I think one of the most unfortunate realities in our
world today is that many people do not watch Science Fiction. Even though it is
a large genre, that has produced some of the greatest stories known to mankind
going back to at least the 19th century, many people look at the
alien worlds, the alien faces, the alien everything and they simply shun this
genre. Of course, there are many people who do watch it, but still many people
will say, “Science fiction is not my thing.” Ok, fine.
But I think this is unfortunate for a very important
reason: science fiction is an important genre for helping us to think about
ourselves as humanity and where we might end up if we go in certain directions,
create certain technologies, or refuse to take certain paths. It is a “what if”
genre. Of course, it does not just have to be this. It could be more space
opera like John Carter. It could be more like James Bond in space like Keith
Laumer’s Retief stories. It can also just be an interesting genre for exploring
stories that allow for things you can’t do with real physics and present-day
technology. It can be all these things. But it can also be a window into our
human souls and destiny.
I was thinking about this recently because I
re-watched the two Blade Runner movies in the last week. For the record I think
2047 is the better movie of the two, but both are incredible works of art. I was
especially reflecting on something I have spoken about and written about
before: how conservatives are obsessed with saying everything bad is communism.
If the government passes a new law they don’t like: communism. If a company
seeks to encroach on our rights: communism. If something happens from above
that people do not like they automatically cry, “Communism.” Everything is communism.
Now, of course, I am not going to defend communism. It
was always and always will be a bad ideology. It is a poison. The idea that the
produce of all should be equally distributed to all, according to our needs is
a poison for the soul. We who know human nature better know this will not work.
Tell a man he can eat, sleep, be warm and housed without having to work and you
will kill his soul. This is as true for the welfare bludger as it is for the third-generation
billionaire child; taking away the drive to work for your place in the world
and the ensuing reward, kills something in a person; it is a poison. Which is
why the Bible says that a man who will not work should not eat.
Communism is also obsessed with the squashing of
individual rights in view of the community. It is a form of extreme
collectivism. I say extreme because not all collectivism is evil. For instance families
sticking together is collectivism. Communities sticking together is
collectivism. But communism goes beyond that and says that we are all
collectively one, which is just another way of saying we are all meaningless
and interchangeable. Communism is a bureaucrat’s dream, when you think about
it. Because that is how they see us, as well, as numbers on a page.
This extreme collectivism leads to a centralization of
power in the hands of a few. What is billed as an ideology for every working
man, becomes a crushing tax burden for every private citizen and a plush state job for an increasing number of unproductive workers. To sustain this system more and
more power must be taken until eventually individual rights are completely squashed.
In fact, the person who talks about individual rights becomes the true danger
to this system, because he or she refuses to be subsumed into the beast.
The problem is that most conservatives are not well
read, they are steeped in one dimensional anti-communist thinking and they associate too much power,
too much centralization, too much overreach, too much control in the hands of the
few, with only communism. Everything bad, from a government or power perspective
is communism. They see communism everywhere. And they miss many other evils as
a result.
Now, of course, communism is evil and bad. No one here
is going to dispute that. But there are other evils that seek those things. In
fact, everything evil communism sought to do existed before communism was conceived.
Because centralization of power in the hands of the few, or centralization of
wealth in the hands of the few, which is often the same thing, is the natural order
of things. This is what always happens when society does not restrain those who
would accumulate.
This is a truth that many people cannot comprehend:
capitalism has basically the same end-state as communism. Capitalism is as well
designed to make people slaves, in fact probably more so, than communism. In fact,
communism is a dead ideology in most parts of the world. Even China has largely
moved on from it. All of Eastern Europe came out the other side of it and
rejects it now, wholesale. But capitalism is a sneakier beast. It takes your freedom
while giving you shiny things. Communism seeks to crush you, it burns itself
out quickly, because you quickly run out of other people’s money. Capitalism
seeks to buy you off, corrupt you, get you addicted, and then it snaps its jaws
shut over you. Communism is the borg seeking to take over, capitalism is the drug
lords getting you addicted and making you their forever slaves.
And the West is seeing this play out right now.
If you cannot fathom how capitalism ends up this way,
I simply encourage you to watch either Bladerunner movie, or even the first couple of Alien movies (which
are set in the same universe). Note who controls everything: corporations.
Humans are no longer free, the corporations have complete control. The police
serve them. No one has the power to oppose them. Not effectively. The end state
of capitalism, if you do not restrain it, is the vast collection of wealth and
resources in the hands of the few which they use to buy all the reigns of power.
Why? They have the money to outbid everyone else, because they can. They might
even create products that you think serve you, but once they are big enough,
then they have you.
We are watching this happen right now, tech billionaires
are making a play for everything,
“OpenAI CEO
Sam Altman thinks it's "terrible" for people to have RAM in their
computers rather than in a data center, as the scarcity of memory caused by the
AI boom continues to drive up costs…
…Altman
claimed that the "invisible hand" (of the market) is failing, likely
because every DRAM wafer isn't flowing straight into a data center to run these
AI models.
Altman said:
"From a global allocation perspective, actually, it's quite terrible to
have everybody have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in
their own computer, and being used maybe 5% of the time. Like, you want maximum
utilization in the cloud if you're trying to deal with this very supply
constrained environment. And somehow many people's intuition is the opposite of
that."”[1]
What do I mean by making a play for everything? Well,
you have heard it all before: you will own nothing and you will rent what you
use off the select few who own it.” It was worded different. But this future is
in the process of being created, at least it is being attempted. The tech
industry is seeking to turn every single one of its customers into a forever trapped rentier
class, and they have a lot of customers, pretty much all of us.
The “invisible hand” is not failing. There never was
an invisible hand. There were many visible hands which moved the market, and as
wealth collects in the hands of fewer and fewer individuals it is becoming clearer
all along who directs the market: those with the wealth to do so, as they have
the biggest hands. When wealth is more relatively shared then more people’s
actions move the market. When it coalesces in the hands of a few then those
large hands move the market. The moves of the tech giants are driving inflation
up around the world. And the only institutions with enough power to stop this are regulatory
powers. Governments are the only entities that can reign them in. Governments can break up monopolies.
The problem is that many conservatives see regulations
as basically a synonym for communism. Which is wrong. Communism is when the
state becomes too strong. But there are other dangers. Like oligarchy, which is
when the wealthy become too strong. Or in our case, technocracy, when a few
tech billionaires have so much wealth and so much access to the products that
pretty much everyone else needs, that this becomes a problem. Not everything
that is bad is communism. Communism is bad because it is stupid and it creates
the perfect conditions for centralization and other evils to happen. So does
unrestrained capitalism or crony capitalism, which also is part of this problem
as many of these tech billionaires have so much power over the government regulators.
When you think about it crony capitalism is a natural
end-state of capitalism, because it is simply the part of the process where
those with money buy the people who make the laws. If you want to see what such
a world is like science fiction has many examples. The Cyberpunk genre for instance, of
which Bladerunner is the epitome of, is a great window into just such a world.
A world where the wealthy have bought everything and now sit in their pyramids and
palaces of power as new kings.
I am writing this to simply encourage people not to
think in binaries. Because when you think in overly simplistic binaries you risk
being blindsided. It is then probably just a little more than ironic that an
industry literally built on binaries is coming at people from a direction they
did not really see coming.
List of References
