The seed idea here was the abolition of copyright in a post-consumerist society — not post-Singularity, but dramatically post-scarcity compared to today. Commercial media stopped being a thing because ① people don’t need jobs because post-scarcity; ② noncommercial media descended from fan-works continued to improve in production quality; but ③ people still like good stories, and the most popular stories are often ones based on established, well-known characters. (From Anansi to Hamlet would make a great book title.)
The twist was literary theory as a scientific-mathematical discipline. This is an extrapolation from the computational turn in linguistics. In this future, “literary theory” refers to the mathematical study of possible and actual stories; with computational literary theory being the application of computational linguistics and cognitive science to the topic.
The bit that I had to go back and rewrite was to consistently use the words “storytelling” and “story” in place of words such as “fiction” and “literature”, except in the article title and the academic field “literary theory”. This future doesn’t consider there to be hard boundaries between “folktales”, “genre fiction”, “fan fiction”, and “literature” — all of these are stories, and this isn’t a fluffy postmodern doctrine but a scientific result.
It’s Whig history. The future writers think of their unitary concept of storytelling as both scientifically proven and obviously true, and the former era’s distinctions (and laws) as being both superstitious and wicked. They think of copyright as an unnatural imposition on human culture — but they do so from a standpoint where authors/storytellers don’t have to worry about earning a living.
Chiyoda is the ward of Tokyo in which Akihabara district is located.
E. Mitchell Leonard, of Leonard’s Theorem, is E. L. James from a parallel universe.
Nice! I really hope the pendulum doesn’t swing that far, though.
Thanks. To explain the joke and/or show my work:
The seed idea here was the abolition of copyright in a post-consumerist society — not post-Singularity, but dramatically post-scarcity compared to today. Commercial media stopped being a thing because ① people don’t need jobs because post-scarcity; ② noncommercial media descended from fan-works continued to improve in production quality; but ③ people still like good stories, and the most popular stories are often ones based on established, well-known characters. (From Anansi to Hamlet would make a great book title.)
The twist was literary theory as a scientific-mathematical discipline. This is an extrapolation from the computational turn in linguistics. In this future, “literary theory” refers to the mathematical study of possible and actual stories; with computational literary theory being the application of computational linguistics and cognitive science to the topic.
The bit that I had to go back and rewrite was to consistently use the words “storytelling” and “story” in place of words such as “fiction” and “literature”, except in the article title and the academic field “literary theory”. This future doesn’t consider there to be hard boundaries between “folktales”, “genre fiction”, “fan fiction”, and “literature” — all of these are stories, and this isn’t a fluffy postmodern doctrine but a scientific result.
It’s Whig history. The future writers think of their unitary concept of storytelling as both scientifically proven and obviously true, and the former era’s distinctions (and laws) as being both superstitious and wicked. They think of copyright as an unnatural imposition on human culture — but they do so from a standpoint where authors/storytellers don’t have to worry about earning a living.
Chiyoda is the ward of Tokyo in which Akihabara district is located.
E. Mitchell Leonard, of Leonard’s Theorem, is E. L. James from a parallel universe.