One of the most transcendental developments of Trump’s new era is how the main billionaires in the technology industry, often known as the Broligarchs, have thrown their weight on the president. Duration The 2024 elections offered high profile support and made great donations; After the inauguration, they announced policies of new companies that aligned them with the regressive cultural idologies of President Donald Trump.
Elon Musk had already become Twitter into a right -wing Eco Chamber since I bought it in 2022, and spent several chaotic months earlier this year as the efficiency of the Trump Active government. Jeff Bezos has renewed the editorial section of the Washington Post to generate support for “personal freedoms and free markets.” Mark Zuckerberg decided to get rid of or target facts.
It was a massive power sample that revealed the possible that is for these rich men to rebuild our culture to their own image, transforming the way we talk and what we know is true. Using that power in Trump seems to have paid mixed dividends by Silicon Valley, but does not make clear how important its vision of the world and its vision for the future is not clear.
That is why it is surprising to observe that Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg share a favorite author: Iain M. Banks, the Scottish science fiction writer best known for his cultural series. Banks is a strange choice for a group of technological billionaires. The author, who died in 2013, was a socialist and declared enemy of the super rich.
“The culture series is certainly, in terms of more modern science fiction, one of my absolute favorites,” Bezos told Geekwire in 2018, added: “There is a utopian element that I find very attractive.” Bezos has tried twice to adapt the television series on Amazon, once in 2018 and again in February. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg chose the culture novel Game player For your reading club in 2015.
Banks is a strange choice for a group of technological billionaires. The author, who died in 2013, was a socialist and declared enemy of the super rich.
However, the most declared culture fan among the Broligarchs is musk. Musk has named Space X Drone is sent after the spacecraft in the Books of Culture. His original name for the Neuralink, a computer chip that can be implemented in human brains, was a pioneer by his neurotecnology company, was the neural lace, a piece of telepathic technology that meets in culture books. In 2018, Musk declared “an utopian anarchist of the best type described by Iain Banks.” (It is worth noting that in 2018, Musk was under fire by Union Busting Buting had not yet gotten into national politics or declared the public war against the “virus of the mind of awakening.”
We like many of ourselves and even identify with pieces of pop culture whose policy we do not completely agree, such as the small libertarian house in the books of the grasslands or the Christian chronicles of Narnia. Even so, the Banks Culture series, which consists of 10 books published between 1987 and 2012, is not coded as it is frankly didactic. “The culture is Hippy communicates with the hyperebrae and a deep Marketolatry and Ceedism Drust,” Banks said in an interview with Strange Horizons in 2010, in a line that is barely more explicit than the books themselves.
The cultural series is carried out in a post-state galactic society known only as culture, which strictly value empathy, pluralism and social cooperation. Most of the volumes of the series see the culture that sails for an altercation with another civilization, usually one with a much less progressive ethos, and discover how to handle the resulting tension. Does culture intervene in the affairs of another planet to, for example, stop the spread of a theocratic empire? What do you do with civilizations where slavery is legal?
The policy of these books is not subtle, and they are not compatible with the existence of billionaires. Therefore, it is worth thinking why Broligarchs have cited a socialist author so constantly as an inspiration. What are tempting on the work of banks? Are they losing the point completely?
Almost everything about culture books opposes the world as seen in Silicon Valley
Almost all aspects of culture seem to be diametrically opposed to the worldview of technological law.
Banks takes as its initial principle for culture, the idea that a space experience civilization will have to be socialist to be effective. In the hostile space of the emptiness of the space, he argues, he must be able to have the collective. The banks also that each spacecraft or planet in the culture will have to be reasonably self -sufficient to survive.
At the same time, culture is strictly not rigic and not individualistic. There is no money and no desire; Therefore, there can be no billionaires or economic inequality. There are no laws and there are almost no crimes. This is not a world in which supremely rich people who use their power to influence social fabric make sense.
“Sucintly; socialism inside, anarchy without,” Banks concluded in a 1994 Usenet post in which he exposes his full theory of culture.
In culture, if someone commits an action that most people agreed, unacceptable, they all respond with social shame instead of the rule of law: they stop inviting the person in question to parties. In other words, as a group of adequate leftists, they deal with bad behavior for social cancellation, that great threat against which Broligarchs have declared war.
Only the balance between work and life in culture exists in opposition to the spirit of the Silicon Valley. Citizens of culture have invented very powerful iso that are responsible for governance for them. This delegation frees up the culture citizens themselves to indulge in what Banks describes as “The Things That Really Bordened with too A lot of ambition to be content in such a Soft Life Take On (Unpaid) Jobs Managing The Culture’s Relationships Withips with Oather Civilizations, Mostly for the Prestige and the Adrenaline Rush of It everything.
This vision seems to have influenced Musk’s idea of a future in which AI has made the work “optional”, so that “if you want to do a job that is a child, you can do a job.” Musk allows that to be “universal income of high income” so that this plan works, but does not describe ideas about how such an ambitious policy could come into force. Meanwhile, in our own world, Amazon, Meta and Tesla are infamous for demanding that employees work in absence long hours.
Finally, and perhaps more discordantly given the current gender policy of the Broligarchs, culture is gender fluid. Anyone can change the genre only when thinking about it, and most people do it at least in their lives, a state of things that banks argue that it is an answer for their strict regime of gender equality. Meanwhile, Musk is Notoriatry Anti-Trans, Zuckerberg has inclined to retrograde gender ideologies while modifying target policies to allow greater hate speech, particularly towards people LGBTQ+, and people, and people and people and people and people.
But it is not just that culture maintains the reverse of the ideology thesis that men represent. The most detestable villain of the Banks series is Joiler Veppers, a man rich in a less evolved civilization than the culture, who uses his wealth to buy and influence the media, the underciled unions and the violation in the intentional servers. Veppers’s money comes from a family fortune built in the computer games industry, and aggravates that fortune by investing a series of infernal virtual reality landscapes on servers, where the unfortunate ones are tortured with horses for the entire Eertnity.
If you want to know how Banks sees capitalist technological billionaires, it doesn’t have to hunt very hard. In the culture series, a capitalist technological billionaire, the literal demon, only he could bother to build hell himself.
So why are Broligarchs so in culture books?
So what is the attraction of the culture series if you are real? are A multimillionaire of capitalist technology? Probably technology itself.
If the policy sacrifices the culture books of its intellectual framework, technology is what gives them their song, their show. Through the series, Banks lovingly describes spacecraft and AIS (and many spacecraft that are also AIS), and artificial planets and gadgets and devices. In general, at the end of the book, culture uses one of those gadgets in an inventive way to win an explosive spatial war war.
Read this light, the technological skill of culture offers the brute force that supports its warm and diffuse ideology. Culture can afford to be idealistic and worry about its moral guilt that has a better technology than all the other civilizations he faces, that Meeans will almost always win in a fight.
If you consider a titan of the industry that is doing that technology for your own culture, which is providing the brute force that allows moralizing with start, there is a certain easy comfort that comes with this alignment. You know you are on the right side of the story because you are on the side that is building the strongest and most advanced technology.
However, within the largest metaphors are being built, the relationship between politics and force is supposed to be the other way around. Culture is not good because they are strong. His strength is a metaphor of his goodness. They have the best technology because that shows that they are rational, that they value intelligence, that they are motivated to give their citizens the best possible quality of life.
Culture is not good because they are strong. His strength is a metaphor of his goodness.
To avoid this idea when reading banks, you will have to be in tune with the pleasant show of technology and the power that technology offers its users, and for everything else. In that case, what reveals the love of the Broligarchs culture is that they see the world through the lens of power and the show in the first place, and have no particular problem evading the deepest meaning of work. That is why this group has a propensity to large and useless acrobatics, such as trips to almost space and transporting a kitchen sink through the Twitter headquarters and threatening to hit others in a public fight. It is how they believe they feel entitled to their power because their favorite book taught them that the side with the best technology always wins, and the most important thing that can make technology put into a program. They seem not to have read deeply what I was really trying to say: that the most important thing can do powerful people is to use their power to make the world freer, faster and more pleasant for everyone else.
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