24
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2026
24 points (100.0% liked)
TechTakes
2561 readers
33 users here now
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
You've gotta love finding fault with "not preserving heritage" over "imperialistic complete lack of democracy".
There's local democracy - in one book some activist reserved a big part of an orbital just to run cable cars back and forth. And I believe the decision to go war with the Idirans was subjected to a vote - part of the Culture split off when it didn't go their way.
But yeah, the Minds decide everything and Contact/SC is all about doing the "needful stuff" that every right-thinking Culture citizen would deplore.
The Culture is imperialist in the previous US sense of "everyone wants to live our lifestyle" but not in the "invade planets and strip them" sense.
I'm less interested in discussing the minutiae of the fictional Culture than exploring nerd's reactions to it, honestly .
Agreed, agreed.
EDIT: Though as far as ambiguous anarchist utopias go, I think I'd rather live on Anarres in "The Dispossessed", even though the material welfare and personal freedoms are much much lower.
and of course there's absolutely nothing in the books that suggests it's a problem. (hell, there's a good chance there actually is a lively japanese folk dance fan community there despite the fact that earth was never a part of the culture.)
I figure part of the "scan" that a Contact ship does when it encounters a "lesser" planet is to basically slurp down all media, read all the books, and send drones down to do full-3d immersive recordings of basically everything going on.
I guess some stuff you really need to train as a monk for 30 years to really grok, but if there's an interest for that some Culture weirdo will volunteer and get sent down with a drone in the form of a crucifix or whatever, and incidentally become the next pope.
incidentally I feel I'm seeing in this post and in the shit like Karp's 22 points a growing sense of ennui and purposelessness that was also reported in Europe before WW1 . Everything is safe and soft and real manly virtues like killing are downplayed so what we need are big strong men throwing missiles.
Banks wrote during the 70s/80s and just imagining a future that wasn't a nuclear wasteland or the Empirium of Man was an act of opposition.
explicit in "State of the Art":
Yeah I vaguely remember that part from the novella.
This is yet another story where a Culture citizen weirdly decides that living in a shithole (1970s Earth) is preferable to literal utopia, so maybe the LW crowd have a point it's not a very good utopia. Or maybe there are weirdos in every time and space. Again, see LW.