10 ms·

Philip K. Dick’s dystopia

112 points by miobrien 4y ago

responsible 4y ago
PKD didn’t consider encryption and the many tools we can use to thwart spying and surveillance. I’m tired of these articles that suggest we’re helpless fools sleepwalking into a dystopia. Encryption is all we have now to fight Orwellian dystopias and it’s worth having good opsec (depending on your threat model). I feel very safe and cozy on the web and with technology in general because it’s all locked down. MFA. Password managers, AD blockers, secure operating systems, compartmentalized identities etc
- anony23 4y ago
  This either satire or laughably naive. You think big brother doesnt have disproportionate access to crack or backdoor the tech that makes you feel so safe?
- alsetmusic 4y ago
  If you trust encryption, sure[0]. But state actors have basically unlimited resources. I don’t think any individual can stand up against that forever. [0] https://www.wired.com/2013/09/nsa-backdoored-and-stole-keys/ https://www.wired.com/2013/09/nsa-backdoored-and-stole-keys/
  - Finnucane 4y ago
    And in addition, to say we can use encryption to fight the surveillance state is a tacit admission that the system actually works as described, or at least that is the intent. And again Dick was not trying to predict actual technology. He was mainly thinking about how it could be used, and he was frequently on the mark.
  - TheBlight 4y ago
    To add to that: https://youtu.be/_ahcUuNO4so https://youtu.be/_ahcUuNO4so - "Crypto Won't Save You Either" from Peter Gutmann
- causi 4y ago
  I’m tired of these articles that suggest we’re helpless fools sleepwalking into a dystopia We aren't. 95% of people are.
- kastagg 4y ago
  To illustrate how far this discussion is from PKD's frame of reference, PKD didn't need encryption when VALIS used a pink laser beam from space to trigger anamnesis so he remembered that he was a secret Christian in ancient Rome, and also predicted that his son would suffer from an inguinal hernia. In case that wasn't clear enough, PKD wasn't talking about what you're talking about.
- motohagiography 4y ago
  Where reading PKD and absorbing his worldview ends and a career in infosec begins is incresingly vague. I've been in it since the 90's and tbh, sometimes I think cybersecurity is just a way of collecting undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenics and setting them against one another for sport. If it weren't, how would we know? There is a great talk by him from about '77 where he outlines the basic idea that we are living in a simulation that became the basis for the plot of The Matrix movies, and the logic is pretty classic psychological disassociation and paranoia you get from using drugs over time. Not to diminish his huge contributions, but there's stuff that's right on the edge. One of the beautiful elements of the "Mr. Robot" series is that this underlying question is also a major plot point. You can see him in the video here (sorry, the better versions seem to haven scrubbed) https://youtu.be/_U6lgSbPj8Q?t=47 https://youtu.be/_U6lgSbPj8Q?t=47 , and he's got the kind of blunted affect that is typically associated with decline. His book "Exegesis," which were the letters he was writing to people at the time are consistent with indications something was going wrong as well. When I was just learning synths and a new sampler over the pandemic, I produced a track from a live session with samples from the speech, albeit they were in reference to the "Computer Controlled" logo on the 303 bass synth I used in it: https://soundcloud.com/n-gram-music/exegesis https://soundcloud.com/n-gram-music/exegesis , but I sampled just the best parts. This is to say, neither PKD nor hackers concerned about surveillance dystopia today may have a reliable picture, as paranoia can be really enveloping. That said, of course that's what They would say - you can see how this becomes an inescapable spiral. Paranoia is the iterated logic of an idea and unless you uproot the foudational one, by virtue of perfectly reasonable and consistent logic, it's going to creep back.
- curun1r 4y ago
  You're assuming that we're talking about a government surveillance setup where information is intended to be private. But the article's discussion still applies when the subject matter is canceling people on social networks. In fact it seems even more apropos of the dual identity of both subject and narc that the article discusses. Traditional government surveillance makes most of us solely subjects with little role in the enforcement process. But in a world where mob justice applies social sanctions, we're all simultaneously judges and candidates to become defendants, able to be condemned by our own words. Encryption is irrelevant when those words are intended for public consumption. Black Mirror did an episode on what it would look like if your social reputation were reified into concrete societal privileges. That kind of ad absurdum exploration makes the surveillance state of social networks much easier to recognize.
- paulpauper 4y ago
  PKD didn’t consider encryption and the many tools we can use to thwart spying and surveillance. I have lost count of the times people used encryption and either it was broken or subverted in some way, an example being the FBI creating its own encryption app as a major honeypot. Encryption apps, chat programs , protocols, etc. have a recurring tendency to be broken or have leaks.
photochemsyn 4y ago
Interesting writeup, and the modern surveillance state certainly has a lot of parallels to Philip K. Dick's world, although the personal flavor of the latter - i.e. the extensive use of undercover STASI-type operatives in A Scanner Darkly, characterized by the betrayal of trust in personal and intimate relationships, is not as much of an obvious general feature of Facebook-type data collection and NSA archival data tracking of both American citizens and non-citizens. At least our current system is not (yet) a true panopticon, which is a system where the prison guards can see all the prisoners, all the time, but the prisoners cannot see or communicate with one another. People can still communicate with one another, but the expectation of privacy is almost entirely gone. Certainly the power structure can see who is communicating with who via metadata monitoring, even if strong encryption can hide the content of the communication in many cases. The extent to which general knowledge of this constant monitoring changes mass social behavior isn't really known, but one imagines it's the kind of thing the research anthropologists in CIA Behavioral Studies programs - characters that populate many PKD works - are obsessed with. Incidentally, PKD's drug-psychosis-theme in many of his works is most likely linked to amphetamine psychosis, a fairly well-studied and well-understood side effect of constant use of amphetamines and their derivatives or analogues (i.e amphetamine, (Adderall), methamphetamine, MDMA (Ecstacy), methylphenidate (Ritalin)). These widely prescribed, used and abused substances should be regarded with more caution, I think - particularly when it comes to ADHD diagnoses in children. Certainly the for-profit drug manufacturers shouldn't be trusted on this, nor the mass social behavior manipulation types. Also, it's likely that Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, another vision of a drug-addled dystopian future (1932), was a major influence on PKD's dystopian works.
- myth_drannon 4y ago
  Most likely some of the communication moved or will move from online to in-person. Similar to Soviet like kitchen talks, far from KGB spies.
- barrysteve 4y ago
  The breakdown of personal relationships has been influenced by Facebook style social media. We crested that wave back in 2012-2015 when politics roared across the web and split families, wives and husbands and laid the groundwork for making any form of verbal negativity a social faux pas. It is close enough to a true panopticon. Inside of any form of web communication, the compulsion to not say anything that rocks the boat too much is felt and seen clearly in people's behaviour. Even in "private" encrypted chat the culture is one of which we shouldn't say anything lest it be leaked, evidence of that outcome or not. Drawing conclusions from ADHD related diagnoses is difficult. The illness is incredibly poorly defined and the state-of-the-art biological research has yet to identify what the problem is, or who even has it. The waters are even muddier, ADHD is frequently diagnosed in the place of other hidden difficulties like narcolepsy, depression, thyroid problems, vitamin deficiency and more. I agree more caution is warranted and also more research. Psychologists operate in a grey area where they can prescribe and hide more than is arguably justifiable.
feintruled 4y ago
I love how their comments section censor any mention of him to D**k. Big PKD fan myself, some of his stories seem impossibly fanciful and he does bang on about drugs an AWFUL lot but the stories can have a lot of insight in them all the same. In one of his books, the characters take drugs so powerful reality itself changes. Bit rum even for PKD, I had thought. Until I read the account of a depression sufferer when asked how he knew his medication was kicking in. He said he felt no internal changes whatsoever, but knew it was working when other people starting being nicer to him. And I realised PKD had got to the truth of something, how we take drugs maybe not to change ourselves but our perceptions of the world, and if your perception of the world changes is that not the world changing?
- jl6 4y ago
  > if your perception of the world changes is that not the world changing? On the other hand, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing it, doesn't go away.”
- russh 4y ago
  No. Changing our perceptions of the world does not change the world. If I put on rose colored glasses I change nothing except how I perceive the world, the world stays the same.
  - Osmium 4y ago
    1. Your mind is also part of the world. Changing your perceptions is changing part of the world. 2. All human minds are only capable of perceiving a small fraction of the total information content of the world, and most of our perceptions are based on constructed social realities (e.g., as this is a tech forum, you could say we live in a virtual machine where small rectangles of woven fiber are given a meaning far beyond the mere fact of their existence, purely based upon our collective perceptions of what those rectangles represent). Changing our perceptions can therefore change this social reality and, as a result, change the context in which we live. Forgive me for the high-school philosophizing.
  - canjobear 4y ago
brudgers 4y ago
I read the headline and into my chicken head “well of course, the empire never ended” popped.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  My reaction to the headline was "which one" to which the article responds "basically all of them"
kastagg 4y ago
This piece shows little awareness of Philip K. Dick's work or the circumstances of his life. PKD wasn't on the typical agenda of a sci-fi author, so it won't really work to analyze his work that way. PKD's fiction doesn't have any clear goal of futurology, deeply analyzing technology (like, say, Arthur C. Clarke) or presenting dystopias (like, say, George Orwell). A Scanner Darkly was written at a tough time in his life and was autobiographical in some fragmentary way. Tessa Dick made a sci-fi novel out of it, but the veneer over 1960s California is paper-thin. It would be more adequate to say that PKD focused on spiritual and religious subjects, particularly the nature of reality and how the "little creatures" suffer and struggle to survive. This isn't a mode of futurology. PKD struggled with the symptoms of diagnosed schizophrenia and his work powerfully reflects that personal struggle. "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" is about a spiritual dystopia that doesn't center the replicants at all - that theme of "our idea of the human" comes rather from Ridley Scott. Then comes the political pivot near the end of this blog post. PKD didn't predict COVID-19 or even try. It's spectacularly unclear that he was trying to warn us about the "danger" of qualified scientists telling us that it would be helpful to get vaccinated and wear masks to reduce the death and disability caused by a lethal pandemic. COVID-19 has killed over a million people in the US alone - hundreds of 9/11s worth. This isn't a conspiracy to control you with technology. To quote a certain wise wizard, "I am not trying to rob you. I'm trying to help you."
- stevenwoo 4y ago
  It's weird how they focused on A Scanner Darkly, I thought Ubik was more prescient in the small part of the plot that corporations run the world and advertising for them is ubiquitous.
  - rwmj 4y ago
    One of them is a movie and the other one isn't (although searching IMDB tells me that an Ubik movie is in development - yay!). You can't expert journalists to read books now can you?
    - NoraCodes 4y ago
NoraCodes 4y ago
I'm all for criticizing hypocrisy, especially in government, but the COVID example strikes me as perhaps the worst possible for demonstrating the point. Some level of "draconian" action would have helped slow, or even stop, the spread of COVID-19; at least in the US, none was taken. A far better example, which actually involves surveillance rather than unrelated masking and distancing measures, would be politicians and wealthy businesspeople pushing invasive CSAM detection systems into consumer devices "for the good of the children" while schmoozing with Jeffrey Epstein. Typical faff from Unherd; a long article full of information better explained elsewhere followed by a poorly veiled gesture towards their existing agenda.
- throwaway22032 4y ago
  Go and look at China.
  - NoraCodes 4y ago
    I absolutely agree. You're comparing an undemocratic illiberal totalitarian state's violent actions against citizens to the US government giving away vaccines, stopping international travel for a short time, and some states and municipalities mandating the wearing of masks. Nobody was taken to the gulag about it. That's not dystopian.
    - weakfish 4y ago
      I do find it amusing how far the window for what Americans consider draconian is from the rest of the world. If I was smarter I could perhaps write an essay drawing on our absurd focus on individualism.
    - origin_path 4y ago
      International travel (into the USA for non residents/citizens) is still stopped for people who didn't take the vaccine even though it doesn't work and never stopped transmission anyway. So it was absolutely a set of Draconian and totalitarian moves that had no impact whatsoever.
    - 4y ago
zasdffaa 4y ago
- trebbble 4y ago
  We don't get to see, directly, how everyone else experiences life. They might tell us, and they might do so more or less truthfully and accurately. They might struggle to communicate those things in a way we really understand. Meanwhile, we ourselves may struggle to explain our experiences and perspectives to others, or be ashamed or embarrassed about doing so. One aim of literature and poetry is (or may be) to open up that inner world—to do a better job of expressing those experiences than most folks manage to, to do so across a breadth of experience we may not all encounter, and to make explicit and examinable things we may not ourselves think to examine, or may otherwise think shameful or private and ours alone. Like, say, the experience of taking a drug and not feeling at all like you changed, but that the world did, as in the original example. The practical utility of this in communication is evident in that the well-read tend to reach for episodes from literature or passages of poetry to relate difficult concepts concerning that inner life, and this practice is in fact helpful to readers who have a similar background, or, if you will, a common language (as in the section of my post that you quoted). This is seen extensively in philosophy, for example, and is so helpful in religion that even those that try to downplay literature or scripture (Buddhism, for example) tend to end up with extensive literatures regardless, because they are so useful for relating difficult, very personal ideas and experiences, even if they can only ever be the "finger that points" and never directly the thing-in-itself. For the individual per se it can help us understand ourselves, help us feel less alone, act as a kind of therapy to some degree, be one factor in working out what exactly we're doing here, what we want or ought to be doing, expand or exercise our empathy, and provide ethical and moral guideposts more effectively than any kind of "do this, don't do that" list of bullet points.
  - zasdffaa 4y ago
    > and to make explicit and examinable things we may not ourselves think to examine, or may otherwise think shameful or private and ours alone That's just a claim, I could write the complete opposite and have it be just as (in)valid. > be one factor in working out what exactly we're doing here, what we want or ought to be doing, expand OK, so give some examples. Without saying "we all are doing/wanting different things". Get a mate, have a comfortable life... any advance on that? > and provide ethical and moral guideposts more effectively than any kind of "do this, don't do that" list of bullet points Another unverified claim and I don't accept any of it. Point is when artistic types are pushed into a corner they come up with this kind of handwavy stuff about being human or whatever, the point being the fuzzier the claim the harder it is to dispute. Art needs to at least try to be as rigorous as science, as it stands it so often lets itself down.
crhulls 4y ago
On a light note, I live down the street from PKD's old house in Point Reyes. I drove by yesterday and took this pic. The current owner has setup a Starlink above his old study where he wrote many of his books. https://imgur.com/a/DojT97L https://imgur.com/a/DojT97L I wonder what he would have thought if someone told him that 50 years later, just a few feet above his head, that there would be an antenna talking to a swarm of low earth orbit satellites in space, that could access all information known to man. But, at least 20% of the data flow would be used to share images of people having sex with each other. He actually might have been one of the few people from that era who would NOT have been surprised this was the future.
- Trasmatta 4y ago
  Is Starlink connected to VALIS, I wonder...
  - crhulls 4y ago
    Many of us who live out here have seen the pink beam... :)
    - Trasmatta 4y ago
      Perhaps one day we'll escape from the Black Iron Prison
  - anony23 4y ago
    PKD might actually have been a psychic time traveler!
peter_d_sherman 4y ago
>"Technology was and is perhaps the most Californian aspect of the American mythos. The idea that the universal constants of human nature were at war with the mutilating demands of technology-driven systems was a very Sixties Californian conceit, to which Dick’s fellow anti-utopians each adhered in their own way: In Kesey’s showdown between man and the castrating nanny-state; in Didion’s emphasis on the vanishing virtue of self-reliance; in Pynchon’s degenerate Ivy League Puritanism; in Thompson’s drug-addled primitivism; and in Stone’s Catholic idea of devotion to a God that might somehow salve the wounds of the survivors once the great American adventure goes bust." What an interesting quote! I will have to check out some of the works of those other authors in the future, to examine the idea sets they propose, and then (after having read them thoroughly!) possibly add some of the better/more interesting ideas they propose -- to my "chock-full-o'-everything philosophical idea corpus in my mind" <g> (For lack of a better term!) Anyway, a very interesting quote -- worthy of future study!
labrador 4y ago
P.K. churned out much of his work in an amphetamine haze driven by then need to make money as writing was his sole means of support. I think a lot of California dystopian writings can be attributed to the overuse of amphetamines. The Summer of Love was destroyed by it as the phrase that emerged at the time was "Speed Kills." Joan Didion wrote about it "Slouching Towards Bethlehem.' On the other hand I'm a optimistic utopian, so I may be inclined to minimize and disregard dystopian writing. Where P.K. Dick really got me is in "How to Build a..." [1] in which he's very interested in the nature of reality and open to the idea that it is far more fungible than we think and in fact there may be a greater intelligence at work in the Universe that arranges reality in such a way as to communicate to the participant who is paying close attention. It doesn't scare and depress me to think that I don't have the control I thought I did and am mostly along for the ride. It's also exciting to think "more will be revealed" [1] "How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later" Philip K. Dick, 1978 https://urbigenous.net/library/how_to_build.html https://urbigenous.net/library/how_to_build.html
- pharke 4y ago
  > there may be a greater intelligence at work in the Universe He believed that there may be two greater intelligences diametrically opposed to each other and vying for control over the universe in order to remake it according to their own preferences. He expressed in his interview in Metz, France 1977[0] that he believes they are engaged in a constant struggle of programming and reprogramming the universe and history each trying to undo the others work. He connects this idea to his novels The Man In The High Castle and Flow My Tears The Policeman Said both of which involve alternate timelines. He even thought that he could retrieve memories of other timelines or other incarnations and that some of them were in worlds that were much more brutal than our own. All this to say that his belief in a higher power certainly followed the same lines of thought that he explored in his novels. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkaQUZFbJjE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkaQUZFbJjE
VictorPath 4y ago
> a surveillance society run by engineers would feel like to its inhabitants with a nauseating accuracy that did not become fully apparent until the rise of the modern tech surveillance complex. Dick used to write letters to the FBI in the 1970s urging them to investigate fellow science fiction writers like Thomas Disch or professors like Fredrick Jameson. He was a participant in (delusionaly?) ratting people out to the secret police. I'll leave it to others to forecast a dystopia, he seems to forecast a dystopia he is trying to build.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  He could have done us all a favor and ratted out LRH.
8bitsrule 4y ago
Read most of Phil's books - not more than once - enjoyed them for what they were ... paranoid, dark, imaginative, disorganized, groping ... but wouldn't include him with the great writers (showing what it can mean to be human in its great variety ... and how that can be denied us ... revealing more as we age). Bladerunner (the director's cut anyway) was a great film, still among my top favorites. It added much-needed clarity to some of Phil's best cud-chewings. Without the film, I think he'd have remained relatively unknown. Other authors, before and since him, I may turn back to for another read - because they offer me more than more confusion.
- scruple 4y ago
  As a fan of PKD, and a variety of others in the same vein, I'd probably be curious to read some of these books by these other authors.

112 points by miobrien 4y ago

PKD didn’t consider encryption and the many tools we can use to thwart spying and surveillance. I’m tired of these articles that suggest we’re helpless fools sleepwalking into a dystopia. Encryption is all we have now to fight Orwellian dystopias and it’s worth having good opsec (depending on your threat model). I feel very safe and cozy on the web and with technology in general because it’s all locked down. MFA. Password managers, AD blockers, secure operating systems, compartmentalized identities etc

anony23 4y ago
This either satire or laughably naive. You think big brother doesnt have disproportionate access to crack or backdoor the tech that makes you feel so safe?
alsetmusic 4y ago
If you trust encryption, sure[0]. But state actors have basically unlimited resources. I don’t think any individual can stand up against that forever. [0] https://www.wired.com/2013/09/nsa-backdoored-and-stole-keys/ https://www.wired.com/2013/09/nsa-backdoored-and-stole-keys/
- Finnucane 4y ago
  And in addition, to say we can use encryption to fight the surveillance state is a tacit admission that the system actually works as described, or at least that is the intent. And again Dick was not trying to predict actual technology. He was mainly thinking about how it could be used, and he was frequently on the mark.
- TheBlight 4y ago
  To add to that: https://youtu.be/_ahcUuNO4so https://youtu.be/_ahcUuNO4so - "Crypto Won't Save You Either" from Peter Gutmann
causi 4y ago
I’m tired of these articles that suggest we’re helpless fools sleepwalking into a dystopia We aren't. 95% of people are.
kastagg 4y ago
To illustrate how far this discussion is from PKD's frame of reference, PKD didn't need encryption when VALIS used a pink laser beam from space to trigger anamnesis so he remembered that he was a secret Christian in ancient Rome, and also predicted that his son would suffer from an inguinal hernia. In case that wasn't clear enough, PKD wasn't talking about what you're talking about.
motohagiography 4y ago
Where reading PKD and absorbing his worldview ends and a career in infosec begins is incresingly vague. I've been in it since the 90's and tbh, sometimes I think cybersecurity is just a way of collecting undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenics and setting them against one another for sport. If it weren't, how would we know? There is a great talk by him from about '77 where he outlines the basic idea that we are living in a simulation that became the basis for the plot of The Matrix movies, and the logic is pretty classic psychological disassociation and paranoia you get from using drugs over time. Not to diminish his huge contributions, but there's stuff that's right on the edge. One of the beautiful elements of the "Mr. Robot" series is that this underlying question is also a major plot point. You can see him in the video here (sorry, the better versions seem to haven scrubbed) https://youtu.be/_U6lgSbPj8Q?t=47 https://youtu.be/_U6lgSbPj8Q?t=47 , and he's got the kind of blunted affect that is typically associated with decline. His book "Exegesis," which were the letters he was writing to people at the time are consistent with indications something was going wrong as well. When I was just learning synths and a new sampler over the pandemic, I produced a track from a live session with samples from the speech, albeit they were in reference to the "Computer Controlled" logo on the 303 bass synth I used in it: https://soundcloud.com/n-gram-music/exegesis https://soundcloud.com/n-gram-music/exegesis , but I sampled just the best parts. This is to say, neither PKD nor hackers concerned about surveillance dystopia today may have a reliable picture, as paranoia can be really enveloping. That said, of course that's what They would say - you can see how this becomes an inescapable spiral. Paranoia is the iterated logic of an idea and unless you uproot the foudational one, by virtue of perfectly reasonable and consistent logic, it's going to creep back.
curun1r 4y ago
You're assuming that we're talking about a government surveillance setup where information is intended to be private. But the article's discussion still applies when the subject matter is canceling people on social networks. In fact it seems even more apropos of the dual identity of both subject and narc that the article discusses. Traditional government surveillance makes most of us solely subjects with little role in the enforcement process. But in a world where mob justice applies social sanctions, we're all simultaneously judges and candidates to become defendants, able to be condemned by our own words. Encryption is irrelevant when those words are intended for public consumption. Black Mirror did an episode on what it would look like if your social reputation were reified into concrete societal privileges. That kind of ad absurdum exploration makes the surveillance state of social networks much easier to recognize.
paulpauper 4y ago
PKD didn’t consider encryption and the many tools we can use to thwart spying and surveillance. I have lost count of the times people used encryption and either it was broken or subverted in some way, an example being the FBI creating its own encryption app as a major honeypot. Encryption apps, chat programs , protocols, etc. have a recurring tendency to be broken or have leaks.

photochemsyn 4y ago

Interesting writeup, and the modern surveillance state certainly has a lot of parallels to Philip K. Dick's world, although the personal flavor of the latter - i.e. the extensive use of undercover STASI-type operatives in A Scanner Darkly, characterized by the betrayal of trust in personal and intimate relationships, is not as much of an obvious general feature of Facebook-type data collection and NSA archival data tracking of both American citizens and non-citizens. At least our current system is not (yet) a true panopticon, which is a system where the prison guards can see all the prisoners, all the time, but the prisoners cannot see or communicate with one another. People can still communicate with one another, but the expectation of privacy is almost entirely gone. Certainly the power structure can see who is communicating with who via metadata monitoring, even if strong encryption can hide the content of the communication in many cases. The extent to which general knowledge of this constant monitoring changes mass social behavior isn't really known, but one imagines it's the kind of thing the research anthropologists in CIA Behavioral Studies programs - characters that populate many PKD works - are obsessed with. Incidentally, PKD's drug-psychosis-theme in many of his works is most likely linked to amphetamine psychosis, a fairly well-studied and well-understood side effect of constant use of amphetamines and their derivatives or analogues (i.e amphetamine, (Adderall), methamphetamine, MDMA (Ecstacy), methylphenidate (Ritalin)). These widely prescribed, used and abused substances should be regarded with more caution, I think - particularly when it comes to ADHD diagnoses in children. Certainly the for-profit drug manufacturers shouldn't be trusted on this, nor the mass social behavior manipulation types. Also, it's likely that Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, another vision of a drug-addled dystopian future (1932), was a major influence on PKD's dystopian works.

myth_drannon 4y ago
Most likely some of the communication moved or will move from online to in-person. Similar to Soviet like kitchen talks, far from KGB spies.
barrysteve 4y ago
The breakdown of personal relationships has been influenced by Facebook style social media. We crested that wave back in 2012-2015 when politics roared across the web and split families, wives and husbands and laid the groundwork for making any form of verbal negativity a social faux pas. It is close enough to a true panopticon. Inside of any form of web communication, the compulsion to not say anything that rocks the boat too much is felt and seen clearly in people's behaviour. Even in "private" encrypted chat the culture is one of which we shouldn't say anything lest it be leaked, evidence of that outcome or not. Drawing conclusions from ADHD related diagnoses is difficult. The illness is incredibly poorly defined and the state-of-the-art biological research has yet to identify what the problem is, or who even has it. The waters are even muddier, ADHD is frequently diagnosed in the place of other hidden difficulties like narcolepsy, depression, thyroid problems, vitamin deficiency and more. I agree more caution is warranted and also more research. Psychologists operate in a grey area where they can prescribe and hide more than is arguably justifiable.

feintruled 4y ago

I love how their comments section censor any mention of him to D**k. Big PKD fan myself, some of his stories seem impossibly fanciful and he does bang on about drugs an AWFUL lot but the stories can have a lot of insight in them all the same. In one of his books, the characters take drugs so powerful reality itself changes. Bit rum even for PKD, I had thought. Until I read the account of a depression sufferer when asked how he knew his medication was kicking in. He said he felt no internal changes whatsoever, but knew it was working when other people starting being nicer to him. And I realised PKD had got to the truth of something, how we take drugs maybe not to change ourselves but our perceptions of the world, and if your perception of the world changes is that not the world changing?

jl6 4y ago
> if your perception of the world changes is that not the world changing? On the other hand, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing it, doesn't go away.”
russh 4y ago
No. Changing our perceptions of the world does not change the world. If I put on rose colored glasses I change nothing except how I perceive the world, the world stays the same.
- Osmium 4y ago
  1. Your mind is also part of the world. Changing your perceptions is changing part of the world. 2. All human minds are only capable of perceiving a small fraction of the total information content of the world, and most of our perceptions are based on constructed social realities (e.g., as this is a tech forum, you could say we live in a virtual machine where small rectangles of woven fiber are given a meaning far beyond the mere fact of their existence, purely based upon our collective perceptions of what those rectangles represent). Changing our perceptions can therefore change this social reality and, as a result, change the context in which we live. Forgive me for the high-school philosophizing.
- canjobear 4y ago

brudgers 4y ago

I read the headline and into my chicken head “well of course, the empire never ended” popped.

aidenn0 4y ago
My reaction to the headline was "which one" to which the article responds "basically all of them"

kastagg 4y ago

This piece shows little awareness of Philip K. Dick's work or the circumstances of his life. PKD wasn't on the typical agenda of a sci-fi author, so it won't really work to analyze his work that way. PKD's fiction doesn't have any clear goal of futurology, deeply analyzing technology (like, say, Arthur C. Clarke) or presenting dystopias (like, say, George Orwell). A Scanner Darkly was written at a tough time in his life and was autobiographical in some fragmentary way. Tessa Dick made a sci-fi novel out of it, but the veneer over 1960s California is paper-thin. It would be more adequate to say that PKD focused on spiritual and religious subjects, particularly the nature of reality and how the "little creatures" suffer and struggle to survive. This isn't a mode of futurology. PKD struggled with the symptoms of diagnosed schizophrenia and his work powerfully reflects that personal struggle. "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" is about a spiritual dystopia that doesn't center the replicants at all - that theme of "our idea of the human" comes rather from Ridley Scott. Then comes the political pivot near the end of this blog post. PKD didn't predict COVID-19 or even try. It's spectacularly unclear that he was trying to warn us about the "danger" of qualified scientists telling us that it would be helpful to get vaccinated and wear masks to reduce the death and disability caused by a lethal pandemic. COVID-19 has killed over a million people in the US alone - hundreds of 9/11s worth. This isn't a conspiracy to control you with technology. To quote a certain wise wizard, "I am not trying to rob you. I'm trying to help you."

stevenwoo 4y ago
It's weird how they focused on A Scanner Darkly, I thought Ubik was more prescient in the small part of the plot that corporations run the world and advertising for them is ubiquitous.
- rwmj 4y ago
  One of them is a movie and the other one isn't (although searching IMDB tells me that an Ubik movie is in development - yay!). You can't expert journalists to read books now can you?
  - NoraCodes 4y ago

NoraCodes 4y ago

I'm all for criticizing hypocrisy, especially in government, but the COVID example strikes me as perhaps the worst possible for demonstrating the point. Some level of "draconian" action would have helped slow, or even stop, the spread of COVID-19; at least in the US, none was taken. A far better example, which actually involves surveillance rather than unrelated masking and distancing measures, would be politicians and wealthy businesspeople pushing invasive CSAM detection systems into consumer devices "for the good of the children" while schmoozing with Jeffrey Epstein. Typical faff from Unherd; a long article full of information better explained elsewhere followed by a poorly veiled gesture towards their existing agenda.

throwaway22032 4y ago
Go and look at China.
- NoraCodes 4y ago
  I absolutely agree. You're comparing an undemocratic illiberal totalitarian state's violent actions against citizens to the US government giving away vaccines, stopping international travel for a short time, and some states and municipalities mandating the wearing of masks. Nobody was taken to the gulag about it. That's not dystopian.
  - weakfish 4y ago
    I do find it amusing how far the window for what Americans consider draconian is from the rest of the world. If I was smarter I could perhaps write an essay drawing on our absurd focus on individualism.
  - origin_path 4y ago
    International travel (into the USA for non residents/citizens) is still stopped for people who didn't take the vaccine even though it doesn't work and never stopped transmission anyway. So it was absolutely a set of Draconian and totalitarian moves that had no impact whatsoever.
  - 4y ago

zasdffaa 4y ago

trebbble 4y ago
We don't get to see, directly, how everyone else experiences life. They might tell us, and they might do so more or less truthfully and accurately. They might struggle to communicate those things in a way we really understand. Meanwhile, we ourselves may struggle to explain our experiences and perspectives to others, or be ashamed or embarrassed about doing so. One aim of literature and poetry is (or may be) to open up that inner world—to do a better job of expressing those experiences than most folks manage to, to do so across a breadth of experience we may not all encounter, and to make explicit and examinable things we may not ourselves think to examine, or may otherwise think shameful or private and ours alone. Like, say, the experience of taking a drug and not feeling at all like you changed, but that the world did, as in the original example. The practical utility of this in communication is evident in that the well-read tend to reach for episodes from literature or passages of poetry to relate difficult concepts concerning that inner life, and this practice is in fact helpful to readers who have a similar background, or, if you will, a common language (as in the section of my post that you quoted). This is seen extensively in philosophy, for example, and is so helpful in religion that even those that try to downplay literature or scripture (Buddhism, for example) tend to end up with extensive literatures regardless, because they are so useful for relating difficult, very personal ideas and experiences, even if they can only ever be the "finger that points" and never directly the thing-in-itself. For the individual per se it can help us understand ourselves, help us feel less alone, act as a kind of therapy to some degree, be one factor in working out what exactly we're doing here, what we want or ought to be doing, expand or exercise our empathy, and provide ethical and moral guideposts more effectively than any kind of "do this, don't do that" list of bullet points.
- zasdffaa 4y ago
  > and to make explicit and examinable things we may not ourselves think to examine, or may otherwise think shameful or private and ours alone That's just a claim, I could write the complete opposite and have it be just as (in)valid. > be one factor in working out what exactly we're doing here, what we want or ought to be doing, expand OK, so give some examples. Without saying "we all are doing/wanting different things". Get a mate, have a comfortable life... any advance on that? > and provide ethical and moral guideposts more effectively than any kind of "do this, don't do that" list of bullet points Another unverified claim and I don't accept any of it. Point is when artistic types are pushed into a corner they come up with this kind of handwavy stuff about being human or whatever, the point being the fuzzier the claim the harder it is to dispute. Art needs to at least try to be as rigorous as science, as it stands it so often lets itself down.

crhulls 4y ago

On a light note, I live down the street from PKD's old house in Point Reyes. I drove by yesterday and took this pic. The current owner has setup a Starlink above his old study where he wrote many of his books. https://imgur.com/a/DojT97L https://imgur.com/a/DojT97L I wonder what he would have thought if someone told him that 50 years later, just a few feet above his head, that there would be an antenna talking to a swarm of low earth orbit satellites in space, that could access all information known to man. But, at least 20% of the data flow would be used to share images of people having sex with each other. He actually might have been one of the few people from that era who would NOT have been surprised this was the future.

Trasmatta 4y ago
Is Starlink connected to VALIS, I wonder...
- crhulls 4y ago
  Many of us who live out here have seen the pink beam... :)
  - Trasmatta 4y ago
    Perhaps one day we'll escape from the Black Iron Prison
- anony23 4y ago
  PKD might actually have been a psychic time traveler!

peter_d_sherman 4y ago

>"Technology was and is perhaps the most Californian aspect of the American mythos. The idea that the universal constants of human nature were at war with the mutilating demands of technology-driven systems was a very Sixties Californian conceit, to which Dick’s fellow anti-utopians each adhered in their own way: In Kesey’s showdown between man and the castrating nanny-state; in Didion’s emphasis on the vanishing virtue of self-reliance; in Pynchon’s degenerate Ivy League Puritanism; in Thompson’s drug-addled primitivism; and in Stone’s Catholic idea of devotion to a God that might somehow salve the wounds of the survivors once the great American adventure goes bust." What an interesting quote! I will have to check out some of the works of those other authors in the future, to examine the idea sets they propose, and then (after having read them thoroughly!) possibly add some of the better/more interesting ideas they propose -- to my "chock-full-o'-everything philosophical idea corpus in my mind" <g> (For lack of a better term!) Anyway, a very interesting quote -- worthy of future study!

labrador 4y ago

P.K. churned out much of his work in an amphetamine haze driven by then need to make money as writing was his sole means of support. I think a lot of California dystopian writings can be attributed to the overuse of amphetamines. The Summer of Love was destroyed by it as the phrase that emerged at the time was "Speed Kills." Joan Didion wrote about it "Slouching Towards Bethlehem.' On the other hand I'm a optimistic utopian, so I may be inclined to minimize and disregard dystopian writing. Where P.K. Dick really got me is in "How to Build a..." [1] in which he's very interested in the nature of reality and open to the idea that it is far more fungible than we think and in fact there may be a greater intelligence at work in the Universe that arranges reality in such a way as to communicate to the participant who is paying close attention. It doesn't scare and depress me to think that I don't have the control I thought I did and am mostly along for the ride. It's also exciting to think "more will be revealed" [1] "How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later" Philip K. Dick, 1978 https://urbigenous.net/library/how_to_build.html https://urbigenous.net/library/how_to_build.html

pharke 4y ago
> there may be a greater intelligence at work in the Universe He believed that there may be two greater intelligences diametrically opposed to each other and vying for control over the universe in order to remake it according to their own preferences. He expressed in his interview in Metz, France 1977[0] that he believes they are engaged in a constant struggle of programming and reprogramming the universe and history each trying to undo the others work. He connects this idea to his novels The Man In The High Castle and Flow My Tears The Policeman Said both of which involve alternate timelines. He even thought that he could retrieve memories of other timelines or other incarnations and that some of them were in worlds that were much more brutal than our own. All this to say that his belief in a higher power certainly followed the same lines of thought that he explored in his novels. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkaQUZFbJjE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkaQUZFbJjE

VictorPath 4y ago

> a surveillance society run by engineers would feel like to its inhabitants with a nauseating accuracy that did not become fully apparent until the rise of the modern tech surveillance complex. Dick used to write letters to the FBI in the 1970s urging them to investigate fellow science fiction writers like Thomas Disch or professors like Fredrick Jameson. He was a participant in (delusionaly?) ratting people out to the secret police. I'll leave it to others to forecast a dystopia, he seems to forecast a dystopia he is trying to build.

jacquesm 4y ago
He could have done us all a favor and ratted out LRH.

8bitsrule 4y ago

Read most of Phil's books - not more than once - enjoyed them for what they were ... paranoid, dark, imaginative, disorganized, groping ... but wouldn't include him with the great writers (showing what it can mean to be human in its great variety ... and how that can be denied us ... revealing more as we age). Bladerunner (the director's cut anyway) was a great film, still among my top favorites. It added much-needed clarity to some of Phil's best cud-chewings. Without the film, I think he'd have remained relatively unknown. Other authors, before and since him, I may turn back to for another read - because they offer me more than more confusion.

scruple 4y ago
As a fan of PKD, and a variety of others in the same vein, I'd probably be curious to read some of these books by these other authors.