Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment
This kind of speculative fiction doesn't work. Usually the template is described as: take some part of the world and tweak it and then press play and see what the world looks like now.Instead this is just "invert some part of culture" which makes no sense. Culture is the emergent externalized collective intelligence of social creatures. You can't invent a culture which would preserve this property without asserting a global belief in the community isomorphic to the alteration. You haven't altered the culture. You'd just asserted a group of unthinking zombies.So when I read:> Imagine a world where computers are inherently old. Whatever you do with them is automatically seen as practice of an ancient and unchanging tradition. Even though new discoveries do happen, they cannot dispel the aura of oldness.I can't conceive of such a world. Its incoherent. I also can't imagine a world where no one likes metals for whatever reason. You can't just assert a fact like that and press play. It's nonsensical.