Sure, but also, because social structures change very slowly (and social and technical structures evolve together, with technical structures that require or imply massive social change getting rejected or growing a protective sheath of norms) it's not wrong to use SF that way.
Conversation
PKD's work remains "relevant" because he knew enough history to recognize that 1950 wasn't *that* different from 1850 or 1650, and to project a 2050 that was based on systematic tendencies rather than naively projecting 1950 forward with progress in only one domain.
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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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Pure tech speculation will tell you what is possible, but will not tell you whether or not anybody will be willing to actually do it (and how the technical problems change under social pressures). Most technical problems are mostly social problems, even when the tech matters.
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The vacuum of space, the ambient radiation, etc., are all genuinely hard technical problems that needed to be solved. And it's comforting to focus on them, because then you're not focusing on the much more difficult problems like how to get senators to sign off on a nasa budget.
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Because it doesn't actually matter if you solved the problem of sealing the atmosphere safely and getting the appropriate gas ratio unless you can actually get the coordination to do a launch. The real work is messy interpersonal politics shit.
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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.
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“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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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.
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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.


