Still cannot xpost to Dreamwidth

[james_davis_nicoll]

I think every writer has a genre or subgenre that they admire, but find baffling. Like a snake charmer watching a trapeze artist. Yeah, yeah, the snakes are poisonous, but you've been handling them for years. But that flip? Those heights? That drop? That's scary.

Well, for me, one of those genres is post-scarcity SF. To my mind it's one of the most difficult to pull off. Scarcity has been a fact of the human condition for more or less ever, and once you remove it you have to figure out what it means to be human aside from that endless parade of want. Before you start chapter one. On top of that, it's damnably hard to fashion a sympathetic protagonist out of someone who has never struggled in the way we struggle in our own lives, to present someone who does not come off as a monster of privilege. My hat is off to those who can manage it, to me it seems a miraculous mid-air twist without a net.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

What historically limits gift economies is probably that they don't scale; once the number of people you deal with exceeds the Monkeysphere, you can't keep track of your social relations with them any more, and if the gifts have a high cost in effort or utility, that's a big problem. But computer technology both provides means of keeping track of more friends, and varieties of commodity whose marginal unit cost is extremely low.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

once the number of people you deal with exceeds the Monkeysphere, you can't keep track of your social relations with them any more

Two free SF ideas:

1: What if technology makes it trivial to meanfully* keep track of an arbitrarily large number of social relations?

2: Humans are evolving at a fearful pace: what if one of the things being selected for is an improved ability to keep track of a very wide number of social connections?

* Sadly, too busy to define "meaningfully" but assume "much moreso than on Facebook or LJ" is in there somewhere.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

As an illustration, The Guy Who Worked For Money by Benjamin Rosenbaum, which includes not only automated reputations and realtime updating, but with familiar internet style flaming and flouncing.

Of course there are people who will game any system; score whores infest social media like greedy obsessives infest the stock market.