https://aeon.co/essays/silicon-valley-has-a-science-fiction-problem
"In January 2026, Elon Musk stood before the US Secretary of Defense and senior
Pentagon leaders at the SpaceX Starbase in Texas. ‘We want to make
Star Trek
real, OK?’ he declared. ‘We want to make
Starfleet Academy real. So that it’s
not always science fiction, but one day the science fiction turns to science
fact, and we have spaceships going through space. Big spaceships!’ He painted a
vivid picture: exploring alien civilisations, humanity spreading across the
stars. ‘That’s the goal!’ he concluded. ‘And that is what I think the public
thinks of when they think of Space Force!’
It was a remarkable pitch selling the Pentagon a science-fiction vision. Of
course, the fit is partial, incomplete.
Star Trek depicts a post-scarcity,
post-capitalist society where money has been abolished and humanity works
toward collective betterment. Gene Roddenberry’s Federation was built on
principles of equality and exploration for the sake of knowledge, not profit or
military dominance. Musk took the aesthetic – big spaceships, alien encounters,
epic adventures – and left its political foundation. You don’t have to be a
Trekkie to know that, in
Star Trek, capitalism, nationalism and militarism
have been left behind. Musk wants the Enterprise, but reimagined for the
military-industrial complex.
In 2021, when Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook’s rebrand to ‘Meta’, he took
the name from Neal Stephenson’s novel
Snow Crash (1992), which imagines the
‘Metaverse’: a virtual reality where people’s avatars navigate digital space.
But
Snow Crash is one of the sharpest satirical novels of the past
half-century. Stephenson wrote it as a warning: his Metaverse is a consolation
prize for a society that has collapsed. The federal government has
disintegrated; corporate franchises govern daily life; even pizza delivery has
been privatised into a Mafia-run operation. The novel’s protagonist is a pizza
deliveryman and part-time hacker whose sword-fighting avatar in the virtual
world is the only place where dignity is available to him. Stephenson intended
the contrast between digital glamour and material poverty to be horrifying. He
saw it as a cautionary vision of where platform capitalism leads.
Zuckerberg’s presentation did not engage with any of this. The platform economy
– where corporations are protected from democratic accountability while
providing essential services – echoes Stephenson’s model precisely, and
Zuckerberg read it as inspiration.
Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co-founder, gave expression to this ethos in 2017 when
he said: ‘We are the people who make fantasies real.’ It sounds inspiring, but
it is important to know which parts of those fantasies they’re choosing, and
which parts they’re leaving out. When Musk unveiled Tesla’s Cybertruck in 2019,
he had already told investors what to expect: something ‘really futuristic,
like cyberpunk
Blade Runner’. Musk was selling survival gear for a collapsing
world, a version of
Blade Runner’s Los Angeles. The aesthetics got
materialised. The warnings did not."
Via Esther Schindler.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
