April 12, 2012
F-box/Consciousness [IDEAS]
F-box
The F-box was first conceived as a solution to the failing American education system. In the aughts, public schools were paralyzed by their inherent inability to adapt and innovate. America fell behind, first to China, then to Russia. As a result, changes began to come from charter schools and online education communities like Khan Academy. Huge leaps were made in understanding how the process of learning and understanding worked. F-boxes debuted in beta in 2014; by 2017 they were ubiquitous throughout the United States. F-boxes were part online community, part school system, part city-state. The idea was that by merging the successful aspects of online learning communities with underground, physical spaces designed for maximum creativity and inhabited by both students and their teachers (who became both teacher and parent), the process of learning would never stop. Education levels rose and with them came an incredible boom in US innovation. Unemployment was solved, disease was all but eradicated, sustainable fusion power was created, a new age of space exploration began, and the world began to heal.
Consciousness
idea: what if there were good reasons for dying? but those good reasons are also dangers that pose new existential questions. you can switch bodies if you’re bored. you can be a gluttonous pig if you want to, ruin your body with fried foods for 10 years then switch to a healthy one. change sexes to experience life, sex, emotions from the other POV. switching bodies so no one knows what you look like (so what’s the relationship between crime and justice now?)<--some of these ideas explored in Dollhouse, Ghost in the Shell
idea: to be upwardly mobile you have to be chosen or pay your way up the food chain. corporate interests or the government decide to let you move up in bodies/social class. the lowest classes have one body/one life, the highest classes can live forever in innumerable bodies. different types of bodies are celebrated by the public for different reasons. youth is the greatest reward, so the most revered leaders/celebrities/most powerful people all look like children<--bringing back the religious conflict... how would religious groups feel about this? there would almost certainly be massive conflict
idea: what if the story followed an older man from a lower class who was desperate to upload his consciousness? he could have a very strong, relatable emotional goal. like he needs to join his wife or his kid, or he’s dying himself and this is his last chance. could be a cool scene if he needs 2x his bankroll to pay for the process so he takes it all to a casino/gambling den...
7 Comments:
KRANTZ posted on April 12, 2012 at 20:39 PM
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/855802805/lowline-an-underground-park-on-nycs-lower-east-sid
QED42 posted on April 12, 2012 at 22:04 PM
I think you've gone too far with the world of F-box, if both inside and outside are utopias it does not leave a lot of room for conflict. Maybe the world you described is the goal for F-box but the story takes place during the early trials, when stuff can go wrong, when the ethics are still up for debate.
How about something more like: Two children are adopted by the state/company/whoever is doing the research and put into F-box to be educated in a utopia. The parents would be fuck ups, border line sociopaths, herion addicts and they want to know does putting the kids in a better environment break the cycle of crime. Eventually funding gets pulled because of change of regime or concerns over essentially experimenting on humans.
All that is back story and the plot takes place 5-10 years later. One of them has turned to crime and one is working for law enforcement hunting the other down. You can get the back story out using flash backs to thier time in the F-box being raised together. Was it just the inability to escape his nature that lead one to turn to crime or does it have to do with who got the breaks after they left the F-box? A good twist would have it be the one that got the seemingly better opportunities was the one that turned to crime.
PrinzVonHapunkt posted on April 13, 2012 at 06:40 AM
Would sure be nice if the thing that caused F-Box to stop working was an F-Bomb
TazUltimate posted on April 13, 2012 at 11:40 AM
Given F Box and the log line here is an idea: adam and eve, brother and sister age 12 and 10 respectively. Both kids live within the f box blissfully unaware that they are the last of the pure race of humans left on planet earth. With the increased decline of the environment and overpopulation the outsiders began to mutate and become hostile. One father bent on saving his children from the enivitable struggle with the outside world put his two kids in statis and created the fbox world for them to grow up in.
The fbox world is a real environment on a large ish island in the mid pacific latitudes. All the in habitants other than the kids are robots with holographic projections as skins. This is where adam begins to see breakdowns in the holoskin which lead him to discovering his world is not as it seems.
TecmoSuperBowl posted on April 13, 2012 at 12:23 PM
I can dig what Taz posted.
KRANTZ posted on April 14, 2012 at 01:53 AM
@Taz I really want to focus on the education problem, but there are some cool ideas in there...
Dan2111 posted on April 14, 2012 at 10:07 AM
F-box:
I don't like the education-element you're bringing into F-box. The originial idea was better.
How about this:
The story starts with Adam and Eve, being alone in the F-box (maybe an island as Taz suggested, but I think that reminds too much of lost. A Winne the Pooh-like forest would be better).
They slowly make friends (ok, maybe I'm too cliche here and maybe this would be bad for the story flow). Anyway, the point is that they're perfectly happy inside the F-box, but there's a creeping feeling of emptiness and the feeling that "life is not real/has no substance to it".
Bit by bit, we learn that F-box is an augmented reality add on to Facebook, launched in 2018 that quickly turned into a virtual utopia.
There were deep changes in the political structure of the world when huge parts of the population migrated to the F-box and refused to spend time in real life.
You'd have to think about how to not make it too Matrix-like, but I think it's doable. You could explore the questions like "is it ok to flee reality and live in false worlds?" or "does the government/family/friends/people from the real world have a right to forcefully take people out of virtual realities and force them to live in the real world" or "do people have a moral right to opt out of the real world, just ignore all the suffering in the real world (macro problems like poverty, AIDS, etc., but also problems in their own family, etc.), and spend their life in the F-box".
You could build in an element like the government hunting for teenage parents that neglect their children by just moving to the F-box.
Adam and Eve could be children in the F-box, being happy and everything with the above mentioned sense of emptiness and bit by bit, the story could reveal how they were neglected by their parents and eventually fled to the F-box themselves. You could go back in perspective, starting with the kids own emotions, then shifting the view to the family, from there you go to society, and then back to the kids emotions.
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Consciousness:
If you made up some bogus reason why it's hard to get new human bodies (or why it's hard to get perfect human bodies), you could turn bodies into a resource. This would lead to some interesting implications. People fighting for bodies. Rich people being more beautiful.
But also people being stored on hard drives (would have to make a decision what that means: are they just frozen and inactive until they get a new body or can they still communicate via chat or something). There could be more people than bodies.
The religious sect could even further that by destroying bodies.
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