Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

YMMV, but feels to me that cstross's Cassandra pessimism has increased rapidly each year, with good reason, but some of these pieces are overly-sensationalist. I still remember his whole bit in 2017 about how Hurricane Harvey was going to destroy Houston - how'd that turn out?

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2017/08/houston-...

But I will say his 2015 piece, "A different cluetrain", still holds up with grimmer and grimmer shades of beige*:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/02/a-differ...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9106983

* a 2013(!) piece: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/02/politica...

Populist demagogues and pandemics might come and go, but the automated, over-financialized, post-political bureaucratic intelligence state is here to stay so long as civilization looks the way it does now. That piece has a lot more deep, systems-oriented thinking. I'd say cstross' pre-2016 predictions still hold up so much better than the more "ripped from the headlines" attempts in these later pieces. His 2017 three-parter in particular has some embarrassingly sensationalist, hand-wavy stuff.

The trouble with blogs like antipope is that more often than not they read like GPT-3, or a more advanced GPT-4, where every sentence seems coherently linked with every surrounding sentence but there’s something that doesn’t seem quite right upon reflection.

And so quite a lot of readers think there is some super duper smart guy offering this cool hidden insight that they can easily use, only to forget it by the next hour.

Doesn't seem quite right because we don't like the reflection that it entails.

I kind of agree, its a bit too fragmented.

I think there are a handful of "obvious" interactions that should have been called out.

Politics + Space: Greater international competition for space-resources will likely begin, and we may see the end of first-come-first-serve orbits. The international inward-turning politics may be particularly poorly timed; we may see irregular military action in space.

Politics + Cyberspace: Inward-turning politics combined with greater awareness/impact of breaches (including on increasingly-autonomous vehicles?) will almost certainly lead to countries closing their digital borders a-la China. Its already been proposed in the UK, I believe.

AI: This is going to be the source of some huge wildcard, and I think everybody knows it. Companies have massive amounts of data on people regarding how they behave; eventually someone is going to give that data to an AI with the right/wrong instructions to make a noticeable impact on society.

Political parties don't need the data itself. They can use the advertising platforms and their algorithms for a nominal fee. I mean nominal in the grand scheme of controlling the populace through digital graphics and social commentary. That is real and it was applauded when the Obama administration was won. Since then, all politicians leverage algorithms and digital channels to spread their messages.

> And so quite a lot of readers think there is some super duper smart guy offering this cool hidden insight that they can easily use

Most "cool hidden insight" can be attributed more to the autor's writing skill (and acting skill if it's youtube talking heads) than to any actual useful info inside. Do not let yourself be mislead by Mr Stross' profession, most internet "experts" are even worse than that. And they don't even admit they're fiction writers.

He has had personal issues, loved ones dying and so on. Plus he had to basically bin a year's work when the US elected Trump and suddenly his "satire" seemed tame and boring by comparison. Near future fiction is prone to that, but Stross got smacked hard. So a bit of pessimism is kind of understandable.

> Plus he had to basically bin a year's work when the US elected Trump and suddenly his "satire" seemed tame and boring by comparison

A near-future series (Halting State) was also cut short when the Scottish independence referendum (and the subsequent Brexit vote) rendered that future impossible.

That said, his Empire Games trilogy is set in a near future where the internal multiverse concept successfully allows for explicit discrepancies from our timeline.

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