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.
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).
"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.
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-t...
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.
> ...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.
I'm no billionaire but I'm certainly a fan of The Culture Series. It's an extremely beautiful series of books.
I am so sad that he is dead. The Culture may be the most interesting series I have ever read.
> 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.
>>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.
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
In several novels of the series, the protagonists are embedded as powerful beings into primitive and very unjust societies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
Related: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/07/the-fake-nerd-boys-of... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23767010)
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
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.
Iain M Banks is the absolute best sci fi if you love space opera. After Dune of course, but Dune stands alone.
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 love the culture series.
Ironic that in the US (last I checked) many books were not available on kindle.
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.
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...
Here's the archived page if anyone else is getting a 503 error. https://web.archive.org/web/20210122161324/https://bloodknif...