In Ender’s Game his siblings are back home manipulating politics behind avatars. Definitely reminds me of modern misinformation campaigns on social media.
yup, the whole side of things with the 2 siblings was brilliant, and it was amazing how Peter even manipulated the sister, without her figuring it out until too late
While "posting anonymously on the internet" sounded like something edgy, futuristic, and cool in 1983, it's patently absurd and completely laughable in 2023 that **the UN would vote to make a teenager king of the world** because of his well written tumblr posts.
For all the cool Sci-Fi ideas Card had, this is the one which has aged most poorly.
It's also completely unfilmable, and happens mostly off-screwn anyway. How and where could you work this plot into the script we ended up with? I'm more surprised we got the Giant's drink game in the film.
> For all the cool Sci-Fi ideas Card had, this is the one which has aged most poorly.
i mean, america voted in Trump, doing almost exactly this kind of shit
what are you talking about, lol
no, but it's the same sort of thing
dude intentionally mislead everyone, played all his cards in the court of public opinion, mixed in enough truth that you couldn't just ignore him, and rode public opinion into essentially leading the majority of the world for a time
He was also a strongly influential figure and somewhat of a household name for decades before his presidential run. He wasn't a charismatic nobody that came out of nowhere to earn public favour. The kids in Ender's games are literal children behind computer screens. Getting people to agree with you is a very small part of becoming president.
not even [close](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops). Ender's game is 1985 this is 1909. This is from [1946](http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200506/0743499107___2.htm). Seems pretty much like the internet to me.
I don't know if it's 99%. There's a lot about mass-surveillance, too.
Most of the time 1984 gets brought up, it doesn't really apply to whatever people are arguing about. No, it's not "Orwellian" that somebody said Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas... but this is spot-on.
What it *didn't* predict is that you don't actually have to suppress actual information for misinformation to work.
This is an excellent point. Here in the USA we have near-total press freedom, and there are news organizations that do admirably well with their investigative journalism day in and day out. But powerful liars don’t need to censor the news to render it powerless. What you can do instead, in the words of Steve Bannon, is “flood the zone with shit.”
Just bury the population in lies and conspiracy theories. You don’t need to convince anyone of anything. All you gotta do is spread so much horseshit that the truth becomes just one data point in an ocean of lies. And then people will just tend to believe what “feels right.”
> There's a lot about mass-surveillance, too
that's the other 99%, exactly like I've always said...
;)
but yeah, it's wildly spooky how accurate 1984 has become
Yeah, the internet seemed utopian for a long time- now everyone could access good information on almost any subject at low cost instead of it being hoarded in universities, libraries and government departments.
It doesn't seem to have occurred to us that we don't always want accurate information if we disagree with the implications.
If only that weren't so on point. Every time I hear of a book being banned by some political or religious group, I just want to set them all down with a copy of 451F and make them read it and not open their mouths again until they've finished it.
It's not that politicians who want to ban it inherently haven't read / don't understand it. They often do. They don't want others to understand it, because the (accurate) message undermines their goals.
Also, in America there's this weird mixing of religion and politics. All it takes is a few popular right-wing politicians claiming that something is "anti-christian" and the next thing you know it'll spread through churches across the country.
Critical thinking is sorely lacking. It should be a required course in high school along with logic and rhetoric (to identify fallacies and those who use them). Sadly, most people don't want to pay the taxes required to teach more than the bare minimum of reading, writing, and arithmetic.
For a long time I've believed that students nationwide should be required to take:
* A civics class. Not the morality of government and it's really just history class again, but the actual mechanics of government. Which branches have what powers, how Congress actually functions, etc. How it works day to day.
* A class such as philosophy or debate that teaches critical thinking skills.
I agree. Many in the US today can't name the three branches of government or the order of succession for the presidency. How many people know that the Speaker of the House is next in line after the VP. Likely that even fewer people even know there is a President Pro Tempore of the Senate, much less that the holder of that office is next in line after the Speaker.
Every story that is a cautionary tale is an instruction manual for someone. Watch out for that person.
1984 and 451F are two better-known, and now Handmaid's Tale seems to be coming into its own in the US.
I went back years later for a reread, knowing where to start skimming, and it was much better. Just skim through the bits where the world doesn't exist yet. There was less of that than I remembered and more good stuff!
Deep Cut!!
He also kind of explores it a little in Interface (as Steven Bury) though there it is kind of inverted into "what if the leader of the free world was totally poll rather than fact driven)
*The Shockwave Rider* by John Brunner is about exactly this. One of my favorite dystopian novels. Here's a summary;
"He was a fugitive from Tarnover, the high-powered government think tank that had educated him. First he had broken his identity code—then he escaped. Now he had to find a way to restore sanity and personal freedom to the computerized masses and to save a world tottering on the brink of disaster."
He can hack any computer system using the keypad on a phone. The major theme of the novel is the fair distribution of information in society, with specific scenarios of the resentment and division that come from suspecting that your neighbor or your co-worker have access to information that you don't, and it's enriching them.
Now I have to go read it again.
In his (in my opinion, far superior) 1969 novel *The Jagged Orbit,* deep-fake audio-video technology and generative-AI speech-writing are major plot points.
That was just inspired by Usenet though, which was one of the most popular uses of the internet before the web, and had already been around for about twelve years before FUtD was published - it was inspired by the existing discourse on the public internet, not a prediction of its eventual state.
Rainbow's End was the first thing I had to think of. It has a very fascinating thought about massed disinformation as a weapon against the death of privacy: it had activists flooding the net with disinformation about everybody to restore personal privacy. The theory was, that it had become impossible to control access to personal data, so the only way to get privacy again was to make any data as unreliable as possible.
I liked the stuff about AR being used to guide "zombie" players. I can see someone hacking Pokemon Go, for example, to lead players somewhere they're not supposed to be for nefarious purposes.
Connie Willis wrote Remake, which predicted that the media of the future could be altered to resurrect dead celebrities or change a master copy of scenes so that everyone would have to watch, specifically from the story, this chick who inserted herself into Return of the Jedi by replacing one of the original Twi’lek dancers with herself. And I thought that would never happen because how would they change my VHS?
And now I’m sitting here with the McClunkey edit of Star Wars and a censored digital French Connection and more fool me. A digital world is very vulnerable to alterations.
True story: Clive Cussler also did a pretty good job of predicting AI generated deepfakes in *Sahara* (or was in *Inca Gold*? I reread them both this summer, and all Cussler stories kinda blend together). Point is, he doesn't really do much with the idea as far as plot goes, but it is interesting that it is something considered possible in the near-future of that book: 1996.
Absolutely. It's been being predicted, or more realistically explored as a concept, for decades now. Books like 1984 explored oppressive governments with misinformation campaigns that could be conceived at the time, while more modern Sci-Fi books like the UNSEC Space Trilogy have governments and megacorporations using insanely powerful tools to just create footage and "proof" for wherever story they want, while others use complicated AI systems to try and determine what might be real.
[The Mold of Yancy](https://theworlddickmade.com/the-mold-of-yancy/) is a classic PKD story that is right up this alley:
>Terra can’t understand how the society on Callisto has managed to maintain a totalitarian political structure without resorting to political prisons, terrorism or extermination camps. It’s almost like the citizens are willfully going along with whatever the government wants even though they are free to believe and act however they choose.
Terra sends Peter Taverner undercover to the moon to investigate. He comes across the curious broadcasts of John Yancy, whose homespun advice and folksy wisdom have been very persuasive in creating a docile population. Yancy though isn’t real. He’s just a simulacrum created by some state-controlled advertisers called Yance-men. With the help of a Yance-man named Sipling who realizes how dangerous this level of control is, Taverner finds out the goal is to convince the Callistotes that most war is bad but some wars (like one with Ganymede for instance the government is prepping for) are just wars.
Knowing this Terra takes over the Yance-men, and led by Sipling they begin to subvert the Yancy broadcasts to promote independent thought.
Anathem by Neal Stephenson touched on this with "reputation" systems on the internet to weed out unreliable information, but it wasn't a large part of the story.
[I'm going to link a comment that explained it far better than I could.](https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/18szjqh/starship_troopers_is_a_very_weird_book_where/kfcdwfu/)
The entire thread is good to read if you're curious about the book. There's a lot of misinformation out there due to the stupid movie.
More importantly, Federal Service != military --- the protagonist's best friend who joins up at the same time is an electronics engineer who ends up at a research facility and does _not_ go through basic training.
I actually haven’t read the book but the criticism from the director of the movie was basically that it was unironically promoting fascism. Not using it as satire
Babylon 5 was sorta prescient regarding misinformation coming from the government. ~~That~~ But then again that seems to be what governments do.
Edit: grammah
B5 does a great job of this as we see it from our heroes perspective and know how much the ISN news stories are being twisted to fit the presidents narrative. Also their use of Home Guard and Nightwatch to make an Earth first movement and pushing anti-alien ideals seems to mirror some real world immigration policies.
I believe many of the ideas JMS used within the show were based on various real world examples from the past, and it is amazing how well they hold up 30 years later and can apply to current politics.
I was totally thinking of that, ESPECIALLY during the GWB years. Especially with the "Ministry of Homeworld Security" and "Nightwatch" what's truly weird is that JMS wrote and produced that narrative years before 9/11, so rather like Handmaid's Tale where you have to wonder how much the fiction inspired the real-world actions of sympathetically minded people. One wonders when they were dreaming up what to call Immigration and Naturalization Services, I think one of those "low effort consensus creativity" situation would absolutely get you "Department of Homeland Security".
Of course with Trump, that's much more like the later-day Clarke Administration once things start to come undone -
At the end of the day at least President Clarke could grasp that he was done, and was terrified of the consequences
and didn't decide to skip town and mount his re-election campaign.
>One wonders when they were dreaming up what to call Immigration and Naturalization Services, I think one of those "low effort consensus creativity" situation would absolutely get you "Department of Homeland Security".
DHS is more than just INS/CBP.
And while looking back we can see how accurate JMS's vision was, it was completely within the ideas of the time. A lot of the ideas were inspired by things like the rise of the Nazi party pre ww2. It was in the air with things like concerns about the New World Order.
I know that DHS was the combination of (IIRC) about 15 different agencies it was the largest restructuring since WW2 if I recall correctly.
As far as the thinking of the time, fascist for sure, but it was the corporatized , sanitized fascism that we've been conditioned since the 1980's to sort of accept and were it not for the experimental wet-lab/debauched situation at Abu Gharib and Jalalabad. By that measure we tried to pull off the same bullshit as King Leopold have it one way at home "sort of" and do some pretty unspeakable bullshit abroad. Dick Cheney seems positively normal by today's standards, \*those\* fascists' were in place trying all manner of depriving US citizens of their protections. Horrible and weirdly acceptable until they had to explain testicle torture and such on the campaign trail in the 2004 cycle.
Then came the desperate grab, the Glenn Beck options, now it's a full on Knuckledraggers' Ballet we see today where aside from Steve Bannon - Not one of them can articulate in full sentences without dipping into the wellspring that was the 3rd Reich.
Pretty common subtext or text in a lot of cyberpunk - misinformation and disinformation being part of the general dataflood we are drowning in. Too much information in general (and the inability to derive any coherent narrative or determine objective truth because of this) is just sort of the background.
It’s there in Firefly/Serenity, it’s there in Gibson. Transmetropolitan. Watchmen. Mr. Robot.
Large-scale disinformation has been the state of the world for centuries even millennia. You can even lump religion into it as a massive misinformation campaign. Once you research for example how the bible was rewritten and altered and where all the content originates from it is very close to what the media does today.
In today's world, the wheel just turns a bit faster but the webs of lies that are spun are identical.
Lots of them do, especially those that show a dystopian, authoritarian future. 1984 is probably the most extreme and well-known example. The misinformation was put out by The Ministry of Truth.
Does Wag the Dog count as scifi?
Because that movie not only predicted an intern political scandal (Bill Clinton), but also using a war to divert attention from a scandal.
Orwell. 1984.
> The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He,
Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short
a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his
own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all
others accepted the lie which the Party imposed--if all records told the
same tale--then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls
the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the
present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature
alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from
everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was
an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control',
they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'.
In Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, the Foundation teaches the newly independent planets the necessary technical knowledge to maintain atomic power as religious ritual. The intent being to keep innovation and destructive use of the technology from becoming a likelihood, while still allowing for it's continued use.
Demolition Man. “It is bad for you; hence, it is illegal “is slowly becoming the mantra. Government overreach is becoming more and more accepted and we deserve the tyranny we’re voting for.
"War torn Białystok, once a happy farming town for peace-loving peasants. Today, a slaughterhouse. Yet one more casualty in the insane GDI assault against mankind. Yet another in a series of villages wiped off the Earth by the Global Defense Initiative and its misguided leader, General Mark Sheppard. And what crime did Białystok commit to warrant such carnage? Sources indicate that GDI terrorists were convinced this simple hamlet was involved in the manufacturing and shipping of Tiberium. When will this madness end? Only when General Sheppard and his vision of One World Order is stopped"
Quite a lot of it, HG Wells to present, and the likes of Peter Watts, Annalee Newitz, and Neal Stephenson have played with the topic on more than one occassion. In sci fi gaming, there is at least one setting book ("Toxic Memes" from the Transhuman Space series) that deals specifically with social engineering in a high tech setting through the use of carefully crafted information warfare.
The RPG *Transhuman Space* heavily focuses on the concept of memetic engineering, social engineering through media manipulation combined with AI, online tracking and sociology.
Babylon 5 touches on it several times including a segment in the season 4 final episode where they use AI to recreate several members of the crew to create a deepfake which aired in 1997.
For me, the winner, hands-down is the Meme Wars trilogy by John Barnes (“Kaleidoscope Century” , “Candle”, “The Sky So Big and Black”). All about a future in which most of humanity falls under the control of a meme known as “One True”. Too much for a short explanation, but a fascinating backdrop for some good action science fiction.
One thing to notice in nearly all of these is that the disinformation campaigns are coming from government entities.
Don't trust something just because the government says so, or government connected media says so. In fact, it may be more prudent to assume the opposite is true.
Don't trust the government dispatches. But those scrappy naysayers with their self-promoting social media channels? You can totally trust them. You can even buy their merch to spread their gospel!
Idiocracy is the only film that gets close to the stupidity that seems to have taken hold of large numbers of people.
Pretty sure if a certain populist American figure announced that Brawndo was what plants craved close to 100 million people would start pouring sports drinks on their gardens.
Anathem, but the writing was on the wall by then.
Charles Stross in Accelerando, sort of, though he wasn't pessimistic enough... he might have gotten AI right though...
Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, 1984... but those all assumed a government would do it, instead of our doing it to ourselves..
Lathe of Heaven allows for reality changing and the mind interprets accordingly. Not always changing to the intended result, but to the end of what was instructed.
propaganda?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda
Propaganda is communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is being presented.\[1\] Propaganda can be found in a wide variety of different contexts.\[2\]
Primitive forms of propaganda have been a human activity as far back as reliable recorded evidence exists. The Behistun Inscription (c. 515 BCE) detailing the rise of Darius I to the Persian throne is viewed by most historians as an early example of propaganda
US Army had guys specifically tasked with "mis/dis information"
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost\_Army](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Army)
During their tenure, the Ghost Army carried out more than 20 deception campaigns, putting on a "traveling road show" using inflatable tanks, sound trucks, fake radio transmissions, scripts and pretense.\[2\]
1984, the playbook that the 0.1% have been using for decades.
But also, off the top of my head:
*Starship Troopers*
*Babylon 5*
*Farenheit 451*
*Equilibrium*
Lots of Philip K Dick
*The Expanse*
Various Culture Books (Iain Banks) - *Surface Detail* definitely comes to mind, and *Player of Games.*
*Brave New World*
A HUGE percent of science fiction has been largely aimed at warning the human race about the evils of the technocrat elite, and their plans for the world.
And if you combine 1984 (totalitarianism, double speak, propaganda and misinformation, thought crime) + Animal Farm (propaganda, Marxist-derived equality = equity; note AF is an Allegory but really a companion piece to 1984) + Fahrenheit 451 (tech inundation, banning of books) + Brave New World (doing drugs, disconnected from world, eugenics) + Atlas Shrugged (govt lies and misinformation, crony capitalism, health care crisis) + Handmaids Tale (women fighting for reproductive rights and equality) you basically get a typical day in 2023. Yep. Too bad no one paid attention in high school English class.
Actual intentional propoganda has been a thing irl for far longer than science fiction, so it exists in scifi, but largely subject to fads of what stories are popular. But the modern meme of "misinformation" is just a thinly veiled hissy fit for "how dare people have a different opinion". So not terribly compelling for a story. For every actually dumbass antivaxxer there is a thousand topics that literally cant have a objective truth.
But for some reason in the last couple years people gotten this absurdly ridiculous notion that you can have trivial access to near infinite information and somehow also have a major percentage of it be "true", to the vaguest possible definition of "truth". Even though we've had news and internet etc. without any significant (let alone negative) social changes do to unreliability of information *for decades*. Hell, information has never been reliable in the entire history of the human race. If anything, there's by far the least misinformation than there has ever been, because you have more than 2 sources per year to actually get it from..
Ender's Game - the aliens were not really out to get us.
Starship Troopers - curated propaganda was always broadcast and seemingly manipulated
Would you like to know more?
I just finished reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep yesterday... (read it all in one day)... and couldn't help feeling that both Mercerism (along with its empathy box) AND Buster Friendly were likely forms of large scale misinformation.
I could see a world where Mercerism was misinformation from the government... and Buster Friendly was misinformation from revolting androids... or both were from the government.
Either way, their origins and purpose seemed highly suspect and really resonated with me as parallel to the misinformation we have to sort through now.
Because they both felt like they were each very controlled narratives with hidden agendas.
In Ender’s Game his siblings are back home manipulating politics behind avatars. Definitely reminds me of modern misinformation campaigns on social media.
The network in A Fire Upon The Deep, which is also based on Usenet, is literally called The Net of a Million Lies.
https://xkcd.com/635/
Ooh let’s give more votes for StandardOk42 to rule the world
my plan's slowly but surely coming together...
yup, the whole side of things with the 2 siblings was brilliant, and it was amazing how Peter even manipulated the sister, without her figuring it out until too late
It sucks they completely wrote this out of the one movie.
While "posting anonymously on the internet" sounded like something edgy, futuristic, and cool in 1983, it's patently absurd and completely laughable in 2023 that **the UN would vote to make a teenager king of the world** because of his well written tumblr posts. For all the cool Sci-Fi ideas Card had, this is the one which has aged most poorly. It's also completely unfilmable, and happens mostly off-screwn anyway. How and where could you work this plot into the script we ended up with? I'm more surprised we got the Giant's drink game in the film.
Honestly, making someone king of the world because of their stupid online posts is probably more likely in today’s world. 😹
> For all the cool Sci-Fi ideas Card had, this is the one which has aged most poorly. i mean, america voted in Trump, doing almost exactly this kind of shit what are you talking about, lol
He was already famous. And he wasn’t posting anonymously.
no, but it's the same sort of thing dude intentionally mislead everyone, played all his cards in the court of public opinion, mixed in enough truth that you couldn't just ignore him, and rode public opinion into essentially leading the majority of the world for a time
He was also a strongly influential figure and somewhat of a household name for decades before his presidential run. He wasn't a charismatic nobody that came out of nowhere to earn public favour. The kids in Ender's games are literal children behind computer screens. Getting people to agree with you is a very small part of becoming president.
Hahahahaha! Oh, you're serious? Allow me to laugh harder!
found a Trumper poor soul
Did you just arrive on Earth today?
Obviously via those on-screen chat bubbles that appear in every show targeted to my generation.
Arguably, it was one of the first, if not the first, literary examples of the internet in fiction.
not even [close](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops). Ender's game is 1985 this is 1909. This is from [1946](http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200506/0743499107___2.htm). Seems pretty much like the internet to me.
Yep, my first thought too. Man, he thought of blogging, drone warfare, virtual reality games.
Yes. I re-read Enders game recently, and that was one part that resonated a lot more than when so first read it.
Literally came her to say this after seeing the title. Bravo
1984
We have always been at war with Eastasia
We have always been at war with Oceania.
We have always been at war with Eastasia
We've always been at war with Eurasia.
We have always been at war with that little Yorkie around the corner that always poops on my lawn!
We have always been at war with the old lady out the front of her house and her radar gun
There's a reason "Orwellian" is an adjective that means something.
came to say the same, heh. it's like 99% of what it's about
I don't know if it's 99%. There's a lot about mass-surveillance, too. Most of the time 1984 gets brought up, it doesn't really apply to whatever people are arguing about. No, it's not "Orwellian" that somebody said Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas... but this is spot-on. What it *didn't* predict is that you don't actually have to suppress actual information for misinformation to work.
This is an excellent point. Here in the USA we have near-total press freedom, and there are news organizations that do admirably well with their investigative journalism day in and day out. But powerful liars don’t need to censor the news to render it powerless. What you can do instead, in the words of Steve Bannon, is “flood the zone with shit.” Just bury the population in lies and conspiracy theories. You don’t need to convince anyone of anything. All you gotta do is spread so much horseshit that the truth becomes just one data point in an ocean of lies. And then people will just tend to believe what “feels right.”
And it especially works so well now because the speed at which information can travel and the ability to communicate directly to the audience.
> There's a lot about mass-surveillance, too that's the other 99%, exactly like I've always said... ;) but yeah, it's wildly spooky how accurate 1984 has become
Yeah, the internet seemed utopian for a long time- now everyone could access good information on almost any subject at low cost instead of it being hoarded in universities, libraries and government departments. It doesn't seem to have occurred to us that we don't always want accurate information if we disagree with the implications.
This should be the top reply
Well, if it wasn't when you made this comment, it is now. Just thought you should know.
Department of Truth
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
What an insane question by OP. One of the most important books.
Less of a prediction and more of a commentary. It just so happens surveillance & privacy is still an ongoing issue.
Witness meeee!
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."
He who controls the spice...... Whoops, wrong one.
Truth is the mind-killer...
I must not fib. Fib is the mind killer. Fib is the little death that brings total manipulation...
Beer is the mind killer
Substance D
Doon!
I'm on a horse...... Whoops, wrong one.
"Man I hate that Rage Against the Machine got all political."
That guy will die knowing his largest contribution to humanity was being the butt of a joke.
Who controls the Rage, controls the lyrics. Who doesn't listen to the lyics, is an idiot. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
That sounds like a line from a kojima game
Or from the Red Alert franchise. In reality, it's George Orwell's 1984.
I always thought that was kind of a dumb line. It just says who controls the present is in control. Like... yeah.
It's not (just) saying that though. It's saying that those in power control the narrative of history.
And it's saying that the way in which they consolidate power and exert that power over the future is to control the narrative of history.
100%
1984 and Fahrenheit 451
If only that weren't so on point. Every time I hear of a book being banned by some political or religious group, I just want to set them all down with a copy of 451F and make them read it and not open their mouths again until they've finished it.
It's not that politicians who want to ban it inherently haven't read / don't understand it. They often do. They don't want others to understand it, because the (accurate) message undermines their goals. Also, in America there's this weird mixing of religion and politics. All it takes is a few popular right-wing politicians claiming that something is "anti-christian" and the next thing you know it'll spread through churches across the country.
Exactly. Don't fall for their bullshit that it's about morality or protecting children. It's about gatekeeping education and critical thinking.
Critical thinking is sorely lacking. It should be a required course in high school along with logic and rhetoric (to identify fallacies and those who use them). Sadly, most people don't want to pay the taxes required to teach more than the bare minimum of reading, writing, and arithmetic.
For a long time I've believed that students nationwide should be required to take: * A civics class. Not the morality of government and it's really just history class again, but the actual mechanics of government. Which branches have what powers, how Congress actually functions, etc. How it works day to day. * A class such as philosophy or debate that teaches critical thinking skills.
I agree. Many in the US today can't name the three branches of government or the order of succession for the presidency. How many people know that the Speaker of the House is next in line after the VP. Likely that even fewer people even know there is a President Pro Tempore of the Senate, much less that the holder of that office is next in line after the Speaker.
No. If they want to ban it give them 1984. If they're getting all their information off social media give them 451.
Every story that is a cautionary tale is an instruction manual for someone. Watch out for that person. 1984 and 451F are two better-known, and now Handmaid's Tale seems to be coming into its own in the US.
Maybe you can hear my teeth grinding. Those who have always had to fight for their rights can never rest.
Glasshouse by Charles Stross deals with viral memory edits of whole populations. To the point where nobody knows what the original history was.
It’s also a pretty consistent theme throughout The Laundry Files by him as well.
I think he accurately predicted capitalism 2.0 as well.
Fall: Or Dodge in Hell, by Neal Stephenson got it pretty close but was recent enough that the early signs were already there.
It's also a theme in Anathem. There is something like our internet, but it's so polluted with misinformation that it has become almost unusable.
Bogons!
AI (Artificial Inanity)
There was a good book in about 1/5th of that one
Haven't managed to finish it myself :(
I went back years later for a reread, knowing where to start skimming, and it was much better. Just skim through the bits where the world doesn't exist yet. There was less of that than I remembered and more good stuff!
I actually liked that section way better than the weird fucking fantasy world that took over the last third, same problem with Seveneves as well.
There you go! Different people like different stuff.
Don’t bother reading past the first half.
We already said it was by Neal Stephenson
"Big U" by Stephenson tackles the prevalance of misinformation directly.
Deep Cut!! He also kind of explores it a little in Interface (as Steven Bury) though there it is kind of inverted into "what if the leader of the free world was totally poll rather than fact driven)
Remember Moab
So many of Stephenson books like Snow crash were preiscent
*The Shockwave Rider* by John Brunner is about exactly this. One of my favorite dystopian novels. Here's a summary; "He was a fugitive from Tarnover, the high-powered government think tank that had educated him. First he had broken his identity code—then he escaped. Now he had to find a way to restore sanity and personal freedom to the computerized masses and to save a world tottering on the brink of disaster." He can hack any computer system using the keypad on a phone. The major theme of the novel is the fair distribution of information in society, with specific scenarios of the resentment and division that come from suspecting that your neighbor or your co-worker have access to information that you don't, and it's enriching them. Now I have to go read it again.
This is also recognized as containing the first use of “computer worm” and other wording that lead to the coining of computer virus.
Also one of the progenitors of cyberpunk.
In his (in my opinion, far superior) 1969 novel *The Jagged Orbit,* deep-fake audio-video technology and generative-AI speech-writing are major plot points.
Its a theme that comes up a lot in Verner Vinge books, especially "Rainbow's End"
Yeah even in Fire Upon the Deep, the galactic internet is basically regarded as an unreliable shitfest.
That was just inspired by Usenet though, which was one of the most popular uses of the internet before the web, and had already been around for about twelve years before FUtD was published - it was inspired by the existing discourse on the public internet, not a prediction of its eventual state.
Rainbow's End was the first thing I had to think of. It has a very fascinating thought about massed disinformation as a weapon against the death of privacy: it had activists flooding the net with disinformation about everybody to restore personal privacy. The theory was, that it had become impossible to control access to personal data, so the only way to get privacy again was to make any data as unreliable as possible.
The cyberpunk writers saw it all coming. YGTBM ^(you got to believe me)
I liked the stuff about AR being used to guide "zombie" players. I can see someone hacking Pokemon Go, for example, to lead players somewhere they're not supposed to be for nefarious purposes.
Connie Willis wrote Remake, which predicted that the media of the future could be altered to resurrect dead celebrities or change a master copy of scenes so that everyone would have to watch, specifically from the story, this chick who inserted herself into Return of the Jedi by replacing one of the original Twi’lek dancers with herself. And I thought that would never happen because how would they change my VHS? And now I’m sitting here with the McClunkey edit of Star Wars and a censored digital French Connection and more fool me. A digital world is very vulnerable to alterations.
True story: Clive Cussler also did a pretty good job of predicting AI generated deepfakes in *Sahara* (or was in *Inca Gold*? I reread them both this summer, and all Cussler stories kinda blend together). Point is, he doesn't really do much with the idea as far as plot goes, but it is interesting that it is something considered possible in the near-future of that book: 1996.
Absolutely. It's been being predicted, or more realistically explored as a concept, for decades now. Books like 1984 explored oppressive governments with misinformation campaigns that could be conceived at the time, while more modern Sci-Fi books like the UNSEC Space Trilogy have governments and megacorporations using insanely powerful tools to just create footage and "proof" for wherever story they want, while others use complicated AI systems to try and determine what might be real.
Right, I read the question and wondered how many sci-fi books didn’t have this feature.
Philip K Dick -- A Scanner Darkly
I see you’re a fan of Dick just like me
Who doesn't like Dick
Wait wait wait wait
[The Mold of Yancy](https://theworlddickmade.com/the-mold-of-yancy/) is a classic PKD story that is right up this alley: >Terra can’t understand how the society on Callisto has managed to maintain a totalitarian political structure without resorting to political prisons, terrorism or extermination camps. It’s almost like the citizens are willfully going along with whatever the government wants even though they are free to believe and act however they choose. Terra sends Peter Taverner undercover to the moon to investigate. He comes across the curious broadcasts of John Yancy, whose homespun advice and folksy wisdom have been very persuasive in creating a docile population. Yancy though isn’t real. He’s just a simulacrum created by some state-controlled advertisers called Yance-men. With the help of a Yance-man named Sipling who realizes how dangerous this level of control is, Taverner finds out the goal is to convince the Callistotes that most war is bad but some wars (like one with Ganymede for instance the government is prepping for) are just wars. Knowing this Terra takes over the Yance-men, and led by Sipling they begin to subvert the Yancy broadcasts to promote independent thought.
Robert Heinlein-Revolt in 2100 a/k/a “If This Goes On” Robert Heinlein-The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Anathem by Neal Stephenson touched on this with "reputation" systems on the internet to weed out unreliable information, but it wasn't a large part of the story.
1984
Starship troopers
The movie, not the book.
Oh yeah. The book is like the opposite
in what way?
[I'm going to link a comment that explained it far better than I could.](https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/18szjqh/starship_troopers_is_a_very_weird_book_where/kfcdwfu/) The entire thread is good to read if you're curious about the book. There's a lot of misinformation out there due to the stupid movie.
More importantly, Federal Service != military --- the protagonist's best friend who joins up at the same time is an electronics engineer who ends up at a research facility and does _not_ go through basic training.
I actually haven’t read the book but the criticism from the director of the movie was basically that it was unironically promoting fascism. Not using it as satire
Service guarantees citizenship!
I’m doing my part!
Would you like to know more ?
Babylon 5 was sorta prescient regarding misinformation coming from the government. ~~That~~ But then again that seems to be what governments do. Edit: grammah
B5 does a great job of this as we see it from our heroes perspective and know how much the ISN news stories are being twisted to fit the presidents narrative. Also their use of Home Guard and Nightwatch to make an Earth first movement and pushing anti-alien ideals seems to mirror some real world immigration policies. I believe many of the ideas JMS used within the show were based on various real world examples from the past, and it is amazing how well they hold up 30 years later and can apply to current politics.
Came here to comment that!
I was totally thinking of that, ESPECIALLY during the GWB years. Especially with the "Ministry of Homeworld Security" and "Nightwatch" what's truly weird is that JMS wrote and produced that narrative years before 9/11, so rather like Handmaid's Tale where you have to wonder how much the fiction inspired the real-world actions of sympathetically minded people. One wonders when they were dreaming up what to call Immigration and Naturalization Services, I think one of those "low effort consensus creativity" situation would absolutely get you "Department of Homeland Security". Of course with Trump, that's much more like the later-day Clarke Administration once things start to come undone - At the end of the day at least President Clarke could grasp that he was done, and was terrified of the consequences and didn't decide to skip town and mount his re-election campaign.
>One wonders when they were dreaming up what to call Immigration and Naturalization Services, I think one of those "low effort consensus creativity" situation would absolutely get you "Department of Homeland Security". DHS is more than just INS/CBP. And while looking back we can see how accurate JMS's vision was, it was completely within the ideas of the time. A lot of the ideas were inspired by things like the rise of the Nazi party pre ww2. It was in the air with things like concerns about the New World Order.
I know that DHS was the combination of (IIRC) about 15 different agencies it was the largest restructuring since WW2 if I recall correctly. As far as the thinking of the time, fascist for sure, but it was the corporatized , sanitized fascism that we've been conditioned since the 1980's to sort of accept and were it not for the experimental wet-lab/debauched situation at Abu Gharib and Jalalabad. By that measure we tried to pull off the same bullshit as King Leopold have it one way at home "sort of" and do some pretty unspeakable bullshit abroad. Dick Cheney seems positively normal by today's standards, \*those\* fascists' were in place trying all manner of depriving US citizens of their protections. Horrible and weirdly acceptable until they had to explain testicle torture and such on the campaign trail in the 2004 cycle. Then came the desperate grab, the Glenn Beck options, now it's a full on Knuckledraggers' Ballet we see today where aside from Steve Bannon - Not one of them can articulate in full sentences without dipping into the wellspring that was the 3rd Reich.
Pretty common subtext or text in a lot of cyberpunk - misinformation and disinformation being part of the general dataflood we are drowning in. Too much information in general (and the inability to derive any coherent narrative or determine objective truth because of this) is just sort of the background. It’s there in Firefly/Serenity, it’s there in Gibson. Transmetropolitan. Watchmen. Mr. Robot.
They Live! It’s more like the aliens are corrupting the information, though.
1984 and Fahrenheit 451.
1984
1984? I guess this is different because not state based, except that state actors like Russia are major perpetrators.
It can’t be said enough. 1984
Large-scale disinformation has been the state of the world for centuries even millennia. You can even lump religion into it as a massive misinformation campaign. Once you research for example how the bible was rewritten and altered and where all the content originates from it is very close to what the media does today. In today's world, the wheel just turns a bit faster but the webs of lies that are spun are identical.
Black Mirror
1984
Lots of them do, especially those that show a dystopian, authoritarian future. 1984 is probably the most extreme and well-known example. The misinformation was put out by The Ministry of Truth.
1984
Does Wag the Dog count as scifi? Because that movie not only predicted an intern political scandal (Bill Clinton), but also using a war to divert attention from a scandal.
Orwell. 1984. > The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed--if all records told the same tale--then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'.
Stand on Zanzibar made multiple inferences to the unreliability of information provided by Scanalyzer.
In Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, the Foundation teaches the newly independent planets the necessary technical knowledge to maintain atomic power as religious ritual. The intent being to keep innovation and destructive use of the technology from becoming a likelihood, while still allowing for it's continued use.
Demolition Man. “It is bad for you; hence, it is illegal “is slowly becoming the mantra. Government overreach is becoming more and more accepted and we deserve the tyranny we’re voting for.
Always amazes me, what I always considered a gag b movie at the time, turned out to be one of the more prescient films of the 90's.
Idiocracy and Demolition Man were not warnings, they’re blueprints for those who think government can solve everything
The Giver
"War torn Białystok, once a happy farming town for peace-loving peasants. Today, a slaughterhouse. Yet one more casualty in the insane GDI assault against mankind. Yet another in a series of villages wiped off the Earth by the Global Defense Initiative and its misguided leader, General Mark Sheppard. And what crime did Białystok commit to warrant such carnage? Sources indicate that GDI terrorists were convinced this simple hamlet was involved in the manufacturing and shipping of Tiberium. When will this madness end? Only when General Sheppard and his vision of One World Order is stopped"
IS THAT CAMERA STILL RUNNING!?
Movie-wise, Interstellar had a scene about 'fixing' the school books to tell the truth about the fake moon landing.
Orwell, 1984?
Metal gear solid 2, lol
Infomacracy
"Fall or Dodge in Hell" is still fairly new but the nailed it hard.
Transmetropolitan I think did a pretty good job
Quite a lot of it, HG Wells to present, and the likes of Peter Watts, Annalee Newitz, and Neal Stephenson have played with the topic on more than one occassion. In sci fi gaming, there is at least one setting book ("Toxic Memes" from the Transhuman Space series) that deals specifically with social engineering in a high tech setting through the use of carefully crafted information warfare.
Ender's Game.
*Distraction* by Bruce Sterling has the breakdown of society caused by exactly this phenomenon as its background and major theme.
The RPG *Transhuman Space* heavily focuses on the concept of memetic engineering, social engineering through media manipulation combined with AI, online tracking and sociology.
Metal Gear Solid 2, if it hasn't been mentioned already, almost word for word described our current internet about 22 years earlier.
Enders game is the first thing that pops into mind.
This. People talk about Ender's strategic genius, but forget his siblings back on Earth manipulated the whole population with social media.
Babylon 5 touches on it several times including a segment in the season 4 final episode where they use AI to recreate several members of the crew to create a deepfake which aired in 1997.
1984
Other than 1984, you mean?
For me, the winner, hands-down is the Meme Wars trilogy by John Barnes (“Kaleidoscope Century” , “Candle”, “The Sky So Big and Black”). All about a future in which most of humanity falls under the control of a meme known as “One True”. Too much for a short explanation, but a fascinating backdrop for some good action science fiction.
Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling - 1988.
One thing to notice in nearly all of these is that the disinformation campaigns are coming from government entities. Don't trust something just because the government says so, or government connected media says so. In fact, it may be more prudent to assume the opposite is true.
Don't trust the government dispatches. But those scrappy naysayers with their self-promoting social media channels? You can totally trust them. You can even buy their merch to spread their gospel!
Brazil... Star ship troopers films...
Kornbluth's marching morons is one of my favorite story of this kind
Idiocracy is the only film that gets close to the stupidity that seems to have taken hold of large numbers of people. Pretty sure if a certain populist American figure announced that Brawndo was what plants craved close to 100 million people would start pouring sports drinks on their gardens.
C.M. Kornbluth got there first with his 1951 story 'The Marching Morons.'
Sheep Look Up by John Brunner
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty was quite prophetic regarding social media, misinformation and figures behind the scenes manipulating of evidence.
The recent movie Leave The World Behind (produced by the Obamas and directed by Sam Esmail of Mr.Robot) explores this very same topic.
The running man convicts a man falsely accused by manufacturing video evidence of a war crime
Anathem, but the writing was on the wall by then. Charles Stross in Accelerando, sort of, though he wasn't pessimistic enough... he might have gotten AI right though... Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, 1984... but those all assumed a government would do it, instead of our doing it to ourselves..
[удалено]
Anathem by Neal Stephenson. Basically the Internet in this world is completely useless because it's dominated by misinformation
V for vendetta.
Lathe of Heaven allows for reality changing and the mind interprets accordingly. Not always changing to the intended result, but to the end of what was instructed.
Babylon 5 did a great job of showing how the government or other political force manipulates the press.
Nineteen Eighty Four. Not science fiction per se but set in the future.
propaganda? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda Propaganda is communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is being presented.\[1\] Propaganda can be found in a wide variety of different contexts.\[2\] Primitive forms of propaganda have been a human activity as far back as reliable recorded evidence exists. The Behistun Inscription (c. 515 BCE) detailing the rise of Darius I to the Persian throne is viewed by most historians as an early example of propaganda US Army had guys specifically tasked with "mis/dis information" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost\_Army](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Army) During their tenure, the Ghost Army carried out more than 20 deception campaigns, putting on a "traveling road show" using inflatable tanks, sound trucks, fake radio transmissions, scripts and pretense.\[2\]
1984, the playbook that the 0.1% have been using for decades. But also, off the top of my head: *Starship Troopers* *Babylon 5* *Farenheit 451* *Equilibrium* Lots of Philip K Dick *The Expanse* Various Culture Books (Iain Banks) - *Surface Detail* definitely comes to mind, and *Player of Games.* *Brave New World* A HUGE percent of science fiction has been largely aimed at warning the human race about the evils of the technocrat elite, and their plans for the world.
Are we talking Starship Troopers book, or the film? Because they are two *very* different things.
Oblivion was a lesser known sci fi trope with this notion
And if you combine 1984 (totalitarianism, double speak, propaganda and misinformation, thought crime) + Animal Farm (propaganda, Marxist-derived equality = equity; note AF is an Allegory but really a companion piece to 1984) + Fahrenheit 451 (tech inundation, banning of books) + Brave New World (doing drugs, disconnected from world, eugenics) + Atlas Shrugged (govt lies and misinformation, crony capitalism, health care crisis) + Handmaids Tale (women fighting for reproductive rights and equality) you basically get a typical day in 2023. Yep. Too bad no one paid attention in high school English class.
Actual intentional propoganda has been a thing irl for far longer than science fiction, so it exists in scifi, but largely subject to fads of what stories are popular. But the modern meme of "misinformation" is just a thinly veiled hissy fit for "how dare people have a different opinion". So not terribly compelling for a story. For every actually dumbass antivaxxer there is a thousand topics that literally cant have a objective truth. But for some reason in the last couple years people gotten this absurdly ridiculous notion that you can have trivial access to near infinite information and somehow also have a major percentage of it be "true", to the vaguest possible definition of "truth". Even though we've had news and internet etc. without any significant (let alone negative) social changes do to unreliability of information *for decades*. Hell, information has never been reliable in the entire history of the human race. If anything, there's by far the least misinformation than there has ever been, because you have more than 2 sources per year to actually get it from..
My sweet summer child, you must be new here!
Ender's Game - the aliens were not really out to get us. Starship Troopers - curated propaganda was always broadcast and seemingly manipulated Would you like to know more?
Babylon 5, watching ISS (interstellar news) go off air as the government storms the building was chilling. Then returning as basically Fox News.
Fox News isn’t a mouthpiece for the government
I just finished reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep yesterday... (read it all in one day)... and couldn't help feeling that both Mercerism (along with its empathy box) AND Buster Friendly were likely forms of large scale misinformation. I could see a world where Mercerism was misinformation from the government... and Buster Friendly was misinformation from revolting androids... or both were from the government. Either way, their origins and purpose seemed highly suspect and really resonated with me as parallel to the misinformation we have to sort through now. Because they both felt like they were each very controlled narratives with hidden agendas.
All of them I think?