Ask A Genius 1048: The Anja Jaenicke Session
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/07/30
Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org
Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The next question is from Anja Jaenicke: “Rick, as I understand, among other things, you are working as a writer for TV. Television programs worldwide are intended for mass entertainment and do not necessarily meet the tastes of the more intelligent individuals. What would your story be if you were asked to create an intelligent plot or screenplay without considering any ratings or critics? What kind of story would you like to share with the world?”
Rick Rosner: I love near-future science fiction. I like the issues that the world is facing as humans fall from the position of being the apex thinkers on the planet. I like depicting what the next 10 to 100 years will bring. It’s deep existential disruption but comes to us through perversity and foolishness. One of the things that annoys me about Star Trek–that I think Star Trek gets wrong–is that it presents a very clean, orderly world in which a lot of the sleaziness and conflict of our current world have been solved.
It’s a very peaceful future. I think that’s crap. It’s a crappy universe that crappier productions have widely imitated. It’s not that Blade Runner was such a great movie, but its picture of a grimy world was one of its best elements, so it’s now a cliche. But I like, and I’m writing, a near-future novel that I would hope, if I ever freaking get it published, would be adapted for TV or a movie that has all this amazing technological stuff happening with some of the same sleazy behaviour we know now.
Our sense of wonder at new tech is always tempered by the feeling that it’s crappy. Our iPhones are amazing. We’re familiar with them. And any further advancements. We’re like, “Yes, a new iPhone comes out every year and a half. Yes, it will have new stuff. We’re used to it; we’re jaded. Many of the products from the FAANG companies have what Cory Doctorow calls enshittification, where mercantile concerns exist.
They mean that these great new advancements and products are low-key trying to screw you over for the financial benefit of the stockholders of these companies. I like depicting–I like depictions of–the near future. There was a show called Altered Carbon that annoyed me. It was about little cassettes that are essentially transplantable consciousness 300 years later. What annoyed me about the show was how little imagination had been put into it.
The future looked pretty; they’d spent some money designing sets, and they got Joel Kinnaman—you’ve seen him in Suicide Squad, the second one, the one that didn’t suck. They got him ripped down to like 4% body fat, and there was a lot of nudity and sex, so you got to see, if you’re into that, you got to see a lot of ridiculously defined Joel Kinnaman. So, I appreciated his sacrifice. All right, if you’re going to make this show and it’s going to be all sexy time, at least you’ve got a guy to go on a diet and lift some weights. Naked ladies, too. But it pissed me off because 300 years from now will not be a sexy time.
There will be certain segments of this incredibly complicated future society where there are a million times more AIs or human-AI hybrids than augmented humans. They’ll be up to a bunch of other stuff besides trying to have sex with each other, so I thought this freaking show was super lazy because the future in that show was still about fucking, with all this amazing new technology. A, they needed to think up more new technology. They only had the transplantable consciousness, and they had virtual people like a virtual Edgar Allan Poe working behind the desk at a crappy hotel. But they hadn’t thought out the future well at all.
The future will still be about getting laid and having a nice house where you have dinner parties. I just got freaking super annoyed. That’s why you can’t write well about 300 years in the future; there will be so much change that you can’t reasonably attempt to depict it. I like Neal Stephenson when he writes about anywhere from five years to a hundred years in the future. He even did 200 years in the future with The Diamond Age, which is now 25 years old.
But he put in much hard thought because it was a fully filled-up world with many new stuff. This one only had two new things, like virtual Edgar Allan Poe and consciousness cassettes. It had dozens and dozens of new things going on in this world. He has yet to write that much stuff like that.
He likes doing many different things, but it must have been much work. But that’s what I like. I like stuff that forces us to look at the world that’s coming and does it in a fun way. Yes, that’s another issue I have with Star Trek. It is serious in its half-assed philosophizing. It took itself, trying to teach lessons and everything. I don’t want that. I want to show the wildly changing world and have enough perversity in it that it’s fun and surprising and funny, which is a lot to expect.
Upload is a show by Greg Daniels, who did The American Office, which presents a world like ten years from now in which the dead can have their consciousness uploaded to a metaverse. Except that it costs much money, and if you don’t have enough money, you’re confined to some shitty neighbourhood in the metaverse. It’s a half-hour sitcom, and for a half-hour sitcom set in the future, they’ve done much hard thinking about how to present a fairly complete version of a near-future world or complete enough to fill up a sitcom in a way that didn’t seem stupid.
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