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this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2026
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TechTakes
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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.
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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.