Conversation

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.
3
3
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.
1
1
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.
1
“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)
1
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.
It’s not that these speculative futures are wrong. They do narrow the range of futures. The problem is that they are almost guaranteed to miss the core of what unfolds and end up elaborating on what ends up being marginal concerns that happen to be central today.
1
Like historians, futurists and science fiction writers end up saying more about their own times than about the times they talk about. Only more so, since there’s so much less data to work with. Which is fine so long as you’re aware of that effect.
1
Show replies