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The Culture War: Iain M. Banks’s Billionaire Fans

152 points by captaincrowbar 6y ago

tracerbulletx 6y ago
I'm no billionaire but I'm certainly a fan of The Culture Series. It's an extremely beautiful series of books.
- captaincrowbar 6y ago
  Oh, I agree. But the article is about the apparent contradiction: what do ultra-capitalists like Musk and Bezos see in a series about a communist utopia?
  - andrewflnr 6y ago
    Bezos and Musk, finding themselves in a capitalist society, are playing the game to win. In part, though, they play because that's how they can build what they want to build. I think it's a misunderstanding of the mindset of these people to think they somehow desire the suffering and poverty of others; that's incidental. Not that that's really ok, but if the technology existed to implement The Culture I think they would honestly prefer that to their current positions.
  - sidibe 6y ago
    I don't see why super-successful capitalists wouldn't want to live in The Culture. I think people who see the Culture as a dystopia are those who either believe work/being useful is an essential part of life OR those who get their satisfaction from their relative well-being rather than absolute. You can be a billionaire CEO and not fall into those categories. I'd imagine a lot of people who have been very successful in capitalism do it because they enjoy their work and not because they feel like work is the only thing worth doing or because they want to be ever-more relatively better off than everyone else.
    - incompatible 6y ago
      Work and being useful is an essential part of most anarcho-communist proposals. There may be some primitivists who think that civilization was a mistake and we should go back to hunting and gathering, but even hunting and gathering is work.
    - Koncopd 6y ago
      For some people it isn't about work or desire to be materially better than others, but about unwillingness to be a mere pet of some advanced beings.
  - bpodgursky 6y ago
    It's only a contradiction if you view the world extremely antagonistically — that Musk and Bezos have the prime and only goal of sitting on top of a pile of cash while the world burns around them. If you see the world as Musk and Bezos building and deploying capital to build what they see as a better future, there's no contradiction at all. There's fierce disagreement about how we get to that future, but we all want the same general thing.
    - BluSyn 6y ago
      Agreed. It's a logical fallacy. The article seems to cynically assume anyone who achieves great wealth must de-facto be in favor of the system that got them there, and couldn't possibly wish to build a more ideal world without being in contradiction with themselves.
      - throwaway316943 6y ago
        It’s an odd quirk of the average socialist/communist that they deride any individual attempting to improve the world while causing some negative economic side effects but they applaud totalitarian governments that take a stab at communism and murder millions of people in the process
  - ethbr0 6y ago
    It's entirely possible Musk and Bezos prefer being Musk and Bezos, even at the cost of ensuring other people don't become them, in a scarcity society. Yet simultaneously prefer a post-scarcity future in which everyone is Musk and Bezos. Heavy lies the crown, etc etc
    - semi-extrinsic 6y ago
      Not to put too fine a point on it, but if Bezos and Musk could make everyone on Earth rich and prosperous without having to give away a lot of their own money, I think they'd be all for it - consumption of the things they sell would probably go up quite a bit. The problem is starting out on that path towards equal distribution is going to mean they lose a lot of money.
      - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
        I’m not following how Musk and Bezos could make the world better off by giving away their money.
        chipotle_coyote 6y ago
        I mean, literally giving it away in a naïve fashion like "we're going to combine their wealth and divide it up equally among everyone else in the world" probably wouldn't make the world better off in a meaningful way -- but between the two of them we're talking about $370 billion dollars. It's not too difficult to imagine how using 90% of that to target specific problems could improve life in tangible ways for a measurable chunk of the world's population, and still leave each of them billionaires. (In fact, judging by rankings from Forbes last year, it would still leave them among the top 50 richest people in the world!)
        chordalkeyboard 6y ago
        > but between the two of them we're talking about $370 billion dollars. Those are investments that are already earning a return. How do you propose to use them to make people any better off than they already do? You could expropriate gates and bezos, and sell the assets to some other billionaire, then fund the government for a fraction of a year, or buy mosquito nets for africans, and then what? Is that what you think would make the world a better place? I’m asking here. > It's not too difficult to imagine how using 90% of that to target specific problems could improve life in tangible ways for a measurable chunk of the world's population This is what I’m asking you to imagine and tell me, because for people like Gates and Buffet who have already given a lot of money away, it actually is kind of hard to find ways to make an actual lasting meaningful improvement in people’s lives, they’ve spent the better part of their lives working on it and they haven’t given up yet. But the money has to be translated into things that help people out, just giving them stuff can actually leave them worse off because it creates dependencies and disparities.
  - BluSyn 6y ago
    There-in lies my disagreement with this article. There is no contradiction. I don't think Musk/Bezos are as ultra-capitalist as many claim them to be; nor do I think The Culture is as much of a communist utopia as the article claims it is.
  - jldugger 6y ago
    I mean, for a good long while it was a pretty easy argument to claim that Bezos was the head of a RAMJAC: a megacorp with no apparent profit motive, and a secret mission to build a state owned economy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAMJAC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAMJAC).
  - alasdair_ 6y ago
    The Culture is post-scarcity. Every single inhabitant is far, far, far richer in absolute terms than Musk or Bezos. There is no logical inconsistency in a capitalist wanting to be a trillion times richer than they are today. Worrying about relative wealth over absolute wealth is a trap for those with limited imagnations.
    - incompatible 6y ago
      I like the idea that each Culture society, such as a large ship or orbital, has a copy of the entire knowledge-base of the Culture, as well as the technical means to manufacture anything that the entire Culture knows about.
    - macca321 6y ago
      It would be a lot harder in the Culture to get someone to be your human footstool.
      - dodobirdlord 6y ago
        It’s a big galaxy. The number of people into that sort of thing in the Culture is probably larger than the number of humans currently on Earth.
    - n4r9 6y ago
      If wealth is defined as the total value of one's assets, and value is determined by people's preferences, how can absolute wealth be a meaningful concept?
      - alasdair_ 6y ago
        It's difficult to put a numerical value on a concept like wealth in a post-scarcity society but a thought experiment could work: would you like to have Elon Musk levels of wealth today (while living in today's level of "total global absolute wealth") or live in a world where you can have your own starship, live essentially forever, and have essentially zero constraints on the amount of matter and energy (and their form) you'd conceivably want to use? Clearly something like The Culture is richer in material wealth (in terms of goods and services and knowledge available), even if it's difficult to put it into pure numerical terms, just as the world we live in now is "richer" than the world we live in three thousand years ago.
  - mozey 6y ago
    They treat ideology as the upper class has always done, not as true believers, just a means to an end?
  - scotty79 6y ago
    It's not a communist utopia. It's benevolent anarchy based on insane power of each individual (AI) where humans and their affairs are just sideshow. Can you see the appeal for modern billionaires now? I think they like "Beggars in Spain" series by Nancy Kress too.
    - vidarh 6y ago
      The difference between communism and anarchism is not really the end goal, but how to get there.
      - n4r9 6y ago
        Nevertheless, the Culture was not a dictatorship at any point during its development, so the term anarchy seems more accurate.
        vidarh 6y ago
        Marx argued that the Paris Commune, with its directly elected and recalleable delegates was the first demonstration of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" - by Marx' definition any system where one societal class has control over society was a dictatorship. Of course one might argue there are many other ideologies that uses other definitions of the term, but there are also many other communist ideologies that argues for even more radical weakening of government control as the first stepping stone towards totally dismantling the state. E.g. libertarian Marxism is a thing. But whatever one calls the intermediate stages, in any case the point is that when looking at a state-less, class-less endpoint, the distinction is entirely irrelevant.
        n4r9 6y ago
        Nevertheless the Culture was non-heirarchical right from the start. Also is "libertarian Marxism" very different from anarchism? Most anarchists are Marxists. PS there is an argument that the sheer power of the Minds means that they essentially have had control over humans for a long time, and I am sympathetic to this. However, at least that control is not institutionalised.
cpeterso 6y ago
Back in 2018, Amazon acquired the television rights to develop a television series based on Banks' "Consider Phlebas", but the project was cancelled last year. :( https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/26/21402585/amazon-cancels-tv-adaptation-culture-series-iain-m-banks-consider-phlebas https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/26/21402585/amazon-cancels-t...
- s_Hogg 6y ago
  I'm glad they did that. It's a series of books that really challenges you to build a world inside your head.
  - noir_lord 6y ago
    Ashers Polity series would make better TV, I love both and would to see something set on Spatterjay.
    - cpeterso 6y ago
      The Culture books can be so weird and wild, I think anime might be a more appropriate medium than a live-action TV series or a movie.
- Bombthecat 6y ago
  Do they still own the right? Maybe they develop a game with it?
  - cpeterso 6y ago
    According to the article, Amazon surrendered the rights back to Banks' estate, blaming the production problems on the estate: "I just think the estate didn’t want to go through with it. It wasn’t the material, it was just because I think they weren’t ready to do it, for whatever reason. I’m a little mystified myself, to be honest.”
alasdair_ 6y ago
I am so sad that he is dead. The Culture may be the most interesting series I have ever read.
- bravoetch 6y ago
  He was kind and affable in person. I was gutted when he passed, and grateful to have met him once.
  - alasdair_ 6y ago
    I lived a few miles away from him in Scotland for most of my life. He regularly attended book signings and I always thought “I’ll go next time...” There was no next time. Just a reminder - sometimes the time do do what you’ve been planning is now
  - arethuza 6y ago
    I went to a few talks by Banks and he mentioned once that a fan went to a book signing of his and was somewhat disappointed that he seemed such a nice guy - given how dark some of his books are (e.g. The Wasp Factory). The fan even apparently discussed the matter with Bank's mother who was at the event who confirmed that Iain was "a lovely wee boy". Saw him a few times in Edinburgh - never had the nerve to say hello - really wish I had now!
raykyri 6y ago
Here's the archived page if anyone else is getting a 503 error. https://web.archive.org/web/20210122161324/https://bloodknife.com/culture-war-iain-m-banks-jeff-bezos/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210122161324/https://bloodknif...
- kurtschiller 6y ago
  thanks for this! it's my site (I also wrote the piece) and unfortunately it seems like my hosting and/or config is struggling to keep up.
  - s_Hogg 6y ago
    Thanks for writing this. I remember getting into Banks only a couple of years before his passing, so I'm really grateful for the people who have kept going with critical thought regarding his work and who he was.
    - kurtschiller 6y ago
      Thanks for reading! He's far and away my favorite author, and I'm happy so many people on here love his writing as much as I do. (And I agree with people's comments that how much of a utopia it really is is up for debate, especially if you don't agree with Banks's views on economics & society. But to me his own personal intent was very clear.)
  - mkl 6y ago
    A picky correction: the Culture has both Orbitals and Rings, and defines them differently, but you're treating them as one. Quoting myself from a year ago [1]: > Orbitals, while enormous (greater surface area than earth), are much smaller. The Culture novels do have Ringworld-sized rings as well, though. E.g. from Consider Phlebas, flying under the orbital Vavatch: "It was like flying upside-down over a planet made of metal; and of all the sights the galaxy held which were the result of conscious effort, it was one bested for what the Culture would call gawp value only by a big Ring, or a Sphere." [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22144228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22144228
xyzzy123 6y ago
It's modern (post Gernsback), optimistic[1] science fiction. How could Musk & Bezos - both sci-fi fans - not like it? They both believe in "progress". This is viewed as quaint, almost Victorian, in today's intellectual climate. That attitude is on display in the article, which in my view misinterprets the conflict of values as being about economic systems. [1] The books themselves can be grim, and the characters often troubled and/or miserable, but they are depicted as outliers within the Culture.
- Pinegulf 6y ago
  Amen. Zeitgeist today can't bear the idea that technology could bring about any positive change. Just check out what they did to Star Trek. 'To boldly go.. vs there is no hope (paraphrased by me.)'
  - paganel 6y ago
    Hard to bear that idea when we got where we are now because of technology. Just a few days ago there was an article in here about our species wiping out the insects population, we wouldn’t have been “capable” of doing that without our technological advances.
    - erklik 6y ago
      Depends on how you look at it. It's tech that has allowed millions to work from their homes during a pandemic, something that has saved thousands of lives that would not have been saved if those people had to go out and mingle among society. It's tech that made a new vaccine possible and that's why humanity had a vaccine for a pandemic in months. Tech is everything and everywhere. Good and bad.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      > Hard to bear that idea when we got where we are now because of technology. s/technology/business/. Technology doesn't have a mind of its own. Yes, it can be more conductive to good (vaccines) or bad (fighter jets), or neutral (knives), but it doesn't go out there doing things on its own, it doesn't hurt or disenfranchise people through its own existence, it doesn't pollute the Earth by virtue of being pictured on a blueprint. No, it's people making these decisions to commission and use particular technologies for ill. Sometimes they make them in full understanding of the bad consequences. Sometimes they only learn too late, but they still make a decision to not retract the use of a technology. Technology is a red herring. The real issue is the usual problem of people being selfish, living in a system that doesn't regulate the selfishness away, but instead amplifies it, consequences be damned.
Animats 6y ago
The critique says more about Schiller than about the Culture series. Schiller is determined to view a drastically different culture in terms of present ideologies. He's almost into classic Marxist analysis. That's not helpful. What he doesn't get about Banks' universe is that the sentient machines are in charge. They treat humans almost as pets. It's a very pleasant society for humans, but the humans are not running it. Now and then the Culture has to deal with people who really want to be in charge, and it usually finds a place for them, elsewhere.
- at_a_remove 6y ago
  And what's really telling is that it was considered quite the faux pas for a mere human to want to evolve and become a Mind.
  - generalizations 6y ago
    I should re-read the series. I do not remember what you're referring to.
    - doesnt_know 6y ago
      I've read 9 out of the 10 culture books relatively recently and I don't remember even a hint of that idea ever coming up in any of them. The most common concept of mind "creation" documented are GSVs physically constructing them and their first ship body. In some places it hints on a sort of ironic/humourous child/parent relationship.
      - db48x 6y ago
        And yet the capability is there within the technologies on display in various books. In Use of Weapons a Mind replaces one character with a machine duplicate that exactly replicates her personality and physiology, complete with memory dumps before and after so that when she gets back she will remember having been in both places. In the same book, the main character is a non-Culture mercenary who got the Culture to make him immortal as his first payment. He can be killed, but he’ll never age. Everyone in the Culture thinks that he’s really weird for doing so. Everyone in the Culture uses their drug glands to consciously tweak their mood and mental capabilities, and when they sleep many of them spend subjective weeks playing adventure–fantasy computer games. With all of that ready to hand, you would think that at least a few Culture citizens would have themselves scanned and uploaded into a computer where they can spend eternity doing whatever they way, including learning how to expand their mind into a Mind. Instead most of them choose to die after 400 years. I think Banks just wanted to write a particular type of story, and so he just air–brushed that possibility out so that people would stay people. Also, don't lose sight of the fact that this utopia is really only possible because energy is literally free, in that any quantity of energy can simply be summoned into existence at any time, for no cost. And they never seem to have to plan for how to dissipate the waste heat, either. Again, he wrote a particular kind of story. Also, once we start building our Dyson swarm we'll be in a similar situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP44EPBMb8A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP44EPBMb8A
square_usual 6y ago
Related: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/07/the-fake-nerd-boys-of-silicon-valley https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/07/the-fake-nerd-boys-of... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23767010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23767010)
- travisoneill1 6y ago
  Nothing worse than journalists who bitch about people who actually do productive things.
BluSyn 6y ago
I'm a huge fan on The Culture series; probably the most thought-provoking, eye-opening, mind-warping sci-fi ever written. I love the moral shades a gray that the books cover in intense detail. That said, I think the article's author glosses over a lot in order to present a capitalist vs. socialist narrative that feels a bit myopic. I don't think reality is so black and white. I'm not sure The Culture could really be described as a marxist utopia, given the real power + means of production within The Culture is actually in the hands of so few. Nor does Bezos'/Elons' personal wealth necessarily have to be in conflict with their idealist view of the future. This does make me want to re-read the Culture series again. I'm actually sad Amazon was unable to pick up the rights to make a TV series; that has potential to be such an incredible ride.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- vidarh 6y ago
  Socialist thinking is about de facto freedom, not de jure freedom. If you have the power and means to do whatever you want then the de jure limits to that power are irrelevant. On the other hand, if you do not have the means to do as you want, then having de jure rights to do what you want is irrelevant. In poverty, then, gaining means is as important as gaining rights, because they are two sides of the same coin. Disagreement between different types of socialist ideologies over how to balance that is part of why socialist political movements span the range from extreme anti-authoritarian to focusing on means, and the power that gives, at the cost of authoritarianism. But in a post-scarcity society, the details of the distribution of power becomes less and less interesting, as long as everyone has enough power to do what they want to do. That de facto power is what matters.
- p_l 6y ago
  Arguably the unspoken social contract of Culture is how the real power and means of production are shared by all. We're seeing Culture at the point where they deliberately curtailed what's considered normal evolutionary path of civilisation, but several times it's mentioned that when Culture turned independent, Minds weren't "like Gods, on the far side", but the core argument behind the breakaway was that the groups that formed Culture figured free redistribution combined with some significant resourcing models allowed them to "disengage" from capitalism and warfare related to their parent societes.
andrewflnr 6y ago
> ...the process of achieving a utopia—and this is something that Banks studiously avoids showing us. Interestingly, this is not quite true. The Hydrogen Sonata gets a tiny bit into the formation of the Culture.
- monkeycantype 6y ago
  I understood the books quite differently to the author of the article. (EDIT: Hello Kurt, didn't know you were here, thanks for writing the article, I love reading writing about about Banks, I feel I'm still figuring out all the ways his books and the idea of the Culture in particular have had an impact on me) I'd have said that ingestion and transformation of civilisations into the culture is the focus of the books. I recall that they consist almost entirely of Special Circumstances CIAing its way through the galaxy causing untold misery, with a vague objective of breaking a eggs to come back and make a utopia omelette in a few hundred years. Musk and Bezos would be right at home in Contact : ' I think of the Culture as some incredibly rich lady of leisure who does good, charitable works – she spends a lot of time shopping and getting her hair done, but she goes out and visits the poor people and takes them baskets of vegetables. Contact does that on a large scale.' - https://www.richmondreview.co.uk/banksint/ https://www.richmondreview.co.uk/banksint/ No, what really becomes a point of ideological tension is the process of achieving a utopia—and this is something that Banks studiously avoids showing us.
  - p_l 6y ago
    Regarding Special Circumstances pulling abhorrent things for the sake of the future (I won't compare them to CIA, that's an insult to SC), an interesting thing in Use of Weapons is that even Zakalwe considered the purposefully lost war to be abhorrent thing, though he still went with it believing that it will shorten the timescale somehow.
    - monkeycantype 6y ago
      Hi p_l, I read all the books as they came out, I was a teenager when I read Consider Phlebas, and took everything the culture claimed about itself at face value. I'm looking forward going back and rereading them, having shifting over time to thinking that the culture may be an unreliable narrator of it's own history and ideology, pacifism is the culture's national mythology equivalent to Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, rather than a statement of fact. Of course I want to live there.
varjag 6y ago
In several novels of the series, the protagonists are embedded as powerful beings into primitive and very unjust societies.
radicaldreamer 6y ago
Misses the mark that "The Culture" is really a benevolent (well, to some it encounters) dictatorship of AIs... which tolerates humans because they like humans, kind of like how humans like their dogs and cats, indulge them, and bond with them.
- scotty79 6y ago
  I wouldn't call it a dictatorship. The world of AIs went so far ahead that they don't really 'rule' humans in any sense. They just make up their environment. Same way we make up the environment of lives of our pets. AIs help humans with their spare capacity out of curiosity and benevolence but they don't really hesitate about inconveniencing them when there are greater things at play. As for political system among AIs it looks to me as a sort of benevolent anarchy where individuals do what ought to be done in accordance to shared logic and etiquette. There is a cool moment when etiquette is violated and one AI comes unannounced to solar system where other is residing. And this other is highly alarmed and fully expecting to be forced to fight for its survival.
- ben_w 6y ago
  The Minds written about mostly seem to be the worst of them; but the exposition about the wider Culture showed they’re about as far as it’s possible to be from a dictatorship. As for the scale of difference between organic and artificial intelligences, with one organic exception whose name I forget, the impression I had was that the difference between typical organic (/drone) and an Orbital’s hub Mind was more like the difference between a gardener and their lawn: human gardeners can communicate with each individual blade of grass under their care (by controlling the level of sunlight or shade and the general chemical environment), but – considering how little each blade has to say in return – looking after them uses such as tiny fraction of a human brain’s capacity that even an entire large lawn of them would not be the only thing one does with one’s life.
  - tialaramex 6y ago
    We see some pretty nasty ship Minds, e.g. one of the protagonists of Surface Detail, Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints is by its own admission psychotic. But it is a warship, and Veppers is, in fact, making war albeit one he can't hope to win. But we also see some that are much nicer, the Bora Horza Gobuchul takes a very balanced outlook on events and on its namesake; the Sleeper Service cares very much about just one pregnant woman even if it also has other reasons to be doing what it is doing; the Lasting Damage organises much of the events of Look to Windward, including a lovely music festival to celebrate its own death. Writing about Utopia is hard, and Banks mostly avoids doing so. We see only fleeting glimpses, a woman's apparent rejection from her chosen career, a game player's frustration at not being the very best, a spoiled girl who wants an adventure she isn't prepared for. They're character backdrops, not focuses. I think the Gaiman run of Miracleman (Miracleman, in some places and times called Marvelman, was a comic book, historically a pulpy knock-off, then made into something quite extraordinary by Alan Moore, and then Gaiman took over for an aborted run last century) is the best treatment of Utopia in fiction I've read. Gaiman's completed "Golden Age" of Miracleman zooms in on the brief period after Miracleman defeats the Adversary and before things go sour. This is an age of enlightened absolute government, nuclear weapons are destroyed ("teleported into the sun"), poverty and homelessness are eliminated, there's wind power and something equivalent to the Internet, even the dead can be brought back after a fashion. But nevertheless, people are still people. The stories follow a woman whose husband is cheating on her, what has been done with all the now redundant spies, school children rebelling against... whatever you've got. Miracleman himself appears rarely, and his daughter gets one issue, sort of, through a story-within-a-story that allows Gaiman to sidestep the conventions of comic books.
trestenhortz 6y ago
Iain M Banks is the absolute best sci fi if you love space opera. After Dune of course, but Dune stands alone.
disillusioned 6y ago
Apropos of nothing, my "The Culture Novels, Ranked": 1. Excession 2. Player of Games 3. The Hydrogen Sonata 4. Matter 5. Surface Detail 6. Look to Windward 7. Consider Phlebas 8. Inversions 9. Hitting myself with a hammer 10. Use of Weapons
- scotty79 6y ago
  I would move Matter and Surface Detail to the first two spots and bumped up Use of Weapons few positions up, but the rest can stay in that order. ;-)
- tern 6y ago
  I once went on a bit of a journey to find "realistic" novels about AI and outside of Superintelligence (which I enjoyed reading as if it were a novel) and The Age of Em, Excession is one of the best I found. Still, nowhere close—I eventually concluded that truly imagining artificial intelligence in a way that would make for a compelling narrative is mostly impossible. Others include: - Accelerando - A Fire Upon the Deep - Permutation City - Daemon So far, the only sci-fi novel that meets the level of rigor I was looking for—albeit about aliens rather than AI—is The Three Body Problem.
  - fossuser 6y ago
    You need to read True Names: http://www.scotswolf.com/TRUENAMES.pdf http://www.scotswolf.com/TRUENAMES.pdf
  - speed_spread 6y ago
    You might like Peter Watt's Blindsight.
    - marvin 6y ago
      Blindsight and Echopraxia are absolutely brilliant accounts of "what happens when you meet someone who is dramatically smarter than yourself". I'm glad someone on HN recommended them to me.
- 6y ago
aboodman 6y ago
I feel like I'm the only tech guy who doesn't like these novels. I've tried a few times since so many people I respect like them. But it's a utopia. Everyone has everything they want and nothing can go wrong. That's like the context these novels start up in ... and I ... just can't get into it. I imagine stuff must actually eventually happen, but I never get that far.
- Scarblac 6y ago
  Which did you try? This is the reason most (all?) of the books focus on things outside or on the fringes of the utopia.
  - aboodman 6y ago
    Player of Games and Consider Phlebas.
    - aboodman 6y ago
      I'll try again at some point.
      - Tor3 6y ago
        Try Excession. I agree "Consider Phlebas" may not be the best one to start with if you're not familiar with The Culture already, and even then it may be a bit hard to get through.
    - p_l 6y ago
      Consider Phlebas is hard read, and considered the weakest book in the story. Excession is probably the most different one, as a lot of it is essentially email logs, and doesn't deal much with the utopian elements except as far background (a lot of the main characters are at least a little eccentric from Culture point of view). Look to Windward has a lot of the Utopia, but is IMHO quite good read except maybe for some of the chapters happening outside of Culture. Use of Weapons happens pretty much entirely outside of the main Culture body.
glangdale 6y ago
The Culture was seemed too difficult for Banks to write about directly; a very large proportion of the Culture books are written about the intersection between the Culture and the "rest of the universe". (side note: It's been a while since I've read them, and I admit I generally only reread the first 4 or so, due to sameiness and/or IMB's increasingly grody enthusiasm to describe Bad Stuff happening to people, preferably women, so we can be really righteously mad when There is Big Revenge. Sadly, this enthusiasm seems to have sparked a trend among even less-restrained authors like Richard Morgan, so I often hesitate to pick up an SF book for fear of reading about, I dunno, women getting heated irons stuffed into their genitals or something) That said, Contact and Special Circumstances are usually what he describes - it's like he couldn't quite come up with much to write about that was within the Culture per se. So most of the action is the Culture at war, regardless of how supposedly peaceful and enlightened the Culture is. I'm not surprised that Bezos and Musk are fans. Given the way post-scarcity is presented as more or less natural outcome of strong AI and space-opera-level physics, a post-scarcity society is entirely unthreatening to a modern-day billionaire (aside, I guess, from the decline in their relative condition - but in absolute terms, even Bezos and Musk would benefit enormously from being transported to the Culture, as it stands). It's not like we're achieving some sort of utopia by redistributing the resources of people like them (I am not claiming that's a good idea).
- scotty79 6y ago
  Culture at peace is just minds sitting around and spending most of their brain power in 'infinite fun space' which is just infinite math done for enjoyment. And humans do whatever, while being watched and accompanied by thousands of ship avatars using up just a fraction of AI power. When there's no matter to attend AIs are not doing anything interesting, so the stories are just "Culture at (usually someone else's) war" crossed with "life of pets". But it's so much fun. :-)
  - ben_w 6y ago
    > spending most of their brain power in 'infinite fun space' which is just infinite math done for enjoyment. I read this and immediately thought “Bitcoin!”, thought I got the impression from the books that IFS was more like a cross between Sudoku and World of Watcraft — both nerdy and potentially dangerously addictive.
bawolff 6y ago
> a world where your Bezoses and your Musks are not just irrelevant, but actively sought out and disempowered by a society comprised of property-less workers and all-caring, mostly-benevolent A.I.s? Irrelevant maybe, but i dont see how they are disempowered in the Culture books. The culture books are full of busy-bodies trying to change the course of events. I'm sure that would be appealing to CEO types in a post scarcity world.
- p_l 6y ago
  The difference is that what makes a billionaire CEO special is purposefully de-specialized by Culture. A Culture citizen is effectively richer than most (with exceptions), but does not have any more power than other Culture citizens. They do not have power over others, except for the effective social standings related to various things - from which anyone can effectively leave, even possibly faking one's own death. Any bondage to the social status is self-made, as can be seen in some more eccentric characters, unless one breaks some of the few taboos that Culture has - like non-consensual mind control, murder, etc.
  - bawolff 6y ago
    We dont talk about musk just because he's rich - we talk about him because he translated his wealth into nerd cred/social standing by investing in space ships, electric cars and leo satellite internet, which excites the imagination.
CryptoPunk 6y ago
>>the absurdity of one of the most exploitative corporations Unnecessary ideologically motivated mud-slinging. Amazon is chosen by consumers because it offers better selection, lower prices, and faster delivery. Amazon has left the world much better than how it found it, unless you think people's wages being able to buy less (i.e. people getting lower inflation-adjusted wages) is somehow a better state of life.
- SyzygistSix 6y ago
  I could buy that argument a lot easier if they treated their workers better.
gadders 6y ago
Communism and Capitalism seem like competing ways of allocating resources when they are scarce. Do resources get allocated by central planning, or are they allocated by people trading with each other? When scarcity ends, I'm not sure either of them are valid descriptions any more. You could say it's communism because there is no private property, but with infinite resources why would there be? If someone (say) takes my jetpack, but I can click my fingers and have an identical one appear then what would be the point in "owning" one?
- arminiusreturns 6y ago
  > Bodily and personal autonomy was also deeply important to Banks, and to his creations: people in the Culture are free to structure both their lives and their bodies as they see fit. > Which bit of not having private property, and the absence of money in the Culture novels, have these people missed?” I think one thing about discussions that involve private property is that it is often viewed as just material possesions of an external nature, but to me as a constitutionalist, private property is a concept beyond that, which also applies to the self, whether that is body, mind or otherwise, just as much to external things. I often find my more conservative friends don't articulate this, but it is a source of complications of communication with socialists, etc, who ask the same question you do: whats the big deal about private property? Just a little perspective on the topic, if I may.
- p_l 6y ago
  Communism doesn't have to involve central planning - in fact, the Soviet Union (if you dug enough) would agree that their economy is State Capitalism.
  - gadders 6y ago
    Is this going to be a one true Scotsman type defence of Communism? Happy for you to identify a nation state that has communism without central planning.
    - p_l 6y ago
rini17 6y ago
Citation needed for "a world where your Bezoses and your Musks are not just irrelevant, but actively sought out and disempowered by a society comprised of property-less workers and all-caring, mostly-benevolent A.I.s?" As in, in which book such thing happened?
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  All of them? Banks was a socialist crafting a post-scarcity society. https://www.tor.com/2017/11/24/the-revolutionary-optimism-of-iain-m-banks-culture-novels/ https://www.tor.com/2017/11/24/the-revolutionary-optimism-of... > On Earth one of the things that a large proportion of the locals is most proud of is this wonderful economic system which, with a sureness and certainty so comprehensive one could almost imagine the process bears some relation to their limited and limiting notions of either thermodynamics or God, all food, comfort, energy, shelter, space, fuel and sustenance gravitates naturally and easily away from those who need it most and towards those who need it least. Indeed, those on the receiving end of such largesse are often harmed unto death by its arrival, though the effects may take years and generations to manifest themselves. “The State of the Art”
  - rini17 6y ago
    I did read them. And I don't remember any instance where Bezoses or Musks were actively sought out and disempowered. On the contrary, they can develop stuff without having to ensure employees are happy and fed. That burden is taken care of by the AI. Plus, if their ideas are any good, AI will help further by offloading most of the corporate management. How can Musk and Bezos not like that?
    - ceejayoz 6y ago
      Surface Detail's plot revolves around the take-down of the richest capitalist on a planet by the Culture.
      - nuncid 6y ago
        Surface Detail's plot revolves around destroying a simulated version of hell. That it was hosted on that person's servers is just a detail.
marvin 6y ago
I greatly enjoyed this article, not necessarily for what it says, but for what it doesn't. It has an ideological undercurrent that probably doesn't represent either the views of Banks, Musk or Bezos; rather, the author attempts to interpret the words of Banks to refute something that neither Musk nor Bezos actually think. What I enjoy so much about the Culture series is Banks' account of the good things in human nature, while also acknowledging the chaotic and sometimes violent, contradictory parts of our motivations. I view the series as a rare, honest attempt at answering the question "if you could wish anything you wanted for humanity, what would you wish for?" Trying to frame such a wish in a way that keeps only what we want to keep, if there were no materialistic limits. I am not sure that Banks would agree with me, but I've interpreted his socialist angle as merely what seemed the best plausible path towards that, from his point of view. Rather than with communism as an end to itself. There's so much philosophy to unpack in this question, and it's fascinating to consider it through the lens of what might be possible in contemporary and near-future society. Today's richest people, while having tremendous power, obviously don't all wish to enslave humanity, the way one could erroneously conclude by going too deeply into far-left ideology. Neither do they necessarily try to move directly in the direction of "progress", if we define progress to mean the fastest possible path towards the nebulous, ideal future of humanity as described above. But certainly some of the efforts of humanity's brightest are pulling us in this direction, and it seems implausible that any single contemporary ideology has the answer. It wouldn't surprise me if some billionaires would wish to move society in that direction. The apparent contradiction in that seems superficial to me. I'm sure that many ideologies get part of the question right, but they all leave so much room for the parts of human nature that we would largely exclude, if given the choice. As do the power structures in contemporary society. They are limited by both the practical limits of contemporary economics and the partially selfish human motivations of their members.
thinkingemote 6y ago
I saw a talk with Ian Banks a year before he died and at the end of the talk one of the questions from the audience was about why he made so utopian books. He answered that he saw that it was likely that when we create AI and they become more intelligent than us with the potential to rule over us, that the AI will be kind and beneficial to their makers. I think he really did see that the end result of technology was good for the human race.
m463 6y ago
I love the culture series. Ironic that in the US (last I checked) many books were not available on kindle.
SunlightEdge 6y ago
Woh. Amazon Prime is going to make a TV series out of Ian M Banks Culture novels! Loved his books - he might be my favourite science fiction writer
- paulz_ 6y ago
  Unfortunately it was canceled. https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/26/21402585/amazon-cancels-tv-adaptation-culture-series-iain-m-banks-consider-phlebas https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/26/21402585/amazon-cancels-t...
  - SunlightEdge 6y ago
    Noooo
SyzygistSix 6y ago
"At one level, it’s easy to see the appeal of The Culture novels to the likes of Bezos and Musk. After all, these men are far closer than anyone else to actually living the life of a Culture citizen. Their every whim is met, and they are free from hunger, struggle, and strife." italics mine I don't know what world the author lives in but, even though I don't believe all the press about Musk, I'm pretty sure both Bezos and Musk have considerably more struggle and strife going on than I do, despite our day to day, month to month challenges being quite different. And I'm pretty grateful for that. I prefer a very different work/life balance, not that I've seen any indication that Musk thinks his is healthy or even recommended. It's a cartoonish view of people who made money by starting ventures like this.
- TheCoelacanth 6y ago
  Bezos and Musk's struggles are purely self-inflicted in the pursuit of self-actualization. Exactly the same as the struggles faced by a Culturenik.
  - AYBABTME 6y ago
    I'd say (almost) everybody is self-actualizing as a primary activity.
alexwasserman 6y ago
As a particularly glib answer - both Musk and Bezos themselves already live in a post-scarcity environment. Neither of them want for anything. They have enough clout, influence, and money to play games like their own personal Special Circumstances projects.
thegreyone 6y ago
Easy to explain. Capitalism/socialism are opposite sides of the communist coin. Capitalism funded the bolshevik revolution. There is, ofc, a connection between these ideologies...
sershe 6y ago
I think they like it for a reason that Banks himself would have disapproved of, and that the author misses completely. I'm pretty sure one of the reasons Banks didn't describe the origins and how-to of creating Culture is that he believed that to be impossible (the article touches on that a bit in the end). That actually reminds me of Noon universe, by Strugatsky brothers (that was published much earlier, although not in English ;), that is also an explicitly communist utopia mostly described thru interactions with non-utopian civilizations, although in this case the former is much less in focus and the focus is on the latter. Unlike Culture, I understand it was born incrementally as various novels shared characters and parts of the theme; also unlike Culture, the authors incrementally arrived at sort of a conclusion of the narrative that they mentioned in the interviews but didn't finish before their deaths. The idea, for the unfinished White Queen novel, was going to be that a character from the complete utopia encounters a society that built a small partial utopia, and a member of the latter eventually tells him that the complete utopia he's describing cannot exist, he must be living in a sci-fi novel :) The reason Bezos and Musk might like the Culture universe because they are technological optimists - they believe technology can in fact build something like that. Thomas Sowell said "The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.". The first lesson of technology for Bezos and Musk is probably that it can gradually abolish the first lesson of economics :)

I'm no billionaire but I'm certainly a fan of The Culture Series. It's an extremely beautiful series of books.

captaincrowbar 6y ago
Oh, I agree. But the article is about the apparent contradiction: what do ultra-capitalists like Musk and Bezos see in a series about a communist utopia?
- andrewflnr 6y ago
  Bezos and Musk, finding themselves in a capitalist society, are playing the game to win. In part, though, they play because that's how they can build what they want to build. I think it's a misunderstanding of the mindset of these people to think they somehow desire the suffering and poverty of others; that's incidental. Not that that's really ok, but if the technology existed to implement The Culture I think they would honestly prefer that to their current positions.
- sidibe 6y ago
  I don't see why super-successful capitalists wouldn't want to live in The Culture. I think people who see the Culture as a dystopia are those who either believe work/being useful is an essential part of life OR those who get their satisfaction from their relative well-being rather than absolute. You can be a billionaire CEO and not fall into those categories. I'd imagine a lot of people who have been very successful in capitalism do it because they enjoy their work and not because they feel like work is the only thing worth doing or because they want to be ever-more relatively better off than everyone else.
  - incompatible 6y ago
    Work and being useful is an essential part of most anarcho-communist proposals. There may be some primitivists who think that civilization was a mistake and we should go back to hunting and gathering, but even hunting and gathering is work.
  - Koncopd 6y ago
    For some people it isn't about work or desire to be materially better than others, but about unwillingness to be a mere pet of some advanced beings.
- bpodgursky 6y ago
  It's only a contradiction if you view the world extremely antagonistically — that Musk and Bezos have the prime and only goal of sitting on top of a pile of cash while the world burns around them. If you see the world as Musk and Bezos building and deploying capital to build what they see as a better future, there's no contradiction at all. There's fierce disagreement about how we get to that future, but we all want the same general thing.
  - BluSyn 6y ago
    Agreed. It's a logical fallacy. The article seems to cynically assume anyone who achieves great wealth must de-facto be in favor of the system that got them there, and couldn't possibly wish to build a more ideal world without being in contradiction with themselves.
    - throwaway316943 6y ago
      It’s an odd quirk of the average socialist/communist that they deride any individual attempting to improve the world while causing some negative economic side effects but they applaud totalitarian governments that take a stab at communism and murder millions of people in the process
- ethbr0 6y ago
  It's entirely possible Musk and Bezos prefer being Musk and Bezos, even at the cost of ensuring other people don't become them, in a scarcity society. Yet simultaneously prefer a post-scarcity future in which everyone is Musk and Bezos. Heavy lies the crown, etc etc
  - semi-extrinsic 6y ago
    Not to put too fine a point on it, but if Bezos and Musk could make everyone on Earth rich and prosperous without having to give away a lot of their own money, I think they'd be all for it - consumption of the things they sell would probably go up quite a bit. The problem is starting out on that path towards equal distribution is going to mean they lose a lot of money.
    - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
      I’m not following how Musk and Bezos could make the world better off by giving away their money.
      - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
        I mean, literally giving it away in a naïve fashion like "we're going to combine their wealth and divide it up equally among everyone else in the world" probably wouldn't make the world better off in a meaningful way -- but between the two of them we're talking about $370 billion dollars. It's not too difficult to imagine how using 90% of that to target specific problems could improve life in tangible ways for a measurable chunk of the world's population, and still leave each of them billionaires. (In fact, judging by rankings from Forbes last year, it would still leave them among the top 50 richest people in the world!)
        chordalkeyboard 6y ago
        > but between the two of them we're talking about $370 billion dollars. Those are investments that are already earning a return. How do you propose to use them to make people any better off than they already do? You could expropriate gates and bezos, and sell the assets to some other billionaire, then fund the government for a fraction of a year, or buy mosquito nets for africans, and then what? Is that what you think would make the world a better place? I’m asking here. > It's not too difficult to imagine how using 90% of that to target specific problems could improve life in tangible ways for a measurable chunk of the world's population This is what I’m asking you to imagine and tell me, because for people like Gates and Buffet who have already given a lot of money away, it actually is kind of hard to find ways to make an actual lasting meaningful improvement in people’s lives, they’ve spent the better part of their lives working on it and they haven’t given up yet. But the money has to be translated into things that help people out, just giving them stuff can actually leave them worse off because it creates dependencies and disparities.
- BluSyn 6y ago
  There-in lies my disagreement with this article. There is no contradiction. I don't think Musk/Bezos are as ultra-capitalist as many claim them to be; nor do I think The Culture is as much of a communist utopia as the article claims it is.
- jldugger 6y ago
  I mean, for a good long while it was a pretty easy argument to claim that Bezos was the head of a RAMJAC: a megacorp with no apparent profit motive, and a secret mission to build a state owned economy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAMJAC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAMJAC).
- alasdair_ 6y ago
  The Culture is post-scarcity. Every single inhabitant is far, far, far richer in absolute terms than Musk or Bezos. There is no logical inconsistency in a capitalist wanting to be a trillion times richer than they are today. Worrying about relative wealth over absolute wealth is a trap for those with limited imagnations.
  - incompatible 6y ago
    I like the idea that each Culture society, such as a large ship or orbital, has a copy of the entire knowledge-base of the Culture, as well as the technical means to manufacture anything that the entire Culture knows about.
  - macca321 6y ago
    It would be a lot harder in the Culture to get someone to be your human footstool.
    - dodobirdlord 6y ago
      It’s a big galaxy. The number of people into that sort of thing in the Culture is probably larger than the number of humans currently on Earth.
  - n4r9 6y ago
    If wealth is defined as the total value of one's assets, and value is determined by people's preferences, how can absolute wealth be a meaningful concept?
    - alasdair_ 6y ago
      It's difficult to put a numerical value on a concept like wealth in a post-scarcity society but a thought experiment could work: would you like to have Elon Musk levels of wealth today (while living in today's level of "total global absolute wealth") or live in a world where you can have your own starship, live essentially forever, and have essentially zero constraints on the amount of matter and energy (and their form) you'd conceivably want to use? Clearly something like The Culture is richer in material wealth (in terms of goods and services and knowledge available), even if it's difficult to put it into pure numerical terms, just as the world we live in now is "richer" than the world we live in three thousand years ago.
- mozey 6y ago
  They treat ideology as the upper class has always done, not as true believers, just a means to an end?
- scotty79 6y ago
  It's not a communist utopia. It's benevolent anarchy based on insane power of each individual (AI) where humans and their affairs are just sideshow. Can you see the appeal for modern billionaires now? I think they like "Beggars in Spain" series by Nancy Kress too.
  - vidarh 6y ago
    The difference between communism and anarchism is not really the end goal, but how to get there.
    - n4r9 6y ago
      Nevertheless, the Culture was not a dictatorship at any point during its development, so the term anarchy seems more accurate.
      - vidarh 6y ago
        Marx argued that the Paris Commune, with its directly elected and recalleable delegates was the first demonstration of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" - by Marx' definition any system where one societal class has control over society was a dictatorship. Of course one might argue there are many other ideologies that uses other definitions of the term, but there are also many other communist ideologies that argues for even more radical weakening of government control as the first stepping stone towards totally dismantling the state. E.g. libertarian Marxism is a thing. But whatever one calls the intermediate stages, in any case the point is that when looking at a state-less, class-less endpoint, the distinction is entirely irrelevant.
        n4r9 6y ago
        Nevertheless the Culture was non-heirarchical right from the start. Also is "libertarian Marxism" very different from anarchism? Most anarchists are Marxists. PS there is an argument that the sheer power of the Minds means that they essentially have had control over humans for a long time, and I am sympathetic to this. However, at least that control is not institutionalised.

Back in 2018, Amazon acquired the television rights to develop a television series based on Banks' "Consider Phlebas", but the project was cancelled last year. :( https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/26/21402585/amazon-cancels-tv-adaptation-culture-series-iain-m-banks-consider-phlebas https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/26/21402585/amazon-cancels-t...

s_Hogg 6y ago
I'm glad they did that. It's a series of books that really challenges you to build a world inside your head.
- noir_lord 6y ago
  Ashers Polity series would make better TV, I love both and would to see something set on Spatterjay.
  - cpeterso 6y ago
    The Culture books can be so weird and wild, I think anime might be a more appropriate medium than a live-action TV series or a movie.
Bombthecat 6y ago
Do they still own the right? Maybe they develop a game with it?
- cpeterso 6y ago
  According to the article, Amazon surrendered the rights back to Banks' estate, blaming the production problems on the estate: "I just think the estate didn’t want to go through with it. It wasn’t the material, it was just because I think they weren’t ready to do it, for whatever reason. I’m a little mystified myself, to be honest.”

alasdair_ 6y ago

I am so sad that he is dead. The Culture may be the most interesting series I have ever read.

bravoetch 6y ago
He was kind and affable in person. I was gutted when he passed, and grateful to have met him once.
- alasdair_ 6y ago
  I lived a few miles away from him in Scotland for most of my life. He regularly attended book signings and I always thought “I’ll go next time...” There was no next time. Just a reminder - sometimes the time do do what you’ve been planning is now
- arethuza 6y ago
  I went to a few talks by Banks and he mentioned once that a fan went to a book signing of his and was somewhat disappointed that he seemed such a nice guy - given how dark some of his books are (e.g. The Wasp Factory). The fan even apparently discussed the matter with Bank's mother who was at the event who confirmed that Iain was "a lovely wee boy". Saw him a few times in Edinburgh - never had the nerve to say hello - really wish I had now!

raykyri 6y ago

Here's the archived page if anyone else is getting a 503 error. https://web.archive.org/web/20210122161324/https://bloodknife.com/culture-war-iain-m-banks-jeff-bezos/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210122161324/https://bloodknif...

kurtschiller 6y ago
thanks for this! it's my site (I also wrote the piece) and unfortunately it seems like my hosting and/or config is struggling to keep up.
- s_Hogg 6y ago
  Thanks for writing this. I remember getting into Banks only a couple of years before his passing, so I'm really grateful for the people who have kept going with critical thought regarding his work and who he was.
  - kurtschiller 6y ago
    Thanks for reading! He's far and away my favorite author, and I'm happy so many people on here love his writing as much as I do. (And I agree with people's comments that how much of a utopia it really is is up for debate, especially if you don't agree with Banks's views on economics & society. But to me his own personal intent was very clear.)
- mkl 6y ago
  A picky correction: the Culture has both Orbitals and Rings, and defines them differently, but you're treating them as one. Quoting myself from a year ago [1]: > Orbitals, while enormous (greater surface area than earth), are much smaller. The Culture novels do have Ringworld-sized rings as well, though. E.g. from Consider Phlebas, flying under the orbital Vavatch: "It was like flying upside-down over a planet made of metal; and of all the sights the galaxy held which were the result of conscious effort, it was one bested for what the Culture would call gawp value only by a big Ring, or a Sphere." [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22144228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22144228

xyzzy123 6y ago

It's modern (post Gernsback), optimistic[1] science fiction. How could Musk & Bezos - both sci-fi fans - not like it? They both believe in "progress". This is viewed as quaint, almost Victorian, in today's intellectual climate. That attitude is on display in the article, which in my view misinterprets the conflict of values as being about economic systems. [1] The books themselves can be grim, and the characters often troubled and/or miserable, but they are depicted as outliers within the Culture.

Pinegulf 6y ago
Amen. Zeitgeist today can't bear the idea that technology could bring about any positive change. Just check out what they did to Star Trek. 'To boldly go.. vs there is no hope (paraphrased by me.)'
- paganel 6y ago
  Hard to bear that idea when we got where we are now because of technology. Just a few days ago there was an article in here about our species wiping out the insects population, we wouldn’t have been “capable” of doing that without our technological advances.
  - erklik 6y ago
    Depends on how you look at it. It's tech that has allowed millions to work from their homes during a pandemic, something that has saved thousands of lives that would not have been saved if those people had to go out and mingle among society. It's tech that made a new vaccine possible and that's why humanity had a vaccine for a pandemic in months. Tech is everything and everywhere. Good and bad.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    > Hard to bear that idea when we got where we are now because of technology. s/technology/business/. Technology doesn't have a mind of its own. Yes, it can be more conductive to good (vaccines) or bad (fighter jets), or neutral (knives), but it doesn't go out there doing things on its own, it doesn't hurt or disenfranchise people through its own existence, it doesn't pollute the Earth by virtue of being pictured on a blueprint. No, it's people making these decisions to commission and use particular technologies for ill. Sometimes they make them in full understanding of the bad consequences. Sometimes they only learn too late, but they still make a decision to not retract the use of a technology. Technology is a red herring. The real issue is the usual problem of people being selfish, living in a system that doesn't regulate the selfishness away, but instead amplifies it, consequences be damned.

Animats 6y ago

The critique says more about Schiller than about the Culture series. Schiller is determined to view a drastically different culture in terms of present ideologies. He's almost into classic Marxist analysis. That's not helpful. What he doesn't get about Banks' universe is that the sentient machines are in charge. They treat humans almost as pets. It's a very pleasant society for humans, but the humans are not running it. Now and then the Culture has to deal with people who really want to be in charge, and it usually finds a place for them, elsewhere.

at_a_remove 6y ago
And what's really telling is that it was considered quite the faux pas for a mere human to want to evolve and become a Mind.
- generalizations 6y ago
  I should re-read the series. I do not remember what you're referring to.
  - doesnt_know 6y ago
    I've read 9 out of the 10 culture books relatively recently and I don't remember even a hint of that idea ever coming up in any of them. The most common concept of mind "creation" documented are GSVs physically constructing them and their first ship body. In some places it hints on a sort of ironic/humourous child/parent relationship.
    - db48x 6y ago
      And yet the capability is there within the technologies on display in various books. In Use of Weapons a Mind replaces one character with a machine duplicate that exactly replicates her personality and physiology, complete with memory dumps before and after so that when she gets back she will remember having been in both places. In the same book, the main character is a non-Culture mercenary who got the Culture to make him immortal as his first payment. He can be killed, but he’ll never age. Everyone in the Culture thinks that he’s really weird for doing so. Everyone in the Culture uses their drug glands to consciously tweak their mood and mental capabilities, and when they sleep many of them spend subjective weeks playing adventure–fantasy computer games. With all of that ready to hand, you would think that at least a few Culture citizens would have themselves scanned and uploaded into a computer where they can spend eternity doing whatever they way, including learning how to expand their mind into a Mind. Instead most of them choose to die after 400 years. I think Banks just wanted to write a particular type of story, and so he just air–brushed that possibility out so that people would stay people. Also, don't lose sight of the fact that this utopia is really only possible because energy is literally free, in that any quantity of energy can simply be summoned into existence at any time, for no cost. And they never seem to have to plan for how to dissipate the waste heat, either. Again, he wrote a particular kind of story. Also, once we start building our Dyson swarm we'll be in a similar situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP44EPBMb8A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP44EPBMb8A

square_usual 6y ago

Related: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/07/the-fake-nerd-boys-of-silicon-valley https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/07/the-fake-nerd-boys-of... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23767010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23767010)

travisoneill1 6y ago
Nothing worse than journalists who bitch about people who actually do productive things.

BluSyn 6y ago

I'm a huge fan on The Culture series; probably the most thought-provoking, eye-opening, mind-warping sci-fi ever written. I love the moral shades a gray that the books cover in intense detail. That said, I think the article's author glosses over a lot in order to present a capitalist vs. socialist narrative that feels a bit myopic. I don't think reality is so black and white. I'm not sure The Culture could really be described as a marxist utopia, given the real power + means of production within The Culture is actually in the hands of so few. Nor does Bezos'/Elons' personal wealth necessarily have to be in conflict with their idealist view of the future. This does make me want to re-read the Culture series again. I'm actually sad Amazon was unable to pick up the rights to make a TV series; that has potential to be such an incredible ride.

deleted 6y ago
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vidarh 6y ago
Socialist thinking is about de facto freedom, not de jure freedom. If you have the power and means to do whatever you want then the de jure limits to that power are irrelevant. On the other hand, if you do not have the means to do as you want, then having de jure rights to do what you want is irrelevant. In poverty, then, gaining means is as important as gaining rights, because they are two sides of the same coin. Disagreement between different types of socialist ideologies over how to balance that is part of why socialist political movements span the range from extreme anti-authoritarian to focusing on means, and the power that gives, at the cost of authoritarianism. But in a post-scarcity society, the details of the distribution of power becomes less and less interesting, as long as everyone has enough power to do what they want to do. That de facto power is what matters.
p_l 6y ago
Arguably the unspoken social contract of Culture is how the real power and means of production are shared by all. We're seeing Culture at the point where they deliberately curtailed what's considered normal evolutionary path of civilisation, but several times it's mentioned that when Culture turned independent, Minds weren't "like Gods, on the far side", but the core argument behind the breakaway was that the groups that formed Culture figured free redistribution combined with some significant resourcing models allowed them to "disengage" from capitalism and warfare related to their parent societes.

andrewflnr 6y ago

> ...the process of achieving a utopia—and this is something that Banks studiously avoids showing us. Interestingly, this is not quite true. The Hydrogen Sonata gets a tiny bit into the formation of the Culture.

monkeycantype 6y ago
I understood the books quite differently to the author of the article. (EDIT: Hello Kurt, didn't know you were here, thanks for writing the article, I love reading writing about about Banks, I feel I'm still figuring out all the ways his books and the idea of the Culture in particular have had an impact on me) I'd have said that ingestion and transformation of civilisations into the culture is the focus of the books. I recall that they consist almost entirely of Special Circumstances CIAing its way through the galaxy causing untold misery, with a vague objective of breaking a eggs to come back and make a utopia omelette in a few hundred years. Musk and Bezos would be right at home in Contact : ' I think of the Culture as some incredibly rich lady of leisure who does good, charitable works – she spends a lot of time shopping and getting her hair done, but she goes out and visits the poor people and takes them baskets of vegetables. Contact does that on a large scale.' - https://www.richmondreview.co.uk/banksint/ https://www.richmondreview.co.uk/banksint/ No, what really becomes a point of ideological tension is the process of achieving a utopia—and this is something that Banks studiously avoids showing us.
- p_l 6y ago
  Regarding Special Circumstances pulling abhorrent things for the sake of the future (I won't compare them to CIA, that's an insult to SC), an interesting thing in Use of Weapons is that even Zakalwe considered the purposefully lost war to be abhorrent thing, though he still went with it believing that it will shorten the timescale somehow.
  - monkeycantype 6y ago
    Hi p_l, I read all the books as they came out, I was a teenager when I read Consider Phlebas, and took everything the culture claimed about itself at face value. I'm looking forward going back and rereading them, having shifting over time to thinking that the culture may be an unreliable narrator of it's own history and ideology, pacifism is the culture's national mythology equivalent to Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, rather than a statement of fact. Of course I want to live there.

varjag 6y ago

In several novels of the series, the protagonists are embedded as powerful beings into primitive and very unjust societies.

radicaldreamer 6y ago

Misses the mark that "The Culture" is really a benevolent (well, to some it encounters) dictatorship of AIs... which tolerates humans because they like humans, kind of like how humans like their dogs and cats, indulge them, and bond with them.

scotty79 6y ago
I wouldn't call it a dictatorship. The world of AIs went so far ahead that they don't really 'rule' humans in any sense. They just make up their environment. Same way we make up the environment of lives of our pets. AIs help humans with their spare capacity out of curiosity and benevolence but they don't really hesitate about inconveniencing them when there are greater things at play. As for political system among AIs it looks to me as a sort of benevolent anarchy where individuals do what ought to be done in accordance to shared logic and etiquette. There is a cool moment when etiquette is violated and one AI comes unannounced to solar system where other is residing. And this other is highly alarmed and fully expecting to be forced to fight for its survival.
ben_w 6y ago
The Minds written about mostly seem to be the worst of them; but the exposition about the wider Culture showed they’re about as far as it’s possible to be from a dictatorship. As for the scale of difference between organic and artificial intelligences, with one organic exception whose name I forget, the impression I had was that the difference between typical organic (/drone) and an Orbital’s hub Mind was more like the difference between a gardener and their lawn: human gardeners can communicate with each individual blade of grass under their care (by controlling the level of sunlight or shade and the general chemical environment), but – considering how little each blade has to say in return – looking after them uses such as tiny fraction of a human brain’s capacity that even an entire large lawn of them would not be the only thing one does with one’s life.
- tialaramex 6y ago
  We see some pretty nasty ship Minds, e.g. one of the protagonists of Surface Detail, Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints is by its own admission psychotic. But it is a warship, and Veppers is, in fact, making war albeit one he can't hope to win. But we also see some that are much nicer, the Bora Horza Gobuchul takes a very balanced outlook on events and on its namesake; the Sleeper Service cares very much about just one pregnant woman even if it also has other reasons to be doing what it is doing; the Lasting Damage organises much of the events of Look to Windward, including a lovely music festival to celebrate its own death. Writing about Utopia is hard, and Banks mostly avoids doing so. We see only fleeting glimpses, a woman's apparent rejection from her chosen career, a game player's frustration at not being the very best, a spoiled girl who wants an adventure she isn't prepared for. They're character backdrops, not focuses. I think the Gaiman run of Miracleman (Miracleman, in some places and times called Marvelman, was a comic book, historically a pulpy knock-off, then made into something quite extraordinary by Alan Moore, and then Gaiman took over for an aborted run last century) is the best treatment of Utopia in fiction I've read. Gaiman's completed "Golden Age" of Miracleman zooms in on the brief period after Miracleman defeats the Adversary and before things go sour. This is an age of enlightened absolute government, nuclear weapons are destroyed ("teleported into the sun"), poverty and homelessness are eliminated, there's wind power and something equivalent to the Internet, even the dead can be brought back after a fashion. But nevertheless, people are still people. The stories follow a woman whose husband is cheating on her, what has been done with all the now redundant spies, school children rebelling against... whatever you've got. Miracleman himself appears rarely, and his daughter gets one issue, sort of, through a story-within-a-story that allows Gaiman to sidestep the conventions of comic books.

trestenhortz 6y ago

Iain M Banks is the absolute best sci fi if you love space opera. After Dune of course, but Dune stands alone.

disillusioned 6y ago

Apropos of nothing, my "The Culture Novels, Ranked": 1. Excession 2. Player of Games 3. The Hydrogen Sonata 4. Matter 5. Surface Detail 6. Look to Windward 7. Consider Phlebas 8. Inversions 9. Hitting myself with a hammer 10. Use of Weapons

scotty79 6y ago
I would move Matter and Surface Detail to the first two spots and bumped up Use of Weapons few positions up, but the rest can stay in that order. ;-)
tern 6y ago
I once went on a bit of a journey to find "realistic" novels about AI and outside of Superintelligence (which I enjoyed reading as if it were a novel) and The Age of Em, Excession is one of the best I found. Still, nowhere close—I eventually concluded that truly imagining artificial intelligence in a way that would make for a compelling narrative is mostly impossible. Others include: - Accelerando - A Fire Upon the Deep - Permutation City - Daemon So far, the only sci-fi novel that meets the level of rigor I was looking for—albeit about aliens rather than AI—is The Three Body Problem.
- fossuser 6y ago
  You need to read True Names: http://www.scotswolf.com/TRUENAMES.pdf http://www.scotswolf.com/TRUENAMES.pdf
- speed_spread 6y ago
  You might like Peter Watt's Blindsight.
  - marvin 6y ago
    Blindsight and Echopraxia are absolutely brilliant accounts of "what happens when you meet someone who is dramatically smarter than yourself". I'm glad someone on HN recommended them to me.
6y ago

aboodman 6y ago

I feel like I'm the only tech guy who doesn't like these novels. I've tried a few times since so many people I respect like them. But it's a utopia. Everyone has everything they want and nothing can go wrong. That's like the context these novels start up in ... and I ... just can't get into it. I imagine stuff must actually eventually happen, but I never get that far.

Scarblac 6y ago
Which did you try? This is the reason most (all?) of the books focus on things outside or on the fringes of the utopia.
- aboodman 6y ago
  Player of Games and Consider Phlebas.
  - aboodman 6y ago
    I'll try again at some point.
    - Tor3 6y ago
      Try Excession. I agree "Consider Phlebas" may not be the best one to start with if you're not familiar with The Culture already, and even then it may be a bit hard to get through.
  - p_l 6y ago
    Consider Phlebas is hard read, and considered the weakest book in the story. Excession is probably the most different one, as a lot of it is essentially email logs, and doesn't deal much with the utopian elements except as far background (a lot of the main characters are at least a little eccentric from Culture point of view). Look to Windward has a lot of the Utopia, but is IMHO quite good read except maybe for some of the chapters happening outside of Culture. Use of Weapons happens pretty much entirely outside of the main Culture body.

glangdale 6y ago

The Culture was seemed too difficult for Banks to write about directly; a very large proportion of the Culture books are written about the intersection between the Culture and the "rest of the universe". (side note: It's been a while since I've read them, and I admit I generally only reread the first 4 or so, due to sameiness and/or IMB's increasingly grody enthusiasm to describe Bad Stuff happening to people, preferably women, so we can be really righteously mad when There is Big Revenge. Sadly, this enthusiasm seems to have sparked a trend among even less-restrained authors like Richard Morgan, so I often hesitate to pick up an SF book for fear of reading about, I dunno, women getting heated irons stuffed into their genitals or something) That said, Contact and Special Circumstances are usually what he describes - it's like he couldn't quite come up with much to write about that was within the Culture per se. So most of the action is the Culture at war, regardless of how supposedly peaceful and enlightened the Culture is. I'm not surprised that Bezos and Musk are fans. Given the way post-scarcity is presented as more or less natural outcome of strong AI and space-opera-level physics, a post-scarcity society is entirely unthreatening to a modern-day billionaire (aside, I guess, from the decline in their relative condition - but in absolute terms, even Bezos and Musk would benefit enormously from being transported to the Culture, as it stands). It's not like we're achieving some sort of utopia by redistributing the resources of people like them (I am not claiming that's a good idea).

scotty79 6y ago
Culture at peace is just minds sitting around and spending most of their brain power in 'infinite fun space' which is just infinite math done for enjoyment. And humans do whatever, while being watched and accompanied by thousands of ship avatars using up just a fraction of AI power. When there's no matter to attend AIs are not doing anything interesting, so the stories are just "Culture at (usually someone else's) war" crossed with "life of pets". But it's so much fun. :-)
- ben_w 6y ago
  > spending most of their brain power in 'infinite fun space' which is just infinite math done for enjoyment. I read this and immediately thought “Bitcoin!”, thought I got the impression from the books that IFS was more like a cross between Sudoku and World of Watcraft — both nerdy and potentially dangerously addictive.

bawolff 6y ago

> a world where your Bezoses and your Musks are not just irrelevant, but actively sought out and disempowered by a society comprised of property-less workers and all-caring, mostly-benevolent A.I.s? Irrelevant maybe, but i dont see how they are disempowered in the Culture books. The culture books are full of busy-bodies trying to change the course of events. I'm sure that would be appealing to CEO types in a post scarcity world.

p_l 6y ago
The difference is that what makes a billionaire CEO special is purposefully de-specialized by Culture. A Culture citizen is effectively richer than most (with exceptions), but does not have any more power than other Culture citizens. They do not have power over others, except for the effective social standings related to various things - from which anyone can effectively leave, even possibly faking one's own death. Any bondage to the social status is self-made, as can be seen in some more eccentric characters, unless one breaks some of the few taboos that Culture has - like non-consensual mind control, murder, etc.
- bawolff 6y ago
  We dont talk about musk just because he's rich - we talk about him because he translated his wealth into nerd cred/social standing by investing in space ships, electric cars and leo satellite internet, which excites the imagination.

CryptoPunk 6y ago

>>the absurdity of one of the most exploitative corporations Unnecessary ideologically motivated mud-slinging. Amazon is chosen by consumers because it offers better selection, lower prices, and faster delivery. Amazon has left the world much better than how it found it, unless you think people's wages being able to buy less (i.e. people getting lower inflation-adjusted wages) is somehow a better state of life.

SyzygistSix 6y ago
I could buy that argument a lot easier if they treated their workers better.

gadders 6y ago

Communism and Capitalism seem like competing ways of allocating resources when they are scarce. Do resources get allocated by central planning, or are they allocated by people trading with each other? When scarcity ends, I'm not sure either of them are valid descriptions any more. You could say it's communism because there is no private property, but with infinite resources why would there be? If someone (say) takes my jetpack, but I can click my fingers and have an identical one appear then what would be the point in "owning" one?

arminiusreturns 6y ago
> Bodily and personal autonomy was also deeply important to Banks, and to his creations: people in the Culture are free to structure both their lives and their bodies as they see fit. > Which bit of not having private property, and the absence of money in the Culture novels, have these people missed?” I think one thing about discussions that involve private property is that it is often viewed as just material possesions of an external nature, but to me as a constitutionalist, private property is a concept beyond that, which also applies to the self, whether that is body, mind or otherwise, just as much to external things. I often find my more conservative friends don't articulate this, but it is a source of complications of communication with socialists, etc, who ask the same question you do: whats the big deal about private property? Just a little perspective on the topic, if I may.
p_l 6y ago
Communism doesn't have to involve central planning - in fact, the Soviet Union (if you dug enough) would agree that their economy is State Capitalism.
- gadders 6y ago
  Is this going to be a one true Scotsman type defence of Communism? Happy for you to identify a nation state that has communism without central planning.
  - p_l 6y ago

rini17 6y ago

Citation needed for "a world where your Bezoses and your Musks are not just irrelevant, but actively sought out and disempowered by a society comprised of property-less workers and all-caring, mostly-benevolent A.I.s?" As in, in which book such thing happened?

ceejayoz 6y ago
All of them? Banks was a socialist crafting a post-scarcity society. https://www.tor.com/2017/11/24/the-revolutionary-optimism-of-iain-m-banks-culture-novels/ https://www.tor.com/2017/11/24/the-revolutionary-optimism-of... > On Earth one of the things that a large proportion of the locals is most proud of is this wonderful economic system which, with a sureness and certainty so comprehensive one could almost imagine the process bears some relation to their limited and limiting notions of either thermodynamics or God, all food, comfort, energy, shelter, space, fuel and sustenance gravitates naturally and easily away from those who need it most and towards those who need it least. Indeed, those on the receiving end of such largesse are often harmed unto death by its arrival, though the effects may take years and generations to manifest themselves. “The State of the Art”
- rini17 6y ago
  I did read them. And I don't remember any instance where Bezoses or Musks were actively sought out and disempowered. On the contrary, they can develop stuff without having to ensure employees are happy and fed. That burden is taken care of by the AI. Plus, if their ideas are any good, AI will help further by offloading most of the corporate management. How can Musk and Bezos not like that?
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    Surface Detail's plot revolves around the take-down of the richest capitalist on a planet by the Culture.
    - nuncid 6y ago
      Surface Detail's plot revolves around destroying a simulated version of hell. That it was hosted on that person's servers is just a detail.

marvin 6y ago

I greatly enjoyed this article, not necessarily for what it says, but for what it doesn't. It has an ideological undercurrent that probably doesn't represent either the views of Banks, Musk or Bezos; rather, the author attempts to interpret the words of Banks to refute something that neither Musk nor Bezos actually think. What I enjoy so much about the Culture series is Banks' account of the good things in human nature, while also acknowledging the chaotic and sometimes violent, contradictory parts of our motivations. I view the series as a rare, honest attempt at answering the question "if you could wish anything you wanted for humanity, what would you wish for?" Trying to frame such a wish in a way that keeps only what we want to keep, if there were no materialistic limits. I am not sure that Banks would agree with me, but I've interpreted his socialist angle as merely what seemed the best plausible path towards that, from his point of view. Rather than with communism as an end to itself. There's so much philosophy to unpack in this question, and it's fascinating to consider it through the lens of what might be possible in contemporary and near-future society. Today's richest people, while having tremendous power, obviously don't all wish to enslave humanity, the way one could erroneously conclude by going too deeply into far-left ideology. Neither do they necessarily try to move directly in the direction of "progress", if we define progress to mean the fastest possible path towards the nebulous, ideal future of humanity as described above. But certainly some of the efforts of humanity's brightest are pulling us in this direction, and it seems implausible that any single contemporary ideology has the answer. It wouldn't surprise me if some billionaires would wish to move society in that direction. The apparent contradiction in that seems superficial to me. I'm sure that many ideologies get part of the question right, but they all leave so much room for the parts of human nature that we would largely exclude, if given the choice. As do the power structures in contemporary society. They are limited by both the practical limits of contemporary economics and the partially selfish human motivations of their members.

thinkingemote 6y ago

I saw a talk with Ian Banks a year before he died and at the end of the talk one of the questions from the audience was about why he made so utopian books. He answered that he saw that it was likely that when we create AI and they become more intelligent than us with the potential to rule over us, that the AI will be kind and beneficial to their makers. I think he really did see that the end result of technology was good for the human race.

m463 6y ago

I love the culture series. Ironic that in the US (last I checked) many books were not available on kindle.

SunlightEdge 6y ago

Woh. Amazon Prime is going to make a TV series out of Ian M Banks Culture novels! Loved his books - he might be my favourite science fiction writer

paulz_ 6y ago
Unfortunately it was canceled. https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/26/21402585/amazon-cancels-tv-adaptation-culture-series-iain-m-banks-consider-phlebas https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/26/21402585/amazon-cancels-t...
- SunlightEdge 6y ago
  Noooo

SyzygistSix 6y ago

"At one level, it’s easy to see the appeal of The Culture novels to the likes of Bezos and Musk. After all, these men are far closer than anyone else to actually living the life of a Culture citizen. Their every whim is met, and they are free from hunger, struggle, and strife." italics mine I don't know what world the author lives in but, even though I don't believe all the press about Musk, I'm pretty sure both Bezos and Musk have considerably more struggle and strife going on than I do, despite our day to day, month to month challenges being quite different. And I'm pretty grateful for that. I prefer a very different work/life balance, not that I've seen any indication that Musk thinks his is healthy or even recommended. It's a cartoonish view of people who made money by starting ventures like this.

TheCoelacanth 6y ago
Bezos and Musk's struggles are purely self-inflicted in the pursuit of self-actualization. Exactly the same as the struggles faced by a Culturenik.
- AYBABTME 6y ago
  I'd say (almost) everybody is self-actualizing as a primary activity.

alexwasserman 6y ago

As a particularly glib answer - both Musk and Bezos themselves already live in a post-scarcity environment. Neither of them want for anything. They have enough clout, influence, and money to play games like their own personal Special Circumstances projects.

thegreyone 6y ago

Easy to explain. Capitalism/socialism are opposite sides of the communist coin. Capitalism funded the bolshevik revolution. There is, ofc, a connection between these ideologies...

sershe 6y ago

I think they like it for a reason that Banks himself would have disapproved of, and that the author misses completely. I'm pretty sure one of the reasons Banks didn't describe the origins and how-to of creating Culture is that he believed that to be impossible (the article touches on that a bit in the end). That actually reminds me of Noon universe, by Strugatsky brothers (that was published much earlier, although not in English ;), that is also an explicitly communist utopia mostly described thru interactions with non-utopian civilizations, although in this case the former is much less in focus and the focus is on the latter. Unlike Culture, I understand it was born incrementally as various novels shared characters and parts of the theme; also unlike Culture, the authors incrementally arrived at sort of a conclusion of the narrative that they mentioned in the interviews but didn't finish before their deaths. The idea, for the unfinished White Queen novel, was going to be that a character from the complete utopia encounters a society that built a small partial utopia, and a member of the latter eventually tells him that the complete utopia he's describing cannot exist, he must be living in a sci-fi novel :) The reason Bezos and Musk might like the Culture universe because they are technological optimists - they believe technology can in fact build something like that. Thomas Sowell said "The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.". The first lesson of technology for Bezos and Musk is probably that it can gradually abolish the first lesson of economics :)