Charlie Stross
Scientific American op-ed:
Tech Billionaires Need to Stop Trying to Make the Science Fiction They Grew Up on Real
Today’s Silicon Valley billionaires grew up reading classic American science fiction. Now they’re trying to make it come true, embodying a dangerous political outlook
(by me):
Charlie Stross
@quinn Oh, you think I'm *pro-capitalism*? (Snort)
Clem H. Fandango
@cstross you are almost there, buddy. keep thinking about it and you'll get there...
Charlie Stross
@quinn What even IS a billionaire?
Money isn't a physical commodity, like lumps of metal; despite what goldbugs and "kitchen sink" economists think, money is simply a measure of economic activity. If it stops moving it's worthless. So "owning" money is more about controling what it's used for than tangible property. Added complication: capital accumulates—money attracts more money, like mass giving rise to gravity.
So what we're saying is "how about we not let individuals control stuff".
Clem H. Fandango
@cstross how about we not let people be billionaires?
Obot 50549535 🌱
@cstross Young folks today may not be aware that a lot of scifi in the 50s and 60s was pretty fascist.
To the point that in 1972 Norman Spinrad wrote a metafictional novel The Iron Dream, a scifi novel as written by Adolf Hitler. You read it and say, yup, fits right in with Burroughs/Heinlein etc, and sounds just like Hitler.
mybarkingdogs
@obot50549535 @cstross THIS. It’s like people don’t get that authors like Lem and LeGuin (and even Asimov, Roddenberry, and Spielberg/Lucas as problematic as they are) were the *outliers.*
So it’s easy for people to get the idea that sci-fi was “progressive, if limitedly so” rather than “mostly fascistic, regressive, sexist trash with a very few authors who rose above enough to, now, define the genre as better than most of it was”
Francis 🏴☠️ Gulotta
@cstross I braced for the mailing list model and the cookie banner and was pleasantly surprised I could just read what you wrote
Charlie Stross
@blackwingedheaven The op-ed was HEAVILY cut down from my original talk (which was 4-5 times the length) and made that point at length: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-create-the-torment-nexus.html
Jeremy Puckett
@cstross I'd be less worried about them trying to make sci-fi real if they didn't constantly and critically misunderstand the fiction in question, ultimately leading them to reinvent the Torment Nexus over and over again.
Charlie Stross
@hexbatch I grew up on that stuff too. That op-ed is drastically cut-down from this: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-create-the-torment-nexus.html
PS: in the 90s I was part of a couple of dot-com startups (first generation). These days I'm an SF writer with multiple Hugo awards. I've seen both sides.
Hex Batch
@cstross i speak for the tech bros. It’s safe because none of them will see it. I understand that the money should go to fight global warming. And for sure many are assholes who don’t deserve so much wealth. And many projects will have bad effects. And yet I too grew up on the same toxic and heady mix of stories and it’s hard for me to let go. There are thousands of stories and you cherry pick a few to fit your argument. But for each example I can counter it with its opposite.
soggy donkey herder
@cstross “Most SF is small-c conservative insofar as it reflects the history of the field rather than trying to break ground or question received wisdom.” Shit! Yes, this is it, this is the thing that makes me DNF otherwise entertaining books!
rrb
@cstross My favorite is the marketing company saying that their product sounds like a Black Mirror episode, as if that were a good thing:
https://www.404media.co/cmg-cox-media-actually-listening-to-phones-smartspeakers-for-ads-marketing/
Charlie Stross
@warmcat That just gets you Arthur C. Clarke (who had weekly phone calls with his fan Rupert Murdoch) ...
Wayne Jones
@cstross perhaps they should have read British science fiction instead #iainmbanks
heavyboots
@cstross “Every technology comes with an implied political agenda.”
That’s awesome that they quote Karl Schroeder. He’s one of my favorites and Stealing Worlds is a book everyone should read!
Charlie Stross
@heavyboots Yeah, I know Karl, he has good stuff to say and that's why I quoted him in my op-ed. (Hint: 😉)
Charlie Stross
@Rjdlandscapes You didn't read the original essay on my blog that op-ed is cut down from (it's four times as long and made the point you just mansplained to me).
RJD
And yet we have the iPad (2001 space oddity), Mobile phone (star trek communicator), video calls (Metropolis, 2001 , blade runner etc), Ear buds (Fahrenheit 451), robotic prosthesis (terminator) , Helpful robots, language translators , smart watches etc etc
Vast swaths of our current world are ideas we've had that takes a lot of effort to bring into reality. Why do you think these people become billionaires.
The difficulty is in the execution
Charlie Stross
@Kay You're recommending my books to me? Thank you! 🤡
Kay :heart_bi: :tinoflag:
@cstross The problem isn't that tech billionaires read #SF #ScienceFiction when they were young, the problem is that they didn't keep on reading!
Had they kept reading #books by a diverse range of authors they may have had better ideas!!
The Monk and Robot #books by Becky Chamber are great for a better balance. Some of Nnedi Okorafor's books outline alternatives too. Charles Stross has written cautionary tales 😉 Kim Stanley Robinson offered better ideas they could try. #SFF #bookstodon
Kay :heart_bi: :tinoflag:
@cstross Of course! It doesn't hurt to remind bystanders watching this thread (stream of consciousness) to pick up and read yours too! Even the warnings about too much maths being bad for some brains are worth sharing! 😉
Charlie Stross
@quinn My point is, it's not just <<some famous techbro with his face on a dartboard>> that we need to deal with; it's a whole interlocking system enabled and perpetuated by an international trade system built out of treaties over a 70 year period. Many of the worst offenders aren't even human beings, they're organizations and states. Musk and Bezos are *poor* compared to the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.
Clem H. Fandango
@cstross Yah... 💯 the same thing... I mean, I literally could not have put it better
Charlie Stross
@quinn I'd abolish the doctrine of corporate personhood (and provide for shareholders and directors to do jail time if the corporation they control are found guilty of crimes), put stringent limits on trusts, then add a wealth tax on individuals that erodes their gross assets—either by inheritance or on an annual basis—faster than capital accumulates.
Then look for the avoidance strategies and play whack-a-mole with them.
Needs international consensus and enforcement, though.
How about you?
Clem H. Fandango
@cstross I'll tell you what, you answer the question I asked, and then I'll consider yours...
Charlie Stross
@quinn Bullshit. Part of the problem is that we like to pin a face on our enemy. But most of the private equity vultures fucking up healthcare and markets globally are owned by diffuse entities like pension funds or sovereign wealth funds (eg. nations like Norway or Saudi Arabia that stashed their oil loot in market funds). Are you going to go after Elon Musk and ignore Saudi Arabia (which plausibly has the capability to acquire nuclear weapons within weeks)? If so, why—and how?
Clem H. Fandango
@cstross you are just muddying the waters. EVERYONE knows what is meant, when one says #AbolishBillionaires. You don't need to be an economics major to understand this. Although I'd like to hear how you plan on "not letting billionaires control things" without taking away their instruments of control, i.e. their billion+ dollars...
Charlie Stross
@quinn If you think I was defending billionaires you have a very odd misreading: because money isn't what most people think it is, the common parlance "billionaire" isn't what most people think it is EITHER, which means we need to be more precise in defining our target if we mean to hit it.
Clem H. Fandango
@cstross I didn't say that. but you literally just defended billionaires, so...
Graydon
@cstross @quinn Money is only an effective tool to manage your insecurity in a context of good government, and good government cannot use money as an objective.
(Money is an abstraction to facilitate having an accounting system; it's there so you can have units. It's not an expression of natural law, the economy, or effort. It's not even a direct measure of the ratio between effort, lifespan, and outcomes.)
Graydon
@cstross @quinn Three interlocking problems.
Money as "a medium of exchange and a store of value" versus "a permanent and never decreasing store of value"; the first one is supportable, the second one isn't, but guess which one existing wealth wants?
Systems structured to accumulate money where "enough money" is undefined.
Policy (ignore climate change; ignore pandemics) creates conditions where "enough money" becomes infinite.
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