Quote:
Originally Posted by ardeegee
See, I was right-- you just described the exact future that I wish to live in-- as if it were a bad thing. My black is your white, my white is your black. "The end of need, want, commerce, value, finance, etc" is a good thing!
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For a writer, it is.
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. -- Leo Tolstoy.
In our real lives, we don't want to have to struggle for everything; those of us who have done so want it even less. Not needing everything makes for much less stress. But it makes for lousy books. It's like the old saw about newspapers not printing "Mr. Smith had a nice day." How many times have you gone to the faucet, turned the faucet handle, and water came out? You've probably done it at least once today. There's no story there. But if you turned on the water and got nothing (or worse yet, got something that has no right to be in a pipe), that might be the start of a story.
Sure, I'd like to live in a post-scarcity world. I'd like to live in a world where I didn't have to worry about being hungry, or wanting clothes, or needing medicine. I'd like to live in a world where I could do just the things I wanted to, relax when I wanted to, create art, and so on. But I wouldn't want to read stories about it, because they'd all be the "Mr. Smith had a nice day" kind, and that's no fun at all.
I agree that a lot of Steve's ideas for the future (his police-state Internet, for instance) are not just undesirable but in some cases even destructive. But I think we have to distinguish between the future he wants to see (that police state, for instance) and the future he wants to write about (one that contains struggle and conflict).