Finally watched a Dr Who episode. Seriously, hadn’t seen more than a clip or three before. Full thoughts will come in episode 19 of the Implausipod.
An odd episode: it felt like a speedrun through the required story beats to link everything together, and a lot of the rest was elided. So I’m not sure it was a representative story of the franchise; we got equal parts “very special episode” and “fanservice”, and while I was able to make some external connections early (and by the midpoint too), by the end it was all internally referential, and the titular Star Beast was a very thin foil for the rest of the internal narrative that the showrunner wanted to hang over the episode.
As a new viewer, I’m not entirely convinced to stick around. Let’s see how the next one goes…
Quick bit of Implausipod news, as it is now up and available on Apple Podcasts, which means it should be propagating to the apps that use that as well. So, great news! Hope that makes the episodes more accessible for a wider audience.
(It turns out that Taylor Swift was right, and “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.” At least to a little extent. Apple had a bit to do with it too, as the Apple Podcasts is not accessible without an iTunes account (basically). So my reticence to use their products was a hard stop, with no workaround. Called their tech support on it too. Fixed now though.)
/2 Been thinking about this all night, how most of my examples would come from some basic and banal films.
And I think that’s the beauty of it, is that they’re all #art
The underlying assumption in responses to the thread is that “art” is defined by something that must be transcendent or sublime, a singular work that stands above others is somehow “art” in ways that the others are not.
Now some films might push this a little bit. If I’m Dan Harmon, I might have issues with #NowYouSeeMe f’rex, and struggle to find the art there, but this is where the subjective alights within #cinema
(Waitasecond, can I still use #frex , or did some tool decide to use it as the label for an AI-generated thesaurus for your smartphone in the last week?)
4/ Anyhoo, where was I? (phone call disrupted the tenuously connected synapses there…)
Oh yeah, there’s beauty in the basics, which is really what I was getting at.
Art can make you feel the little things too, is what I’m getting at.
Which is where I’m sitting at. So I’m thinking I’ll list out the films, and the frames, that strike me as “art”, however it gets (subjectively) defined, and I’ll run through the list here in the next few days.
In episode 18 of the Implausipod we return to Appendix W with a little known but pivotal short story for both science fiction generally and Warhammer 40000 specifically, and the creation of the Warp, and the daemons that dwell within: Cordwainer Smith’s “The Game of Rat and Dragon” from 1955.
Read along here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29614/29614-h/29614-h.htm
“Out in that nothingness, he could sense the hollow, aching horror of space itself, and could feel the terrible anxiety which his mind encountered whenever it met the faintest trace of inert dust. Here, there was nothing to fight, nothing to challenge the mind, to tear the living soul out of a body with its roots dripping in effluvium as tangible as blood.”
This is The Game of Rat and Dragon. Learn all about it in our first visit to the Instrumentality of Mankind, as we return to the Appendix W in this week’s episode of The Implausible.
Welcome to The Implausipod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. And it’s been a little while since we talked about Appendix W, so perhaps a quick refresher is in order. It’s been about a year since we last posted on Starship Troopers, and well, things took a little bit of an interesting turn there for a bit.
But the Appendix W is one of the major threads of this podcast. We’re going to include it here for now, though at some point in the future, we may have to spin off Appendix W to become its own thing. We’re going to talk a little bit more about the future of Appendix W at the end of this episode. But for those new to the podcast or unfamiliar with the concept, Appendix W is a look at the science fiction history and influences that went into the development of the Warhammer 40, 000 universe published by Games Workshop.
I’m calling it Appendix W as it mirrors the Appendix N that was originally published in the Dungeon Master’s Guide for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and showed the influences that went into the development of that game. And while both games share some overlapping elements in their influences, there’s some radical differences that led to the development of the Grimdark.
And it’s that Grimdark that I want to touch on at the start of this episode. Because more than anything else, it’s the defining adjective for the Warhammer 40,000 universe. It was a tagline in the original publication of Rogue Trader: “In the grim darkness of the 41st millennium, there’s no hope, no peace, no forgiveness, only war.”
And it’s kind of stuck, that portmanteau of those first two words, grim and dark, is what’s been used to describe the aesthetic of the Warhammer 40, 000 universe. And it’s managed to sneak out a little bit and enter the larger popular culture being used to describe things like George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones or Song of Ice and Fire.
But what is the Grimdark really, especially when it comes to Warhammer 40, 000? It’s a nightmare gothic future where humanity has decayed and fallen, still living with high technology that they no longer realize how to build and maintain. Humanity is a fallen race living in the shadow of their ancestors.
Humanity is maintained by a ruthless bureaucracy, a massive army, and endless brutality. And it’s this brutality that defines the Warhammer 40, 000 universe. It’s not a pleasant place, and there are no good guys. Whatever side you might think you’re on, there is no good side.
Warhammer 40, 000 was originally developed by Games Workshop in the mid to late 80s and it drew inspiration from some of their other products. The rules were written primarily by Rick Priestley and assisted by other artists and writers in the Games Workshop studio, and it drew inspiration from a game called Laserburn, which was a sci fi ruleset, as well as their Warhammer Fantasy Battles world and ruleset, which just recently had its 40th anniversary.
It was in the second or third edition by the time 40k was published. As part of this crossover, we can see the inclusion of traditional Tolkien- esque fantasy races like elves and dwarves and orcs, all placed in a space faring format, different, but recognizable.
There were other fantasy elements included as well, particularly the role of chaos, and we’re going to see a lot more of that in our next episode when we look at the Eternal Warrior. But for right now, the idea of chaos and the warp was manifest in some early science fiction writings, or ones that kind of crossed the barrier between fantasy and science fiction. In the Warhammer 40, 000 universe, Chaos and The Warp are pretty much inseparable, but they don’t completely overlap.
So we’re going to focus on The Warp in this episode and get to Chaos in the next one. And we’re focusing on these two episodes because they work as a pair, as well as something came up in the real world which required some background explanation in order to provide that foundation. We might as well get to it right now.
And in addition to that, there’s currently nothing in production for both these media properties. So they fall outside the domain of the current and ongoing SAG- AFTRA strike. We can discuss them freely. Even though they’re both highly influential, there’s currently nothing under development for either of them to my knowledge either.
But before I go too far off on a tangent, what exactly is the Warp? Well, in terms of Warhammer 40, 000, it’s one of the defining characteristics of the Warhammer 40k universe. It’s the space between the stars, the background behind the scenes of the galaxy. But in true 40k fashion, it’s not a nice place, which is understating it.
It’s a sanity twisting realm inhabited by terrible monstrous entities, where time flows differently, where reality itself can be bent and twisted. And of course, as a space, it can be conquered, but at a terrible cost. During past more enlightened ages of humanity, humans spread across the galaxy and the Imperium of Man along with it.
And now, in the 41st millennium that is, humans in the Imperium of Man can find themselves cut off from the rest of the Empire for years or centuries by vast storms that occur across the warp. So the warp is a vast non-space where time is a little wibbly wobbly, and because of that humanity can travel faster than life and was able to colonize the galaxy.
For humanity, it isn’t easy. It requires some element of psychic power in order to traverse across the warp, and the warp is not without its inhabitants either. In Warhammer 40, 000, these include the daemons and some other entities as well, and in the works of Cordwainer Smith, these include the Dragons.
But the dragons aren’t really dragons at all. It’s just how we perceive them. They’re creatures that we found that manifest out of the dust, like in that opening quote. And when humanity first encountered them, it didn’t go too well for us. But ever the resourceful creatures, we found a way.
The Game of Rat and Dragon was first published in 1955 in Galaxy Science Fiction magazine, a collection of short stories that was how most science fiction got published at the time.
It was written in 1954 by Cordwainer Smith, and it was influential. It was nominated for Best Short Story at the Hugo Awards in 1956, though it lost to Arthur C. Clarke’s The Star. Other nominees that year included James Blish, and Ray Bradbury, and Theodore Sturgeon. So, you know, you’re judged by the company that you keep.
Cordwainer Smith was the pen name of Paul Linnebarger, who was born in 1913, and was named Lin ba lo by his godfather, Sun Yat Sen, who Linnebarger’s father was an advisor to. He received his PhD in political science from John Hopkins University before becoming faculty at Duke for a number of years during World War II, he served with the United States Army, but because he had an advanced degree, he was a second lieutenant that was working in psychological warfare and military intelligence.
Well, the advanced degree and those other factors, too.) He coordinated intelligence operations with China and was a confidant of Chiang Kai Shek. And a lot of his work post war was also in the intelligence community, so he kept his professional life and fiction writing separate, and the connection between the two wasn’t known until he passed away at the young age of 53 in 1966.
Most of his fiction appeared in short stories written during the course of his career, though he did begin writing at a very early age. His first published work was in 1928 that he wrote while he was in high school. And many of those stories took place in what we might now call a cinematic universe or shared universe.
In this case, the universe of the Instrumentality of Mankind. Now, I think we’re going to need to take a deeper look at the Instrumentality in some future episodes. So, I’ll let you listen for the Mr. Socko reference in that one, but for now, we’ll just give you some brief details about the Instrumentality.
The Instrumentality can be the connective thread that occurs across all of Cordwainer Smith’s future history novels. He’s detailing a period sometime between 6, 000 and 20, 000 years in the future, and as such, the novels are loosely collected, describing the background of the setting, which becomes more and more apparent throughout the course of the short stories and the one novel.
In these stories, humanity are the survivors of a nuclear holocaust that took place on Earth. There’s advanced technology, robots, bioengineered people, and of course, faster than light travel, the planoforming, the technology that’s described in detail in The Game of Rat and Dragon. But without further ado, let’s get into the text.
If you’d like to follow along, the full text is available through Project Gutenberg. I’ll make a link available in the show notes,. And you can treat this as your spoiler warning. Here we go.
In the story, we follow the tale of our protagonist, Underhill, who is a pinlighter, which has a specialized role on the starships.
They’re the ones who help the starships cross interstellar space safely. Think of them like a psychic gunner. The four pinlighters that we’re introduced to are all telepathic, to some degree. It’s a tough job, though. Two months of recovery is required for every half an hour of work, and mandatory retirement is enforced after ten years.
But, as they say, work’s work. The pinlighters are given a military rank, even though their specialized talents kind of set them apart from the rest of the organization. As we meet Underhill, he’s getting ready for the next space flight by donning a Pinset, a helmet that vastly amplifies his telepathic abilities, allowing him to see the range of the solar system.
If you’re thinking Professor X with Cerebro, then you’re not far off. It presents that image of the solar system to him in a kind of a non space, kind of a precursor to virtual reality or augmented reality that we think of now. But again, this was written in 1954. With the enhanced abilities, you can see this whole solar system, but there’s no danger there, as the bright light of the stars keep the dragons at bay.
They mostly inhabit the Up-and-Out, the dark space between the stars, where the light is too dim to shine. They weren’t really dragons, but the telepaths could sense them, and that’s what they were collectively named. Quote: “Dragons. That was what people called them. To ordinary people, there was nothing, nothing except the shiver of planetforming and the hammer blow of sudden death, or the dark spastic note of lunacy descending into their minds.
Dot dot dot. Beasts more clever than beasts. Demons more tangible than demons. Hungry vortices of aliveness and hate compounded by unknown means out of the thin tenuous matter between the stars.” End quote.
The dragons preyed on humanity as it tried to spread amongst the stars to leave the solar system behind. They didn’t catch every ship, but enough, and as time went on, more and more dragons pursued ships trying to leave the solar system.
When a dragon attack did occur, it would either kill everybody on board or leave those touched by it insane. Almost like the Reavers from Firefly and Serenity. Like I said, there’s deep echoes of this text throughout sci fi in the 70 years since its publication.
But through luck or happy accident, humanity was able to discover that all it took was light, super intense light, to turn the dragons back into the immaterial dust that it was formed out of. And once this was figured out, a set of technologies and practices was put into place to allow humanity to once again safely travel between the stars. But it didn’t last long, and the dragons got quicker and faster.
So humanity had to turn to their companions to help them through, and thus were introduced to the Partners. Cordwainer Smith strings us along for a couple pages until it’s revealed that the Partners are indeed cats, that the telepaths are able to connect to psychically.
I’m not sure if this is the first appearance of psychic cats in science fiction, but if not, it’s very close to it, and that’s the long association of cats joining us in space begins. The cats, the Partners, have much faster reaction times than humans, as I’m sure we’re all aware, and they see the entities not as dragons, but as Rats, as creatures to be chased down and hunted, and so they’re exceedingly good at their job.
The cats are loaded into capsules that are launched outside the ship, and they maintain a… Psychic contact with the telepaths inside, and from there, they hunt the Dragons, directing the pins that are sent by the telepaths, the photonuclear bombs that light up space and destroy any Dragons that get too close.
From there, we’re introduced to the telepaths that are working on this particular mission, a team of four of them per ship. Underhill, our protagonist, Woodley, who’s close to retirement at the age of 26. Father Moontree, an older man who started his career late, and West, a young girl who was recruited at a young age because of her psychic abilities.
We’re also introduced to two of the partners, Lady May and Captain Wow. The other two Partners remain unnamed, though present. From there they get ready to protect the ship, drawing lots to see who their partners will be. Underhill’s partner is Lady May. They’ve worked together before. They have a bit of a history.
Once they’re ready, they let the ship captain know. The captain is a Scanner, introduced by Smith in his previous short story, Scanners Live in Vain, which was his introductory work. When that one was released, everyone thought he was already an accomplished author, writing under a pseudonym, but as we say, Cordwainer Smith had a bit of a gift for the art form early on.
We’ll return to those Scanners when we look at the Instrumentality as a full series in a future episode. And then they planoform, which is when the ship shifts into hyperspace or warp speed or however we might call it nowadays. The ship has to make a number of short hops shifting in and out of real space in this hyperspace.
And it’s during that journey that they encounter the dragons, when it’s most risky for the crew and passengers, and it’s during the second hop that the ship is attacked by something terrible in the darkness. West and her partner Captain Wow have at it first, but they’re unable to score a direct hit. So Lady May swings around from the other side of the ship and is able to finally take it out, but not before it lashes out and strikes at Underhill.
The entirety of the combat has taken milliseconds and the psychics are barely able to get their thoughts out. Lady May was able to direct the photonuclear bombs at the enemy across the distance of a hundred thousand miles, but even then, for a fraction of a millisecond, it struck Underhill, and even that was enough to nearly permanently disable him.
He spends the rest of the flight in stasis as the other pin lighters take over for defense of the ship, and when they arrive at the system that was their target, he is sent into retirement. And he spends a long period of recovery in the hospital, where his chief concern is not the passengers, not the crew, nor the other pin lighters, but only his love, Lady May, and scene.
So the story of the game of Rat and Dragon isn’t long. Maybe over 5500 words, a dozen pages, but within that contains seeds for a massive amount of things we saw in science fiction in general, and Warhammer 40, 000 more specifically. As is our want and as we’ve done in previous episodes, I’d like to run through what some of those elements are right now.
Among those elements include the technology, as we saw with our Starship Troopers episode, as well as those setting elements that were directly or indirectly adapted for the Warhammer 40, 000 universe, and then the key elements and influences for science fiction in general.
Despite the short length of the story, we did see the introduction of some new technologies, like the pin sets, the telepathic amplification units that allow the telepaths to see the distance of the solar system, and also the pin lighting, the Quote, “ultra vivid miniature photonuclear bombs” that the Partners were able to deploy against the Dragons, generating intense light that vaporized them from existence.
And then lastly is the planoforming, warp travel, hyperspace. There’s other science fiction stories that were talking about similar things, notably Foundation. Foundation was being published around contemporaneously with Cordwainer Smith’s first two short stories. Scanners Live in Vain came out in 1950 and…
Game of Rat and Dragon came out in 55. So they’re around the same time as this serial publication, the development of the universe now, obviously Asimov was a giant even in the early 50s within the science fiction community and Cordwainer Smith was a young and relatively unknown author, but still, the impact that the stories had were outsized.
Now, when we shift over to Warhammer 40, 000, we can directly see some of those influences. The development of the warp, and warp travel, and the daemons that existed within it. And so many of those elements that are now taken as canon within the Warhammer 40, 000 universe are coming directly from
The Game of Rat and Dragon and the other stories about the Instrumentality of Mankind, the tech, the photon bombs, and that did show up within Warhammer 40, 000 as it was a combat game.
There was more of a focus on that rather than some of the more background elements that we’d see within the instrumental instrumentality stories as a whole and. Within the instrumentality, there was much more influence on Warhammer 40k, even though they were only briefly mentioned or hinted at here.
One of those is the Scanners, people who have had their sensory inputs severed so that they could withstand what’s called the Great Pain of Space. These can be seen in the Astropaths of the Imperium. Others can include the social organization of the Instrumentality itself, reflected in the Lords of Terra.
And the Abhumans, the half-human, half man hybrids that have been bioengineered as part of the Imperium. And finally, that idea of Deep Time. The Instrumentality stories take place over thousands and thousands of years, from 6, 000 years in the future to 14, 000 years in the future. And finally, the idea of the story taking place in the 41st millennium itself may have been drawn from a Cordwainer Smith story.
As Gautham Shenoy notes in their blog post from 2018, there was a misprint on a copy of Space Lords, published by Pyramid Books in 1965, which collected the instrumentality stories that said: “Take a trip 40, 000 years into the future to the weird and wonderful universe of Cordwainer Smith.” End quote. So, yeah, the 41st millennium may have been based on a misprint.
I mean, the Instrumentality stories took place 14, 000 years in the future, not 40, 000, but uh, 40, 000 sounds kinda catchy, doesn’t it? I wonder if it’ll take off. Clearly there was an influence. And we see much of that influence in other sci fi series. that would follow, like Dune. Frank Herbert’s serialization began eight years after the publication of Game of Rat and Dragon.
Thirteen years after the publication of Cordwainer Smith’s first story, and we know it did have an influence. We see a lot of those same elements like the warp travel, space empire, and specialists being needed for the empire to function in space. But we’ll have to go into some of those direct connections when we look at Dune in a future episode.
But we’ll return to the Instrumentality at least a few more times, as the echoes in the warp ring deeply. For now, this has been episode 3 of Appendix W, episode 18 of the Implausopod. Join us next time, we’ll be returning to Appendix W shortly, but there’s some timing issues, we’ll see how long that takes, but stay tuned for an episode on Blood and Souls.
In the meantime, the Implausipod will continue as we investigate a unique occurrence within Las Vegas as this fear has made manifest in our reality, and a film interview outside of the SAG AFTRA strike, Postcards from Earth by Darren Aronofsky, a pseudo- documentary that is showing on the sphere. We’ll talk about this in upcoming episodes.
In the meantime, I’ve been your host, Dr. Implausible. The Implausipod is produced under a Creative Commons Sharealike 4.0 license. All production, including writing, recording, narration, mixing, and music, is done by yours truly, Dr. Implausible. Until next time, take care.
References and Links:
Smith, C. (1955, October). The Game of Rat and Dragon. Galaxy Science Fiction, 11(1), 126–146.
If you had asked me on October 15th, 2023, how to self describe myself, I might say I was a techno optimist. But on October 16th, Mark Andreesen, the founder of Netscape, released the Techno-optimist manifesto, and I can no longer say that I’m a techno optimist.
In this episode we’ll walk through the quick scan of the document, and the red flags that it raised while looking through it, and where some of the problems lay in the underlying assumptions of the manifesto.
Technology. If you’ve listened to this podcast for more than a few episodes, you realize that that’s one of the underlying themes here, that I’m interested in technology, how it appears in popular culture, how it’s developed, it’s what I’ve researched, written about, taught about, and I think about it a lot.
I think about its promise and potential and what it can offer humanity. And if you had asked me on October 15th, 2023, how to self describe myself, I might say I was a techno optimist. But on October 16th, Mark Andreesen, the founder of Netscape, released the Techno-optimist manifesto, and I can no longer say that I’m a techno optimist.
I’ll explain why in this episode of the Implausipod.
When the manifesto was originally published, I gave it a quick scan, and that scan raised a number of red flags. And throughout the rest of this episode, we’ll look at those red flags as if they were laid down by a surveyor on the landscape. But before we do, I want to go into the value of giving something a quick scan, of jotting down your initial impressions.
I’m going to employ another surveyor’s tool, one of triangulation, of being able to hone in on the target by looking at it from different angles and directions, from different points of view. Because, as we talked about a few episodes ago, that empathetic view of technology requires that triangulation; of being able to step outside of one’s own perspective and view it from the perspective of somebody else. And this can be done for both things we find positive, and things that we find negative as well.
So as is tradition, we’re going to talk about something by chasing down a couple tangents first before we get back to those red flags. But bear with me, it’ll all kind of come together at the end.
So when it comes to the techno optimist manifesto, the thing that really struck me was the ability to identify those red flags, to spot them, to pull them out of the larger text. (And it was a 5200 word text. There was a lot going on in there.) but I think identifying these red flags speaks to something larger: the ability of experts or people heavily involved in the field to identify key elements or themes and figure out where a problem might be lying. It doesn’t matter which field it’s in: whether it’s a mechanic or medical doctor, academic or art historian.
And if that last one rings a bell, it’s because there’s a source for it. In his 2005 book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell talked about the process by which an art historian was able to evaluate a statue that was brought into the Getty Museum. and at a glance, the evaluators were able to identify key features that led them to believe that it was a forgery, that the statue in question had never actually ever been in the ground and subsequently recovered. It’s the ability to spot the minutiae of a given artifact or piece of art, and through long experience and knowledge and exposure, be able to determine its authenticity, the validity of a piece of work. And again, this isn’t just an academic thing. It goes across so many fields, crafts, trades, practices. It’s a key, essential element of them.
And to link it back to the ongoing discussions about AI, it’s one of those things that AI generated texts or artifacts often lack. It’s that authenticity. We can sense that there’s something off about the piece. As the saying goes, we can tell by the pixels. So this assemblage of tools that we have, the skills and knowledge and practice and experience, all come together to form what we might call a set of heuristics.
It’s similar to what Kenneth Burke calls equipment for living, and there he’s referring to literature and proverbs function in a way similar to the memes we talked about last episode, but these are the tools that we can use to judge something, and how we come to an assumption about what we’re seeing in front of us. We do this for pretty much everything. But when it’s something that’s particular to our skill or our particular area, then we can make some judgments about it.
And when it comes to those particular topics, perhaps we have a duty to communicate that information, to share that knowledge with the world around us. So that’s what we’re going to get into here with the techno optimist discussion and the red flags, because I’ve read a lot of the texts that Andreesen cites within the manifesto, but obviously have a radically different worldview, and we can, discuss why we might come up with those radically different interpretations at the end.
But before we do, I want to throw one more point into the mix, one more element or angle for our triangulation on the topic at hand, and something I like to call the Forest Hypothesis. Now, this is different than the Dark Forest Hypothesis, where we are, as a species are tiny mice in a universe filled with predators lurking in the darkness (which we’ll touch on next episode). Rather the Forest Hypothesis is related back to the Blink idea, that it’s a way of evaluating knowledge, of evaluating expertise. The Forest Hypothesis basically asks how much can you talk about on a given subject if you’re out in the forest away from any cell phone signal, Wikipedia, handheld device, book, or any other form of external knowledge, something that was extrinsic to yourself.
And it’s a good test. There are people that can expound endlessly on stuff that they know about, and there are those who may be less comfortable discussing things online, or in an academic setting, but you know when push comes to shove, they actually do know things, and they don’t have to just reach out to their Wikipedia on their phone. Now, the analogue to this is the bar talk phenomenon that we used to have, where no one had access to phones, and we’d get into discussions about who could recall what. We could call it the Cliff Claven Corollary, right, where we’re not necessarily sure in the moment, but we can use those rhetorical strategies to ask: “eh, does that sound right to you, or are you just, like, making that up?”
And in the interest of full disclosure, much of the rest of the episode about the red flags came from two conversations that I had with different sets of colleagues about the techno optimist manifesto and the material espoused within. So much of the rest of this episode is going to be me recreating that discussion and talk off the top of my head as best I can. I’ll refer back to specific elements, but without further ado: why I am not a techno optimist.
So, as stated, the Techno Optimist Manifesto was published on the morning of October 16th, 2023. During the day, it started making the rounds on social media, on Mastodon, and elsewhere, and I saw numerous links to it, so I thought I’d dive in and give it a quick look. There’s been articles written about it since, in the intervening ten days or so, but I want to really just capture my thoughts that I had at the time.
I had jotted them down and had them in conversations with colleagues, as stated. So flipping through the manifesto, I kind of gave it a high level skim and a couple of things started to pop out. And these were the red flags that started to be a cause for concern. The first of those was some of the works cited. Now, one of those heuristics that we talked about earlier that you can use whenever you’re evaluating an article is kind of, you read it from the front, you read it from the back, and then you can read the meat of the article itself, which means take a look at the abstract or the introduction, and then take a look at some of the authors they’re citing, because if you’re familiar with them, that can give you an idea of where the conversation’s going to go.
But with respect to the manifesto itself, early on in the work Mark Andreesen starts referring to a number of economists that were influences for the work that he was producing. The first one he mentions is the work of Paul Collier, who wrote an influential book called The Bottom Billion, which talks about development and in the global south. There’s nothing really wrong there. He’s going into some interesting information about what’s happening in the developing economies around the world.
But then Andreesen goes on to cite Frederick Hayek and Milton Friedman as influences. Now from a glance and, these are, you know, well known and respected economists, and Hayek in particular for his work on the Knowledge problem. But both of them were influential in other ways, and drove the policy for the Thatcher governments in the UK in the 70s and 80s, as well as the Reagan governments in the U.S. in the 1980s, So they had a very neoliberal bent to them and a lot of the underlying ideology from their economic works are what we still see in policy circles today. Taking a look at the state of the world and the economic system, we may want to questions those underlying influences, and seeing them in this manifesto is raising some red flags again. Now, even though, some economists like say Tyler Cowen would recently would include both Hayek and Friedman is part of the greats of all time, and again, I’m not disputing this: they have a massive influence. But those influences can have outsized effects for millions and billions of people across the world.
Some of the other elements that, showed up as red flags in Mark Andreesen’s work was the section of the manifesto, and just a quick second, whenever you declare something as a manifesto, that in and of itself is a red flag, it’s a cause for, just to maybe look at the document from a particular point of view, to go through it with that fine tooth comb.
A manifesto can be seen as like an operating manual, like “this is what we’re working with; these are our stated assumptions” and sometimes getting that down on paper is fine. It gives you a target that you can refer back to. But when we see a manifesto, we also want look at it with a greater degree of incredulity, to dig a little deeper on what’s included therein.
So in the manifesto, there’s this section of beliefs that Mark Andreesen goes through, where each sentence starts “we believe that dot dot dot”. And beliefs are fine, there’s nothing wrong with having beliefs, but it’s when we have beliefs that are contrary to evidence that it can become a problem. And in the belief section, you see a lot of these statements, where the belief is contra to evidence.
One of the things he says is they believe in… That energy should be too cheap to meter, and that if you have widespread access to this energy that’s too cheap to meter, then that can be a net societal good, and by and large, I agree. Now, the method they decide to get there is part of the problem. They say that through nuclear fission, they will be able to achieve energy that’s too cheap to meter. Now, this is part of the problem, because nuclear fission alone will not get there. Aside from the massive environmental costs of nuclear fission, of the plants that are currently existing (and I’m referring here to an article on phys dot org from 2011, that I still remember), and it was basically saying that at the time in 2011, there was 440 existing nuclear fission reactors that supplied, you know, a portion of the world’s energy. To supply the full energy demand through nothing but nuclear, we would need 15,000 additional nuclear reactors with all the associated costs, the fissile material, the environmental costs, and they’d still be putting out the, you know, the heat, the steam that is released from nuclear reactors. So, there would still be a massive environmental cost from transitioning to that source, and that would require building, like, ten reactors a day, every day, for like half a decade to get us close to those numbers.
There’s no way for us to… as a society build up that kind of capacity through nuclear fission alone. And Andreesen states that that would allow us to provide energy too cheap to meter that we could move away from an oil and gas economy. So, the actual path is through more passive elements like solar, wind, and alternative energy sources, but nuclear fission will not get there, and using nuclear fission to accelerate us into nuclear fusion is also a problem, in that nuclear fusion has always been about some mythical target 20 or 30 years down the road and much like AGI seems to always be off in the future. We’re never quite getting to that point. So citing that as a goal is necessarily a bit of a problem.
We’re barely getting started and we’re already three flags in. Now, the next one is that in this area, they also self identify as apex predators. Earlier, on he draws a comparison to sharks in nature: move or die, and that ties into this apex predator bit later on. He says that they are predators, that they are able to make the lightning “work for us”. It moves directly from their to a return to the “great man theory” lionizing the technologists and industrialists who came before. Hmmm. Really? Do tell. Whenever you’re self identifying as a predator, that’s just like a massive red flag, a warning sign.
And I want to be clear, that there are aspirational elements to the work, it’s just that the aspirational elements are like flowers in a garden filled with these bright red flags.
I can get behind the aspirational elements, but even some of those have a massive disconnect with reality. They see the earth as having a caring capacity of like 50 billion humans. we can barely manage with the 8 billion that we currently have, which is massively overusing the resources available to the tune of requiring three earths worth at current consumption rates. And while the may be able to support 50 billion humans, but that would require a massive change in organizational and resource usage and resort in horrible inequalities across massive amounts of that 50 billion, with a very select few having anything close to the living standards that we have now or that are seen across much of the OECD nations, let alone the globe as a whole.
We see a number of other aspirational elements, other flowers in the garden, in quotes from Richard Feynman, Buckminster Fuller, and others, with odes to the transformative power of science to enlighten us and provide answers to the mysteries of the world around us. But this also comes hand in hand with a de-legitimizing of expertise, using the Feynman quote to propose a return to the “actual scientific method” using “actual information”. Whenever we start seeing echoes of the No True Scotsman fallacy in a text, making distinctions about what counts, once again, red flag. Actual information? Who decides? Isn’t that what science is about?
And from there, the Andreesen leans heavily into accelerationism. And again, this is a massive flag for me personally, whenever someone self identifies as an accelerationist, I start to seriously question everything they’re talking about.
Accelerationism is basically the belief that what capitalism really needs is for the gas to be put all the way down to the floor, to press the pedal all the way down so that we can actually hit “escape velocity” quote-unquote, and move quicker along the curve towards the singularity or whatever.
If you consider technological development as a curve, as a growth curve, then the only way to get higher up it is to go faster. Now, if you look at Geoffrey Moore’s work on innovation in Crossing the Chasm, which is an adaptation of Rogers’ work on the diffusion of innovations, of the innovation adoption curve, there’s a point where any new technology will succeed or fail, based on the point of low down on the slope. If I do the video version of this, we’ll put this on the screen, but basically at the low end of the slope, there’s this little thing, which Moore calls the chasm. And that chasm is where you have the innovators and early adopters have kind of picked up this new tech, and then you’re trying to take that product, that technological tool or artifact out to larger market, to get widespread adoption, and then see if it flies. Basically we’ve seen it with things like virtual reality or DVDs or home video recording, smartphones, whatever. There’s a point where the product might be under development for a while, and then the larger population says, okay, we can use this and they adopt it. And then it sees widespread distribution.
Accelerationism views that as a challenge and views tech more generally. And that, like we said, things need capitalism just really needs more gas, more fuel. Problem with it is that obviously you can’t necessarily tell what’s going to take off, what’s going to get adopted – you can’t necessarily make “fetch” happen, even if you’re a billionaire, and there’s a lot of problems when you start going that fast with no brakes. If the road starts to swerve ahead of you, you might not be able to change direction in time, and this is where the other side of accelerationism comes in.
You see, Accelerationism isn’t necessarily something that’s either left or right. There are accelerations on both sides of the political spectrum. There’s accelerationists on the right, that are pro-capitalist, pro-tech version seen here. There are other accelerationists on the right, and you can go check out the Wikipedia page to see what other groups are associated with it. There’s also accelerationists on the left who view that capitalism is inherently unstable and want to see it go faster because that will expose the iniquities in the system and help it go off the rails so something better can be rebuilt.
You see this in the works of like Slavoj Zizek and other academics on the left though. Zizek himself is kind of… Um, mid, I guess, but you’ll see that amongst those who are critics of capitalism, who also want it to go faster. There’s a problem with both these perspectives and the problem is basically that, and this is the problem I have with accelerationism is that it is a perspective of a tiny elite minority and would result in massive amounts of pain for millions and billions of people, while that acceleration is resolving itself.
While things are going faster, more fuel is getting added to the system. You know, the climatic change that we see because of more fuel literally being added to the system. Just the disruption that we can see happening would cause starvation, job loss, and untold pain and suffering, if the current systems we have are disrupted is also a problem. And so, from my perspective of doing the least pain, of not wanting to see humanity as a whole suffer, then accelerationism is necessarily a bad thing. Let’s find a different way.
Now, this is about the point where the Techno Optimist Manifesto gets into the list of enemies as well, and while that may or may not be typical for a manifesto, I think whenever you’re writing something and you have a enemies list, you know, that’s a warning flag in and of itself.
Now amongst the enemies for the technological optimist are things like sustainability, sustainable development, social responsibility, trust and safety, tech ethics, de-growth, and others besides. And when you start to look about who your enemies are, what you’re against, then you start wondering really what you’re for, right? So the concern here is that any kind of regulation or responsible governance is seen as an enemy, as something to be combated, to be avoided, to be dealt with. And aside from being a massive red flag, it reveals some of the under some of the underlying ethos as well.
This is what they’re against. They’re against regulation, things that were put in place for safety, for ethical use, for management, for sustainability, for our continued existence on the planet. And these are things they’re against. And I think that is, again, a massive warning sign. And from there we get to the last one.
The last red flag sign is a quote that comes up near the end. Now the quote is uncited, unattributed. We don’t see the conviction to actually state who this is from because that may be actually make it too obvious. The quote is as follows:
“Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.”
That quote is from Filippo Marinetti, from 1909, from the Futurist Manifesto which he wrote. If you’re not familiar with Marinetti, here’s the low down, and it’ll highlight the problem. Like I said, it was uncited, but if you know who Marinetti is and the story, then that is the biggest warning flag in the entire document, of the entire list of warning flags that we’ve already seen. Marinetti, of course, is the founder of the Futurist School in Italy and wrote the Futurist Manifesto in 1909.
Here’s some of the elements of futurism: technology, growth, industry, modernization. Okay, but also these other elements: speed, violence, destruction of museums, war as a necessity for purification… Hmmm. Now, Marinetti would go on to get into politics in Italy a few years later, and work with another group of Italians on another manifesto in 1919. That, of course, is the Fascist Manifesto, which he co-authored. So there’s a direct lineage from Marinetti’s work and elements of it that appear in that later manifesto and the works that that was adopted to as well.
If we take all these things, all these red flags together: a list of neoliberal economists, denialism and beliefs contrary to facts while downplaying education, self identifying as predators, accelerationism, lists of enemies, and citing proto-fascist literature. All this combined is a massive red flag and why I am not a techno optimist.
So, that being said, then how would I identify?
And that’s a fantastic question, because judging on the words alone, “Technical Optimist” is pretty close to where I am. I believe that technology can be used as an assistive tool, as we’ve stated prior, and that it can help people out, and is generally an extension of man, that we can use it for adding to our capabilities.
So I might be a techno-optimist, or at least I was until October 16th. Other terms I’ve seen floating around that I could self-identify as include things like techno revivalist, which is close, but not quite. That feels like it ties more into like experimental archeology, where we try and recreate the past or use methods of the past in the modern era to kind of figure out what they were doing. It’s a fascinating field. We should talk about it at some time, but that isn’t really where I am.
Solarpunk isn’t quite where I’m at either because, well, or cyberpunk either. I don’t think I’m really fit within any of the punk genres. I’m pretty straight-laced. I’m a basic B to be honest.
Taking the opposite stance doesn’t work either; I’m not a techno-pessimist. I’m generally hopeful for the opportunities that the new technologies can bring. I think that’s part of the challenge is that there isn’t a good line for where I sit. Aside from what is now defined as a techno optimist. And I don’t think it can be reclaimed because as I went through the number of red flags there, the well is really well… well and truly poisoned and with the breadth of reach that that particular manifesto got and the reporting that it saw in multiple areas, I don’t think that that would ever come back, even though much like Michael Bolton in Office Space, why should I change if they’re the ones that suck, right?
So I think techno-optimist as a term is where it is, and that will not change. But I am almost anything but that. And why? Well, part of it I think is just exposure and upbringing. As I said, I’ve had a significantly different path. One that doesn’t lead through Silicon Valley, one that’s not even in the same solar system as a billionaire.
When you have to go about the business of daily life, when you’re almost middle class, you’re going to have a very different view of technology and its uses, and how it can be used for exploitation as well. And I think that comes through in some of our work.
So, to tie this back to the beginning, to close the loop on why we had to triangulate with examples before we could assay the manifesto: if exposure and experience are what lead one to be able to make quick judgments about a particular work and see where the references are coming from, they also can allow one to see some of the harms that might come about from exposure to those statements as well. And that’s really what we’re trying to do: to bring some of those associations to light through this particular podcast episode.
So as I still search for a term: Retro Tech Enthusiast, just Tech Enthusiast perhaps, media historian, media archaeologist, etc. I’ll keep working on it. And once we figure it out – and the figuring it out is what I think is going to be the journey of this podcast as a whole – once we figure it out, I’ll let you know.
But if you have any great suggestions in the meantime, reach out and let me know at drimplausible at implausipod. com or on the implausi dot blog. I’ll see you around. Take care.
