At Patheos: TF: Stuck in traffic

Fred Clark has posted a new post, TF: Stuck in traffic, at Patheos.com.

This week Fred writes about pp. 440-443 of Tribulation Force.

Excerpt:

if we speculate about possible developments based on our current technology and cultural trends, we can imagine a world of the not-so-distant future in which “the news” would become a personalized, idiosyncratic stream of information tailored to each individual. In such a world, the “news” that you would read, hear or watch would be different from the “news” I would consume. It would be shaped to meet our personal needs and preferences, based on location (not just our addresses, but using GPS tracking in our phones, tablets, etc.), and based on a host of data mined from our browser histories, digital TV and radio habits, our social media “likes” and our responses to a steadily evolving series of interface surveys.

....

If that were what Jenkins were portraying here, then the characters’ behavior and reactions would also make more sense. Because a story involving that sort of technological development wouldn’t be a story about technology, but a story about people — the kind of people such technology might foster and the kind of people who might incline toward such technology. It would likely be a satire chiding an increasingly self-absorbed culture of people stunted by a myopic epistemic closure.

[Fred Clark, TF: Stuck in traffic, December 6, 2011, posted at Patheos.com]


Commentators who would like to share their responses to the new post with all of Fred's fans (old and new) can cross-post to both boards.

 

Comments

[Mmy]

Also posted at Patheos:

In 1996, when Tribulation Force was first published, cellphones were not yet as ubiquitous as they are today, but surely the publishers, top editors and star reporters for Time andNewsweek had them.

In 1996 I was a graduate student and I had a cell phone. (It didn't look anything like modern cell phones -- but it worked as a phone.) People who, like me, made long commutes, were encouraged to have one in case their car broke down. 

By 1996 The X Files had been on for several years and Mulder went nowhere without his cell phone.

L&J aren't just bad at guessing the technology of the near future they don't seem even to be fully aware of the technology of the time they were writing.

[Rodeobob]

The Discus commenting software over there is getting exceedingly buggy.

I'm still trying to understand the whole "massive attack by militias, with help from Egypt and England". What sites were attacked, and how? Was it a missle strike? Shelling by artillery and heavy armor? Offshore bombardment by British subs? Were there ground troops, and if so, what were they doing?

You don't just hear "Washington DC is in ruins" as a standalone declaration! You hear "Washington D.C. was the target of a nuclear strike" or "Washington D.C. was the subject of a co-ordinated bombing and artillary campaign supplimented with missle strikes. The primary targets seem to have been Global Community sites, but colatteral damage has been heavy."

D.C. is a big city; a single nuclear warhead won't destroy the whole city, or even the whole downtown.

But setting aside the "how", I'm still left with the "why"... why would anyone think this was a good idea? Why would the President of the United States think this was a good idea? How, exactly, did these folks think it would work? The 'logic fail' here is just unbelievable.

[Firedrake]

As I mentioned last time, this book was written after the WTC and Murrah Federal Building bombings. So Jenkins really had no excuse for not knowing how people react to terroristical events.

"United States of Britain" - now that's interesting. It argues that the OWG hasn't simply been plonked down as a federal layer on top of existing governments - rather, those existing governments have at least in some cases been completely rebuilt. And it's not as though this were just lazy writing, for once - Jenkins could easily enough have said "from the former sovereign states of Egypt and the UK". No, there's probably an actual reason for this!

If Britain wants to destroy Washington DC, that's a matter of sending orders to a missile submarine. It doesn't need help from a local militia, or from Egypt. What do they have to do with this business?

My American isn't fully fluent, but wouldn't it be "a former Nike base" rather than "a former Nike center"? The latter makes it sound like some kind of shopping mall. (Incidentally, I'll say it's a "former" base - the last ones in the US were deactivated in 1979!)

("You might be a fundie if... you think 'Oh, dear God' is a prayer rather than an expletive.")

("You might be a fundie if... you use 'Bible' as an adjective.")

As Pthalo points out, if you're one of the unfortunate many still using Google as a search engine, you're already being fed a silently-customised version of news and the web without the option. See http://dontbubble.us/ for more explanation.

If an RTC prays enough over his car, does it get Raptured with him?

[Rodeobob]

On the Google-filter/bubble effect: maybe I'm ignorant, or an optimist, but I think part of the issue is that using a search engine, any search engine is a skill, and some (but not all!) of the filtering that occurs is because users aren't very skilled at using the search engine.

If I type "Egypt" into a search engine, that's not a very good search, so the engine tries to guess at what, specifically, I'm trying to see. I could be a tourist, wanting information about travel, lodging, and sight-seeing. I could be a student looking for historical information. I might be looking for news reports of current events.

Filtering can be a problem, if you never develop better searching skills, and there is a bit of a negative feedback loop in search engines learning to filter your results, rather than you getting better at making more specific or accurate queries. (i.e. if you search for "driver", and don't learn to search for "Linux driver" versus "golf driver")

[AnaMardoll]

On the one hand, that DuckDuckGo link is awesome. On the other hand, the first thing I tested it on provided me with a FoxNews link about the Siri-Abortion issue that was written very poorly, which made me realize that I kind of LIKED my comfy echo chamber or warm liberalism. *sigh*

[AnaMardoll]

*s/b "comfy echo chamber OF warm liberalism." Not that the correction is especially relevant. But I feel compelled to make the correction anyway.

[Spalanzani]

The Bruce Barnes Death Countdown: 5 pages

Getting close. I don't suppose Ruby had any specific plans for what to do when the big day finally comes? Because I don't really know what to do in commemoration. Top 10 Bruce Barnes moments, perhaps?

[AnaMardoll]

@Ana: otoh, new opportunities for deconstructions?

Ha. Point. :D

[Will Wildman]

D.C. is a big city; a single nuclear warhead won't destroy the whole city, or even the whole downtown.

To what degree have we seen the destruction that can be caused by the most modern devices? When trying to picture a nuclear strike, I tend to think of the US nuclear attack on Japan, but that was a partial detonation of a much smaller yield than later weapons. One shot still obviously wouldn't take out the whole city, but I wouldn't be surprised if they could get the White House, Congress, and everything in-between with one shot. Am I drastically overestimating?

But setting aside the "how", I'm still left with the "why"... why would anyone think this was a good idea? Why would the President of the United States think this was a good idea? How, exactly, did these folks think it would work? The 'logic fail' here is just unbelievable.

I'm imagining something like...

Fitzhugh: But how can we possibly bring down the entire global government in a single strike?
Assistant: Well, sir, the capital of the global government is in New Babylon. How would someone have tried to destroy the US government when you were president?
F: A concentrated strike on Washington DC, of course.
A: Exactly, sir.
F: Yes - a coordinated terrorist attack, possibly with strategic car bombs.
A: But this is the global government, so we'll need to scale up from that.
F: Scale up... yes, I see what you mean...
A: I have here a list of the fourteen regional capitals that our militia forces are prepared to-
F: WASHINGTON DC MUST BE PURGED WITH NUCLEAR FIRE!

[Froborr]

D.C. is a big city; a single nuclear warhead won't destroy the whole city, or even the whole downtown.

Actually, D.C. is a fairly small city, less than 70 square miles. A modern high-end nuke could cause "complete destruction" of the city and moderate damage to most of the closer suburbs. Even a lower-end nuke would completely destroy the downtown area and cause "moderate damage" to everything inside the Beltway.

I was a nerdy elementary school kid in D.C. in the 80s, I did the math on what would happen in a Russian attack. One getting through is definitely all it would have taken.

[Mmy]

@Froborr: And that would only be the people taken out in the initial strike. As the voice over in the chilling movie Threads explained, there wouldn't be enough medical personnel and resources in the entirety of England to handle aftermath of a nuclear hit on a single English city.

The communication structure of the country would be down. Clean water would be hard to find. Food would be contaminated. There would be an immediate shortage of drugs we take for granted (antibiotics for example) and soon people would be dying of diseases we haven't seen in a hundred years. The sewage system would be destroyed. How would food be brought into the area?

One of the things King gets right in The Stand is the extent of secondary die-off in the aftermath of a disaster.

[Ross]

@Pthalo: I'd add that USB printers are a little bit of a crapshoot and that scanners are basically "Good luck; you'll need it", but printers that connect via the network almost always work (All good printers do this, and an increasing number of low-end printers do as well now that wireless is A Thing). Digital cameras are, very bizarrely, almost exactly the opposite, where it's the more expensive ones that tend to use proprietary software and therefore be windows-only, while the cheap ones act like a USB mass storage device.

Oh, and the current generation of iPod uses a new encryption sceme and can't be synced on Linux. This led to me crying on christmas day over The Big Present That Served Only To Make Me Suffer. (And even borrowing a windows box to populate it proved to cause more pain, since it turns out that itunes is utterly impractical if your media collection consists of several hundred thousand tracks of audio books.)

[Froborr]

Oh, and the current generation of iPod uses a new encryption sceme and can't be synced on Linux.

But... MacOS... built on Linux... *brain-explody at the stupid*

[Ross]

@Froborr: Not exactly. (MacOS is built on BSD, which like Linux is in the POSIX family of operating systems, but that is not the same as being "built on linux" any more than windows is "built on VMS"), but even if it were, the issue isn't an operating system thing. The database on the ipod is encrypted, and only apple has the keys, and apple has less than no interest in making ipods work with linux, so they are keeping them to themselves. (The thinking is that iTunes is their Killer App. It might not be enough to persuade a windows user to join the cult of Mac, but linux geeks might be more flexible)

[Brin]

In my experience, I have to be very careful with music on Linux. If I change any of the tags* on a file using Linux, both Windows and my Sansa will perceive the file as having no tags at all until I switch to Windows and re-do them. That, Runescape when I need the sound to work, Age of Empires, and Portal are the only things I still need Windows for.

*Or whatever the things are called that tell the computer what the artist name and title and such are.

[chris the cynic]

I've collected some stuff I wrote at other place onto Stealing Commas:
My first thought, which was in response to the way exposition on the new subgovernments of the OWG was shoved into a report on the oubreak of World War three.
My second was about the use of terminology in that same report, because the shoes really seem more likely to be thought of than the missiles.
Yet another thing about that radio announcement, this time focusing on how the reporter on the scene in D.C. under attack is giving a traffic report for Chicago.
And finally something else, spesifically how things might be if the Tribbles had done any actual resistance (which might have left them, you know, on the run.)

And apparently I forgot the thing where Chloe uses a cellphone to get information while they're stuck in traffic.

So there's five bits of short fiction.

[chris the cynic]

I believe I was spamtrapped, probably because my post had five links in it.

[The Board Administration Team]

You were (spamtrapped) and now you aren't

[Ross]

@Brin: That's not a linux thing. It's probably an ID3v1/ID3v2 thing. iTunes only honors ID3v2. Almost everything else that writes tags only supports ID3v1, especially on linux (I suspect windows adoption was spurred by itunes).

There's a good program for editing ID3v2 in linux called, surprisingly, "id3v2". I've never had any problem editing tags with that in linux and having the changes honored in windows. There's also a program called id3convert (Debian/Ubuntu package "libid3-3.8.3-dev") that can convert between versions.

(id3v2 is a command line program, so there's that. I know that there's gui programs that do the same thing, but I find it pretty much pointless to try to use a GUI for most of my tag manipulating stuff, since it's always some form of "now do the same thing to the other 10,000 files")

[Rakka]

I finally got what Bucky boy reminds me of. That unfortunate radio reporter in the beginning of Starship Titanic, who absolutely dreads anything unforeseen happening that he'd actually have to cover without a script. As something unforeseen does pop up he dribbles for a moment, manages a coherent sentence and descends to weird flat nonsense. And that's even before the really strange and unforeseen things happen. Bucky here is a dreadful reporter because he's frightened of news. Only, he manages to be an amoeba about it.

Also, am I the only one who thinks it's really very odd that New Babylon MUST be located on the site of Old Babylon? Afer all, New Caledonia is nowhere near Scotland, nor is New York. Why not pick something actually accessible? Of course that would have required some thought, and... L&J don't do that.

[chris the cynic]

L&J don't believe the prophecies refer to New Babylon, or Third Babylon, or even Babylon 5. They think they refer to Babylon itself. It's not the name that matters to them, it's the location. It has to be located at the site of Babylon. It's called New Babylon because it's a new city, but as far as L&J are concerned the fact that it's at the same site means it's really the same as the old Babylon. Anything less wouldn't be (what, in their minds, passes for) literal.

[Rakka]

Oh yes. I forgot the obvious literal reading with super secret society footnotes. My bad.

[Firedrake]

Pthalo, I'm using the Duck as a first resort these days - particularly with the !tags to auto-forward to other searches I often use.

As an open-source Firedrake I don't touch Windows these days except to run the 3D modelling program for the webcomic. Seems to work reasonably well. But I do have to be quite careful about other computers - I don't buy iThings, because I won't run iTunes, for example. (But I did pick up a cheap Touchpad in the fire sale a few months back, and I'm very glad I did.)