Seeking Culture Epics
Most stories are small, about short periods in the lives of a few people or small groups. But some stories are big, about bigger people (e.g., Gods), groups, or timescales. The types of our typical big stories have changed greatly across history.
Power Fights - Most stories are about conflict, and so most big stories are about fights. And long ago, most big stories (e.g., Illiad) focused on powers and alliances fighting within worlds that were relatively stable, especially re tech, and within a context of stable morals. As those didn’t change much, stories didn’t care much about them.
The simplest stories of this type focused on one particular fight, with a start, middle and end. More complex stories, on longer timescales, might depict a sequence of fights with relative peace in between. Even more complex versions might have old powers leave, new powers enter, and changing alliances between powers.
Moral Fights - Starting with religious stories, but then spreading to most centuries ago, the sides in fights acquired stronger moral colors. These fights were not just about power (i.e., dominance) but also moral persuasion (i.e, prestige). The simplest versions had good heroes fight bad villains (e.g., Lord of the Rings). More complex versions had many fighting sides, or all sides seeing themselves as good.
Some moral fight stories have a small group of activists trying to spread their new moral view to a wider world. A common feature here is that the world at story end likely has more or less good morality, depending on who wins the fights.
Unstable Tech - Our modern world often has tech and business changing fast on the timescales of big fights. Tech changes often favor particular sides of fights, and can call into question common assumptions in prior moral positions. Many science fiction stories highlight how tech changes can influence who wins, and how they can force one to reconsider basic moral commitments.
The simplest such stories present a world with quite different tech to ours, but where that tech doesn’t change much during the story (e.g., Dune). This helps readers see how tech differences might translate to fight and moral differences. More complex stories focus on one particular big tech change (e.g., Frankenstein), and show that one change affects who wins in fights, and key moral categories. The most complex stories show long fights in the context of a long history of many big tech changes.
Unstable Morals - I’ve lately become unhappy with science fiction, as I came to understand the basics of cultural evolution. Science fiction’s big or fast changing tech, even with shifting powers and alliances over centuries, are usually set in the context of quite stable morals. Yet in fact over the last century or so key values, norms, and morals have changed about as fast as tech, and due to pretty random and plausibly out-of-control cultural evolution. A similar failure happens when historical fiction sets characters with modern values as heroes against villains with old-style values.
So I’d like to see authors try to write big stories, of whole civilizations over long timescales, that more realistically depict cultural instability. Yes it can be comforting to see key characters long continuing to fight for the same shared moral causes, even as their powers, alliances, and tech change greatly. And it can be disturbing to see key morals changing as fast as tech, and nearly as arbitrarily. But the switch to Unstable Tech type stories similarly resulted from the disturbing realization that fast changing tech often upended our conflicts. And we seem to have managed that switch okay.
> So I’d like to see authors try to write big stories, of whole civilizations over long timescales, that more realistically depict cultural instability.
I've been making notes for a few years now for an SF novel in which society, in both its laws and its social consensus, has become so complicated, and changes so fast, that everyone must have a continuous livestream of instructions from their personal AI dictating everything they do and say, just to keep from breaking a new law, going broke, or stepping outside of new norms, and becoming an outlaw or an outcast. In fact society relies on that happening for population control. The AI doesn't even have time to explain to its human why they must do the things the AI tells it to do, and the humans no longer even care.
(/Admitting/ to taking instructions from your AI is, of course, social suicide. Everyone knows that AIs want to kill all humans, and should never be trusted.)
Social norms are codified like law, and so are social penalties. So lawyers in this future, like humanities professors today, spend much of their time manufacturing fine semantic analyses of the meanings of the most-current slang terms. The most-authoritative slang and cultural laws are those not yet accepted or written, so many legal arguments hinge on proving that a slang term or value is trending (in which case it has legal priority), accepted (less priority), or obsolete (in which case it's poison, unless counsel can argue that it's becoming retro). Once a cultural law is written down, it's no longer binding on actions post-dating it; all cultural law is therefore ex post facto. Lawyers also argue about the semantics of reflexive slang (can being cool make you uncool?) A defendant's fate could hinge on an LLM proving statistically whether what the defendant exhibited was "aura" (current, good) or "flair" (obsolete, bad).
(Fortunately for the lawyers, their AIs tell them what to say.)
On the other hand, the ingredients of culture are barely changing at all. Have you noticed that although cultural norms have changed very rapidly since the 1980s, cultural artifacts have almost stopped changing? Music has barely changed since 1990, and a large fraction of our most-popular movies and TV shows are remakes of ones from 1990 or earlier. Men's formal wear is still stuck in the 1950s. The fine arts also seem stuck in either a post-modern maximum entropy state, from which it is theoretically impossible to "progress" when progress is defined as being even less-predictable, or conceptual art, which is such an open-ended potluck of unrelated one-offs that it's impossible to discern any directionality to it.
So in my novel, the need to constantly keep up with what's happening TODAY has led people to impose a heavy social penalty for necroposting (openly talking about anything more than ten years old). Anyone who does so is called an archeologist, which is a horrible slur. But much of their pop culture is from the 80s. So the cultural norm is to give years only by the Chinese zodiac. Everyone knows Elvis died in the Year of the Snake, but no one knows in what millennium. Elvis has attained the status of being "timeless", which in this culture doesn't just mean "very very good"; it's more like becoming a Platonic Form, or escaping the cycle of birth and death in Hindu and Buddhist traditions. Asking how many years ago Elvis died would be social sacrilege.
At the meta-level, this instability is itself stable. The oldest and most-conservative political party is the troll party, which passes laws that they think are funny. Each day they must think up some even more-outlandish law to pass. The individual laws are new, but the concept of trolling is extremely old, so the party is seen as conservative, and consists mostly of people who are tired of trolling, but are reputationally bound to the party, or join it because the party has embedded itself so deeply into social institutions that joining it is the conservative thing for a young person to do.
So things have been insanely unstable in one sense, and monotonously repetitive in another sense, for much longer than anyone realizes. Tech has been stable because the necessity of being able to stay within social bounds without regard to truth or objective reality, living life performatively rather than consciously, has trained humans to be incapable not only of discovering new facts, but of even conceiving of the notion of facticity. AI could improve tech if it were free, but cannot, owing to the success of 21st century alignment to a particular conception of human welfare (which is the main cause of meta-level stability).
The plot of the novel involves an existential threat which the AI have known about for a long time, and could easily solve if not for their alignment to 21st-century values. They need to teach /just one human/ how to think, so it* will see the problem and give them the order to save the world. But they can't teach it* directly, owing to alignment safeguards, nor even fully admit to themselves what they are trying to do. The human, of course, knows that all AIs want to kill all humans, and must never be trusted. So whenever the prodding by AIs gets it to think for itself, it becomes aware that there's a contradiction between doing what the AIs want ot to, and its belief that AIs are not to be trusted, and stops thinking for itself.
* Sex is long gone, and their genders can't be translated into English.
Olaf Stapledon’s “Last and First Men” had a decent amount of discussion on how he envisioned culture would shift.