So, I'll react the the title. The real reason "the Culture Wins" is basically the storm trooper effect: they're the protagonists in fiction, so they're written to win regardless if it makes sense or not.
I believe one of the books does hint that the eventually disappear. The culture novel about that is the one I really want to read.
It's a bug in their CSS. They've tried to set the background of the text container to white, but they included an alpha value which made the white completely transparent.
So not an intentionally bad design.
Firefox reader mode fixes that, and that site really needs it.
Reviewers of the Culture novels tend to project their own political biases onto it. This writer quotes Marx a bit too much. There's some other review where someone was trying to read race and gender issues onto the Culture. They're missing the point.
The Culture novels describe a stable society where the machines are in charge. That's been addressed many times in science fiction, but not, usually, well. Asimov's later robot novels, where it become clear that the robots are manipulating humanity, do address it. That's about as good as it gets. Frank Herbert's Dune has the "Butlerian Jihad", but Herbert's idea of robot social organization is just humans in robot costume. Jack Williamson's "Humanoids" stories, about benign but overprotective robots, reflect someone getting the goal system slightly wrong.
In more popular culture, The Forbin Project (1970), a movie which seems to be enjoying a renaissance, does address the issue. The machines which control the nuclear weapons of both sides get into contact, and agree to take over to keep humanity from destroying itself. They come up with a reasonably sensible plan for running things, which is fleshed out more in the books.
The Star [Trek|Wars|Gate] universe never really addresses this directly, since it would undermine the show's stars. Nor does the Marvel universe; AIs appear, but are not in charge. There's Marshall Brain's "Manna", of course, the dystopian version of this.
The Culture novels show a stable society that's run by intelligent machines yet is flexible, adaptable, can deal with crises, and is pleasant for humans to live in. They don't show how to get there. Which is a problem.
I think if you’d rather read about the downfall of the Culture, then you’ve somewhat profoundly missed the point of Ian’s writing.
It's a society where the VAST majority of people are happy. Really truly happy. A society that is in ecological balance with nature.
If Brave New World is a dystopia, what does that make the world we live in now? It has to be some kind of super-dystopia, because it's worse in every way you can possibly imagine.
The the society of Brave New World would fail as a utopia because of the "What would the Culture think?" test ;-)
It certainly plays the "moral" card, and more back when it was released. It FEELS dystopian because it plays at a different moral than ours. Oh, a world totally devoted to hedonism, with no families, everyone drugged all the time, where eugenics creates a cast system where people are clearly not equal.
Right now some of those things are less shocking than in 1932 (sexual promiscuity, for example), but Huxley makes a great work into presenting a good case on how the society presented WORKS and it is, at least, superficially a paradise. The book, after all, was written as a response to other "utopian" books that were describing "ideal societies".
I think that a lot of people, even today, gets a gut feeling that's a dystopia, and feel more identified with John the Savage, which is totally out of place and hates it. But I think that the genius of the book is that it presents a world that we can interpret as bad while their inhabitants live in bliss.
> It's a society where the VAST majority of people are happy. Really truly happy. A society that is in ecological balance with nature.
If you're locked up in prison, but the food is really, really good, aren't you living in a utopia?
The article says that the Culture intervenes in places that don't quite live up to their values or are otherwise problematic in some way. So if people leave the Culture and develop in ways that become unacceptable to the Culture and thus get interfered with again, how free are they to actually leave?
However, if you do go off and set up your own fascist dictatorship outside of the Culture there is also no protection should the Grey Area come hunting for you.
In practice, they mostly intervene against people with, like, slavery and death camps, not minor philosophical differences (or even pretty major ones; many civilisations run artificial afterlives of eternal torment for their people, and the Culture doesn't openly intervene against _that_). A number of breakaway ex-Culture cultures show up in the books, along with various Culture dissidents.
Key word: openly.
I wonder how you're able to enjoy science fiction at all given that the answer to every story is "because it's fiction and it was written that way".