Terraform

by Various, Claire L. Evans - editor, Brian Merchant - editor

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

An anthology of near-future science fiction from VICE’s acclaimed, innovative digital speculative story destination, Terraform—in print for the first time.

Terraform hones the predictive capacity of science fiction and seeks new, vivid, and visceral ways to depict the future we’re hurtling toward, translating the decay and anxiety that surround us into something else, something unexpected, something that burns like a beacon and upends the conventional ideas of where we’ll end up next.

Section by section—Watch/Worlds/Burn—the book takes on surveillance, artificial intelligence, and climate collapse. With a potent roster of established names and rising talents—from Bruce Sterling, Ellen Ullman, Cory Doctorow, Jeff VanderMeer, and Omar El Akkad, to E. Lily Yu, Elvia Wilk, Fernando Flores, Tochi Onyebuchi, and Gus Moreno—it confronts the issues that orbit our everyday existence, and takes them to unsettling dimensions.

 

Read more

Release date: August 16, 2022

Publisher: FSG

Sample

INTRODUCTION: YOU ARE A LUDDITE


CORY DOCTOROW

You are a Luddite, but you (probably) don’t know it yet.

History is written by the winners, and the Luddites lost, so they get a bad rap. That’s a shame. Luddites weren’t opposed to weaving technology. They were weavers, and no one knew better how brutal and labor-intensive textile production was. They had the arthritis, chronic strain injuries, and workplace maimings to prove it. The advent of mechanized looms meant (lots) more cloth at (much) lower prices. That was good news! Before the mechanical loom, every weaver wove for every hour they could, and still cloth was expensive, a luxury good.

You couldn’t just throw more weavers at the problem, either. It was a skilled trade, and it took a long time to master it. Weavers were in chronically short supply, which had one upside: Weavers could command a decent wage, since they had a seller’s market for their labor.

The advent of the steam loom could have been amazing news for weavers. The machines meant that a single weaver could produce far more cloth, which meant that weavers could have reduced their working hours while still producing far more cloth, at lower prices, without taking a pay cut.

But that’s not how it worked out. The factory owners—whose fortunes had been built on the weavers’ labor—bought steam looms and threw weavers out of work by the thousands. Rather than cutting hours, the bosses cut wages. They insisted that this was only natural, inevitable, even.

That’s the moment when weavers became Luddites. They assembled themselves into an underground, self-mythologizing army, claiming to be led by the legendary General Ned Ludd, a literal giant who was credited with the daring machine-wrecking raids and arson attacks on the new factories. Letters to newspaper editors and factory owners were signed by General Ludd, demanding justice for the weavers.

The weavers weren’t anti-technology. Rather, they were in the grip of a vision of a new social arrangement for technology. They were doing science fiction: asking not just what a gadget did, but who it did it for and who it did it to.

* * *

That, after all, is the question. The social arrangements around our technology are not foreordained. A Martian peering through a telescope could not tell you whether the Luddites or the factory owners were the rightful recipients of the automation dividend. There’s no objective answer to that question, only a socially determined one. The outcome of a social contestation like the Luddites’ is determined as much by the storytelling ability of the warring sides as by the technical capabilities of the gadget they’re fighting over.

Everyone who cares about technology is a Luddite, because as soon as you start imagining more than one way the gadget could be used, you’re doing Luddism.

We’re all Luddites, but we don’t always know it. Back in 1988, the legendary engineer-pundit Donald Norman published The Design of Everyday Things, a furious and brilliant book-length argument for usability over ornamentation. Norman demanded that engineers advocate for technology users, by making everything as functional as possible, even if that came at the expense of beauty. Millions read Norman’s work and pledged themselves to his cause.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the future. In 2005, Norman published Emotional Design, a critical follow-up that repudiated much of his Everyday Things advice. Specifically, Norman confronted the reality that in a complex world of complex systems made of complex devices, no amount of thoughtful engineering could produce reliable, self-sufficient gadgets. Rather, the ground state of all our gadgets, today and forevermore, was to be somewhat broken.

When things are broken, you need to be creative: You need to troubleshoot, find work-arounds, improvise. This kind of creative thinking requires an expansive mindset, the kind of expansive mindset that you get when you’re happy—and that is terribly elusive when you’re in a rage because your gadget stopped working.

So Norman briefed for beauty. In Emotional Design, he celebrated the flourishes and finials that Everyday Things raged against. Beauty, Norman wrote, would make us happy, even when things were broken. And when you’re happy, you can fix the broken, because happiness is expansive, while rage contracts your world to a red-tinged pinprick.

Norman was doing Luddism: realizing that there was no inevitable way to make things work, that everything was contingent, and that the users of technology were not its subjects, but rather active participants.

* * *

When a certain kind of conservative wants to mock a certain kind of leftist, they’ll talk about “postmodernists” who insist that “reality is socially constructed” and decry the “hegemony of saying that 2 + 2 = 4.”

The message is that there is an objective reality, separate from our social construction, and that that reality is knowable and real and can (and should) be acted upon. That’s the anti-Luddite way, the Capitalist Realist way, embodied by Margaret Thatcher’s famous aphorism “There is no alternative” (by which she meant, Stop trying to imagine an alternative).

Time and again, the real world disappoints people who insist that the abstract perfection of numbers means that our physical world is governed by crisp absolutes.

That’s a staple of hacker tales and hacker fiction. Sure, “The street finds its own use for things,” but how?

“Evaluating Physical-Layer BLE Location Tracking Attacks on Mobile Devices” is a paper by a group of brilliant UCSD security researchers, accepted for the 2022 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (DOI: 10.1109/SP46214.2022.00030).

The researchers investigate the security of the kind of “zero-knowledge” Bluetooth tracking systems that are used for Covid exposure-tracking apps and find-my-stuff gadgets like the Apple AirTag. These systems deploy incredibly clever cryptographic protocols that let each gadget transmit an ever-changing series of serial numbers that other devices record and report to a centralized database.

When you, the owner of an AirTag, need to find your keys, you query the database with a secret cryptographic key that allows you to unlock only those entries that refer to your thing. The maintainer of the database doesn’t know who you are until that moment, doesn’t even know that a series of database entries all refer to the same thing. It’s a way to anonymously track the locations of billions of items worldwide, or to anonymously allow people to move through space and then get an alert when someone they were close to is diagnosed with an airborne contagious disease.

The underlying cryptography in these systems appears to be as solid as its creators claim. Really, it’s an amazing piece of engineering.