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Replying to and
I finally understood what PKD was all about when I read his early novel CONFESSIONS OF A CRAP ARTIST which was his not very good attempt to write realist fiction, set in a tedious suburban Marin County in the 1950s
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Replying to and
That’s a better way to think of PKD and most social science fiction. Space as a convenient allegory for talking about eart. Foundation saga was basically fall of Rome with 1950s Cold War bureaucracy thrown in. The robot stories were really about bureaucracies, not robots.
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Replying to and
Sure, it’s relevent and mild fun as social commentary and psychological insight. It’s just not that interesting as technological speculation because it underindexes on tech potentialities and overindexes on societal inertia. I look elsewhere for tech speculation.
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Replying to and
Ah the heart of the disagreement is clear now. Violently agree that pure tech speculation will open up underdetermined potential. Disagree that extrapolating the past is particularly useful to make meaningful predictions either. McLuhan rear view mirror principle.
“People will be disillusioned and turn to drugs and reactionary fantasies” is either a trivial tautology (it always happens to some extent) or not even wrong (it is unlikely to be a determinative feature of the future that reveals its meaningful contours)
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The problem is the auteur problem. New tech potentially tends to activate new kinds of political actors who bring more diverse patterns of agency to the party and do weird new things with the potential that turn extrapolations of pasts featuring fewer, less diverse agents moot.
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