by Roger Bourke White Jr., started April 2017
These are stories about baby clubs. Lets make this about the differing experience in various baby clubs.
Challenge: given the many baby club settings, what can be the common theme to the stories? Common theme: "war stories" of a baby club inspector.
What kinds of baby clubs will there be?
Necessity oriented, Ambition oriented, religious-centric, cult-centric, what else? Clubs raising specialty babies such as space travelers. Clubs with cyber moms instead of human moms, these will fill the "Baby Gap" of humans not raising enough children to sustain the human population.
What will be the admitting criteria for clubs? What will exclusive clubs be like? What will "we take anyone" clubs be like? What will be in between? How much will The Curse of Being Important affect club admission policies? As in, nosy neighbors getting involved in admission policies. Another example: when will the race card get played getting into a club?
One the other end of the spectrum, what will the shaming and exiling criteria be? What will it take to get kicked out? What happens to the child when the mother gets kicked out? What happens to the mother when a child gets kicked out?
o Setting club policies -- Who is going to get prescriptive about baby club policies? Some of the club members, of course, who outside the club? What will the community or government, have to say.
One thought: zoning commissions, "These will affect property values, you know." Another will be the constant and significant worry about child abuse. This will bring up conflicts between those who believe Tender Snowflaking is the right way and Tiger Moms who want to let their children experience more risky situations. And the worry about sex abuse isn't going away.
o Social shaming about clubs -- What kind of social shaming will a "bad" baby club endure? What are scandals that will be discovered at baby clubs? There will be worry about traditional ones such as bad building maintenance and traditional child abuse issues. What happens if a club allows mothers to engage in illegal gene editing of their babies? What if a parent gets a surrogate baby filled with illegal genes? Contemporary examples of shamed but allowed communities are brothels.
o Social shaming in the clubs -- How will club members who "cross the line" be treated by other club members? How will shaming be handled? How will mothers and how will children be shamed? How will mothers' companions be shamed?
o Gene editing -- One new hot topic will be gene editing of the children. As the choices available steadily get larger and less expensive this is something prospective mothers will talk about as much as what outfits and toys to get their upcoming babies. Mothers will talk about it, and so will the clubs they want to join. What kind of gene editing will specific clubs condone? This can be something that distinguishes clubs. Will clubs become known as bad for condoning gray area or illicit gene editing? How much demand will there be for gene editing that crosses the line? The "I want the best for my baby." instinct is going to weigh in heavily on this crossing the line issue.
o Wearables and physical enhancements -- What other bad practices besides questionable gene editing will there be? How much physical enhancement, as in performance enhancing wearables and prosthetics, is OK? How much is OK for adults, how much for kids? How much worry about kids getting addicted to implants and wearables?
o Child raising practices -- Tender Snowflakism is going to be the standard raising practice. Instinct will support it. So... When is it OK to not raise Tender Snowflakes? Doing alternatives to Tender Snowflaking can come to be thought of like home schooling is today.
o Coming of Age rituals -- What will coming of age rituals be in baby clubs? What can children access when they get old enough? What will replace moving from grade to grade in school? What will replace driver's licenses? In a world filled with cyber muses and lots of other companion distractions, what will a first date be like? Will it still be a meaningful ritual? If not, what will replace it? What kinds of fashions? When will tattoos and piercings be OK? What will be the 2050's version of these? How will AR mix with physical reality in adult and child appearance and fashion? How will these mix with coming of age?
What will initiation rituals be for the child raisers? When will they be accepted as fully competent members of the club?
o How will opposite sexes be treated -- both as child raisers and as children? How will androgens -- those who give up on having a sex orientation -- be treated? This is likely to vary widely from club to club.
o How will companions of child raisers be treated? What will be the difference between "meaningful contributors" and "freeloaders"? How will the freeloader companions of child raisers be treated? Who will define a freeloader? This becomes ironic in a TES community, but I'm sure some people will come up with ways of freeloading. And I'm sure others will choose freeloading as a reason to disapprove of someone they don't want hanging around the club. What other "bad influences" will there be? There will be abusers of various sorts -- the spookiest one being child sex abuser. A more common one will be self-abuse of various sorts -- the equivalents of 2010's drug and alcohol abusers.
o Who will get to slap the "child abuser" label on other people?
o A related issue: Can cyber be accused of being child abusive. If it is, and it is decided to have happened by some kind of judicial body, what happens next to the cyber? Reprogramming, exile, execution, something else?
o How about personal self-abuse? Drinking to abuse will be harder to arrange because of wearables and pervasive surveillance. What will replace drinking and drug abuse as common ways for someone to abuse themselves, just because they want to abuse themselves? This is a privacy topic as well.
o Who is paying for the club? There will be a much discussed "Baby Gap" in the 2050's due to the low fertility rates that all urban societies experience, so there will be general approval in the communities for supporting baby clubs, but that approval feeling will compete with NIMBY feeling. "Yes a club is a wonderful idea, but not in my backyard."
There will be ambitious kinds where the members pay, and TES kinds where the government pays. Any other kinds? Who is paying for religious-oriented ones? What other kinds of special purpose clubs will there be? Will most clubs consider themselves special purpose?
o What happens when a club gets taken over by a cult? Or founded by one? There should be lots of these. Any cult worth its salt will want to found a baby club not long after it gets established. What happens when the cult withers or transforms its foundation tenets.
o What happens when there is acrimony and squabbling in a club? How can a club split when that happens and gets seriously divisive? Conversely, will clubs merge? What will make that a compelling choice?
What will be the differences between a necessity-oriented baby club and an ambitious-oriented baby club? More on that in these next sections.
o Necessity clubs will be filled with urban legends and urban legend education for the children -- legends feel good, this is why they endure. Many will also be Tender Snowflake oriented -- protect the children comes first, last and always -- another feel good instinctive way of thinking.
Necessity will teach system gaming because this activity also brings instinctive satisfaction. How much Us versus Them thinking will be allowed, and taught? This is instinctive, but hard on community relations.
How much will necessity get into dilettante activities? Things such as rock star entertainment success will likely be common aspirations in necessity clubs. Another will be sports success. There will be lots of computer gaming activity and aspirations -- these will be of the 2050's formats. Necessity parents and kids will aspire to Top Forty Jobs -- work that is familar and comfortable to engage in. This is like Top Forty music, but job-related.
o When will urban legend and aspiration harmonize? One place may be the politics of this time. What politicians and voters get concerned about in 2050, and be able to affect, will be quite different than what concerns them and they can influence in the 2010's. Big Business will be beyond their reach. What can they tax? Will anything be left to them, or will cyber be handling it all? Likely humans will still be handling dilettante craftsman certifications of many sorts and they may handle the taxing on those. Many of these may become coming of age rituals.
The instincts for "strong man" rulership and populist giveaways that feel like system gaming will still be strong. The Venezuela Experience of the 21st century is something many necessity rulers and followers will aspire to repeat. Note that even today, as bad as the situation is there, with lots of food and goods shortages and crazy explanations as to why these disruptions exist, the government still has a lot of support along with all the dissatisfied protesters. The US and British media see and report lots more problems than some of the locals see, as in, those Chavistas who are still supporting the Chavismo of the good old days.
o Part of the urban legend is fearing child abuse in many forms. This means when stressful times come upon the club, part of the stress relief will be witch hunting for child abusers and sex molesters. The shaming for those accused will be as serious as the club allows. If those accused are cast out, then the community they move into as exiles and refugees can get involved in the shaming as well. What happens to the children they are raising will be tragic as well. Sometimes they will be cast out with their mothers, sometimes they will remain behind and acquire new mothers who are still club members. If they stay in the club they will likely still carry a taint.
o Necessity clubs will have more teenage mothers. These are where this instinct can flower. The career versus motherhood issue will keep the number of teenage mothers in ambitious clubs small.
o Ambitious clubs will be educating children for jobs which are solving real world problems. The education will be more rational and analytical with less urban legend. There will be lots of STEM, but it will be updated versions that reflect 2050 employment conditions -- the kind of difference between learning horses in 1900 and learning engines in 1940 in the delivery wagon business. There will be less urban legend, but it won't be gone. Urban legend is comfortable feeling thinking and it will survive where it doesn't make a difference in the outcome of what ambitious folk are attempting to accomplish. A current example is the durability of urban legends surrounding the Titanic.
How much education will be for dilettante jobs versus world shaking jobs? This will vary from club to club. Dilettante activities can be seen as very important to some ambitious club members.
The kids can engage in risky activities and getting hurt is considered part of learning. Because medical care is good and surveillance pervasive, getting hurt is not as risky as in contemporary situations. The harsher risks of the day -- risking getting disabled or killed -- will be more extreme activities than contemporary versions -- a bicycle accident is not going to be as damaging in 2050, unless it involves getting rolled over by a steamroller. Who will tolerate the extreme levels of risk in 2050? I don't know.
Child abuse will be less of an issue than in necessity clubs. It will not be as fearful to ambitious club members because it will not be seen as being as damaging as it appears to necessity club members. There will be exceptions to this generalization.
Those are the differences. What will be the consequences of these differences?
o How will necessity club-raised kids and ambitious club-raised kids interact? How will they interact as kids, and adults? Their backgrounds are so different! It will be like immigrants mixing in a cosmopolitan community. Who will be the intolerant rednecks of this day? What will cause outrage in these different cultural groups? Who will grumble, "There oughta be a law." about the rumors they hear about what goes on in the other groups' baby clubs, and other social settings? If there is social stress in the community and baby club witch hunting, how will it be handled?
The difference in education will be huge, unless there are enacted laws about education standards. (Keep in mind that the universal education we embrace today came about in the 1800's in Europe and North America because it became important for all people to handle Industrial Age activities.) Because of the differences in education and ambition, the adult lifestyle differences will also be huge. What will cause arguments? When and where will these groups mix? Will "separate but equal" reemerge as a social aspiration?
o This 13 May 17 Economist article, Carrying a child for someone else should be celebrated—and paid Restrictive rules are in neither the surrogate’s interests, nor the baby’s, is about surrogate mothering issues of today.
From the article, "THE earliest known description of surrogacy is an ugly biblical story: in Genesis, the childless Sara sends her husband to bed with her maidservant, Hagar, and takes the child as her own. It is this exploitative version of surrogacy that still shapes attitudes and laws today. Many countries ban it outright, convinced that the surrogate is bound to be harmed, no matter whether she consents. Others allow it, but ban payment. Except in a few places, including Greece, Ukraine and a few American states, the commissioning parents have no legal standing before the birth; even if the child is genetically theirs, the surrogate can change her mind and keep the baby."
o Gene editing is going to be a hot topic. It will suffer from The Curse of Being Important. But as the tools for gene editing get simpler and less expensive the number of people engaging in it, and wanting something to happen for them, will grow. It will be much like how the use of computing grew as computers got cheaper and simpler to use.
o As DYI gene editing gets more pervasive, all sorts of stuff is going to appear, most of it not related to human gene editing. Most activities will be viral and bacterial-based, and the most innovative will be modifications of these because the starting platform is so much simpler than it is for eukaryote cells -- the kinds that make plants and animals. This 6 May 17 Economist article, Cell-free biotech will make for better products A new type of biological engineering should speed up innovation, takes this simplifying a step further. It talks about gene editing without even using cells, and this is a 2010's development.
From the article, "[the cell] It is a system that has worked well over the 4bn years that life has existed on Earth. To some biotechnologists, though, the cell is old hat. They approve of the machinery of DNA, RNA, ribosomes and proteins, which can be engineered to make useful chemicals, ranging from drugs to the building-blocks of plastics. But they want to get rid of the bags that contain it, retaining only the part of the protoplasmic “gloop” inside a cell needed to do their bidding."
The social implications of this trend to faster, cheaper, easier and diverse styles of gene editing is that there will be diverse legal and black market activities. Because of the Curse of Being Important there will be lots of worries about implications, and lots of calls for rigorous monitoring of gene editing. The more these cries for regulation are paid attention to the slower legal progress will become. As a result the easier the editing gets the more black market there will be. There will be lots of shrill worries about unleashing plagues and creating other disasters. But, as was pointed out back in the early-1970's when I was a student at MIT, natural selection does a billion times more experimenting than people do. In the real world of natural selection a fast-spreading plague means an organism succeeded in finding a successful new twist. An example of this we constantly live with is flu viruses coming up with new combinations every year. Note that even with this Mother Nature success pointed out, the gene experimenting labs at MIT had to become lots more protective after the outcry. The Curse of Being Important runs strong in genetic editing of all sorts.
That said, the human editing will be conducted more smartly than natural selection does and with lots of AI help. And it can aim for goals that Mother Nature has no interest in, such as having the organism create exotic chemicals as part of its metabolism, as talked about in the article mentioned above. What else beside exotic chemical creation will interest human designers? Exotic chemicals is the commodity use, what is the surprise use? How will this mix with 3D printing? Any surprise synergies there?
o Gene editing to make humans well adapted to other environments --
oo Adapting to living comfortably in weightless and radiation filled space ships going on long voyages. Or related, colonies on low G, thin atmosphere moons and asteroids in the solar system.
oo Deep under the ocean, either breathing highly compressed air or going full-gill and breathing water: Porpoise people and Fish people.
oo Also, Fish people can be adapted to high-G constant acceleration space ships, as in a steady 10G. These can make interstellar journeys take a year to a century or so, not the millennia or ten that boost-and-coast journeys would take.
Home or baby club? -- the person (woman or man) who is living with parents decides now is the time to have a baby. The parents say, "OK, have it here." The person thinks, "Is this the best I can do, or should I raise it in a baby club?" The story is about the differences, the parents promoting, opinions of friends and boyfriend/girlfriend, and the person making a choice.
Ambitious baby club story -- I want the best for my child, and I can afford a lot. There will be just barely ambitious baby clubs and super rich baby clubs. There will be clubs centering on what the parent's occupation is -- a nuclear engineers club with lots of Fukushima members.
Necessity baby club story -- I want the best for my child, and I will exercise every right I have to get it. These clubs will be a lot more similar in styles and themes than ambitious clubs because the member themes will be inspired by the Top 40 occupations that necessity folk like to engage in, an example being entertainment.
Teenagers getting into baby raising story -- These won't be ambitious class people. They will be instinctive mothers with necessity parents. These teenage mothers will be a large percentage of necessity baby club members. The ambitious class members who become teenage mothers will be the children of ambitious parents who rebel and become family black sheep -- they choose kids over career. Most often they will join a necessity class baby club.
Cult baby club story -- One sign that a cult is getting seriously established is starting a baby club.
Weird-ass ways of raising babies (such as not part of clubs)
o Brothel baby club story -- poor folk who get money from both ends -- Johns and governments. What makes them different from other TES types? There will be social shaming, but they choose to do the brothel part anyway. This gets them luxury money? What does the social shaming cost them? Not enough to make them give the brothel part up. What will a moral crusade against brothels look like?
What are "crossing the line" issues in each of these circumstances?
o In the brothel club, how do you betray Johns? How do you stand by them? How does pervasive surveillance fit into this mix?
How are outsiders handled by these various club styles? -- What are going to be desired "Us" types? What are going to be spooky "Them" types? What is going to define an undesirable freeloader? How will worries about child physical abuse and child sexual abuse mix in with these outsider relations? Cyber can do a lot of teaching and child tending. Who will want to bring in outsider human teachers?
What are surprise uses of the technologies?
o gene editing to make better babies is an obvious use, this is a commodity use. Making better subsystems may be a surprise use, such as making better gut bacteria. What will making better pets consist of?
o how will wearables interact with baby clubs? Those teenage mothers are probably going to still love to party-hearty, and wearables can help. What else? How much will wearables become part of children's play toy set? In the 2010's children get toy smart phones not long after they start walking and talking. In the 2050's they are going to get toy wearables, but what will these toy wearables do?
--The End--