💗💭.ws

A Child's Playtime

I've been thinking about this short note by Toby Ord about how the past might understand a modern child's toy. Please, read and return, it's short.

This is precisely the dual to the reaction I have to most superhero media. Bruce Banner is made into a Hulk, but there is some fixed single digit number of times someone can be Hulked. Steve Rodgers is a supersoldier but not a member of a superarmy. Tony Stark has world-dominating military tech, but somehow his supply chain is so isolated that he's not even providing low cost shortcuts to others who might follow in his wake. The Black Panther has tech no one else has, but his supply chain is even more isolated, with even raw materials not being shared, although somehow he knows how to use them very efficiently (despite there being little non-aesthetic reason to do so, they have tons and there's just one Black Panther). Even Hawkeye has special arrows no one else has. Ray Palmer has a shrinking suit no one else has, even throughout all of time. They make a technological advance, and never make it broadly available, and it's never replicated.

It's this absolute lack of scale I find bizarre. In the same way that economists of the past would marvel at a wonder being clearly mass manufactured (because the cost of attention to minor paint details is clearly not worth putting in), I marvel at how a hero would refuse to share their tech. How is the entire world not transformed by nanotech, shrinking, etc. even if you only share the most positive-sum, restricted safe cases? How do they say no, to their less-than-superpowered teammates going into the battle alongside them, when they beg for anything that might keep them safe?

If the past might marvel at modernity's mass-production of miracles, perhaps I should be more amazed that, because it's needed for a simple narrative, we excuse the frankly bizarre level of selfishness in fictional characters. If this happneed in real life people would be pretty upset, not that getting people upset is a challenge. But it is weird behavior; there are costs, beyond the obvious, to having precisely one instance of a helpful thing. It's never explained or justified, really, beyond paranoia, and yet risk management around the technology is not meaningfully attempted. Sure, sharing a super-weapon would be bad -- but there are components, necessary for it to function, that aren't dangerous. Pim could make a fortune shrinking things just for international shipping, monitored and tracked and kept safe as no one but them would ever have access to the shrinking tech. And yet. A child's playtime requires the hero be special by mechanism, and not by choice. Because the focus has always been the super half of superhero, and not much attention is paid to heroes.