Ready for a sharp turn?

I got some feedback from Craig on the Advantage outline that he didn’t feel like it was visual enough. My natural inclination being to fix rather than ditch, I went through it looking for the problem areas, and realized I had to get one of the characters a more interesting job. So I started thinking about jobs in the future.

I then had a meeting with Rose where she was wondering why people would care about the Advantage kids. I realized I didn’t really care too much about these overadvantaged underachievers myself. Then Sanford offered to do some matte paintings for futuristic backgrounds and I started thinking about the CN tower covered in giant space spider webbing. So this is the new idea:

Ghosts With Shit Jobs is a 2040 documentary for the entertainment of the Chinese mainland, “ghosts” being slang for white people. The western economy has completely collapsed and China and India are the new first world. While laughing at the North American slumdwellers, the documentarian (a tiny fly camera who follows them around) also cultivates a paternalistic concern about these people.

Subject one is, Oscar, a pixelator. The future of Google streetview is an immersive experience indistinguishable from reality, and they’re planning to unroll the Wayback feature — where you can visit every moment in the past fifteen years from when they started filming. However, for legal reasons they have to blur out copywritten images. This is obviously a huge task, and has to be done by humans. It’s a boring job, and the sustained time required in the virtual world gives most employees nose bleeds.

Subject two is Anton, who’s in silk recovery. In 2025, giant arachnoid egg sacks landed on earth, and quickly hatched. Before they left in search of octopi prey, they covered the CN tower and many other buildings with space spider webbing. The webbing turned out to be an exceptionally useful building material, favoured by the big Shanghai architects, and so people like Anton spend their days collecting it from increasingly difficult spots around the city.

Subject three are Karen and Gary, who are freelance robot assemblers. However, the main demand for robots in 2030 is in lifelike babies, so Karen and Gary must care for these very demanding products for months before they can certify them as tested. They have sworn an oath never to become parents.

The documentary brings them together over beers to discuss why they don’t get better jobs. Oscar wants to go back to school to learn an Asian language. Anton’s saving up to bring back his girlfriend, a nanny for a wealthy technocrat in Mumbai. Karen and Gary started out planning to make customized robots, but the robot fairs where they could pitch their designs are so expensive to attend. Money is an issue for all of them. Karen has an idea about the Wayback feature Oscar has access to — doesn’t that mean you can watch someone unlock a safe? Or type in a pin number? or a password?

They trap the documentary maker’s fly cam in a beerglass and go out to change their destinies…

I started the script on this new idea today.

Feedback welcome, especially brainstorm ideas that start “In the future…”

This idea of political reform occasionally comes to me, and last night I was thinking it might make for good sci-fi. It’s at a time in the future where technology allows for voting to happen on the fly. There’s no more routine elections, but rather everyone has the opportunity to vote on every policy in the government (through the Internet). But like today, people are busy, working, raising kids, going out, and also like today, it’s just too much effort to stay engaged in politics. So a person can give another (a friend, or someone’s values they share) the ability to vote for them (i.e. by proxy). Some people actively collect votes, and then they in turn can give the votes they’ve collected to more prominent people, and in turn, they can pass their votes on…etc

So what happens is, you have the guy in your office always trying to convince you to swing your vote over to them. He collects 80 votes from co-workers, friends, family, and puts them behind a well known local activist, who has accumulated a few thousand votes. The local activist might use their big vote count to vote directly on policy or they may put them behind an even bigger politician.

Anyone can switch their vote at anytime — they can take it back, or put it behind another. Also policies could end up switching back and forth… for example, let’s say 49% of the votes are going towards abolishing meat as a food, and then after some grassroots campaigning, it passes the 50% mark, all of a sudden meat production stops and everyone is forced to eat vegetarian. An underground meat market develops. But then it swings back, and more people support meat as food.

Perhaps there’s no central head, political parties, or hierarchy, and the only power held is how many votes a person has behind them.

It’s a world where anyone can be a politician, there’s way more politicians, a lot of people are trying to gather votes, and it’s considered much more democratic.

Then we could take all the follies of this system and play them up. i.e. it’s kind of like government by polls, except real power transfers as soon as a vote is changed; majority has power over the minority; it’s unpredictable – many policies may be in constant flux.

The system was brought on by a collapse in the current political system, but now, because of it, the world is much worse. Everyone’s stuck in it, and because of this new system, it’s impossible to reform it again. Finally, there’s an underground movement trying to over through it.

My favourite talk at Defcon, the Las Vegas hacker convention that flew us out to screen Infest Wisely, was one on social engineering.

The speaker brought up the idea that by asking questions of someone you can increase the chances of getting what you want from them — somewhat similar to opening several applications at once on a computer can crash the system. I came across this idea again on a recent Radiolab piece on Choice:

…again, focusing on the idea that the human brain has limited analytical power. But it also explores the idea that a Vulcan like rationality causes indecision, since there’s no emotional “tilt” one way or the other.

So I’m imagining a duo of scientifically grounded con men (or women) who get what they want by exploiting this limitation of the human platform. As the movie progresses we discover their relationship to an artificial intelligence that needs their emotive decision making ability to function, and who has given them this training as a reward.

In 2014, the hottest toys for babies are Play’n Advantage brand. Backed by studies and reports, the odd but undeniably engaging products are sold out two weeks before Christmas… and then never go into production again. A year after that, the sought-after toys themselves break and disintegrate, dissolving in a similar fashion to the corporate entity that produced them.

It would all chalked up to eccentric inventors, but the Play’n babies are testing off the charts. Twenty years later, their emotional, intellectual and creative capacities (depending on which toy they played with the most) make them valued but somewhat ostracised members of society.

They form a weird subculture that’s parts toy nostalgia, hyperdevelopment, and mystery: what was behind the Play’n company? What were they given Advantages for?

I was talking about the alley theme with Sean last night and he brought up this guy who gives alley tours, which made me say “Alleyologist”. It rolled really nicely off the tongue, and I’ve been picturing a trailer:

A tall, good looking young man with a doctor’s bag walks through an alley.

He’s peering at small things in the alley very closely, an earnest look on his face.

A close up on his mouth as he speaks into a small dictaphone: “The city… is sick.”

A hipster girl, arms crossed, gently mocks him. “So what — a bit of garbage in an alley makes you panic?”

He responds intensely: “Of course not. Alleys are the lower organs of the urban organism. Garbage, grafitti, all these things are like flora in the lower intestines. They’re natural. It’s something else.”

I’m seeing alleyology as being this slightly arcane practise passed down from his father — they’ve been monitoring, and in some cases treating, the cities they live in for generations (I’m imagining a great great father who was an ex-flâneur in France). He’s slightly out of step with modern life due to his passion and focus, but the girl has a serious crush on him…

Instead of the universe being one where the Nazi’s won, it’s a tiny tiny change — it’s a universe where all water is actually blue instead of clear (excepting seawater, which is green). Or a universe where people’s internal clocks are so slow to adjust that it takes immigrants years to sync up, condemning them to years of a nighttime existence. Each world could be a different episode.

I’m thinking they could be accessible via the alleys, since alleys are betwixt and between, themselves.