fubarobfusco comments on Wikipedia articles from the future - Less Wrong

19 Post author: snarles 29 October 2014 12:49PM

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Comment author: fubarobfusco 30 October 2014 07:18:11AM *  14 points [-]

Fan fiction is an historical term for certain forms of [[storytelling]] during the [[Industrial-Copyright Era]]. The term was first used within [[early fandom]] to describe not-for-profit storytelling within fandom, but in the late 20th century came to refer specifically to stories told in violation of the era's [[commercial censorship]] laws, under which a commercially and legally recognized "owner" could impose legal penalties on tellers of "derivative" stories.

Subsequent to the international abolition of commercial censorship following the [[Chiyoda Convention of 2023]], the term became one of largely historical significance. Analytic and [[computational literary theory]] does not support a distinction between "fan" storytelling and "original" storytelling in works published before or after the Industrial-Copyright Era.[1][2][3]

While pre-analytic literary theorists had by and large discarded the concept of "originality" as a poor model of the process of story creation, [[Leonard's Theorem]] showed that the classification of authors or works into "original" and "fan" was an artifact of the censorship regime rather than of the creative process itself. The bimodal distributions of βcha and φplot arose from intermediate values being subject to legal penalty.

"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different." —T. S. Eliot, early industrial-era author

"In gist, 'original' stories are just 'fan' stories with the names changed." — E. Mitchell Leonard, analytic literary theorist

Comment author: ancientcampus 31 October 2014 01:33:10AM 3 points [-]

Nice! I really hope the pendulum doesn't swing that far, though.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 31 October 2014 03:11:33AM *  4 points [-]

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.
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