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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.

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.