers on a chip, virtually free ultra-high bandwith, the end of the greenhouse effect and the ozone layer problem, and semi-intelligent machines of all kinds and all scales."

It sounds great, but Burke stresses we must think of the side effects. The unpredictable spiraling concequences of such a vast transformation could be almost beyond imagination. Here is the list Burke comes up with, almost arbitrarily, of questions that the nanopocalypse might raise:

"So what happens to the organisations satisfying [our] needs when people with personal nano factories don't need?  What happens to all the jobs in those organisations, and to all the taxes they provide the economy with so governments can create and manage the national infrastructure? But, if you no longer need power coming off the grid, or goods going up and down the road, do you need an infrastructure? Or anything else the government does? Will politics survive at all, with virtually no need to tax and spend? If people don't work to live anymore, how do they define themselves? Does abundance remove the trigger of scarcity that used to stimulate our creativity? How would we organise a global community composed not of 196 countries but of nine billion autonomous individuals? If there is no scarcity, does anything have any value? What does worth mean? Will DIY nanoweapons trigger guerrilla terrorism the like of which we've never seen before, and if so, how do we prevent that when in one sense there is no longer any "we"? With no need to grab or protect raw material resources, is that the end of war? Will the cities empty when we can live, and live comfortably, anywhere on the planet? And when each of us does live a geographically separate, truly independent life, what happens to the culture we once shared? Or will we achieve that through the use of real time 3D holograms? And what will that do to the way we socialise, especially if we hide behind avatars? Will any institution or organisation of any kind survive in its present form? Will the last act of nation states before they turn off the lights and leave the building be to provide emergency free downloads for nanomanufactured essentials like food, water, shelter, clothing, transportation and medication? And then, will nine billion people, each with their personal nanofactories ready to download software and spit out dreams, represent the greatest individually customised consumer goods software market that history has ever seen? The amount of innovation that such a marketplace could sustain might be limited only by the global imagination. But, what will we use to pay for it? There are a million more questions which abundance throws up to be answered, and we may have no more than 40 years to predict what those answers will need to be."

As my friend Carl points out, other questions raised might include disputes over privacy, sociable behaviour, drug use, land ownership/rights, protected nature and wildlife, and a wildly unpredictable reaction from humans as regards notions like entitlement and mental health. There'd be potential for never-ending hedonistic parties, with no limits of work or other obligations, other than your own health. 

For myself, my immediate instinct is to think of superpowers and tech, with everyone wearing customised versions of Iron Man's suit, and popping out to other continents for lunch on super-high speed flying cars or jet packs. Instant manufacture would speed up scientific research in all areas immeasurably, since it would remove barriers of equipment and funding. Things like music and filmmaking would be even more opened up to everyone than they are in this internet era. You could make your house and furniture out of pure diamond, so that they never wear out. Or maybe you'd prefer to make them out of cardboard, so that you can easily feed them back into the machine when you get bored and want new furniture. 

Health care would be so improved that you could push your body to much greater limits safe in the knowledge of more or less assured recovery. Disease would vanish. We would almost certainly reach Aubrey de Grey's beloved medical singularity, where life expectancy rises exponentially to immortality. It may even be possible to resurrect the dead with samples of their DNA.

Could you command your nanofactory to create a space elevator, massively boosting space exploration potential? Could we fire a couple of nanofactories off to Mars and leave them to terraform the environment for a few years, creating colonies that we will need to solve the overpopulation problems caused by immortality? Or will overpopulation even be a problem when there's no more resource scarcity?

To be serious, I just want to give my two pennies' worth on the subject of social consequences, which is the same two pennies I always give whenever people get hyperbolic about the impact of new tech on culture and society. Here they are:

1. Culture and society always change and evolve. Change and evolution are nothing abnormal - it always feels like things are different to how they were before, at every stage in history. Neither are they unhealthy, contrary to the beliefs of those labouring under the Golden Age fallacy (see Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris). 

2. Society always takes new configurations, but they're normally based on certain core elements that are much more resistant to change than people think. Ever since Hobbes, there's been a theoretical assumption that people only stay in each others' company for mutual benefit in terms of resources and material prosperity. I'm afraid that our friend Burke seems to have fallen for this one too. But it's a manifestly ridiculous idea. Humans enjoy socialising for its own sake. If cities do evaporate, it will only be because transport is so much better that frequent social contact no longer requires proximal living. Sure, maybe there will be increased use of digital or holographic avatars. But people aren't suddenly going to atomise and abandon community ties. There is a fundamental social logic that pulls people into groups. In the nanofuture, these groups may well transcend the narrowly-conceived boundaries we impose on ourselves now, and this is an exciting prospect. But there will always be a billion sub-groups; we will continue to invent new ways to identify with one another.

3. Cultural habits will undoubtedly change to precipitously radical extents. Lovers of tradition and the Old Ways will find constant cause for alarm. But they will be surrounded by like minded individuals and will be able to realistically reconstruct their Ways in little enclaves. (I'm also sure that many groups will shun the new tech for a long time, choosing to stay with the scarcity they know instead of embracing the plenty they fear.) But the main point is that there will still be culture - i.e. forms of behaviour, creation and communication that are shared among groups. 

Given this, in the spirit of Burke's call for an examination of possible consequences, let's take a very preliminary and sweeping look at some potential effects of the nanorevolution. It might help in some areas (or might not) to take the online game "Second Life" as a model - this is a game where players use an avatar to interact with others in a virtual online reality. Like the nanoworld, the Second Life world is entirely adaptable to one's will, so that you can create practically any object you like. You can also teleport and fly, choose your appearance and abilites, your pastimes and forms of socialisation. 

Materialism

I would be very surprised if the ability to acquire any material item you desire leads to a decrease in materialism. There's no reason why people wouldn't still judge each other by appearances and possessions. Even in today's world, taste has become less about what's expensive (although there's still a way to go), and more about what's considered culturally "good taste". Hence the social category we call "chavs": people with excessive materialistic tastes, who display cultural poverty, not economic.

In Second Life, you can also have whatever you want for your avatar. Everybody is slim and good looking, conforming to mainstream ideas of beauty; their clothes are universally trendy or otherwise impressive. But it's not like fashion disappears, or everyone just starts wearing the same identical outfit which is recognised as the most cool. Your appearance is still used to convey social facts about oneself - the kinds of groups you belong to, the things you like, the way you want others to think of you etc. There's no reason this would vanish in circumstances of plenty in the actual world as opposed to the virtual.

Religion

Ever since the Enlightenment, we've predicted the end of religion due to modernisation and/or science. The fact is, religion is not the result of backwardness, lack of education or ignorance of scientific knowledge. It is merely a fairly typical form of social behaviour that is appealing across many demographics. Religion would continue to evolve and appeal to the new age in new ways.

Fanaticism of both religious and non-religious sorts would continue to appeal to certain individuals to roughly the same extent it does now. Why wouldn't it? There's no reason to suppose that we would become better educated. People may stop going to school because they will never need a job. Or, more likely, they will go to school in greater numbers because they have more time on their hands. Education might start at sixteen rather than six, and would never really end. But education doesn't make you less fanatic, if you're already an obsessive/crazy kind of person. 

There are plenty of fanatics on Second Life, a certain amount of educational opportunities, and lots of religious institutions and activities. I can't see how we could predict these ratios for the nanofuture.

Politics

Continuing from this, I would say that by far the biggest danger presented by the personal nanofactory is that it could make WMDs easy and accessible to all. It only takes one Chapman or Oswald to decimate an entire continent in a fit of delusional psychosis. This presents two alternatives for the political realm.

In the first, politics basically becomes about security and regulation of the use of nanotechnology. They would try to install unhackable systems that prevent the use of nanofactories for making anything with, say, depleted uranium or chemical agents capable of mass destruction. The internet would be highly policed to prevent downloads for the necessary software becoming available. People would probably be happy to put up with such regulation out of fear of what would happen without it.

But then how far would the regulation go? What would count as reasonable precautions whilst not overly limiting our freedom to create whatever we want? These would be the guiding questions of the new politics.

In the other version, the tech is so open and the firewalls are so easy to bypass that it becomes impossible to regulate. In this case, we would just have to hope that no one was crazy enough to do anything rash. But if the fear got high enough, people might start wearing radiation-proof suits and living in indestructible bunkers. Politics would then be less about security and more about helping everyone live in harmony. It might go super-local, with all political authority ignored outside the confines of one's own little community. There might be hardly any government action, with infrastructure maintained by altruists in their own free time. Wikipedia would become ludicrously active and informative, used as a model for all kinds of new projects, and many other volunteer-based activities would see a massive uptick in participation. That is, until someone decides in a moment of inspired lucidity to suddenly generate an army of lethal robots bent on the destruction of humanity.

In both versions, the political boundaries would likely shift away from countries and become more global/locally structured.

Ethics

One thing Burke mentions is that not just our politics but our morality and moral values are based on the assumption of scarcity. Hence the injunction to share with others, to treat them as you would have them treat you, and so forth. But again, I think the idea that this might collapse when we have everything we want is a tad facile and implies that we only stick together to keep ourselves fed and sheltered (damn you, Hobbes). On Second Life, there are definitely notions of good and bad behaviour, and anything that's disruptive or unpleasant towards others is strongly frowned on. Communal spirit and altruism is just a part of the way we like to be around others and feel like we fit in. I would imagine that if anything, such instincts would flourish in circumstances where notions like private property seem petty and pathetic. We would basically become communists, but not in a big deal kind of way, but just because there's not really any reason not to be.

Irreplaceable objects, or ones with sentimental value, would become even more important to us. And as these become ever more scarce, the real irreplaceable things of worth would be relationships. Quality social time would become much more highly valued. Making time for others would be the focal point of altruistic morals.

Things like stereotypes would presumably be at least slightly eroded or changed, helping things like feminist and minority struggles and maybe causing decreased intolerance. The gaps between rich and poor and man and woman would not vanish overnight, but would slowly get filled in and replaced by gaps between other kinds of groupings that are less based on unchangeable things like gender/sexuality/wealth/ethnicity. Although, there's no guarantee that there wouldn't be similar amounts of institutional unfairness and inequality - at least in terms of prestige, "coolness" and so on if not actual material lifestyle. Women would become more independent, but may remained shackled to raising children. With unlimited life expectancy and probably also fertility, there may not be the same pressure to have children, however, and it may be that men become just as likely to raise kids as women, seeing as neither will need to work or stay at home. Family structures would be likely to continue their evolution in non-traditional directions. Child-rearing may become more of a communal enterprise, as it is in many so-called "primitive" cultures.

Environment

Wildlife and natural habitats may become more valued as they get filled with people escaping city crowding, or they may become less valued as they are easily replaced by nanofactories. People may like to spend time in them as something "real" and unmanufactured, even if they can't tell the difference between what is and isn't man made. Extinct species may be resurrected in nanoLazarus Pits, including dinosaurs if we can find any DNA.

Climate change will be greatly reduced by lack of fossil fuel consumption, but by the time this future is realised it may already have taken a huge toll. Nanotech will help to mitigate the effects and patch up some of the ravishings that have already been experienced.



Any other ideas, comments, thoughts? What do you think would happen in a nanofuture? What have I missed and got wrong?

Lay off Frank, he's a "free" man

Frank Turner, the so-called legendary folk-punk musician, was outed in the press recently as a person of right-wing political persuasion. This upset a lot of people, who seemingly thought he was a good, decent, morally upstanding lefty like themselves. It's unclear why they might have thought this, given that at least one of his songs is a hymn to libertarianism. Turner himself wrote a very reasonable response to the apparent scandal, saying he's never tried to hide his anti-government inclinations. It's obviously a bit cruel of the Guardian and the twittersphere to be so unkind to the guy over the whole thing so suddenly, but there you go.

Why do we find Turner's politics so upsetting? It's because we assumed he was one of us, of course. We assumed he was one of us, even to the point of ignoring his actual politics that came from his mouth, because he projected a punk-inspired, anti-corporate, culturally alternative persona. As he himself points out, Turner is far from a conservative or a Tory. What we failed to account for is that you don't have to be conservative to be a right-wing nutjob.

Turner's particular brand of nutjobbery is libertarianism. I suspect it's the whole concept of libertarianism that is getting people so hot and bothered, rather than any specific betrayal they unfairly perceive on Turner's part. We on the left find libertarianism extremely unsettling, because some of its core elements, almost embarrassingly, appeal to us. Yet at the same time, it's anti-government and anti-tax, which is anathema to leftist dogma.

Many on the left need to think things through a bit more before we can whole-heartedly believe in our own views without feeling guilty. What it comes down to is the liberal inability to deal with the concept of freedom. Freedom is a trigger-word; like "hope" or "justice" or "community" - it is automatically something to aspire to, something that must be sought at all costs. Any belief system can be imbued with positive affect by filling it with these words. When libertarians talk about the need to preserve freedom, it takes the wind out of the sails of our counter-argument. Something in our brain goes click, and we suddenly think to ourselves: "hold on, freedom is good, they're right about that. So why am I arguing against it? Especially since this guy seems so nice and punk." Normally, the response is to deny that left-wing principles or policies really reduce freedom, which is actually a fairly strong argument (they're no real evidence it's curtailed by government action), but we don't even need to go there. We just have to get over our cultural obsession with the word.

It doesn't take much musing on the subject to see that freedom, much like the other buzzwords I mentioned, is an entirely empty concept. It's so ill-defined as to be meaningless. We talk about it in quantities, as if you are always somewhere on a scale between pure power over all creation to shackled in a prison. (It's worth noting that even at this abstract stage, freedom is greatly limited by physics. I can't choose to fly or to kill people with my mind). We assume that limitations on freedom imply a smaller number of choices, when in fact you could argue the opposite is the case. And we see it in terms of individuals all trying to do their own thing, as if we weren't constantly impacting hundreds of other people with every choice we take.

What people mean by political freedom, perhaps, is restricted to certain specific actions or choices that are in some way deemed important. If the government blocks one of these, then we can fairly say we have been wronged. In this case, freedom is arbitrary - we want to be able to do whatever it is we happen to want to be able to do. Fair enough. It's nice to be able to do stuff we like. But what if we like to start wars or have sex with small children?

Freedom is a ridiculous ideal on which to base a social system, because it can't possibly exist in any social context. Even without a government, any interaction that involves two or more humans automatically implies a loss of freedom. Each individual set of desires and choices is likely to conflict with others. That's before you even come to things like culture, which is a set of behavioural codes and moral values that automatically massively limits the conceivable choices of individuals. I can't walk around naked, be overtly homophobic or talk to strangers on the tube without incurring social disapproval - is this restraint on my freedom the government's fault? All the biggest restraints on freedom take this form - we're not even aware of them as restraints because we've internalised them as second nature. So if we're not aware of them, are they still a restraint? What if I'm so used to paying tax that I no longer see it as a restraint. Is it still a limit on my freedom?

But even where the government is concerned, i.e. in the maintenance of a functional political system, no one expects full freedom. If you're going to lock up murderers, then you're going to limit the freedom of the entire population to kill each other. If you're going to prosecute libel laws, then you're going to infringe our freedom of speech. Not only that, but for either of these cases, you're going to have to have an effective police force and legal system, which you'll need to fund by limiting people's freedom to use their money as they want.

Everyone agrees that freedom must be limited to an extent, and even if we didn't, it still would be. The debate between libertarians and socialists concerns the size of this extent. Socialists may be willing to lose more freedom if it helps more people and makes everyone happier. We might be happy to fund the UK film council with tax money allotted by an elected government rather than let it slide into private hands with their own agenda. The libertarians might complain that the Council would then be funded through "the threat of violence towards citizens" (Frank's own words), which is obviously moronic on every level. One man's threat of violence is another's rule of law, and in either phrasing, you have to have it in some form if you want to lock up murderers.

But the debate about freedom is itself silly. We have so little of it anyway - or so much, depending on how you look at it - and government policy makes no real difference. If you deregulate the economy, our freedom merely becomes limited by corporate profiteering rather than government policy. This phenomenon has been documented extensively by social scientists; how the introduction of neoliberalism in the 80s largely led to an increase in regulation - only it was the market rather than the government doing the regulating. Meanwhile, societies we traditionally think of as lacking freedom, such as Soviet Asia, have been seen to produce communities that devise all kinds of new forms of action through which they can express their choices and create their own cultural limitations under the radar of official structures. (I can give references for studies documenting both these phenomena if anyone's interested). This doesn't mean that totalitarianism is OK, it just means that freedom tends to be the roughly the same in every kind of system. Or at least it's different in kind, not in degree.

The point is, freedom is so poorly understood, so amorphous and meaningless, that we need to abandon it as a valid political ideal. When arguing against libertarians, who are often obsessed with freedom to the point of insanity, we should have no inner doubts. This doesn't mean it's OK to stop people from doing stuff just for the sake of it, or that we can disregard things like privacy, but rather that when considering such issues, we should evaluate them in terms of benefits like happiness rather than moral absolutes like freedom. Such absolutes rarely exist in the real world the way we think they do, and they rarely bring any tangible gain when sought.