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> (He named SpaceX's drone ships after Iain M. Banks spaceships, thereby proving that irony is dead) I don't get it. The Culture ships ("minds") are not cautio
by marcellus23 3y ago
> (He named SpaceX's drone ships after Iain M. Banks spaceships, thereby proving that irony is dead)
I don't get it. The Culture ships ("minds") are not cautionary tales about AI, or space, or anything like that. They're just AI-controlled spaceships. I don't know what point Stross is trying to make with this particular sentence.
EDIT: it's been pointed out to me that this probably pointing out the irony of Musk being a hypercapitalist billionaire, while the Culture is a post-scarcity leftist utopia.
- karaterobot 3y agoI was confused by this too. I thought the GSVs were pretty neat, and the world of The Culture was generally better for the median person than our world is. By far, probably. I'm aware that those books were originally intended to be a sort of parody of Star Trek's techno-utopianism, but I'll be honest, I'd trade either of those imaginary worlds for ours. Maybe Stross would say I'm credulous.
- ceejayoz 3y agoStross would point out Banks was an avowed socialist writing about space commies who change gender at will as the good guys, with Musk-style megabillionaires like Veppers as the bad guys.
- throwaway4aday 3y agoIn that case the irony is strongly in Musks favour with the failure of socialism to produce anything useful and the runaway success of a megabillionair in increasing access to space.
- kmeisthax 3y ago>failure of socialism to produce anything useful The Soviets were kicking America's ass in the space race up until Kennedy said "Fuck everything, we're doing five blades[0]" and shot for the literal moon. They absolutely could produce useful things, the problem was that those useful things were produced at the expense of other, possibly more useful things. Eventually the US was able to exploit this by electing a crazy person to spook the Soviets into overspending on their military, which is why we survived with merely a huge deficit spending problem rather than extreme rationing and starvation. However, the gross misallocation of resources done under Soviet communism is not unique to Soviet communism. Capitalists do it all the time, the only difference is that free markets usually punish them for it quicker. But they don't always punish. People like Musk can still spend loads of other people's money on useless bullshit, like Twitter, or sending people to Mars[1]. [0] https://www.theonion.com/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-blades-1819584036 https://www.theonion.com/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-bla... [1] Mars is a dead rock covered in poison constantly being blasted with radiation. It wants to kill you in more ways than regular ol' space wants to kill you, and making it not kill you is likely impossible given our current technological capability. Anyone going to Mars today will be condemning themselves to living the rest of their lives out in a very small bubble of rad-shielded underground bunker.
- throwaway4aday 3y ago"other people's money" The whole universe is trying to kill us so I'm generally in favour of finding new ways to fight against that pernicious form of lazy entropy. If a socialist strategy involves taking other people's food from out their mouths in order to build rockets that's a much worse plan than convincing them to give you their discretionary income in order to fund ventures that they can also pay for and benefit from. Central planning is a fool's errand that harms everyone in the long run.
- gary_0 3y ago> Stross would point out In fact, he has: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38221741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38221741
- TeMPOraL 3y agoStross is employing his skill as a professional fiction writer to bend facts and ideas so hard they loop on themselves, just to shit at the favorite tech industry punching bags, whether it makes sense or not. It's both clever and depressing.
- karaterobot 3y agoI'm genuinely not sure how that changes anything. You can appreciate something while disagreeing with the politics of it—or of the author, which are often separate. You can especially like certain aspects of something without liking the politics of the entire thing. I assume that's what happened here.
- ceejayoz 3y agoNah. We have Musk’s own words to go on here. He just… missed the point. “If you must know, I am a utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks” https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1008120904759402501 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1008120904759402501 “Iain certainly wasn’t pro-union in the Culture books. At all. And wouldn’t be in the case of Tesla. Banks was about freedom through & through.” https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1008389798740963329 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1008389798740963329
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoMusk clearly has no idea what Banks stood for, because he has deluded himself that his brand of libertarian capitalism is somehow liberatory and progressive when it's just papered-over elitist free market absolutist hogwash, from someone who read too much Ayn Rand as a teenager and never grew out of it. Just like a lot of folks on this group. Bring on the downvotes! I know you got 'em! ... And because he has the usual North American biases about what socialism -- let alone communism (small c) -- is he can't even recognize a self-avowed communist when he's standing right in front of his face. Special Circumstances would likely... take care... of someone like Musk.
- sangnoir 3y ago> Iain certainly wasn’t pro-union in the Culture books. At all. WTF does this even mean? Does Musk think the people and minds of the Culture were gainfully employed?! You can't be pro-union when there are no employers/employees - that's not even wrong.
- monknomo 3y agoI think it's that they are ai controlled space ships that are part of a post-scarcity, hedonistic communist space empire, and an arch-capitalist adoring space communism is ironic?
- marcellus23 3y agoOh. Yeah that's definitely it. I was just thinking about the Minds themselves. Haven't had my coffee yet.
- orangecat 3y ago"Post-scarcity" and "communist" don't really go together. The entire point of our current economic systems is to deal with scarcity.
- jl6 3y agoI imagine he thinks that it's ironic for an ardent capitalist to make references to a book about a socialist paradise, and "irony is dead" means he thinks Musk doesn't recognise the possibility of irony. Or something.
- sneak 3y agoIf you want to create a spacefaring socialist (or anything-ist) utopia, first you must amass a giant fortune of Earth money to hire a small army of engineers and mechanics and build rockets to get the hell off the rock and away from the existing moneyworshippers. Blanketing the planet in internet access so that every person can receive the message is a useful side-effect, as well. Or did you think you can just scream "socialism is better" loud enough to manufacture megatons of stainless steel, methane, and o2? There's literally no path from here to there that doesn't involve statist (either capitalist or whatever the CCP is calling their economic system presently) gigabucks first. Large and complicated things don't get built on Earth without piles of cash for your staff and to grease the wheels of the state that currently maintains a monopoly on access to orbital weapons and surveillance. You need to get those piles of cash from somewhere, either from selling people something voluntarily, or collecting taxes from them on threat of violence. Welders and and machinists and steel mills (to say nothing of rocket engine designers) don't work for free. Show me a crowning achievement of mankind, and I'll show you a hundred+ billion dollars of 2023-equivalent-value. If you're not in the taxation business, that means you gotta sell stuff.
- timmytokyo 3y agoI suspect this is in refernce to Banks's stated purpose for writing the Culture series. >He first conceived the Culture in the late 60s, and has developed it ever since. “It’s basically a lot of wish fulfilment, I write about all the things I would like to have,” he says. “I’d had enough of the right-wing US science fiction, so I decided to take it to the left. It’s based around my belief that we can live in a better way, that we have to. So I created my own leftist/liberal world.” [1] https://spikemagazine.com/iain-banks-interview/ https://spikemagazine.com/iain-banks-interview/ Given Musk's red-pilled foray into right-wing culture war discourse, it is indeed ironic that he would revere these books.
- krapp 3y agoPlenty of right-wingers apparently enjoy Star Trek, despite it being an expression of everything they stand against, literally a universe where humanity abandons capitalism and nationalism for a one world government of woke space communism. They just can't see the progressive subtext (unless it's obvious like "black female captain" or "gay relationship"), it's all just spaceships and pew-pew laser adventure to them.
- oasisaimlessly 3y agoThere's no cognitive disconnect in believing that pre- and post-scarcity societies would (or should) be substantially different.
- krapp 3y agoWe're getting into the weeds of semantics but I do think there is some cognitive disconnect in a right-wing/conservative mindset believing a post-scarcity society is even possible, much less desirable.
- gary_0 3y agoThey see the Federation as Space USA using their superior pew-pew spaceships to enforce Freedom on the unwashed Aliens, many of whom are based on racial stereotypes. Because every planet only has one culture on it, doncha know.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoBecause Bank's vision of the future and for what he dreamed humanity would create and become is about as polar opposite of Musk's as you can get.
- cstross 3y agoI used to go drinking with Iain regularly (we lived in the same city). Iain was a hard-left socialist -- in US terms, a communist. He's been dead for a decade now, but I'm pretty certain his opinion of Elon Musk as he is self-revealed today would be unprintable: he hated everything billionaires stood for. Hence: irony being dead.