20-05-2025
The tech billionaires are missing the point of their favorite sci-fi series
One of the most momentous developments of the new Trump era is how major billionaires in the tech industry — frequently known as the broligarchs — have thrown their weight behind the president. During the 2024 election, they offered high-profile support and made big donations; after the inauguration, they announced new company policies that aligned them with President Donald Trump's regressive cultural ideologies.
It was a massive show of power that revealed how possible it is for these wealthy men to remake our culture in their own image, transforming how we speak to each other and what we know to be true. Using that power on Trump's behalf seems to have paid mixed dividends for Silicon Valley, but it nonetheless makes clear how important it is to understand their worldview and their vision for the future.
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Which is why it is striking to note that Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg share a favorite author: Iain M. Banks, the Scottish science fiction writer best known for his Culture series. Banks is an odd choice for a bunch of tech billionaires. The author, who died in 2013, was a socialist and avowed hater of the super-rich.
Banks is an odd choice for a bunch of tech billionaires. The author, who died in 2013, was a socialist and avowed hater of the super-rich.
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Plenty of us like and even identify with pieces of pop culture whose politics we don't entirely agree with, like the libertarian Little House on the Prairie books or the Christian Chronicles of Narnia. Still, the Banks Culture series, which consists of 10 books released between 1987 and 2012, is not politically coded so much as it is downright didactic. 'The Culture is hippy commies with hyper-weapons and a deep distrust of both Marketolatry and Greedism,' Banks said in an interview with Strange Horizons in 2010, in a line that's only barely more explicit than the books themselves.
The Culture series takes place in a post-scarcity galactic society known only as the Culture, which strictly values empathy, pluralism, and social cooperation. Most of the volumes of the series see the Culture navigating an altercation with another civilization, usually one with a much less progressive ethos, and figuring out how to handle the resulting tension. Does the Culture intervene in the affairs of another planet to, for instance, stop the spread of a theocratic empire? What does it do about civilizations where slavery is legal?
The politics of these books are not subtle, and they are also not compatible with the existence of billionaires. So it's worth thinking about why the broligarchs have so consistently cited a socialist author as an inspiration. What do they find tantalizing about Banks' work? Are they missing the point altogether?
Almost everything about the Culture books is opposed to the world as seen in Silicon Valley
Nearly every aspect of the Culture seems to be diametrically opposed to the worldview of the tech right.
Banks takes as his starting principle for the Culture the idea that a space-faring civilization will have to be socialist to be effective. In the hostile environment of the vacuum of space, he argues, you will need to be able to count on the collective. Banks further reasons that each spaceship or planet in the Culture will have to be reasonably self-sufficient to survive.
At the same time, the Culture is stringently non-hierarchical and non-individualistic. There is no money and no want; therefore, there can't be any billionaires or any economic inequality. There are no laws and almost no crime. This is not a world in which supremely wealthy people who use their power to influence the social fabric make sense.
'Succinctly; socialism within, anarchy without,' Banks concluded in a 1994 Usenet post in which he lays out his full theory of the Culture.
In the Culture, should someone commit an action that most people agreed was unacceptable, everyone responds with social shaming rather than the rule of law: They stop inviting the person in question to parties. In other words, like a group of proper leftists, they deal with misbehavior by social cancellation, that great threat against which the broligarchs have declared war.
Even work-life balance in the Culture exists in opposition to the ethos of Silicon Valley. The Culture's citizens have invented vastly powerful AIs that take care of governance for them. This delegation frees up the Culture citizens themselves to indulge in what Banks describes as 'the things that really mattered in life, such as sports, games, romance, studying dead languages, barbarian societies and impossible problems, and climbing high mountains without the aid of a safety harness.' Those who are burdened with too much ambition to be content in such a soft life take on (unpaid) jobs managing the Culture's relationships with other civilizations, mostly for the prestige and the adrenaline rush of it all.
This vision appears to have influenced Musk's idea of a future in which AI has rendered work 'optional,' so that 'if you want to do a job that's kinda like a hobby, you can do a job.' Musk allows that there would need to be 'universal high income' for this plan to work, but outlines no ideas as to how such an ambitious policy could take effect. In the meantime, in our own world, Amazon, Meta, and Tesla are all infamous for requiring employees to work abusively long hours.
Elon Musk is one of the most ardent fans of Iain M. Banks's Culture series. Nathan Laine/Bloomberg via Getty Images
But it's not just that the Culture holds the inverse of the ideology these men stand for. The most detestable villain in Banks's series is Joiler Veppers, a wealthy man in a civilization less evolved than the Culture, who uses his riches to purchase and influence media outlets, undercut labor unions, and rape his indentured servants. Veppers's money comes from a family fortune built in the computer game industry, and he compounds that fortune by investing in the servers to a series of virtual reality hellscapes, where unfortunates are horribly tortured for all eternity.
If you want to know how Banks views capitalist tech billionaires, you don't have to hunt very hard. In the Culture series, a capitalist tech billionaire is the literal devil, only he couldn't be bothered to build hell himself.
So why are the broligarchs so into the Culture books?
So what's the appeal of the Culture series if you actually are a capitalist tech billionaire? Probably the tech itself.
If politics offer the Culture books their intellectual framing, the tech is what gives them their zing, their spectacle. Throughout the series, Banks lovingly describes spaceships and AIs (and lots of spaceships that are also AIs), and artificial planets and gizmos and gadgets. Generally, at the end of the book, the Culture uses one of those gizmos in an inventive way to win a big, explosive space war.
Read through this light, the Culture's technological prowess offers the brute force that backs up its warm and fuzzy ideology. The Culture can afford to be idealistic and worry about its moral culpability because it has better technology than all the other civilizations it faces off with, which means it will nearly always win in a fight.
If you think of yourself as a titan of industry who is making that technology for your own culture — who is providing the brute force that allows for wishy-washy moralizing — there is a certain easy comfort that comes with this alignment. You know you are on the correct side of history because you're on the side that is building the strongest and most advanced technology.
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Yet within the larger metaphor Banks is building, the relationship between politics and strength is supposed to be the other way around. The Culture is not good because they are strong. Their strength is a metaphor for their goodness. They have the best technology because that shows that they are rational, that they value intelligence, that they are motivated to give their citizens the best possible quality of life.
The Culture is not good because they are strong. Their strength is a metaphor for their goodness.
