Books – Page 2 – The Implausi.blog

Dr Implausible’s Book Club

“Read a book!” This is more than just the catchphrase for Handy, the supervillian puppet and partner of the Human Ton in The Tick animated series (1994) (pictured to the right). Its also one of the more effective ways to spread knowledge. And while there may be an anxious pressure in the first month of 2025, that reading is a distraction or ineffective, there’s no time like the present.

While TikTok is seeing a nice resurgence in learning with the #HillmanUniversity and #TikTokUniversity programs, here we’ll just focus on going through some critical books, one at a time. This is a expanding and evergreen project so we’ve created a page for this project over in the pages section: Dr Implausible’s Book Club and we’re also mirroring the content over on the indie version of the blog here.

This one is focused on academic content, but there are a couple concurrent and overlapping genre-specific themes that we’ll dip in and out of too. We’ve introduced both of those on the podcast, in the early days, with the Cyberpunk 101 episode, and the Introduction to Appendix W (which we mentioned here way back in… 2021? Whoa). We sorta-kinda did the Appendix W as it’s own thing, and that may still continue, but we’ll try and keep everything contained here as well, in case you don’t feel like following three separate things. For those that only interested in a specific element, the companions will help narrow that focus.

We’ll start with Technology Matters: questions to live with by David E. Nye (2006). This was a text that was used as a supplementary reading for one of the classes I taught in the past, a “sociology and ethics for engineers” type of class in the STS vein. It’s approachable, and written for a non-technical audience, which makes it especially worthwhile. As Nye mentions in the preface, these are big questions, and such big questions defy simple answers (or at least ones that are easily testable), and as such we have to come at them with some empathy. Or at least, that’s my take.

We’ll start with the basics, and check back in over the next week or so, and then publish a full post (on at least one of the platforms). Trying hard not to overcommit at the outset though. Let’s see how it goes…

Simulation Theory as Cyber-Eschatology

While reviewing some of the deep cuts on accelerationism – stuff that won’t make it onto the current episode by may well be part of a standalone ep – several things kept popping up. One of those is Kurzweil’s earlier work on the Singularity (and I do happen to have a copy of that in the depths of Dr Implausible’s Bookshelf, so we’ll dig into that a bit more later). The second is repeated reference’s back to Simulation Theory, most formally put forth by Nick Bostrom, and picked up by others since.

The two competing theories mesh quite well – they’re situated at different “sides” of the singularity, pre- and post-. Kurzweil’s “A Theory of Technological Evolution: The Law of Accelerating Returns”, presented as chapter 2 of The Singularity is Near (2005) uses various trends in computing tech to extrapolate a trend where we can achieve full brain simulation and eventually neural uploading. (The timeframes he suggested for these two events were 2013 and 2025, respectively, and while there are still a few months left in 2024, I think we’ll miss those targets.) The obvious goal here, is to reach a state where full simulation can be achieved.

On the other side of that – taking a jump through the event horizon of the technological singularity – we have the Simulation Hypothesis, where the acceleration is already assumed to have taken place, and we’re all already uploaded (or NPCs in someone else’s simulation, tbh). Bostrom was writing around the same time as Kurzweil (2003 compared to 2005), so it was floating around in the zeitgeist.

Viewed in this way, simulation theory can’t be seen as anything less that a cyber-eschatology. (Eschatology being the theological interest in the final judgement and the soul). If the drive by accelerationists is to go fast enough with the development of technology that they can outrun death by uploading their consciousness, then living in a simulation is that final goal. Eternal (virtual) life.

Hail to the new (machinic) flesh.

We’ve seen this cyber-hell before, in various forms, but nowhere near as vividly as that described in Iain M Banks’ Surface Detail (2010), the penultimate novel in his Culture series. Here, we are treated to a war in the virtual heavens (and hell), and the fate that may bestow billions if this were to be achieved.

Within the context of the novel, the souls are released, but such a fate was by no means assured. And depending on your view of the fate of humanity locked away within the creches of The Matrix (1999), one might wonder if they fate they escaped to was perhaps worse than the virtual one they were entombed within.

Hard to say. This is why it remains firmly within the idea of the “post-singularity”; there’s no way to answer the question until after that event horizon is crossed.

Perhaps.

Perhaps our collective imagination will allow us to evaluate the promises and perils of the course we’re on, before we hit the point of no return. To take a look from the side at the width of the Snake River Canyon before launching down the ramp, Evel Knievel style. And maybe, just maybe that allows us to judge whether strapping rockets to our motorcycle is really the best way to make that leap.

1970s-era accelerationism at its finest.

We’ll see if that’s the fate in store for us.

Appendix W 04: Dune

(this was originally released as Implausipod episode 30 on March 11, 2024)

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/14666807-e0030-appendix-w-04-dune

With the release of Dune part 2 in cinemas, we return to Appendix W with a look at Frank Herbert’s original novel from 1965. Dune has had a massive influence on the Warhammer 40000 universe in many ways, especially when looking at the original release of the Rogue Trader game in 1987, in everything from the weapons and wargear, to space travel and technology, to the organization of the Imperium itself. Join us as we look at some of those connections.

Since its release in 1965, the impact of Dune has been long and far reaching on popular culture, inspiring science fiction of all kinds, including direct adaptations for film and television, and perhaps a non zero amount of inspiration for the first Star Wars film as well. But one of its biggest impacts has been in the development of the Warhammer 40, 000 universe.

So with the release of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune part two in cinemas on March 1st, 2024, I’d like to return to a series on the podcast we call Appendix W and look at Frank Herbert’s original novel Dune from 1965 in this episode of the ImplausiPod.

Welcome to the Implauosipod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. So when we first started talking about Appendix W in the early days of the podcast back in September 2022, I had posted that based on a list I had put up on the blog a year prior about what some of the foundational titles for the Warhammer 40, 000 universe is.

Now, Warhammer 40, 000 is the grimdark gothic sci fi series published by Games Workshop. The Warhammer 40, 000 universe was originally introduced in 1987 with a version they called Rogue Trader, which has become affectionately known as the Blue Book, and I think I still have my rather well used and worn copy that I picked up in the summer of 1988 on a band trip.

For the most part, Warhammer 40, 000 is a miniatures war game, though the Rogue Trader version had a lot more in common with Dungeons and Dragons, and there’s some roleplay elements in there. The intellectual property now appears in everything from video games, to action figures, to merchandise of all sorts, to web shorts, and a massive amount of fiction set in that universe.

As primarily a miniatures war game, it sits as a niche of a niche with respect to the various nerd fandoms operating at a level far below Star Wars or Star Trek, but you might’ve heard more about it recently with rumors of an Amazon Prime series and Henry Cavill, the former Superman and Witcher himself being behind the scenes on that one, or just talking about it positively on various talk shows that he’s appeared on. Other fans include people like Ed Sheeran, who’s been spotted building Warhammer model kits backstage at his concerts. By and large, despite its popularity, it’s managed to stay relatively under the radar compared to some of the other series that are out there with respect to mainstream attention, knowledge.

It is what it is. Now, the material isn’t necessarily something that’s gotten a lot of scrutiny in the past, but that’s pretty much it. Part of what we’re doing here on the Implausipod, especially with the Appendix W series, and the goal of the Appendix W series is to look at some of those sources of inspiration that got folded into the development of Warhammer 40, 000.

And for those unfamiliar, what is Warhammer 40, 000? Well, it’s a nightmare Gothic future where humanity is fallen, basically. They’re still living with high technology that they no longer totally realize how to build and maintain. They are living in the shadows of their ancestors. Humanity spread across the galaxy, across untold millions of planets, united under an emperor in the imperium of man, beset by a civil war nearly 10, 000 years in the past that tore the empire apart, and now facing foes on all sides with alien races, both ancient and new, vying with humanity for control of the galaxy.

Humanity is maintained in this universe by a massive interstellar bureaucracy that redefines the word Byzantine. And much of humanity lives in massive hive worlds where massive cities cover the entire surface of a planet.

Ultimately, life for most of humanity in the Warhammer 40, 000 is what Hobbes would call poor, nasty, brutish, and short. It’s not solitary by any means, there’s way too many people around for that to be the case, but still. Now, as we covered earlier in our previous episodes on Appendix W, obviously Games Workshop is a British company, and there is a particular British flavor to a lot of these sources that Warhammer 40, 000 drew inspiration from.

And we’ve seen that in some of the sources that we’ve already looked at, like Space 1999. But even though Frank Herbert is an American author, Dune has had such an impact on the development of sci fi since its release, it definitely shows up as interesting an impact on Warhammer 40, 000. Now I’m going to lay out the evidence here throughout the rest of this episode.

You can take it or leave it as you see fit, but in terms of structure, what I like to lay out here is what we’ve done in previous episodes, looking at Appendix W and look at it in terms of things like the military examples within the book. Now, not all the sci fi influences that we list in Appendix W are military ones, of course, but as it’s a military war game, that’s a big part of it.

Then we’ll look at other elements of technology. And then cultural elements as well. A lot of Dune’s impact on the Warhammer 40, 000 universe expands outside of the miniatures war game itself into the larger structure of the setting. So we’ll take a brief look at those too, even though that isn’t our focus.

And then even a work like Dune didn’t appear out of nothing, ex nihilo, so we’ll look at some of the other sources that were out there that inspired Dune itself. And then I’ll wrap up the episode with a brief discussion of the future of Appendix W, so stay tuned.

Now looking at a work like Dune, you might think that the main source of inspiration is the planet Arrakis itself, with the hostile environment and the giant worms and everything. That’s actually one of the least influential elements. We do see the appearance of various, what Warhammer 40, 000 calls death worlds, planets that are very hostile to life, that as serve as recruiting grounds for various troops within the setting, including various Imperial Guard, sorry, Astra Militarum regiments, including the Talarn Desert Raiders.

But the biggest influence from Dune is the existence of the Empire and the Emperor. Within the book, the emperor is an active participant in the machinations that are taking place in the empire that they control. Whereas in Warhammer 40, 000, the Emperor is a near godlike figure that’s barely kept alive by the arcane technology of a golden throne where they’ve been placed for the last 10, 000 years since suffering a near mortal wound in combat.

In Warhammer 40, 000, the Emperor is not well, but their psychic power serves as a beacon that allows navigation throughout the rest of the galaxy for those who are attuned to it. But despite that difference, the other main takeaway from Dune is the Emperor uses his legions in order to maintain control.

Within Dune, the Emperor lends out his personal guard, the Sardaukar, to engage in the combat on behalf of the Harkonnens against the Atreides. Quoting from the glossary included at the back of the original Dune novel, the Sardaukar are, quote, the soldier fanatics of the Padishah Emperor. They were men from an environmental background of such ferocity that it killed six out of thirteen persons before the age of eleven.

Their military training emphasized ruthlessness and a near suicidal disregard for personal safety. They were taught from infancy to use cruelty as a standard weapon, weakening opponents with terror. Within Warhammer 40, 000, when the Emperor was still active, he had, of course, 20 legions of his space marines, the Adeptus Astartes, who were loyal to him.

Two of those legions became excommunicado and stricken from the records, and another nine ended up turning traitor in a civil war known as the Horus Heresy. But the tie is very deep. I mean, both of these draw on some Roman influence, obviously, but still, the linkage directly from Dune to Warhammer 40, 000 is strong, and much like the Roman Empire, both of these have the vast bureaucracy that I mentioned earlier.

Within Dune, of course, there’s the various noble houses that the Emperor is playing off against each other, like the Harkonnens and the Atreides, but there’s many more besides that. Within Warhammer 40, 000 can often be seen within the various Governors of various planets or systems who are given a large amount of latitude due to the nature of space travel and sometimes the chance that systems could go without without communications for Hundreds or thousands of years and the final major linkage would most likely be the religious one within dune It’s the role that the bene gesserit have behind the scenes with their machinations taking place over decades thousands of years.

Within Warhammer 40, 000, it’s the role of the ecclesiarchy, the imperial cult, that reveres the emperor as godlike. And as I’m saying this, I realize I’m only talking about the impact of the first Dune novel on Warhammer 40, 000, and not the series as a whole. So as we look at later books, later on, as part of Appendix W, we’ll see how some of those other linkages come into play into how Warhammer 40, 000 looked at launch and how it’s developed subsequently.

But for right now, we’ll just look at the impact that the Bene Gesserit have on the storyline within the novel. Now, despite all these deep linkages that really inform the setting, it’s with respect to the military technology that we see the influence that Dune really had on Warhammer 40, 000. Despite all the advanced technology in the book, oddly enough it’s a defensive item that comes to the forefront.

One of the conceits that we see with Dune is that a lot of the combat takes place with the Melee weapons with swords and knives. The reason for that is because of the shields. Reading again from the appendix in the back of the original Dune novel, it describes the defensive shields as, quote, The protective field produced by a Holtzman generator.

This field derives from phase one of the suspensor nullification effect. A shield will permit entry only to objects moving at slow speeds. Depending on setting, this speed ranges from six to nine centimeters per second, and can be shorted out only by a Shire sized electric field.

These are the shields that were visible in both movie adaptations early on, with the fight training between Gurney Halleck and Paul Atreides, the ones that made them both look like fighting Roblox characters in David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation. Within Warhammer 40, 000, we can see evidence of those with refractor fields that are widely available to various members of the Imperial forces.

These are fields that distort the image of the wearer and then bounce any of those incoming attacks into a flash of light. Within the Dune Universe these are so widely available that even common soldiery will have them, though in Warhammer 40, 000 they’re a little bit more rare, but as we said, it’s a fallen empire.

The other commonly available tool to the soldiery is that lasgun, which is described again in the appendix as a continuous wave laser projector. It’s use as a weapon is limited in a field generator shield culture because of the explosive pyrotechnics, technically subatomic fusion, created when its beam intersects a shield.

So even though they’re commonly available, they’re not widely used because hitting somebody who has wearing a shield with it is like setting off a small nuke. And within Dune, those Nukes, or atomics, remain one of the most powerful weapons available to the various houses and factions, to the extent that they’re kept under strong guard and rarely if ever used.

In fact, there’s a prescription on their use against human combatants. This is why Paul’s use of the nukes against the Mountain Range during their final assault doesn’t provoke sanctions from the other houses. Those sanctions could be as severe as planetary destruction, which in Warhammer 40, 000 would be called exterminatus, even though they’re not typically called that framed as being done by nukes. There’s a number of other weapons that show up in various ways in Dune that also make their way into the Warhammer 40, 000 universe. Everything from the sonic attacks, from the weirding modules, to the Kriss knives that are used in ritual combat. And we can see other technological elements as well, like the Fremen stillsuits, elements of that showing up in the Space Marines power armor in 40k, the look and feel of The mining machines showing up in the massive war machines of the 41st millennium, like the Baneblade or Leviathan or Capitol of Imperialis and even the Ornithopters themselves, the flapping wing flying machines that show up so prevalent in every adaptation of Dune.

All of these will appear at some point within the 41st millennium, even if they’re not present within Rogue Trader at launch in 1987. But It’s more than just the technology. It’s more than just the emperor and his legions. It’s more than just the psychic abilities, which we barely even touched on. There are two essential elements that deeply tie the Warhammer 40, 000 universe to Dune.

And those two elements are two groups of individuals with very specific sets of skills, the Mentats and the Navigators of the Spacing Guild. Now, the Mentats are basically humans trained as computers to replace the technology that was wiped out in the Butlerian Jihad in the prehistory of the Dune universe.

For those just joining us here in this episode, we covered the Butlerian Jihad in depth in depth. in the previous episode in episode 29. It was basically a pogrom against thinking machines that resulted in the destruction of all artificial intelligence, robotics, or even simple computers. Within Warhammer 40, 000, the Butlerian Jihad can be seen in the war that took place against the Men of Iron and led to the Dark Age of Technology, again in the Prehistory of that universe and while the mentats themselves aren’t as directly prevalent because obviously machines still exist. The attitude towards technology that it’s treated as a Religious element and something that’s known and understood is widely prevalent throughout the universe The final element is the Spacing Guild. Within the Dune universe the spice that’s only available on Dune – the melange – that allows for the navigators to gain prescience and to steer the ships as the Holtzman drives allow them to fold space and move them rapidly through the stars.

Over time, through their exposure to the melange, the navigators become something altogether no longer human. Whereas in the 41st millennium, the navigators are outright mutants to begin with, whose psychic abilities allow them to see the light cast by the Emperor on Terra, the Astronomicon that serves as a lighthouse to guide everybody through the shadows of the warp.

Now, both of these are mentioned in Rogue Trader in 1987, but they show up much more commonly outside the confines of the miniatures board game where much of the action takes place. They’re prevalent in the fiction and a lot of the lore surrounding the game, even though they rarely function within it, at least within the confines of the Warhammer 40, 000 game proper.

Now, the Games Workshop has leveraged the IP into a number of different realms, including the game systems like Necromunda, Battlefleet Gothic, and their various epic scale war games. So some of those elements are more common in certain other situations, but the linkage between the two, between Dune and 40k, is absolutely clear.

Now, as I said at the outset, dune had a massive influence on not just war hundred 40,000, but basically Sci-Fi in general. Since its release, it was, it spawned five sequels by Frank Herbert himself, which extended the stories and then. Brian Herbert, Frank Herbert’s son, and Kevin Anderson have done subsequent stories within the same universe.

Galactic Empire has been common throughout science fiction, especially since then, though most notably within the works of George Lucas, the Star Wars series. I believe Lucas has stated at least someplace that Dune was a partial source of inspiration, though some contest that it’s a much more than partial, and that there’s 16 points of similarity between the Dune novels and the original Star Wars film.

I think anybody reading the original novel and then watching the film may draw similar conclusions. But influence is a funny thing, and it works both ways, because just as Dune inspired numbers of works, including massive franchises like Star Wars and Forever 40, 000, Dune was in turn inspired by a number of sci fi works that were written well in advance of its publication.

There’s at least five works or series that were published before Dune came out that had elements that appear within the Dune stories. For the record, Dune was published as serials in 63 and 64, and came out as the full novel in 1965. Now, the first link, obviously, is Asimov’s Foundation, published as short stories in the 1940s, and then as novels in the early 1950s.

Here we’re dealing with the decay of an already existing galactic empire, and by using math and sociology as a form of Prescience, which is the same ability that Paul and the Bene Gesserit have, they’re able to predict the future and able to steer the outcome into a more desirable form. Does that sound familiar?

Asimov calls this psychohistory, and I’m sure if you’re watching the current TV series you’re well aware of that, but wait, there’s more. Next up is the Lensman series, written by E. E. Doc Smith, starting with Triplanetary, which was published in 1948. I mean, there’s aliens and stuff in it, but there’s a long range breathing program on certain human bloodlines in order to bring about their latent psychic abilities.

And then they’re tested, with a device called the Lens, which can cause pain to people that aren’t psychically attuned to it, which, again, sounds familiar. The third up would be the Instrumentality series, by Cordwainer Smith. Now, there’s a novel, Nostrilia, which was originally published after Dune came out, but the short stories from the series came out starting in 1955 and through the early 1960s.

In it, space travel is only made possible by a drive that can warp space, and a guild of mutated humans that are able to see the path between the stars to get humanity to where they need to be. In addition to that, the rulers of Earth are a number of noble houses. that are continually feuding amongst themselves and through various technologies are extremely long lived, almost effectively immortal.

Now we’ve touched on some of that with the instrumentality before, back in episode 18, and we will be visiting the instrumentality again, at least twice more, in Appendix W, with a look at Scanners Live in Vain and then the Instrumentality series as a whole. So if you’re interested in more on that, go check out that episode and stay tuned for more.

Now, even the fighting around the giant space harvesters has some precedent. In 1960, Keith Laumer published the first Bolo short story. In it, 300 ton tanks are controlled by sentient AIs. And the story’s about how the fighting in and around those tanks go. But of course, we know that there’s no AI in the Dune universe because of the Butlerian Jihad.

Which Herbert got from Samuel Butler, who wrote it in 1869, and then published it as a novel in 1872, which we talked about last episode and mentioned earlier. So, of course, this influences almost 90 years before Dune came out. And, of course, the granddaddy of them all is probably Edgar Rice Burroughs, Warlord of Mars.

Now apparently, according to an interview with Brian Herbert, the Dune series was originally proposed to take place on Mars, but it was decided against it because of our cultural associations that we have with the red planet. And some of this obviously comes, takes place from the tales that came before it.

Now, in addition to the sci fi influences, there’s other real world influences like the The stories of Lawrence of Arabia, as well as Frank Herbert’s own observations that he took in the sand dunes in northern Oregon, and the reclamation project that was taking place there to bring back some of the land from the desert.

So all of these and more went into the creation of Dune. Now, don’t get me wrong, Dune is an amazing creative work, and it draws all these elements and other ones together more than we mentioned. It’s unique and interesting, and that’s why it’s timeless as it is. But everybody draws influences from multiple places.

The creativity is in how it gets put together. So we will continue exploring that creativity of both the Dune series, And the Warhammer 40, 000 series in episodes to come.

Once again, thank you for joining us on the ImplausiPod. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. You can reach me at drimplausible at implausiblepod. com, which is also where you can find the show archives and transcripts of all our previous shows. I’m responsible for all elements of the show, including research, writing, mixing, mastering, and music, and the show is licensed under a Creative Commons 4. 0 share-alike license. You may notice that there was no advertising during the program, and there’s no cost associated with the show, but it does grow through the word of mouth of the community. So if you enjoy the show, please share it with a friend or two and pass it along.

If you visit us on implausopod. com, you may notice that there’s a buy me a coffee link on each and every episode. This would just go to any hosting costs associated with the show. If you’re interested in more information on Appendix W, you can find those on the Appendix W YouTube channel. Just go to YouTube and type in Appendix W, and I’ll make sure that those are visible.

And if you’d like to follow along with us on the Appendix W reading list, I’ll leave a link to the blog post in the show notes. And join us in a month’s time as we look at Joe Haldeman’s Forever War. And between now and then, I’ll try and get the AppendixW. com website launched. And for the mainline podcast here on the ImplausiPod, please join us in a week or so for our next episode, where we have another Warhammer 40, 000 tie in.

You see, Warhammer 40, 000 is a little lost with respect to technology, and they’ll spend a lot of time looking for some elements from the dark age of technology. The STCs are standard template constructs. The plans that they put in their fabricators to chew out the advanced material of the Imperium. You could almost say that these are general purpose technologies, or GPTs.

And a different kind of GPT has been in the news a lot in the last year. So we’ll investigate this in something we call GPT squared. I hope you join us for it, I think it’ll be fantastic. Until then, take care, and have fun.

Silicon Dreams

(This was originally released as Implausipod Episode 26, on February 4, 2024)

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/14428351-implausipod-e0026-silicon-dreams

Silicon Dreams are those glittering visions of mythic intensity that inspire the continued development of revolutionary technologies. Listen to this episode of the Implausipod to learn more about where they come from, and how the mythic imagination has been behind the development of virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and other tech innovations.

When Neuromancer appeared, it was picked up and devoured by hundreds, then thousands, of men and women who worked in or around the garages and cubicles, where what is still called new media were, fitfully, being birthed. Thousands who, on reading his description of cyberspace, thought to themselves, That’s so freaking cool!

And set about searching for any way the gold of imagination might be transmuted into silicon reality. End quote. This is by Jack Womack in the 2004 introduction to the 20th anniversary version of Neuromancer. And this episode of The Implausipod is about those silicon dreams.

Welcome to The Implausipod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. And as we ease into 2024, we seem to be living at that intersection, as the technologies of sci fi past are being shown off every week, with new products and instruments of echanger like automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence being brought to market, and older technologies like 3D printing and drones being so commonplace that you can find them at a Costco or Target.

But this process isn’t anything new. It’s been happening for at least 35 or 40 years. And when I first began researching it, almost 20 years ago, back in 2005, I had a hunch that I might be onto something, but reality is far outpaced even my wildest imagination. And that imagination is what this episode is about, the mythic imagination that inspires the development of new technologies, whether it comes from science fiction or fantasy or other sources as well.

So for this episode, I’ll take you back to that initial hunch and how it led me to track down the sources of those myths and what impact they had on the creation of the digital sublime and how that has impacted our current reality as well.

And with the incipient release of the Apple Vision Pro, their forthcoming AR VR headset, or whatever their marketing department is describing it as, this hunch couldn’t be more timely because my early work was on the development of virtual reality.

Now, the hunch came about reading something else unrelated.

It was Ray Kurzweil’s work on the singularity that came out in the early 2000s. And I noted how much the work was influenced by or influenced upon, basically co creative, of the works of science fiction that were coming up in those prior 20 years. And it seemed to me that there had to be a lot of overlap between science fiction and science and the development of these new technologies.

But at the time, the literature wasn’t there yet. There was a few authors that had worked on it, notably William Bainbridge, who took a look at the early influences on the development of the space program in his 1976 book, The Spaceflight Revolution. Now, this was a sociological review of it. So he was looking at science and engineering at NASA and elsewhere through that sociological lens.

And in so doing, you noted how a revolutionary technology, like spaceflight, came around mostly theoretically before it was even attempted practically. And that theoretical drive was often influenced by, you know, the visions. In this case, we’ll go back to the mythic visions, that can be influenced by, in this case, fiction.

I mean, visionaries had long thought about traveling to the moon long before science fiction was even a genre, for everything with Jules Verne’s From Earth to the Moon from 1865 all the way up to Georges Méliès A Trip to the Moon, the 1902 short film with the bullet in the eye that we all probably famously remember.

So the idea was definitely there, but the technology wasn’t ready and the science wasn’t necessarily sure either. So this is what all made it a revolutionary idea in what we might call Kuhnian terms. They needed a goal, a target, a vision of what to work towards collectively across different countries and different cultures and different political systems.

They were all still kind of building towards this shared collective vision of getting to the moon in this case as the objective. And this holds true for other technologies as well. In the 40 year retrospective on the original publication of his work titled The Spaceflight Revolution Revisited, Bainbridge notes that we’re seeing something similar with the development of the singularity, referencing Kurzweil explicitly, and that that drew from influences going back to the 50s with Arthur C. Clarke’s novel The City and the Stars.

And we can see that thread connecting all the way through to 2023 with the developments of ChatGPT and OpenAI. So, a 70 year development timeframe from inception to manifestation to when something actually comes about and is brought forth into reality. And did we see similar timeframes with the development of rocketry from inception to landing on the moon?

Yeah. And are we seeing similar lengths with even current technologies like, again, VR or direct neural implants with Neuralink recently being in the news? And again, the answer is yes, anywhere from 40, 50, 60 years from inception to something being made manifest in the world. Now, there can be reasons for this.

Often, it can be tricky, but what drives that development over that long of a time frame? What keeps us going towards the realization of those dreams of something that will necessarily outlive those originally imagined it? And perhaps several other generations following, but still working towards that idea, that realization.

And the answer is a cultural one. This is where the role of myth comes in.

When we hear the word myth, particular associations often come to mind. We can think of mythic heroes from ages of legend, like Heracles and Thor, Zeus and Odin, and the modern retellings of those, whether they’re showing up as superheroes in Marvel and DC movies, or cartoon characters like Bugs Bunny being a stand in for Anansi or Coyote.

In fact, comic book literature as a whole is filled with the retelling of myths and legends, but also we can see it in our political discourse as well, with myths about the foundation of a country, like those in the United States, with the myth of the Promised Land, or the Founding Fathers, or Pocahontas, or any of a number of other things.

Usually you can tell by whether they’ve shown up in a Disney movie or something. And I’m not harshing specifically on Disney here, at least not for this. The idea is that these myths are the tales that we share, that we share collectively. They’re part of our common cultural understanding. And we’re gonna call this, for lack of a better term, the mythic dimension.

And this is where some of our ideas come from. And these can be ideas about how we shape our culture, how our political system is supposed to work. We’ve talked previously about the social imaginary, way back in episode 9, and this kind of continues on with that thread, or streams, we’ll kind of start changing our metaphor mid stream, for reasons to be explained next episode.

But the point being is that our innovations come from new ideas, whether that’s social innovations, political innovations, cultural, and technological, and when it’s technological innovations, they often come from elements of culture that deal with technology. In this case, science fiction. Now, that isn’t the only source and only pathway for new ideas, of course.

As Henry Petroski has mentioned, human wants have long outpaced human needs as a driver of new inventions. But when we’re talking about revolutionary ideas, radical innovations, stuff that’s new to the world, then it can be one of those primary sources. And as stated, it’s one of those things that can kind of keep the vision and drive going from generation to generation to generation.

And as an expression of our culture, literature has an important role in maintaining this drive. And in the 20th and 21st centuries, we’ve had an explosion of other cultural artifacts like film, television, photography, gaming, and the rest, and these all have a role too, but literature is going to be our primary focus.

And the role that literature takes is that of an exemplar. It points forward towards a daring imaginative goal that may not be achievable, but at least gives those who may be in a position to enact change something to aim for. As Northrop Frye notes, “the written word recreates the past in the present and gives us not the familiar remembered thing, but the glittering intensity of the summoned up hallucination.”

This is from 1981. And it’s in this role that fiction finds itself as a part of literature, as a creator of the prophecies that contradict the conventional wisdom. It allows us to take all these opportunities and use them to drive towards the future. And building on what Northrop Frye said, the Canadian author John Ralston Saul elaborates, he says: “Fiction often reveals to us a greater understanding of our own society as it functions today.”

In other words, great fiction can be true for its time, as well as somehow timeless and true for our time. So this is the role that fiction plays, providing a goal, something timeless and transcendent and intense, something that we can work towards as if it was a dream. And this is what brings us to the development of these new and emerging technologies.

And I do want to stress that we’re looking at multiple technologies here. It isn’t restricted to just one thing. As Canadian academic Vincent Mosco pointed out in his book The Digital Sublime, there’s been similar cycles of mythic inspiration for previous radical technologies like the telegraph, electricity, radio, and television.

And as we noted in our Postcard from Earth episode, this can apply to cinema as well, what Andre Bazin was talking about with regard to the myth of total cinema. What these all link back to is what Perry Miller calls the idea of a technological sublime. An American historian of technology, David E. Nye, goes further into the exploration of this in his own work.

What the technological sublime is is that mythic feeling that we feel when we encounter new technology, the one that strikes right through to our emotions. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be anything electronic, it can be something like witnessing the Hoover Dam, or the first experience of air travel.

But honestly, indoor plumbing, refrigeration, and light switches can all conjure that experience as well, especially if you’ve never experienced it before. To return to Arthur C. Clarke, who we mentioned earlier, that old adage that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic holds true, and this is how we have to understand the enduring appeal and pursuit in development of a new technology, VR.

As the Apple Vision Pro launches, there’s no killer app for it. The business case for it is limited and tenuous at best. The use seems forced, often within the Apple ecosystem, and we don’t know what the enduring appeal of it is. Now, it may be that its time has finally come, with other developers like Meta and Valve both producing products within that market.

And this may create enough interest in it for not just a standard to emerge, but also user demand to match up with the available supply. And this is largely the challenge, to make reality match our dreams. Now, the myths of VR largely come from science fiction within the 70s and 80s, so there was contemporaneous development within the technological sphere as well.

Now, there are authors who have gone into great depths about the history of VR, circa 1990. I’d refer the audience to both Howard Rheingold’s Virtual Reality and Michael Heim’s The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality from 91 and 93, respectively. But when it comes to cultural representations, there have been versions of virtual reality going back for decades.

In 1973, there was a short film version of the Ray Bradbury short story The Veldt. which was originally written in 1950. It was marketed as educational programming, and so the contents of that were burned into my brain when it was shown at school. It took my little eight year old brain a little while to understand what those lines were eating in the final frames of that one.

And you can follow a stream through from that one to their first appearance at the Holodeck on Star Trek The Next Generation in 1988, and then every subsequent appearance thereof. And somewhere in between we had the original Tron from Disney. But the visual representations were few and far between. The main source of representations of virtual reality was science fiction.

While we had early versions of computer use, like John Brunner’s Shockwave Rider from 1975, which would still be recognizable to a modern audience, but with its gated communities, urban decay, and computer viruses and identity theft, the first major representation of virtual would be Vernor Vinge’s True Names from 1981.

Now, both Shockwave Rider and True Names had something in common, that they were gobbled up by the people working in computer engineering at the time. Whether it was on campus or within specific firms, the reports are that both those titles were ones that were held in high regard by computing enthusiasts in the 70s and early part of the 80s.

As Katie Hafner and Michael Lyon note in their book Where the Wizards Stay Up Late, “Bruner became a cult figure as the book swept through the worldwide community of science fiction readers. It had a strong influence on an emerging American computer underground, a loose affiliation of phone freaks, computer hackers in places like Silicon Valley and Cambridge, who appeared simultaneously with the development of the personal computer.”

And six years later, this was still going on when True Names was published. As James Frenkel notes, quote, “When True Names was written, it was considered visionary, and was read by some of those who have had a great deal to do with shaping the internet to date.” And while I admit that his mention is problematic now, writing in the afterword to True Names, Marvin Minsky, the co founder of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, writes, and I quote,

“In real life, You often have to deal with things you don’t completely understand. You drive a car, not knowing how its engine works. You ride as passenger in someone else’s car, not knowing how that driver works. And strangest of all, you sometimes drive yourself to work, not knowing how you work yourself. To me, the import of True Names, that it is about how we cope with things we don’t understand.

But, how do we ever understand anything in the first place? Almost always, I think, by using analogies in one way or another, to pretend that each alien thing we see resembles something we already know.” end quote.

So it’s here in the early 80s where computer scientists and developers are being influenced by the science fiction texts, and you’ll note that I’ve hardly even mentioned the words cyberpunk or cyberspace up to this point in time.

We’ve covered cyberpunk in depth way back in episode 3, and honestly, we will continue to do so in the future. But the influences for the current implementations of virtual reality, which mostly draw from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, whether it’s Meta’ slash Facebook’s pursuit of creating the metaverse, or whether it’s Apple Vision Pro Wearer’s inadvertently becoming the gargoyles from Snow Crash, conducting OSINT at every opportunity, whether inadvertently or not.

But the point is that these ideas of how virtual reality might be achieved, what it would look like, and how it would be incorporated into our daily lives, were prevalent long before the development of the tech actually enabled its use on a regular basis. The vision of the technology of what it could be is what drove the development and subsequent adoption as the users could see themselves incorporating those technologies into their own lives in ways similar to what they saw within the books.

The reason why is that those ideas sparked the mythic imagination as we noted earlier. As Mosco mentions, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre concludes that “myths are neither true nor false but living or dead”, and the myths of virtual reality are still very much alive. All the attempts to bring them about in the real world, and the unsuccessful attempts at that, haven’t managed to kill the myth or kill the dream.

To quote Mosco a little bit further here: “A myth is alive if it continues to give meaning to human life, if it continues to represent some important part of the collective mentality of a given age, and if it continues to render socially and intellectually tolerable what would otherwise be experienced as incoherence.

To understand a myth involves more than proving it to be false. It means Figuring out why the myth exists, why it is so important to people, what it means, and what it tells us about people’s hopes and dreams.”

So what does it mean if we’re continually pursuing these dreams of being someplace else, not on this earth, of having different jobs, of having different lives, having a different society that we live in?

And what does it mean when those dreams are pursued by the very richest among us? For those who, to quote a James Bond film would say “the world is not enough”, we can understand what the silicon dreams might mean to the average citizen, the regular users, or even to the developers to bring about something “freaking cool”.

But what does it mean to the technocrats and the industrialists and the billionaires? Why are they so dogged in their pursuit of something that has no killer app? Stick with us as we dig deeper into this in future episodes of The Implausipod.

Thank you for joining us once again here on the Implausipod. I’ve been your host, Dr. Implausible. You can reach me at drimplausible at implausipod. com for any questions, comments, or concerns. The show is licensed under a Creative Commons 4. 0 share alike license. All research, writing, editing, mixing, and music is done by me, Dr.

Implausible. Join us soon for The Old Man and the River, as we’ll look further at the impacts of pop culture on the development of technology. And then I think we’ll be returning back to Appendix W for a couple episodes before the release of Dune II. I hope you join us for that. Stay tuned, take care, and have fun.

Bibliography:
Bainbridge, W. S. (1983). The Space Flight Revolution: A Sociological Study.

Bainbridge, W. S. (2002). The Spaceflight Revolution Revisited. In Stephen Garber (Ed.), Looking Backward, Looking Forward: Forty Year of U.S. Human Spacelight Symposium. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. http://mysite.verizon.net/wsbainbridge/dl/spacerevisit.htm

Brunner, J. (1975). The Shockwave Rider. Harper and Row.

Frenkel, J. (Ed.). (2001). True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier. TOR.

Frye, N., & Lee, A. A. (2007). The great code: The Bible and literature. Penguin Canada.

Hafner, K., & Lyon, M. (1996). Where Wizards Stay up late: The Origins of the Internet. Simon and Schuster.

Mosco, V. (2005). The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace (1 edition). The MIT Press.

Ray Bradbury (Director). (1973, September 16). The Veldt. http://archive.org/details/the-veldt

Rheingold, H. (1991). Virtual Reality. Summit Books.

Saul, J. R. (2005). On Equilibrium. Penguin Canada.

Stephenson, N. (1992). Snow Crash. Bantam Books.

Vinge, V. (1981). True Names. Bluebird.

Womack, J. (2004). Some Dark Holler (pp. 355–371). Ace Books.

The 7G Network

Online spaces have often been labeled as ‘toxic’, and new entrants to an online community may unwittingly run into this before really engaging with the community. We’ve talked about this on the podcast a couple times, at least in passing, over the last two years (E0010 Eternal September, E0014 Dumpshock, and E0032 Baked In would all qualify, for a start), but this idea of the 7G network is something I started working on for a conference paper back in 2021.

At the time, I was frustrated with the behaviours I was witnessing in the D&D community within TikTok, and recognized some of the behaviours as being strikingly similar to ones I had noticed around gaming web-forums over two decades earlier. So I began to catalogue those practices, and how the members of online communities would deploy them, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unknowingly, and how these practices, these doxa, made the online space a worse place to be in, driving people away, often never to return.

So as part of an effort to communicate some better practices for online communities, I’m publishing these here (while I continue to work on the full paper) in hopes that people can recognize these toxic elements and take steps to stop or remove them when they occur.

The ‘G’ in 7G Network is mostly a mnemonic, as it helps to keep the characteristics in mind, and it is by no means an exhaustive list. The seven are Gatekeeping, Gaslighting, Gravedancing, Grandstanding, Griefing, Grifting and Grooming. The toxicity of most of these should be self-evident, but in case there’s some ambiguity I’ll go into them in a bit more detail below. The ‘Network’ part of the term means you’ll often find the toxic characteristics working in concert; where there’s one, there are likely to be more. This can also help when trying to identify some of the more subtle characteristics like Grifting and Grooming. Not sure if something qualifies as grifting? Were there other toxic characteristics that you noticed? Perhaps being a little more reticent in your interactions is warranted…

But without (much) further ado, let’s see what we’re talking about.

Gatekeeping is that class of activities that focus on exclusion. If the subcultural wars are a battle for territory waged using social and gamer capital, the gate is at the boundary of that territory. It defines the limits of the group, the marker for inclusion or exclusion. And it is continually contested.

Gaslighting is the denial of objective reality for your audience. Now, there can be some quibbles about “objective reality”, but we’re not getting into the edge cases here. We’re dealing with “sun rises in the West” levels of denialism here. While gaslighting has gotten more attention in the “post-truth” era of the current political landscape, it still manifests in some ways in geek subcultures too. There’s different kinds of gaslighting too: we’ll group them as overt and covert for ease of use.

Gravedancing is a form of communal organizing and editing of collective memory. Once a person has been chased out of the community, there will often be a period of celebration, where the community justifies their actions, in which community members congratulate themselves on how they came together and worked towards a common goal. Of course, that goal is ostracism and exclusion, but they were able to put aside whatever other differences they may have and achieve something, so it can often be somewhat celebratory. The community will engage in a reification of the past event, restating the reasons why the offender had to be chased out, and reframing the event in the groups’ collective memory.

Grandstanding is the typical online posturing and performative “tough talk” that is somewhat endemic in online spaces, where internet users drastically overstate their prowess, ability, and credentials from the safety of the couch or behind their keyboard, free from immediate reprisal and unlikely to be fact-checked or called on it.

Griefing is online harassment, trolling, and bullying, and we are grouping these here under the singular “griefing” which is a form of harassment common in online video games (Chesney, 2009).

Grifting. The prevalence of #venmo, #cashapp and other payment details in bios facilitates this. This is a challenge, of course, as not every cry for aid on GoFundMe is a grift, especially in the era of the gig economy typical of late-stage capitalism in the 21^st century. Rather, the ease of payment options and transactions has made the opportunity for grifting that much easier. The barrier to entry is that much lower.

Grooming is the set of behaviours “in which an adult builds an emotional relationship with a minor in order to gain the minor’s trust for the purposes of future or ongoing sexual contact, sexual abuse, trafficking, or other exploitation.” (Bytedance, Inc., 2022). As these appear

To sum up (well, the sum should be “7”, but in words…), the 7G Network is a heuristic, a collection of interconnected hostile and anti-social behaviours that can be used to identify the if an online space is particularly “toxic”, however that might be defined.

And as a heuristic, it isn’t set in stone. The 7G is a mnemonic, and any or all of the components might be swapped out at some point. But it is a starting point, and I’ll share more on the heuristic and how it might be deployed in the coming weeks.

Bibliography:

Chesney, T., Coyne, I., Logan, B., & Madden, N. (2009). Griefing in virtual worlds: Causes, casualties and coping strategies. Information Systems Journal, 19(6), 525–548. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2575.2009.00330.x