We are living in science fiction theater

Blade Runner took place in an alternate 2019.  Of course, I love that movie.  I am required to love it.  The director's cut.  No voice-over narration.  The hazard of near-future storytelling is that the audience will see the year.  The world of Blade Runner had replicants, space colonization, and of course, flying cars.  Given how bad drivers are on the ground, I really don't want flying cars.  Please, no flying cars.  Yet when Deckard wanted to make a video call to Rachel, he had to use a booth.  In... 2019.  What, no FaceTime or Skype?  And I guess we're all on Zoom now, in 2020.  The hazards of predicting the near future of technology.

Anyway, I admit that I am guilty of a particular variation of the trope that we are living in a science fiction world.  Yet, while the common version is to marvel at technological development, I prefer to use science fiction itself as a lens through which to look at the world.  Science fiction at its best is a form of literature that allows us to step back from the world as it is, and create a counterfactual to compare to our world, and thus to examine and critique certain aspects of our political, social and economic world.  It is, as much as any other literary form, a scholarly endeavor, at its best.  Or, that's what I tell myself when I ramble about science fiction novels as I shout into the void on this pretentious, little blog.  Those shoutin's are social examinations of the world as it is, rather than predictions of the world as it will be.

Today, though, I'd like to step back and try to draw all of this together.  We are living, technologically speaking, in a bad attempt at the science fiction future.  We are living in science fiction theater.

Cue Lovitz...

Of course, there is entertainment value to recognizing that you are living in someone's bad attempt to write science fiction.  See John Scalzi's Redshirts.  That's his best book, in my opinion.  However, that's not quite what I mean.  Consider the world as it is.  COVID.  I'd call it the 800 pound gorilla in the room, but I don't know how much a virus weighs, and I'm too lazy to look it up this morning.  Some tiny number.  Whatever.

Anyway, a while back, I recommended that everyone read Feed, by Mira Grant.  It was about the normalization of the zombie apocalypse.  Yeah, zombies are there, and they just aren't going anywhere.  A thing that humanity just has to accept.  Basically, when you die, your body will zombify.  And, it might zombify while you're out 'n about.  Why?  A virus called Kellis-Amberlee.  How does humanity respond?  Basically, everybody goes into permanent lockdown.  If you want to enter a building... blood tests to see if you are about to "amplify."  And that's just how society copes.  To the degree that that's copin'.

So.  Have you had this experience yet?  Depends on where you go.  However, airports, doctors' and dentists' offices, and others have set up temperature screenings.  You stand on your mark-- you hit your mark, just like in theater!-- and there's a tablet with an IR camera to check your temperature.  Bing!  If your temperature falls below fever levels, you are determined to be safe to enter.  Otherwise... procedures.

See?  Science fiction!  The future!

And from one perspective, that's kind of futuristic.  Show me this from the perspective of the 1980s, when Blade Runner came out, and I'd say, yeah, that looks futuristic.  We didn't have that stuff.  But... it also isn't a Kellis-Amberlee blood test.  That blood screening procedure actually does check to ensure that you aren't about to amplify.  How effective are the temperature screenings?  Um... not very.  Not according to the studies of their uses at airports, anyway.

You know how the TSA is a total, fucking joke, right?  How they should all be fired for their worthlessness, right?  Yeah, this is about the same.  Here's the problem.  You are most contagious before you are symptomatic.  So, OK, I guess maybe it's better than nothing, but not by much.  Then again, the way-up-the-nose nasal swabs... yikes.  What're those, like samplers for zombie Whole Foods?  You can't see that I shiver as I type, but trust me that I am.  Yikes.  So... yeah.

My point is that from the technological perspective of the 1980s, yeah, these things are advanced, but they aren't actually doing what we pretend that they do.  We are faking the Kellis-Amberlee blood tests.  Science fiction theater.

You know what works?  Old-fashioned masks, hand washing, and dumping a shitload of money into the known process of vaccine development, so that the biotech industry just says, fuck it, this is what we are doing, we will find something and profits galore to whomever gets it right.

Fuck science fiction.  Raw politics, raw economics, and the idea of masks goes back a long way.  They just looked cooler when Italian doctors were worried about the bubonic plague.

So what else is goin' on?  Yeah, I'm still writing on the long-dead platform of blogspot because I will never join the modern age and Mark Zuckerberg can drink a milkshake made from the hair that collects at my bathtub drain.  And Dorsey...

But we do have these intertubes thingamajigs.  And... Zoom.  So who here is sick of Zoom?  I've said my piece about Zoom, as a classroom substitute.  Close-quarters congregation is stupid, and Zoom is... like a stale K-ration to a starving person.  For necessity only.  Welcome to necessity, which is the mother of lazy fallback options.

So how many years have we spent, being five to ten years away from functional VR, according to futurists and other bullshit artists?  William Gibson published Neuromancer in 1984, and that set our science fiction understandings of VR.  "Cowboys," like the POV character of Case, plugged themselves into a full-VR internet, called "the matrix" as futuristic computer hackers.  Science fiction ideas of VR went from there, be they holograms, holodecks, pseudo-intellectual, solipsistic bullshit with cool special effects and fight scenes... it became a whole, big thing.

And of course, back when everything was shutting down, I recommended Sarah Pinsker's A Song For A New Day, in which the combination of a pandemic and some terrorist attacks lead to anti-congregation laws that somehow never go away.  (Pinsker published right before COVID.  I'm not saying she's a bioterrorist who created COVID in a lab, and then released it to sell books, but I'm not not saying it.)  Instead, everyone starts using an advanced VR system with these things called "Hoodies."  Even... schools!  And you know, with full VR, that might actually work.  Zoom, though?

We're faking it.  We don't have VR.  We don't have William Gibson's matrix, much less some pseudo-intellectual, solipsistic bullshit elaboration on it.  We don't have holodecks or Hoodies, or any of that.  We have... Zoom.  Granted, Zoom is better than Skype, but that's not saying much because Skype sucks.  If Bill Gates weren't committed to saving the world right now, I'd tell him to take a swig of that bathtub hair milkshake that Zuckerberg should be drinking, because his products suck.

Zoom.  Yeah... livin' in the fuckin' future.  Or rather, faking it.  This is what passes for the VR that we have been promised by tech companies and futurologists (read:  worthless bullshit artists) for years.

In any sense, are we living in the science fiction future?  Sure.  The post-truth information dystopia.  COVID conspiracy theories?  Oh yeah.  Take your pick of references, but I keep using Stephenson because he did it best.  Stephenson fanboy, here.  Then again, Neil Postman published Amusing Ourselves To Death in 1985.  So... yeah.  There's that.

There is a history of science fiction authors devising ideas, and those ideas coming to fruition.  From Jules Verne through... well, Star Trek.  Anyone remember flip-phones?  I kinda miss mine, geek that I am.  Original series communicator.  Tablets?  More Star Trek, and hell, we're getting some tri-corder functionality out of them.  Yes, science fiction can inspire invention.  In a sudden crisis, though... no.  We're faking it.  Science fiction theater.

Current research indicates that universal mask-wearing, combined with hand sanitation would basically wipe out COVID.  Why isn't that happening?  The greatest and most insurmountable problem in human history.

Stupidity.  Willful, fucking stupidity.

So instead, we are going about vaccine research using existing scientific techniques-- and granted, the mRNA stuff is cool, and low-key sci-fi!-- while pretending that we have something like the world of Mira Grant's Feed, and the various VR technologies from post-Gibson sci-fi, most especially Pinsker's A Song For A New Day.  Yet that's all theater.  We're muddling through that too.  What would work?  Bluntly, I don't know, because there, we run into some real SES issues.  A lot of the people I know are, well, college professors.  Take away functioning schools, and college professors may be able to muddle through some home schooling, given that they have been mostly working from home, have high levels of education, broad-based education (mostly), teach for a living (sometimes), and statistically, probably have children with higher levels of ability and interest.  Yeah, that's a thing.

Parents with less time, stuck trying to work outside the home, without a college education...?  That gets way harder.

Of course, if everyone just wore their fucking masks and washed their hands, we could have gotten out of this anyway, and this wouldn't be a burden on the parents and kids in those positions, so at the end of the day, we come back to stupidity.

And if that mask is below your nose, you aren't doing any good, asshole.

See, this is why it's better to stay home and read books anyway.  I don't have to deal with people who are too stupid to wear a mask properly.  This ain't the future.  It's a world of people faking it because everyone else is too stupid to put the mask on, or up over their fucking noses.