Elon Musk, Utopias, and The Culture
Tags: Iain M Banks, Communism, Science Fiction, Utopia, Elon Musk

In that context it’s easy to see how a radically minded person might fall for the promise of SpaceX or Tesla or any other sci-fi adjacent trinket Musk offers. The actual things are almost irrelevant — the appeal is the possibility that capital can build a better world. That just like heaven, communism is obsolete and you can be hopeful without needing to change a thing. Tell the AI to solve for scarcity and it will be just fine.

All it takes to unravel this approach is a slightly closer reading of the Culture novels. Banks clearly loves the place and illuminates it with luscious detail across the series, but the plots of the stories frequently take Culture citizens far from its idyllic orbital habitats. The artificial afterlives found in Surface Detail were not built to replicate heaven — they were built by a cruel theocracy so that they could ensure the souls of their unworthy citizens were adequately punished in an artificial hell. The Culture, being a powerful moral society, tries to intervene when other societies commit such atrocities, and in doing so often create atrocities of their own. A meddlesome interventionist approach led to the full scale war forming the backdrop of the first book of the series.

Consider Phlebas — it is told from the perspective of an alien shapeshifter fighting against the Culture. He loathes its machines that control their lives and sees them as the end of biological life in the galaxy, going so far as to ally himself with fundamentalist zealots that destroy entire stars in attempts to bait The Culture into surrender. The war does not end in the book — the end of the book is a tragic farce with no impact on the conflict whatsoever. It is only in the epilogue that the history of the war is recounted in the dry tone of a textbook. Eight hundred and fifty one billion dead in the fictional conflict including sentient machines, biological slaves, and non-combatants. The Culture, having won the fight, now seemingly justified for their future moralist interventions on behalf of less ethically developed societies.

Length of war: forty-eight years, one month. Total casualties, including machines (reckoned on logarithmic sentience scale), medjel and non-combatants: 851.4 billion (± .3%). Losses: ships (all classes above interplanetary) — 91,215,660 (± 200); Orbitals — 14,334; planets and major moons — 53; Rings — 1; Spheres — 3; stars (undergoing significant induced mass-loss or sequence-position alteration) — 6.

In future books like The Player of Games or Look to Windward we are assured that the minds of the Culture only intervene where it is justified. The AI solving for problem of utopia and only meddling where they know it is truly the most kind and compassionate option. The means are mercenaries, knife missiles and ultimatums, but the end is always yet more people under the wing of the merciful Culture. To live in it is to live in total paradise, to live in a society that its minds have deemed cruel is to live in the firing line of progress. Your only comfort that your death, while regrettable, was actually optimal and therefore, through a particularly sick lens, both noble and necessary. This sets up the core question asked across the series — can there ever be an end so fantastic that it justifies any and all means?

For people like Musk and Grimes the answer is an enthusiastic yes. If, as the TikTok says, an AI can just solve scarcity and create heaven on earth then of course it’s fine for a Stalin quoting radical to marry an exploitative billionaire, as long as he is the one building the AI. If you earnestly believe that a utopia even a fraction as luxurious the one depicted in the Culture novels is possible then you can justify anything to reach it. You can justify union busting, wars over mining rights, any number of deaths, and the destruction of the stars themselves. The problem is that The Cultures utopia never arrives. In the same way that Musk’s AI is always a few years out, there are always new exceptions or out of context problems that demand the intervention of the Culture’s minds. This is not the Federation of Star Trek, there is no final frontier — the frontier is endless, stretching out to the infinite reaches of the universe and down into depths of new discovery. Every entity or society that The Culture discovers is another moral imperative to spread civilization and that imperative can justify any amount of bloodshed. The infinite pleasure of its citizenry is rivalled only by the infinite violence that that pleasure justifies. The ends and means of paradise do not exist isolated of each other, and the continuation of one necessitates the continuation of the other.

That is the function of utopia in the hands of Musk. It is an eternal, unreachable ends that can justify any horrific means that might grant him power. It is a bottomless vessel for our hope trying to re-justify the flailing appendages of capital. In a world where the most basic kindness preached by religious texts is dangerously close to that bogeyman form of communism, tech fanaticism preached by Musk becomes a new and innovative opiate for the masses. A cult to a science fiction god willing to bleed the world dry while waiting for a Deus Ex Machina that can never arrive.