Highlights of Pohl/Kelly Conversation

James Patrick Kelly
Frederik Pohl

4,962 words
posted: august 29, 1998

[The material below is an edited version of a
discussion held at MIT on september 18, 1997.]

A Plan for Virtual Democracy

Pohl: The Years of the City describes the city of New York at some time in the near term future, maybe 10-20 years from now, maybe less, then again fifty years after that and fifty years after that and so on. The first section is called When New York Hit the Fan and basically that's what it is about. A sociologist has worked out new notions of governance but nobody will try them out until things get so bad that they do not have any choice. New York has been deluged with terrorism and crime and blizzards and strikes, you name it, and he gets a chance to explain his plan:

"'The Universal Town Meeting', said Brandon,' is a synthesis of sociology, communications theory and computer studies. What it promises to do is to make it possible for a city of the size of New York, 7 or 8 million people, to participate in an interactive two-way discussion on problem solving in the same way that the New England town meetings did in the past. The Universal Town Meeting makes use of the redundant communication facilities available in the city, seven VHF and a large number of UHF television channels, approximately a hundred AM and FM radio stations and cable. Let me sketch a scenario that might be actually employed right now: as you know, the city has been having a series of confrontations with its unions, particularly in the uniform services. There is a logical impossibility here in that the police want their pay scale to reflect the fact that they have the highest risk and occupational hazard of any service, and the firemen want the same pay as the police. Since you cannot agree with both, there is a logical impossibility. How are we going to solve that? We invite the entire city to take part. A major television channel provides a studio where, let us say, the City Council is gathered. Everyone can watch. At the same time AM radio stations are assigned to provide simultaneous translation in Spanish, Japanese, Yiddish, Chinese, Italian and whatever other languages have a large enough constituency in the city to justify their use.'"

I really think that something like this might work and I have two or three other such ideas, which I call political inventions, I would love to have someone try.

They include what I call "the 5% solution", paying a 5% surtax on your income tax which gives you the right to say how your tax is spent. This came to me with some force a few years ago when through no fault of my own, I sent to the Internal Revenue Service a check for $34000, and, about a week later, I saw in the paper that every time Ronald Reagan's Prime Minister, I forgot his name, went skiing, it costs the taxpayers $34000. I thought I had better uses for my money than that.

Another of my political inventions is what I call the "selective service congress." Under this system, instead of bothering to elect Congressmen and Senators, we would draw 535 names by computer, randomly, out of the population of the country, we would gather them in a room and we would say "You hundred people, you are the Senate, the other 435 of you, you are the House of Representatives, now go forth and legislate." People I have described this to say "But that is ridiculous! If we did things like that, it might be that we would find that in congress we would have scoundrels and crooks!" (Laughter) and I say, "Yes, this is possible, but we would also have people who, whatever their faults, at least did not owe anybody for the campaign funds and other bribes that got them elected."

Question: You've raised a lot of large issues - body modifications, the collapse of the family, scarcities. How do you think society as a whole will try to cope with those issues? Do you think your virtual town meeting would work on a national or even a global scale? What kinds of things will society do to solve those issues? Right now, there's nothing meaningful in place.

Pohl: I think my universal town meeting is worth trying. The thing is that electronic voting doesn't change anything. All that it does is make the probable results come out faster. What you need to be able to do to decide major questions is to have interactions, have people of varying views find some way of compromising on them, or, somehow, reaching a consensus of some sort. What we have now is a cock fight. We have two groups of people fighting each other and the one with the sharpest spurs wins. Electronic voting does not do anything towards solving the problem. I think that the universal town meeting might work. Whether it will work, I don't know. Whether it is ever going to be tried out, I don't know. A friend of mine, who is also a computer person, they have tried something like that for a school board meeting once and it did not work out at all. The school board election did not work out at all. So, I don't know. I would like to see it tried. I would also like to see the other things tried. I never will...

Kelly: Everyone hypes the Internet as the thing, and I am not sure what thing it is exactly, but maybe that is where it starts. One of the things that we hear so much about today is that we need to encourage diversity and give people their own space to find their own ethnic and cultural identities. In fact, the Internet is a very homogenizing force in the world and I'm not sure that is a bad thing. One of the reasons that we have so many conflicts lies in diversity. If there is some way that we can make people be more understanding about other people's diversity, I'd be for it, but I don't see it yet... So maybe the answer is not that at all. Maybe what we need is not diversity but uniformity, scary thought.

Question: Point of information. You've been talking about electronic democracy. There have been a number of different experiments that have gone on over the last twenty years. Ted Beeker at Auburn University in Georgia has a webpage that links to most of the ongoing experiments and there's an organization called America Speaks that was involved in a reinterring of government projects a few years ago. A past president of NBC News and PBS has written a book on electronic democracy which is actually quite good.

Pohl: What they are talking about is getting people to represent groups. They are talking about getting the local head of the PTA and the local head of policemen's benevolence association and all these people to get up and discuss and make their points. And that is what I'm trying to avoid. In this proposal, which will never happen, people would be selected more or less at random, not because they represent the point of view of the community but because they represent their own point of view. There is a basic flaw in the current political process, whether it is taking place in elections or in halls of congresses or in the back rooms of politicians. People are voting as groups and the people who run the groups are the people who feel most violently about the subjects. If you own a gun or like to shoot guns, you are represented by the NRA and the NRA is represented by the people who are most in favor of giving hand grenades to babies... (laughter). That sort of thing. The most violent people, the most firmly dogmatic people run these groups and that is what I would like to avoid. Most of the proposals I've read provide forums for people who represent interest groups, not for people who represent only themselves.

Question: I think that I am not particularly happy with the government that we have but it is far better than anything else out there right now...

Pohl: As Winston Churchill said...

Question: ...and in direct democracy you have the people on the street making laws but do you really trust the people in the street making your laws. If you take the average person on the street, they are going to say things like "yes, tv ratings are a good idea so you can have the television baby sit your kids" or "what's wrong with outlawing flag burning and encryption! No one will ever do things like that! What are they trying to hide?". I think that you get more of the...

Pohl: Excuse me but you are talking about things that the Congress is about to do if they can...

Modifying the Body.

Jenkins: Both of you read us stories about body modification in one form or another. As a media scholar, I can't help but recall Marshall McLuhan's characterization of media as "extensions of man," as augmentations of our bodies and our senses. I wonder if you might both say something about the human desire to transform or extend our bodies and about why that theme is suddenly so prevalent in science fiction?

Kelly: I think that one of the fundamental desires of humankind is to live a long time and have a great life. Both of those things are possible with body modifications. Although it's perhaps too optimistic to say, we are probably not going to bomb ourselves into the nuclear dust. So, this is probably the issue that's most important to think about: what is going to happen to us physically when we get done with the human genome project? What will we do with it? And what kind of people will we be when we start manipulating our own genome? There's this notion floating around in science fiction that sometime in the next century there will be this sort of cultural singularity. Since we are going to be changed so radically, this is probably the most important thing our culture needs to be thinking about at this point.

Pohl: The idea of being able to make changes and improvement in your body is not a new yearning that is unique for this century or even this millennium. People have tried that sort of thing ever since the Egyptians put khol on their eyes. I know in my heart that I am very handsome, but when I look in the mirror, I do not see that. I would like to correct this physical appearance to correspond with the reality within me. If I had a chance, I would like to try living with a somewhat different physique, taller, shorter, fatter, skinnier. I might even like trying to live like a woman for twenty minutes or so, so that I would know what their reality is like from the inside. John Varley makes it sound like it would be a lot of fun. Actually, Samuel Delaney does the same thing. I would like very well to be a character in one of those stories, for a while. I'm not sure how long I would like it but I would like to try all these things.

Kelly: It strikes me that when you look out and see body mods of this and that (not too many nose rings here in the room or tattoos but you can't always see tattoos), you see a pale shadow of what these yearnings to mark ourselves in a way that says "This is who I am" will be capable of in a hundred years. And, I wrote a story called "Mister Boy" in which we have such complete control over our genome that we can transform ourselves into basically anything that is biological. And even some things that are biological constructs of other things. The main character in "Mister Boy" is a boy who is going to be twelve for the rest of his life. He has been genetically changed such that he will be nearly immortal and twelve. I think I must have had some sort of shocking puberty because I do not want my characters to ever get hair, you know. (laughter). And, in that same story, there's a boy who has had himself genetically manipulated to look like a velocoraptor and he's just happy with it, and the mom is a biological construct, a skin of cells hung on a skyscraper frame. She looks like the Statue of Liberty. To some extent, these things are metaphors too, (laughter) and that is a thing about science fiction: you can have this big metaphorical thing, say a mom that somebody lives inside, and you can tap dance around and look at your science and say that 'this actually could be possible!! And, what do you think of that?' And in good science fiction, the tap dancing is so skillful that it hides the fact that the big metaphor is sitting there looking at you off the cover of the book and in fact you are busy saying 'Wait a minute, that is interesting, could that actually happen, how close are we to this? What are the implications of a society where you can do this?' When I was a kid, we grew our hair long, that was easy! Tattooing is harder, nose rings are harder still. What if, instead of buying the latest Nikes, you could have your legs cut off and have Nike legs and you're all of a sudden Michael Jordan. If you've got the dough and you can take the pain, and the society does not just automatically say you are insane to doing such a thing, that would be a big thing! Believe me, people would do that all the time.

Question: I noticed both of you are talking about people changing the body and I was wondering what you thought about people changing the mind. If you live a long time and you're tired of it, instead of dying, just rebooting the personality, or something like that...

Pohl: I tend to agree with General Westmorland who said, "if you get them by their private parts, the minds will follow." If you change the body, it will probably change the mind. There are a lot of people who have defective bodies, they have got some illness, or they have got a malformation or they are just getting old or whatever. And if you could repair those bodies so that they no longer cause problems for the mind, then they can get some better minds.

Questions for Discussion: Why do you think the theme of body modification is so prevalent in contemporary science fiction? Do you think there are logical limits to current trends towards piercing and tattooing? Do you think people would radically change their bodies if they were able to do so? What do you think the effects would be of being able to change your sex?

Virtual reality.

Jenkins: Both of the stories you have read have an image of what we now call virtual reality. "Day Million" has a very early image of a surrogate relationship, in a certain sense, in which human life is translated into information. We engage with this virtual construct that is almost as real to us as physical life. This idea of translating human life in the information or dealing with virtual surrogates runs through a lot of contemporary science fiction as well.

Pohl: I think virtual sin is a lot better than any other kind. If virtual reality ever gets really good, I think that it will relieve a lot of the necessity for crime. Maybe I am just dreaming, but it seems to me that if you can do anything you like in virtual reality, so that it is very real to you and you think it has actually happened, than you do not have to go out and do it to your neighbor. That's one of the things I look forward to. Of course, I never got any of the other things I look forward to.

Kelly: We handle our addictions so poorly in our culture. What would a virtual reality addict look like? He will be sitting there with the headphones on and a bag of Cheetos and his hand is going like this (gestures) the whole time... Our point of view on this is that 'oh, that poor guy needs to get a life. He's sitting in that room. He doesn't go out.' It could well be that in his culture, that person will be looked at as sort of a hero: 'he totally gave himself to the computer and this is the kind of person that we all should strive to be because most of us are not strong enough to sit there in virtual reality for 24 hours a day, but this guy has the right stuff.' I think this will be a big thing when it gets good. Is virtual reality addictive? Our culture has a lot of sorting out to do before we decide what we think about that. I mean, in some ways, virtual reality is an addiction. But he could be doing productive work in virtual reality as the meat withers away under the helmet...

Pohl: Nobody will ever know...

Kelly: Well, maybe he is in your virtual town meeting, maybe the only person who can run your virtual town meeting is someone who is so much into virtuality that he lives there. And the rest of us are just visitors.

Question: Can virtual reality - or media consumption more generally - be addictive? Is James Patrick Kelly right to suggest that different cultures might place different values on our engagement with virtual reality? Is there a generational divide today in terms of how people think about on-line experiences?

The future of the family.

Question: I noticed in the passage you read from your forthcoming novel that even though it is set in the medium future, there is still the model nuclear family of the Eisenhower era. Was that intentional?

Kelly: This is chapter one of the novel, and the whole idea of this novel is to try to think about the future of the family. In fact, although it seems very nuclear at this point, the family is about to fly apart in a million ways. I am trying to decide the future of the family. How could families function? What do we need to have families for in the future? It starts out like Ozzie and Harriet. , I hope it is better than a sitcom, but it has that sort of look and feel to it. Ok, Dad's a bumbling guy and mom is the one who pulls everything together. But, this guy has two other families and one of them is totally dysfunctional. And they will intrude to break up this family in ways that will make people very uneasy. So much of my stuff is dystopian and scary and the future does not work, my thought was to try to imagine what the future of the family will be like. Is it possible that people will be happy in the future even if their families fall apart and they are losing their sexual identity and all other kinds of things? So, I acknowledge your point but I have more to come.

Questions for Discussion: What will be the future of the American family? Can we be "happy in the future" without the current family structure? What alternative social structures might take its place? Or do you think the family is basic to human experience and unlikely to collapse in the face of other kinds of social and cultural changes?

Cyberpunk.

Question: I wondered if both of you would comment about cyberpunk. How do you feel about that genre? Does it actually exist?

Kelly: I can talk about it a little bit. I went to Clarion [science fiction writers workshop] in 1974 and one of the people I was in Clarion with was Bruce Sterling. He was 20, I was 22. Whatever cyberpunk is, he was already a cyberpunk then. It started out and, to some extent, it is still very much a young persons genre. Punk, in itself, is a youth signifier. When he first started writing this stuff and it got called cyberpunk in the 1980s, it was stuff we had been doing in 1974. What they were calling cyberpunk was this edgy, high-tech, disaffected kind of fiction which was interesting. My quarrel with cyberpunk is that as glitzy and romantic as it seems, the people who are main characters in the classic cyberpunk books do not have any connections with the rest of the world. And, in fact, the rest of the world exists as a stage for them to prance around and show off their mirror shades. When I started writing cyberpunk, the first story that Bruce thought was cyberpunk was actually supposed to be a satire. This "Solstice" story was supposed to be sending cyberpunk up. My idea writing it was sort of an odd fellows in bed: what would it be like if Connie Willis collaborated with Bruce Sterling? It has got this sort of bleeding humanist heart, and it's totally obsessed with history. On the other hand, this guy is a drug dealer and he has a very cyberpunk futuristic attitude towards drugs - 'Drugs are fine. Hey, drugs are great, drugs are the best, they are an art form.' I was channeling Bruce over here and I was channeling Connie over there. Bruce was the polemicist, Bill Gibson didn't care. Bill was doing his own thing and he was a friend of Bruce but he was not out there to conquer the world. He was out there to write his stories, but Bruce wanted to conquer the world and he was writing his polemical things. "Our stuff is good over here and this stuff is derivative over here, so this is cyberpunk and all the other stuff, why bother?" It created an impossible situation for him, for the cyberpunks to live in. So, as soon as they got recognized, the cyberpunks had to move away. If they had stayed in that neighborhood, they would have all got killed. So they all started backing off as quickly as they could. I don't think cyberpunk exists anymore as that young person's adventure literature with a tech edge, but I do think that some of those attitudes are still there. If you read Bruce's Holy Fire or Gibson's Virtual Life, they seem to me more mature takes on the rest of the world. It's like "So, we looked at the cyberpunk world when we were young guys and now we are turning around, what was the rest of the world at that time." So, now they look at the other pieces that make that cyberpunk world, and they are not always edgy or dangerous.

Pohl: Bruce's Holy Fire was a Hugo nominee this year and it came in dead last in the voting and Bruce was really shaken up by this because he thinks it is a more mature and better work.

Kelly: It is. It's his best work.

Pohl: I did not read it, so I don't know. But what I feel about cyberpunk is that the cyber part is fine, the punk part leaves me very cold. I don't really care about these people. Jim said they are detached from reality and by God, they are. I just don't care whether they live or die and would prefer simply that they go away. I don't want them. The other stuff is fine. Bruce is a very talented writer and so is Bill Gibson and so are a lot of other people who are doing it, but I think that they are using their talents for the wrong thing.

Questions for Discussion: What do you think have been the major contributions of cyberpunk to the evolution of science fiction as a genre? Do you agree with Pohl and Kelly that its characters lack depth and human interest? How might we defend them against such criticisms?

Science Fiction and Technological Change

Question: I was wondering how actual developments of technology have helped or hindered your projections and imaginations.

Pohl: Well, they've screwed everything up.

Kelly: Yeah. All you folks at MIT, stop doin' things!

Pohl: We used to have so much fun writing about Mars and, when I was a kid, the science fiction magazines were full of big brawny Jouviens and little, tiny Martians. You cannot have them anymore. But, there is always another mountain; you climb one mountain and you cannot write about that anymore. There is always something we do not know about, whether is transhuman intelligences or quantum reality or whatever. There is always something more you can still write science fiction about. It does get hard to make an exciting story out of cosmic strings or something like that. But it's worth trying.

Kelly: One of the things that, for me, is the scariest about technology , something that looms or maybe it will always loom and never actually arrive, is nanotechnology. The applications of a successful nanotechnological society are so stunning that I can just throw up my hands and say "Ok, I am not going to write about that. I am just going to pretend it does not exist because I cannot wrap my mind around that. I cannot begin to do that." That often happens. When you write about the future, you sort of pick a future that you want to talk about, some issue you want to talk about, some character in the context of his culture and you have to leave the other stuff out because if you let all this other stuff back in, which you know it is probably going on in the background, the narrative will be dead. You have to sort of say "Ok, I am selecting only this to tell you about and maybe this other stuff is going on in the culture or maybe not, but I do not have time and you do not have time to talk about it." Anyway, nanotechnology scares me.

Pohl: None of us is so insane as to write about THE future, we are writing about a possible future. We make up this possible future and we write about what happens in it, but we do not pretend this is what is going to happen.

Question: I want to suggest that a lot of what's been talked about by way of body modification or culture reaching the point of radical transformations beyond which we can no longer comprehend - that's another way of dealing with a very old theme, the alien. I also want to comment on the dehumanizing effect of cyberpunk and I feel to some degree of body modification stories. Where are the big issues? Why do we care about these people?

Kelly: One of the things that make people care, one of the things that literature has been about ever since they started writing it, was that you are struggling against limits. There are things you cannot do that you want to do and your reaction to that state of affairs is what makes literature. One of the most interesting things in our age is that the limits are starting to recede a little bit, so some of the things are a little less tangible than they used to be. We are not going to be carried off by wolves when we venture into the forest. We do not have plagues that wipe out half of the population, like the black death. So, we are more in control. The people in this room, we do not starve to death. The rate of death for babies is vanishingly low compared to what it used to be. On the other hand, we are all escaping from nature. Maybe we shouldn't be, but we are. Our technologies allow us to escape from nature and we are also distancing ourselves from that creature that ran across the savannah and feared for his life the whole time because somebody was going to track him down and kill him. We do not have that immediate kind of fear anymore. Our fears are "Well, maybe somebody will drop a bomb on us, but that is not my problem. I cannot do anything about it. I cannot run away from the bomb. I cannot run any faster." Maybe there will be some sort of gigantic failure of antibiotics and we will be all wiped out by some new disease, but I cannot do anything about that either, so everything is a little more distant than it used to be. And that makes the storyteller's art much much harder.

Questions for Discussion: Is Kelly right that most of our core narratives emerge from things that frighten us? If so, will the greater mastery over nature reduce the importance of storytelling? What kinds of stories are we likely to tell in the future?