Selling Tomorrows

Help Pick the Name for the 2010 Decade

"The war years," "The Depression," "The 60's" -- all terms of time that hold special cultural meaning.  They also take decades or even centuries to take hold in the public's conciousness.  After all, people didn't walk around the smoldering embers of Rome saying "we're now in the dark ages."  So what should people refer to the coming decade as?  Cindy Wagner, Managing Editor of Futurist Magazine, is asking for people's help in coming up with the best term.  From the Futurist's email newsletter:

"What will we call the decade coming up, 2010-2019? Will it be the "twenty-tens," "twenty-teens," "two- thousand tens," or something else? What about 2010 through 2012, which aren't "teen" years? Should we call them the "twenty-tweens"? Send your ideas to FUTURIST UPDATE editor Cindy Wagner, mailto cwagner(at)wfs.org. And by the way, we still don't know what to call the decade of 2000-
2009. Any suggestions?"

Remember that 80's sitcom Dinosaurs?  One of the best moments was when the rebellious teenage son asked why their calendar was running in reverse (i.e. 10 million BC).  "What are we counting down to?" he asks.  

Top 10 "tomorrows" for sale in Sleep Dealer

Saw the movie last night and have to say the comparisons to Blade Runner were right on.  Truth is, it's not fair to this film to write a review after just one viewing, but darn it, the flick is too good to hold back on.  Here's my top 10 list of "Tomorrows" that Sleep Dealer serves up.  Mucho spoilers follow.

1. Subjugation. The opening scene shows workers plugged into the network, moving like marionettes, dancing to the tune of global demand for crop pickers and construction workers.  It's a shame-flavored milkshake and the swirl of " cool idea" that makes you feel even guiltier after swallowing it.

2. Dystopia Now. The first part of the movie takes place in a small town in Mexico, far from the tech wonderland.  Water supplies are under lock and key.  Life is hard. There's heartbreaking poverty.  It looks like many third world towns today, and that's the message.  The dystopia is here now.  It's one thing to know academically that visions of tomorrow are often used to point out the flaws of today, but in this director's hands, it's a sucker punch.

3. Social networks as "Big Brother."  There's a "Memory Market" where people can sell their experiences.  We saw this idea in Strange Days, but Sleep Dealer brings a whole new level of creepiness to the issue.  In an era of social media, Sleep Dealer shows how easily "Big Brother" can switch from meaning the government to, well, everyone.   

4. Plugging in means losing yourself. The process of inserting the node plugs into the body (which look a lot like what we saw in the Matrix) is violent, invasive and dehumanizing.  Metaphorically, it speaks to the degradation that people will suffer to support their families or be a part of something larger.  Paraphrasing here a bit, Memo (the main character) says after his surgery, "at last, I'm plugged into the global economy."  At the beginning of the movie, each plug is a symbol for a lost piece of humanity.  By the end, we're reminded that it's now what you're made of, but what you do that makes you human. 

5. “It’s people!  Soylent Green is made of people!”  A white pipeline is shown snaking through the wilderness in several scenes.  At first I thought it was an oil or water pipeline.  Then I realized it’s holding fiber optic cables.  So it’s not so much data coursing through the wire, but the physical work of the sleep dealers as their actions are transmitted to robots across the border. Often times today, human labor is categorized as a natural resource.  Here that metaphor materializes.  Labor is broken down into bits and bytes, normalized, commoditized and extruded into whatever form the market requires.  I'd call it beautiful and ghastly.  Luz (Memo’s girlfriend) would just say I’m “old fashioned.”  

6. Fear that we won't know what we've lost.  On the "old fashioned" thing for a second, this film, like many dystopias, generates a feeling of dread because as bad as things are, it's somehow worse because the future generation on the screen doesn't KNOW how bad it is. They've grown inured.  And that ranks up there with the “unknown” for things so scary we usually don’t think about them consciously.  (See earlier post on why we WANT to call this the Great Depression.)

7. Redefining "Writer" & "Reader." In this vision of the future, the woman sells her memories online, complete with narration.  She calls herself a "writer."  And when she makes contact with the man who purchased her memory, she refers to him as a "reader." It’s an interesting prediction on the future of these terms.  Remember when we referred to phones as "cellular telephones?"

8. The Campfire: The happiest points in the movie come when Memo sits around a fire with a couple old codgers in a shantytown.  They talk of ageless issues—relationships—and it’s the only point at which life in this world feels real, legitimate, worth it.  This image’s ancient roots are no accident. 

9. Superior technology doesn't equal moral superiority: Recalling that Germany was technologically ahead of most countries in the 1930s, the movie reminds us that as much as technology can instantly connect us to other people or reduce the physical pain of work, it can't make us more moral.  This is a critical point.  Most techno utopias are built on the premise that "if only we could talk with each other" or "if only we didn't have to labor so hard" then crime and wars would go away.  Hundreds of years ago when canals and hot air balloons promised to connect Europe, the intellectuals of the day believed that connection and communication would eliminate the causes of war.  Sleep Dealer reminds us that this STILL won't be true in the future.  

10. "A future with a past if I connect and fight:" At the end of the movie, Memo utters this phrase.  It captures Tom Friedman's argument that only by holding onto our olive trees will we be satisfied with our Lexus.  That being engaged is critical for peace.  And finally, fights for the moral good must be undertaken. 

Boingboing: "Science fiction's contributions to science terminology"

Boingboing picked up a post from the Oxford University Press that details "nine words you might think came from science but which are really from science fiction."  My favorite's "zero gravity."

"Zero-gravity/zero-g. A defining feature of life in outer space (sans artificial gravity, of course). The first known use of “zero-gravity” is from Jack Binder (better known for his work as an artist) in 1938, and actually refers to the gravityless state of the center of the Earth’s core. Arthur C. Clarke gave us “zero-g” in his 1952 novel Islands in the Sky."

 

Round 3: The future of classifying planets

Neil: I don't know of any other branch of science that checks with the public on its definitions. Why don't we have a classification system that uses six-word definitions encompassing factors like shape, place, dynamic...



Sara: That's where things are headed.



Alan: 50 years from now you'll have a lot more variety in terms. That's what science does, it brings in new facts and doesn't object. The problem in Prague (where the Pluto debate happened) is people wanted to limit the planets. One guy objected saying his daughter couldn't memorize the names of 50 planets.

Neil: Maybe in the next century, as we get a closer look at these objects, we'll merge terrestrial and exoplanet fields and have a whole new way of seeing these issues. 

That's it!  The end of a great debate that shows how word choices have literally altered the course of exploration of the universe, and will continue to vex even the brightest minds on this planet.  Great show, AMNH.  See you at the 10th annual debate.  If you want more, check out Neil deGrasse Tyson's book, The Pluto Files. 

Round 2: Can the words we use blind us to scientific truth?

8:20 Neil: Doesn't giving something the wrong label blind us to the truth? (The guy's an astrophysicist AND a linguist!) Thinking that Pluto was the last planet in our solar system closed our minds to the other objects in the Kuiper belt. In fact, those other objects are seen in data from decades ago but were never "discovered" in their time.


-Several objections to that point. That it's easy to find those objects in old data now because we can backtrack from what we see today.



Neil: Are we wrong to use our own solar system to build the classification system?

Jack: Earth was not originally considered a planet. Planets were the things like the Sun and Moon that orbited the earth. When Copernicus came onto the scene, the Sun and Moon were no longer called planets and the Earth became one. (You know that feeling when you realize our species probably doesn't know a darn thing, even in 2009?)



Round 1: My definition is better than your definition

7:50: Neil kicks off the evening explaining that the flap over whether Pluto should be called a planet or not was actually a debate about what a planet is, and then if Pluto fit into that definition.  Funny.  We like to think a science as hard as astronomy would have this kind of question down cold. I'm sensing a lot more "social" ingredients have been cooked into this science cake.



Reactions from the debaters:


-Most astronomical classification schemes are based on observation, not the process by which an object (like a planet) was formed.

-When Captain Kirk shows up somewhere and looks out the window, you can tell that the thing he's looking at is a planet. (Now you're speaking my language)



Sara: No one seems to care about the definition of planets except the people discovering them.



Gibor: Much of the arguments are over what to call Brown Dwarf Stars. To get media attention, some people say they've found a planet instead of a BDS.

This sets off lots of reaction:


-What we've got is an adjective v. noun issue. We have books that are encyclopedias, dictionaries, etc. Why not just have adjective-based planet classification scheme? We have big planets, small planets. They're all just planets.

-Classification is meant to facilitate communication.


-If roundness is part of the definition, what if something that was round gets hit with something and is no longer round? Is it still a planet?



This sets off a very cool debate about whether a classification system should apply just in the present tense or must it include past and future.



Mark: Ceres was first called "Asteroid" because it looked like a star (prefix "aster"). But then when we looked at it through the Hubble, we saw it was round. Now we've discovered that it has an ocean, and we have to send our probe into a higher orbit so we don't risk contamination. Compare THAT to the small pieces out there.



Sara: Now we see what the debate is really about. Geophysicists arguing it's what the objects are and the Dynamicists insisting it's what the object does.



The debate begins: What's a Planet?

7:40pm: Oh goodie. No cell signal in the museum auditorium. Well, I'm gonna blog like it's live and you can close your eyes and imagine it's the 1980s when everyone got their news hours after it happened.
 By the way, all the items below are paraphrased -- big time. There's no way I can peck out a transcript on the Blackberry, so I'm shooting for tracking the flow of conversation, not specific comments.  My comments are in parenthesis; the hyphens symbolize rapid-fire commentary among the speakers, not necessarily the last person cited by name in the entry.  I'll try to link to the video of the panel so you can get the full content.

If any panelist wants to revise/add/correct/etc. their comments, I'd be happy to do so at their request.  

The moderator is everyone's favorite astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, Director of the Hayden Planetarium

Panelists are: 

Gibor Basri—Professor of Astronomy, University of Berkeley
David Jewitt—Professor of Astronomy, Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii
Jack Lissauer—Space Scientist, NASA Ames Research Center
Sara Seager, Professor of Planetary Science, MIT
Alan Stern—Planetary Scientist and author
Mark Sykes—Director, Planetary Science Institute