The internet doesn’t really exist – at least not as a distinct culture. It’s just people exchanging thoughts, information, good and services, as we’ve always done. It’s never going to be anything but a perfect mirror of what we are individually and collectively. It’s not going to change us, make us better, more charitable, more honest, more courageous or compassionate. The internet is not “rewiring our brains”. It’s not going to make our lives more exciting or interesting or satisfying. There’s no evidence that it’s made us any happier or unhappier. It’s not going to redefine privacy, or identity, or copyright or ownership.

The internet is not going to do away with national borders or poverty or tyranny or censorship. There was a famous adage which bravely proclaimed that ”the internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it”. But the CEO’s of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft saw censorship as an opportunity and they leapt at it, like a Wall Street banker would leap in front of a subway train if you tossed a dollar bill onto the tracks. It was the “cost of doing business in China”. The internet never has and never will stop the firing of  so much as a single bullet. Ask the residents of Burma, the first national insurrection to have a global online audience of concerned spectators. No new tool or technology is ever going to accomplish revolutionary – or even evolutionary – change  for us because everything we create can only be a projection of our fundamental characters and natures. That’s as inevitable as the laws of thermodynamics. I think it’s going to apply to the artificial entities we create later this century as well.

Our creations may be fascinating and superficially exciting. They may make certain aspects of our lives more convenient, but they’re never going to change who we are  in any meaningful way. We can change our natures, improve ourselves and strive to create a better society. But as always, we still have to do that ourselves. That’s the real meat of science fiction for me – it’s not about technology changing us, it’s about us having the vision to change who and what we are. A future in which every child can read, in which poverty doesn’t exist and no one ever goes to bed cold and hungry, a future of universal equality and opportunity and liberty – THAT is science fiction to me, much more “out there” than a future of warp drives or mind uploads, hyperlongevity or “spiritual machines”.

That future is just as achievable as any technological utopia. But no technology is going to get us there any faster. Not by so much as a single day. I think it’s even dangerous to assign hope in technology to facilitate an evolutionary role for us because that hope ultimately diminishes our sense of personal responsibility in creating a better world- a responsibility we will never be able to escape no matter how far our technology and our ability to “connect” with each other develops.

Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this blog. If you’re interested you can look me up on Facebook, where I’m spending most of my online time these days. ( Do a search for “Chris Wren, Ajijic”) I’d love to hear from you!

Oh, probably. Or not. Who cares? Why must we continually ask these sorts of questions? Why are we so obsessively curious about what media other people consume or create?  I think it would be stating the obvious ( this  blog’s particular speciality) to say that young people use social networking tools more than they blog and people who think blogs are the NEXT BIG THING are generally squares my age or older.

And that’s the only aspect that would interest me about the question of whether blogs are dead or not. The irony of a younger generation looking on blogs as “old  media” is just so delicious, it’s heavenly. After a decade of relentless, obnoxious, triumphant crowing from the likes of Andrew Sullivan, Ann Althouse, Jeff Jarvis, Glenn Reynolds and the rest of the “Army of Davids”  brat pack – for them to be seen by generations Y and Z  as old-fashioned and frumpy as bloggers themselves consider newspapers – now THAT’s my definition of sweet!

But really, the entire question is just silly. It takes a particularly banal mind to think that each new development must necessarily displace the thing that came before. In other words, social networking is about as likely to kill off blogs as photography did away with painting. And to Glenn Reynolds and the Army of Davids political blogger crowd – I can assure you, the reason newspapers are having trouble is most certainly not because people are reading YOUR blogs.

God, I’m so glad that show is gone. Scifi can finally become scifi again, and leave the Left Behind/Touched by an Angel shit in the vast unmarked grave of  Televisions self-indulgent wankfests. I’ve spent the last two weeks arguing with people about the relative merits of Ron Moore’s ham-fisted grade 10-level religious melodrama and my mind hasn’t changed. However well the show started off, it ended up being the worst thing to happen to scifi television since The Great Vegetable Rebellion.

Actually they started out as the eight deadly temptations and later got edited down to seven and rebranded as sins. And of course, like the depiction of Hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy, they appear nowhere in the Bible. Which might come as a surprise to the catholic nuns and priests who I had to listen to in grade school, going on endlessly about how Jesus warned us about the seven deadly sins. Did they ever even read the thing?

Watched “Things to Come” last night – the classic version with Raymond Massey based on the H.G. Wells masterpiece. I think scifi did a remake – or one’s planned. Who knows. Anyway, I was struck by how differently progress and technology were viewed in Wells’ time, right through to the 30’s than they are today. The contemporary vision of technological progress is dominated by a Kurzweillian sense of inevitability. Technological advancement is defined by an exponentially accelerating curve that we have no real control over. We’re just along for the ride. Wells on the other hand saw progress as a manifestation of individual and collective will, sustained by continuous, unrelenting effort. Relax for even a moment, and progress instantly ceases and reverses itself. I think the history of societal collapses bears out Wells’ version over Kurzweil’s. Civilizations collapse either from calamity, or because enough  people lose the interest and the will to maintain the mushrooming infrastructure necessitated by technological progress. There’s nothing inevitable about aqueducts, for example. What seems more inevitable is people standing around beneath the ruins of aqueducts going “So, how do we get water from the lake to our fields? Any ideas?”

It just occurred to me  that I can’t remember the last time I read a review of anything, written by an actual  full-time professional reviewer.  Not for electronics, movies, books, TV shows, games…anything. Every review I’ve read in the last five years or so has been written by my peers and equals – either in the form of customer reviews, or just comment threads, blogs or fan sites. Strange that I hadn’t noticed. I used to read movie reviews on a regular basis, especially by Roger Ebert, who I think is an absolutely fantastic writer. So it’s not like I’ve got some weird internet fascist thing against professional reviewers:  “the internet is so empowering! Professionalism is as obsolete as intellectual property rights in the NEW ORDER!”  But I guess it’s just something I don’t think of as a specific profession anymore. I don’t even care to speculate whether that’s a good or a bad thing. As my friend Terry might say, it is what it is.

I’ve always been pretty inclusive in my definition of scifi, which I think includes metaphysical speculation by default. But I draw the line at pure unadulterated mysticism. I’ll accept just about anything in scifi except magic* or the suggestion that we surrender reason and accept “God’s plan for Humanity”. You can call it whatever you want. But the presence of robots and spaceships isn’t enough to make it science fiction. And if that’s where scifi has come to – being nothing more than a vehicle for generating alternate postmoderny religious mythologies – then I no longer find myself able to argue with those who claim that the genre is dead.

* and in case you’re going to invoke Clarke’s famous law – yes, I have actually heard of it and no, sufficiently advanced technology will only seem to be indistinguishable from magic. It won’t BE magic. That’s the difference between science fiction and fantasy.

I’ve got no problem admitting that Battlestar had some brilliant moments – even right up to the end. You’d have to be an idiot to deny that. But as a fan of Genre, I’m much more fond of the Stargate franchise. Yes, Rodney Mackay got on my nerves and I thought that the last season of Atlantis really fell flat. But the reason I like Stargate is because in over 12 years of programming, the writers have never lost touch with the core sensibility of science fiction, which apart from science, involves people thinking their way out of problems. I think that has to be central to any definition of what makes science fiction distinct as a genre.

Stargate’s never lapsed into mysticism (even the ’Ascended’ have an electromagnetic basis to thier existence and can be killed), never resorted to leaps of faith, or had characters babbling incoherently about angels and divine plans. I mean, all that stuff’s OK on its own, but when you have that you don’t have science fiction anymore. You have Harry Potter and the Secret of the Cylons. You have Supernatural with spaceships.

I get what they tried to do with Battlestar too: craft a replacement mythology for a generation that’s rejected old world religions but which still has the same longing for mystical narratives that’s been hard-wired into every generation of humanity for the last 100 thousand years and which will be with us – probably forever in some form. And that’s fine. But people gushing about how Battlestar is where science fiction is at right now gets me up in arms. Battlestar has absolutely nothing to do with science fiction beyond a superficial use of traditional scifi iconography. It’s a mythological parable.

Science fiction has always distinguished itself by offering an anti-mythological counterpoint to our deep need to embrace epic supernatural fantasies. In science fiction, the apparently mystical always turns out to have a rational, comprehensible explanation. In Battlestar, all hope of reason is ultimately abandoned and the characters are forced to confront the fact that their situation is ultimately beyond thier comprehension or control. That is the absolute antithesis of science fiction. That’s why to me Stargate with its reliance on rationalism and non-mystical problem solving is where pop scifi is really at – for the moment at least.

Update: or, in other words, “on the air right now”.  I still consider Star Trek to be the gold standard for pop scifi franchises that adhere to the rationalist worldview of scifi. But if I had a young child watching TV today I’d encourage them to watch Stargate and do my best to steer them clear of Battlestar’s cynical anti-intellectualism.

For starters, after the way they dealt with the Starbuck question we now live in a world where I don’t ever have to listen to some fanboy crow about how Battlestar Galactica is “serious” science fiction. Not unless Deus Ex Machina and magic are now formally considered acceptable scifi plot devices writers can use not once  but as many times as required  to get themselves out of corners they wrote themselves into whole seasons ago and which they hoped would just sort themselves out “somehow”. There’s even a new law –  Wren’s First Law: Any sufficiently clumsy scifi plot contrivance will be indistinguishable from magic.

Living in a post-Battlestar world means I never have to hear about how stupid it is that in Star Trek, the ship takes a beating but the artificial gravity never fails. Not for the rest of my life. We also live in a world were the “If robots look and act and feel just like us, then what does it mean to be human?” cliche is done. Forever. No one can ever use that one again. It’s so done that even if Honda unveils a completely convincing humanoid robot tomorrow and the first thing it says when they turn it on is “Give me liberty or give me death!”, people are just going to roll their eyes and go, “Oh, god, not that again.”

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