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ckdSecond panel of the con. These reports are coming along, slowly, as I'm finishing one every two or three days...I hope they're useful and/or interesting.
[These are reconstructions by memory based on notes. I apologize in advance for any mistakes, and nothing here (even if in quotes) should be assumed to be an exact or even inexact version of what someone said without checking it with them. Comments of the form [ckd: bracketed text] are my own glosses, comments, or snarky bits.]
Bear started by mentioning the feminist critique of the idea of the Singularity she wrote.
McManus gave the Wikipedia definition, then talked about the Vernor Vinge essay, first published in OMNI in 1983, then revised in 1993. [ckd: see also this 2003 set of annotations.]
Bear: "The Rapture for nerds", as Ken MacLeod put it.
McManus: The topic is thinking of the "post body future" and what this has to do with women and the human race; will there be gender, will we need to reproduce?
Marley: Does posthuman mean postgender?
McManus: Are our brains even capable of being genderless?
Cramer: Like most SF concepts, this is more about the present and less about the future. Wikipedia is the "Sockpuppet Liberation Movement", with a cultural norm that it's improper to wonder about who is behind an alias. Surgical tools are now often disposable, rather than being sterilized and re-used; online identities are the same. Women can't just dispose of their identities, because they can't just abandon their kids. [ckd: all women are mothers?] There's a big difference between durable pseudonyms and totally disposable identities.
Bear: New Scientist had an article on a study that concluded people are more distrustful of an online identity without apparent gender. [ckd: quite likely, but...New Scientist is not at the top of my trust list.]
Morrow: I was the primary parent for my kids, and was surprised by how much of the nurturing role a man can play. There's a book, Who Will Raise The Children? [ckd: Google suggests it's by James Levine] that discusses this.
Cramer: There are more constraints on female identity; it's harder to be a traveling female con artist.
Morrow: On a panel on the effect of raising kids on fiction, a story [ckd: not sure if it was Morrow's or someone else's, my notes have no details] was brought up about future punishment in a world with full prisons. Issue each offender a 2 year old they have to take care of!
Cramer: A 2 year old is a psychotic dwarf with a neurosis.
McManus: But what if you don't have children?
McManus: There will be pockets of people who don't want to become posthuman, just as people don't all have access to the Internet now.
Marley: Envy goes in both directions; people with children envy the freedom, but many people who don't or can't have children want them. We have a biological, emotional attachment to the experience of gender roles.
McManus: But how much of the urge is biological? If we become posthuman, will we want kids?
Cramer: The makers of Second Life wanted people to have multiple accounts so they could have whole families; "be your own children".
Bear: There's an assumption that reproduction, if we're talking about a real posthuman future, is a sort of Apollonian "child of the mind", an intentional creation of another being. Perhaps a machine-child. It's a very directed kind of reproduction. This means questions like who gets licensed to reproduce? Is there a testing process? Are there limits? Do we have feral children of computers?
Cramer: In Second Life you pick a gender, but you have to go buy genitalia.
Cramer: A key concept of the Singularity, though, is that society must be unimaginably transformed.
McManus: We can't imagine it, but it's our job to do so.
Bear: Yeah, that's why they pay us the big bucks! [ckd: much audience laughter]
Bear: It's more of an unpredictable future than an unimaginable one.
Cramer: We don't even understand the world we live in now. We're already post-Singularity; post-multiple-Singularities.
Bear: Even the concept of malleable gender is a Singularity.
Marley: Changing hair color is easy, eye color is easy, nose shape is less easy but routine; gender is changeable now, just not yet easily.
Morrow: There's the idea of the dualistic psyche; once we don't have bodies, I find that incoherent.
McManus: It's related to the idea of the mind-body split.
Cramer: Even now people are living their psychological lives online, but their physical lives are lived in their mother's basement. What kind of life are you living?
McManus: During the work day, I'm getting constant emails from people in other countries or wherever.
Bear: I'm "online" all the time, even when I'm in the other room.
Cramer: But how to get away from or limit the connectivity?
Marley: Your friends only know what you let them know.
Bear: If we had a constant connection, how would that change society? It'd change how people learn; no memorization.
McManus: We're almost there now. How often do you say "just Google it"?
Marley: Or phone book deliveries. You get the phone book every six months or whatever and just have to recycle it. When will those go away?
Bear: Western Union won't send telegrams any more.
Cramer: Online behavior tends to be more highly gendered, not less. You see online dating cons, or using aliases but not changing gender.
Audience: Keep the distinction between sex and gender in mind. Even without biological gender, do attitudes carry over into new situations? Can you use this to alter social attitudes to gender?
Marley: Social attitudes: look at "matrilineal" vs "matriarchy". Same root word, but very different things. Look at the reactions to women in politics, like Margaret Thatcher or Hillary Clinton.
McManus: The idea of "brain reproduction": does it represent men's desire to control reproduction?
Morrow: Cloning stories are really about growing up, using artificial maturation. I'm working on a cloning novel, where a woman has clones made at different ages so she can compress the experience of being a parent, but in doing so robs them of their childhoods.
Cramer: Internet harrassment; once I started writing about private military companies I got all sorts of 7th-grade level harrassment, "you're ugly" and so forth, much of it very gender-specific because of "crossing gender lines".
Audience: It's an available weapon, so it's used.
Audience: Singularity stories often take place with Amish or other non-Singularity folks. A post-Singularity society may assign genders by behavior; in some tribes, if you weave baskets you are automatically a woman, even if that makes you a woman-man.
Audience: There are more choices than male or female. Neuter, hermaphrodite, etc.; don't limit the options based on cultural baggage.
Bear: the second generation in a new environment is the one that really changes. That's where you will lose gender.
Audience: Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis introduced a new gender. [ckd: first mention of Octavia since the introduction; I wonder if everyone was just taking this as assumed common knowledge.]
Audience: If you count the number of computers that arrived in my home over the past three years, and the number of children in the same timeframe, you find that they're outreproducing us. Perhaps we're already at the Singularity.
Audience: ISO recognizes seven different genders. [ckd: No source, no further information given.]
Audience: The Singularity is a very theological idea. How much of it is about fear of death or fear of aging? [ckd: see above about the "Rapture for nerds".]
Audience: In Charles Stross's Glasshouse, people in the post-accelerated world are forced back into what the future remembers our current society to be. In the book this is a horrible punishment.
Morrow: "As the only man up here, I wonder how much of this speculation is due to women's desire to control reproduction." Frankenstein is not only about a man trying to reproduce without a woman, but also his being a very bad parent.
Interesting topic, and an interesting panel, though I think Kathryn Cramer was actually on a panel about online society and anonymity rather than the Singularity discussion that the other panelists were on.
"The Singularity Needs Women!"Great set of panelists for this one, with James Morrow as the token male.
Elizabeth Bear, Kathryn Cramer, Louise Marley, Victoria McManus (L), James Morrow
At Readercon 14 (2002), GoH Octavia Butler said "As the only woman up here, this may be a strange question, but I can't help wondering how much of this speculation about a post-human future has to do with men's desire to control reproduction." We sadly can't ask Octavia exactly what she meant, but we want to pursue this striking statement. Does the post-humanist ideal of freedom from bodily constraints clash fundamentally with the ideal of freedom for the more than half of the population with female bodies? Or might the Singularity actually be a means to the freedoms sought by feminism? Has anyone written fiction about how these ideals interact, and if not, is this an opportunity?
[These are reconstructions by memory based on notes. I apologize in advance for any mistakes, and nothing here (even if in quotes) should be assumed to be an exact or even inexact version of what someone said without checking it with them. Comments of the form [ckd: bracketed text] are my own glosses, comments, or snarky bits.]
Bear started by mentioning the feminist critique of the idea of the Singularity she wrote.
McManus gave the Wikipedia definition, then talked about the Vernor Vinge essay, first published in OMNI in 1983, then revised in 1993. [ckd: see also this 2003 set of annotations.]
Bear: "The Rapture for nerds", as Ken MacLeod put it.
McManus: The topic is thinking of the "post body future" and what this has to do with women and the human race; will there be gender, will we need to reproduce?
Marley: Does posthuman mean postgender?
McManus: Are our brains even capable of being genderless?
Cramer: Like most SF concepts, this is more about the present and less about the future. Wikipedia is the "Sockpuppet Liberation Movement", with a cultural norm that it's improper to wonder about who is behind an alias. Surgical tools are now often disposable, rather than being sterilized and re-used; online identities are the same. Women can't just dispose of their identities, because they can't just abandon their kids. [ckd: all women are mothers?] There's a big difference between durable pseudonyms and totally disposable identities.
Bear: New Scientist had an article on a study that concluded people are more distrustful of an online identity without apparent gender. [ckd: quite likely, but...New Scientist is not at the top of my trust list.]
Morrow: I was the primary parent for my kids, and was surprised by how much of the nurturing role a man can play. There's a book, Who Will Raise The Children? [ckd: Google suggests it's by James Levine] that discusses this.
Cramer: There are more constraints on female identity; it's harder to be a traveling female con artist.
Morrow: On a panel on the effect of raising kids on fiction, a story [ckd: not sure if it was Morrow's or someone else's, my notes have no details] was brought up about future punishment in a world with full prisons. Issue each offender a 2 year old they have to take care of!
Cramer: A 2 year old is a psychotic dwarf with a neurosis.
McManus: But what if you don't have children?
McManus: There will be pockets of people who don't want to become posthuman, just as people don't all have access to the Internet now.
Marley: Envy goes in both directions; people with children envy the freedom, but many people who don't or can't have children want them. We have a biological, emotional attachment to the experience of gender roles.
McManus: But how much of the urge is biological? If we become posthuman, will we want kids?
Cramer: The makers of Second Life wanted people to have multiple accounts so they could have whole families; "be your own children".
Bear: There's an assumption that reproduction, if we're talking about a real posthuman future, is a sort of Apollonian "child of the mind", an intentional creation of another being. Perhaps a machine-child. It's a very directed kind of reproduction. This means questions like who gets licensed to reproduce? Is there a testing process? Are there limits? Do we have feral children of computers?
Cramer: In Second Life you pick a gender, but you have to go buy genitalia.
Cramer: A key concept of the Singularity, though, is that society must be unimaginably transformed.
McManus: We can't imagine it, but it's our job to do so.
Bear: Yeah, that's why they pay us the big bucks! [ckd: much audience laughter]
Bear: It's more of an unpredictable future than an unimaginable one.
Cramer: We don't even understand the world we live in now. We're already post-Singularity; post-multiple-Singularities.
Bear: Even the concept of malleable gender is a Singularity.
Marley: Changing hair color is easy, eye color is easy, nose shape is less easy but routine; gender is changeable now, just not yet easily.
Morrow: There's the idea of the dualistic psyche; once we don't have bodies, I find that incoherent.
McManus: It's related to the idea of the mind-body split.
Cramer: Even now people are living their psychological lives online, but their physical lives are lived in their mother's basement. What kind of life are you living?
McManus: During the work day, I'm getting constant emails from people in other countries or wherever.
Bear: I'm "online" all the time, even when I'm in the other room.
Cramer: But how to get away from or limit the connectivity?
Marley: Your friends only know what you let them know.
Bear: If we had a constant connection, how would that change society? It'd change how people learn; no memorization.
McManus: We're almost there now. How often do you say "just Google it"?
Marley: Or phone book deliveries. You get the phone book every six months or whatever and just have to recycle it. When will those go away?
Bear: Western Union won't send telegrams any more.
Cramer: Online behavior tends to be more highly gendered, not less. You see online dating cons, or using aliases but not changing gender.
Audience: Keep the distinction between sex and gender in mind. Even without biological gender, do attitudes carry over into new situations? Can you use this to alter social attitudes to gender?
Marley: Social attitudes: look at "matrilineal" vs "matriarchy". Same root word, but very different things. Look at the reactions to women in politics, like Margaret Thatcher or Hillary Clinton.
McManus: The idea of "brain reproduction": does it represent men's desire to control reproduction?
Morrow: Cloning stories are really about growing up, using artificial maturation. I'm working on a cloning novel, where a woman has clones made at different ages so she can compress the experience of being a parent, but in doing so robs them of their childhoods.
Cramer: Internet harrassment; once I started writing about private military companies I got all sorts of 7th-grade level harrassment, "you're ugly" and so forth, much of it very gender-specific because of "crossing gender lines".
Audience: It's an available weapon, so it's used.
Audience: Singularity stories often take place with Amish or other non-Singularity folks. A post-Singularity society may assign genders by behavior; in some tribes, if you weave baskets you are automatically a woman, even if that makes you a woman-man.
Audience: There are more choices than male or female. Neuter, hermaphrodite, etc.; don't limit the options based on cultural baggage.
Bear: the second generation in a new environment is the one that really changes. That's where you will lose gender.
Audience: Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis introduced a new gender. [ckd: first mention of Octavia since the introduction; I wonder if everyone was just taking this as assumed common knowledge.]
Audience: If you count the number of computers that arrived in my home over the past three years, and the number of children in the same timeframe, you find that they're outreproducing us. Perhaps we're already at the Singularity.
Audience: ISO recognizes seven different genders. [ckd: No source, no further information given.]
Audience: The Singularity is a very theological idea. How much of it is about fear of death or fear of aging? [ckd: see above about the "Rapture for nerds".]
Audience: In Charles Stross's Glasshouse, people in the post-accelerated world are forced back into what the future remembers our current society to be. In the book this is a horrible punishment.
Morrow: "As the only man up here, I wonder how much of this speculation is due to women's desire to control reproduction." Frankenstein is not only about a man trying to reproduce without a woman, but also his being a very bad parent.
Interesting topic, and an interesting panel, though I think Kathryn Cramer was actually on a panel about online society and anonymity rather than the Singularity discussion that the other panelists were on.
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no subject
Date: 2007-07-13 03:31 (UTC)I'd like to do a ReaderCon but in some ways I'm scared of serricons (http://johnringo.com/Abyss/Con%20theory.asp) on SF. I find very little of the literary tropes worth my time.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-13 04:51 (UTC)Not to mention that it seems weirdly archaic, as none of her comments were specific to women rather than parents, and there is a difference between saying that women are more likely to be the primary parent and defining parenting as a specific function of female and female only identity.
lecture?
Date: 2007-07-15 01:23 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-13 04:58 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-13 06:44 (UTC)How divorced from reality does one have to be to believe this?
(Unless maybe she means like
no subject
Date: 2007-07-13 21:46 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-13 11:36 (UTC)I was really irritated by Cramer's comment, which seemed to me to imply that women without kids don't really "count". Enough that I caught her sometime later in the con and said, "listen, have you considered this?" And received a lecture about how "well, you could adopt a kid, or become a grandmother (?! if I don't have kids, how could I become a grandmother?) and end up getting stuck with care of the kids, and then you still couldn't disappear...
Well, sure. But a) I said very specifically that I was talking about myself and other childless women; b) aren't men equally capable of adopting or otherwise "getting stuck with kids" in a non-biological way? Which seems to invalidate her point, but she wouldn't acknowledge that either.
Audience: The Singularity is a very theological idea. How much of it is about fear of death or fear of aging? [ckd: see above about the "Rapture for nerds".]
That was me (and please note that the first thing I said was that the "rapture for nerds" comment had started the train of thought). More specifically: that having an ideal of a mind easily divorced from the body, to be downloaded into a new computer or new body or whatever, seemed to me very Platonic/Gnostic/Patristic.
And, following from that, how much of it was not primarily about control of women and women's bodies, as the panel had suggested, but fear of death and decay, which women's bodies have always represented to the Gnostic (etc.) mind.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-13 13:54 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-13 14:01 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-15 22:54 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-16 17:21 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-14 11:14 (UTC)I expect we'll carry over whatever urges and mental habits made each of us who we are. I may be an atheist, but I still have inside of my head the good Catholic kid who even did the altar-boy thing.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-17 20:00 (UTC)I found the quality of discourse at Readercon the best I've ever seen. It wasn't just my fellow panelists, but input from people in the audience. Rich and rewarding discussions, and it's great to see this detailed redux to remind me of things that might have slipped my mind. Thanks! Hope to see you again next year.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-17 20:56 (UTC)