Status Updates From Chasing Shadows: Visions of...

Not really a fan of the chat room format, as it's slow-going reading for me, but it was an interesting and possibly semi-realistic concept or vision of our near future and a crowdsourcing manner of solving problems through networks and coding and location/data tracking prowess. It reminds me of the old Facebook chat groups I frequented just to experience good conversation and to learn, generally full of engineers.

The jaded cynic in me judges some details to be distractingly discordant, flippant, nonsensical, unappreciated. I guess I'm many times more of a luddite than I thought. I am an unreformed and un(mal)adjusted Patrick from the David Walton piece. But exp the unsavory > not living long enough

"What was this, but the opposite of Alzheimer's? An expanding of the self, a preservation of exp/memory in the minds of 1000s."

Surveillance section preface/setup:

"Indeed, today, reliance on broadcasting [but not Orwell's conception] is the very definition of a technologically backward society...We may be able to see what's going on more quickly, but that doesn't mean we'll agree about it any more readily...[T]he ground of history has a way of shifting the most basic of assumptions from beneath the most scrupulously imagined situations."

One of my favorites, so far, I think; and different the rest, so far, about chemical concoctions toward 'lycanthropizing' and sniffing out (literally) any individual's skeletons in the closet---the latter at first to keep a manner of control and power over the local populace, and later, to root out those edifices by revealing past lives and secrets, gaining the power back to community decision. Twist on mad scientist

An interesting surveillance emotion monitoring system as predictive for crime and bad behavior, but again, not terribly feasible. Good characterization of the old man, a drunk, they come to monitor.

"It had a natural filth that clings to a cheap room, and a manmade, careless filth that would disfigure a Taj Mahal...Clean as the works of man could make it, yet still filthy as only the minds of man could achieve."

Robert J. Sawyer's story. Two centuries after the Earth sent two dozen astronauts outside the solar system to investigate some sensors reporting oxygen on another planet, they return to a world w/o government, only a popularity contest based off of crowd-sourced trustworthiness ratings from birth/first social interaction in these free days. I don't think this would be self-regulating, but it resembles cancel culture.

Stories 2 & 3 were weaker than 1, though the 3rd---focusing on an experience of travelling back to Earth and experiencing gravity as a space-bound citizen and neuro-feeding it live---matched the emotional height and resonance of 1. 2 was brief, felt more like an interlude, forgettable, but w/scenes of interesting dialog

"You can't explain. You have to know: Has the culture of the stars made us *more* human? Or less?

Whew, that was a banger of a 1st story. Foray into the private life and anxiety of someone who has joined as collective organ donor, much more connected and high stakes than our own current system, and connected to an invasive online community--but she needed it, just in case she needed a organ donor herself. The writing is indicative of the anxiety of our FMC. It's a tale that we all judge harshly, stranger neighbor

Introduction, on what science fiction has taught us. A brief run through socioanthropological history of privacy, advancement, civilization and the new dynamics it brings, technology and our adaptation in living and habituating to them, surveillance, anticipating how these all collide and merge in anticipating how these technologies will be used and will influence---Asimov and outcome: tech will not lose but be used.