The looting of science fiction ⊗ We’ve been here before

Time for summer break! The next Sentiers will be in your inbox August 23rd. In the mean time, this is a pretty long one to tide you over. I almost made it a broligarch special but, since that might be a bit much, I kept the best piece up top, on the looting of science fiction, and tacked on the other two under it. The one about techno-negativity is a short history of opposition to tech “inevitability” and the one on billionaire derangement provides a bit more context on their bizarre world view. The last featured piece is an intriguing take on LLMs at work.

The looting of science fiction

Even though what he explains is enraging, this is a strong piece by Ali Rıza Taşkale for Aeon. I’ve already mentioned the Torment Nexus “joke” a few times: a writer invents a cautionary technology, and a founder then reads the caution as a product brief. This is the detailed and more serious version of it. Silicon Valley’s most powerful figures describe their projects through science fiction constantly. Musk invokes Star Trek, Zuckerberg renamed his company after Snow Crash, Bezos funds colonies drawn from Gerard K O’Neill, Thiel cites Heinlein, Palantir takes its name from Tolkien (ok, we’re in fantasy here), OpenAI’s offices gesture at Gibson’s cyberpunk after building something closer to it than they’d like to admit. But of course, the borrowing is always partial. The source material carries a political architecture, usually anti-authoritarian, anti-corporate or clearly satirical, and that architecture gets left behind while the imagery, the scale and the confidence are kept.

The pattern repeats with enough consistency to be seen as a playbook. Asimov’s Foundation argues for distributed institutions over lone genius; Musk quotes it while positioning himself as the exception the books warn against. Heinlein’s lunar rebels are convicts, not entrepreneurs, and their politics rest on coerced labour; Thiel and the seasteading movement keep the anti-government aesthetic and drop the coercion. Gibson wrote Neuromancer as a warning about corporate capture of digital space; the industry now resembles his dystopia and treats it as a design goal rather than a threat avoided. Tolkien imagined the palantíri as instruments of corruption; a surveillance company took the name anyway.

The essay places this inside a wider shift, which the author calls “reactionary futurism”: going from the networked optimism of the 1990s toward a harder, extraction-minded politics rooted in Texas rather than California, backed by longtermist arguments that justify present neglect with appeals to distant future populations. The gadgets inspired their adolescent dreams, and now they come back to science fiction, which supplies the aesthetic cover for their politics, turning a rollback of democratic accountability into something that sounds like frontier ambition. Taşkale closes with counter-examples that resist this pattern—Le Guin, Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson—and argues, as readers here already know quite well, that the choice of which stories get built from is political, not inevitable. “Our task is to stop being background characters in someone else’s spec script, and start writing—and building—our own.”

[What] Fred Turner recently called the ‘Texan ideology’: a century-old fusion of resource exploitation and millenarian Christianity, the conviction that providential destiny justifies the conquest of nature and the extraction of its wealth. […]

By trying to steer policy debates toward distant catastrophic scenarios – killer robots, rogue AI, existential risk – the industry diverts attention from regulating the systems already causing harm: algorithmic bias in hiring, facial recognition’s racial disparities, platform amplification of extremism. […]

Taken together, these cases converge on what I call ‘reactionary futurism’: the deployment of science-fiction aesthetics to advance anti-democratic political projects. It uses the chrome-plated aesthetic of the new to engineer a return to an idealised, brutal past – 19th-century frontier capitalism with radical individualism, unregulated markets, and rejection of democratic governance, but armed with 21st-century drones and algorithms. […]

These stories remind us that the future is not neutral inevitability but choice – one we have the right to reclaim from boardrooms treating dystopia as a business plan. When Thiel, Musk, Zuckerberg and Andreessen mine science fiction for blueprints, they are not finding the only possible futures. They are selecting the futures that justify their power.

§ A brief history of techno-negativity. Thomas Dekeyser’s piece, drawn from his book Techno-Negative (not a fan of his framing it as negative), argues against the idea that technological progress is a natural, unstoppable wave: from Archimedes destroying his own inventions to the Luddites burning looms, from early modern governments banning gigmills to 1980s groups like CLODO firebombing computer companies, resistance to technology has been a recurring, organised political force rather than a footnote of failure. Each episode had different targets and justifications, worker displacement, surveillance, a rejection of capitalist life entirely, but together they undercut the claim that today’s technological path is inevitable. Where the first essay shows Silicon Valley’s habit of using science fiction to imply inevitability, this one flashes over the history of people who never accepted that destiny in the first place.

§ The political economy of billionaire derangement. Another one to go with the Aeon essay is this piece by Henry Farrell’s, where he supplies the psychology behind the looting. He takes Tim O’Reilly’s diagnosis of Musk—that he uses shareholder capitalism’s legal machinery while escaping its restraints—and Frankensteins it to Peter Thiel’s own writing on founders as kings. Thiel’s lectures and Zero to One describe startups as monarchies, monopoly profits as the reward for breaking rules, and founder eccentricity as something that compounds through feedback loops rather than settling down; add Silicon Valley’s dense, clannish social world, where founders watch and imitate each other constantly, and Farrell argues you get the conditions for something like the madness of old princes: unchecked power plus a tight circle with no one willing to say no.

We’ve been here before

Excellent article by Jay Springett with an original angle on how we can view / think about LLMs in companies and knowledge work more generally: he proposes that the current AI divide inside organisations echoes the arrival of the spreadsheet. Within a year of release, VisiCalc turned a tedious accounting format into a “simulation machine,” and he sees a parallel mutation happening now: language models are turning documents into what he calls software-shaped things—hypertext objects that sit between a document and an application, built quickly, by people with no formal development background, for one-off local use.

Organisations accumulate “feral databases”: unofficial spreadsheets that track the real forecast or the real headcount plan, sitting closer to ground truth than whatever the official system records. Every office has a spreadsheet wizard, someone fluent enough with LOOKUP or pivot tables to be the person colleagues turn to, and that partial fluency compounds across a workforce even when most people never go past summing a column. Jay has started observing the same pattern with LLMs: a new class of informal expert producing dashboards, briefs and interactive explainers in minutes, work that used to require a product team and a sprint cycle, while most colleagues are asking whether the model can write a decent email.

Spreadsheets gave people autonomy and also produced business-critical files nobody but their departed author understood; Springett expects LLM-made artefacts to generate the same kind of ungoverned sprawl; drifting duplicate versions, decision aids built on bad assumptions, interfaces with no clear owner, harder to audit than a nested formula. He argues however that resisting the tools solves nothing. The shift he wants readers to watch for is the mundane one: the day a colleague sends a single interactive HTML file instead of a slide deck, or turns a folder of interview notes into a navigable tool for a meeting, because that is how a vernacular technology spreads, one imitated example at a time.

More → Also by Jay, but much older. It’s not the same mechanism, but the mining and corrupting of beloved fiction in the first piece reminded me of his concept of cultural fracking. Extracting material from the past because nothing new can compete with an audience’s existing reference points.

At the deeper end of the pool, LLMs can produce all sorts of artefacts: dashboards, briefs, internal tools, status pages, decision aids, and interactive explainers. Instead of asking for a fifty-page report, you ask for a thing. Instead of accepting a rubbish dashboard locked inside a SaaS product, you can produce a lightweight custom interface built for your situation over the top of a CSV export. […]

I’ve also been sent an interactive document for a book project that someone is working on. It contained the full proposal and plan, chapter summaries, notes and references, and a way to move between them all. A single webpage sitting on top of the project allowing you to explore it from multiple angles. it was made in minutes from a Claude project and flung over Telegram for my one time use. […]

A similar kind of mutation is happening now as different kinds of data get squeezed through the language machine. I wrote a call for the return of hypermedia back in 2024, and it feels like it’s actually beginning to happen. The AI handles the translation and the user only needs to know what sort of hypermedia they want to navigate.

§ Report from the march to Stop the AI Race. “Even if the danger isn’t as existential as the doomiest doomers imagine I believe this is a great opportunity for humanity to prove that we can actually make choices about the development and deployment of powerful technology. If we can’t, then we are not as sovereign as we imagine; if we can’t, a machine god has already taken over this planet, and it’s called the market.”

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

• We are losing the ability to discover what we didn’t know to ask. A looser category fit for this one, but I think it aligns with foresight research. “Our technology is increasingly treating the territory between the query and the answer as dead space to be eliminated, when that territory is where most of the learning actually happens.”
• STARLOG. “A gorgeous print magazine looking forward with hope, authority, and an unyielding sense of wonder. Edited by Annalee Newitz.”
• In Other Worlds. “Through an immersive experience, created in collaboration with leading voices from film, TV, literature and science, comes a display of films, audio stories, tapestries, soundscapes and costumes. In Other Worlds constructs a series of imagined futures for our planet, rooted in real technology and climate-based possibilities.”

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

• How to talk about “AI” without adding to the anthropomorphization. That ship has sailed, but I like the exercice. “De-anthropomorphizing language talks about computer systems in terms of their functionality (what people build and/or use them to do), assigns agency to people using systems and not systems, and avoids aggrandizing metaphors about cognition.”
• OpenAI and Google sell AI models to blacklisted China groups. “The US companies confirmed to the FT that they have been supplying AI services to Singapore-based subsidiaries of Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, which the US government has accused of working with China’s military.”
• A functional taxonomy of world models. “The World Labs team and I want to go one level deeper: of the many things now being built and called ‘world models,’ which functional pieces actually compose that capacity — and what is each one for?”

Built, Biosphere & Breakthroughs

• Underwater kites harvest power from slow-moving tides. “Researchers from SRI International, a research institute in Menlo Park, Calif., are testing a buoyant kite that flies underwater to determine whether it can squeeze enough power from intermittent, often slow-moving tidal currents to provide clean energy to small coastal communities.”
• A quarter of EU power came from solar for the first time in June. “Record solar output across Europe coincided with relatively high summer power demand, driven partially by demand for cooling due to record-breaking heatwaves. Solar helped sustain power supplies as other power sources struggled in hot and still conditions.”
• China’s “Green Great Wall” tames desert growth, but scientists warn the fight is not over. “The initiative launched in 1978 has played a crucial role in transforming vast regions covering nearly half of China from ‘the desertification advancing and people retreating’ to ‘greenery advancing and the desertification retreating.’ Forests planted by the program now cover a cumulative 500,000 square kilometers (200,000 square miles).”

Asides

• Frame of preference. 5/5 nerd factor but also worth a click for the very well made and fun to scroll page. “Turns out, the Mac settings have lived a far more fascinating life than I imagined, have been redesigned many times, and can tell us a lot about the early history and the troubled upbringing of this interesting machine. Join me on a journey through the first twenty years of Mac’s control panels.”
• We can now track animal panic from space. Here’s why it matters. “Scientists are now able to study these signals written in animal panic thanks to a new satellite system, named Icarus, which is tracking animal movement and behaviour on an unprecedented scale from space. By monitoring how animals react to the presence of human intruders, conservationists hope to pinpoint and crack down on poachers.”
• “See the whole world in lichens,” the marvels that grow anywhere. “Lichens delight, confound and inspire. A thing unto themselves on the tree of life, they have puzzled scientists for more than a century as to just what they even are. One of earth’s most adaptable forms of life, lichens live on every continent and have passed multiple tests of their ability to survive in outer space, even for months.”
• The Seinfeld Chronicles. A fan could spend hours on here. “I was intrigued by the possibilities of mixing work with pleasure: visually exploring a sitcom through its data.” (Via Steve Bryant.)