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Comment by wanderingbit | Hacker News Reader

This was a great in-depth exploration of some of the ideas from Banks' books that I thought deserved a deeper drive. Even though he was writing in the 80's Banks has a lot of foresight into how modern tech such as AI could result in a society like The Culture. It's definitely utopian, but to the author of this blog post's credit it comes with a subtle lack of meaning that some would find unbearable.

Reading this blog post gave me insight into our my own (Western) culture, and modernity. What happens as we move away from ascribed identities, like be born and dying a feudal serf, to achieved identities garnered from the actions we choose in our lives? I laughed at the jibe about the 2 ways a modern person finds meaning; either embracing their Celtic heritage or going full memeplex!

The website design is unreadable, except if you highlight sections of the text which make it straightforward to read. No idea how you'd read this on mobile, though.

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I always had the impression that the lack of meaning in The Culture was fairly overtly portrayed with many side stories and the fact that the main story line always had to follow some special operation outside The Culture in order to be interesting.

In fact several of the main characters literally call out that 'lack of meaning'.

> Even though he was writing in the 80's Banks has a lot of foresight into how modern tech such as AI could result in a society like The Culture.

Oh, there's nothing modern about AI, or at least about the concept of a GAI. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter - "AI" has been swinging from "the future, now" to an embarrassing past fixation every few years since the 60s.

Firefox mobile has a pretty good reader mode. I wish Chrome would do the same.

The Culture novels were published from 19872-2012 and I believe generally written the year before they were published so perhaps the foresight has to be weighted against when the books were written.

Use of Weapons was first written about 1974, but apparently needed a lot of work (and help from Banks' friend Ken MacLeod - also an excellent author) to get in into a shape that could be published - which it eventually was in 1990.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_Weapons#History

Ah, always wondered about that. It always felt like a slightly more... unfinished version of the Culture than the one in the Player of Games, which was published earlier.

It's interesting that the Culture was created as a background for Zakalwe, the ultimate warrior, who would he work for - the ultimate good guys of course! At least that's how I would read it....

I always though the point of the title was that the ultimate good guys wouldn’t use a weapon like Zakalwe.

> What happens as we move away from ascribed identities, like be born and dying a feudal serf, to achieved identities garnered from the actions we choose in our lives?

We've had 500 years to test that one out.

Well, bulk of humans still have ascribed identity of a worker often with some dependants and they perform many failed actions trying to get out of it.

Not really. Most people in that situation worked on what was available that paid, and then retired with a grown up family successfully provided for. That's not a serf.

Depends on what counts as freedom and serfdom. I'm sure many serfs in middle ages were fairly content with their lives and how free they are. Such is life an human nature. Best walls are the ones you are not even sure if they are there. Less reasons for you to seek the ways around them.

"Serf" isn't synonymous with "person who has to work". It's a specific condition. There's no point renaming things; just say what they are.

For example: if you wish food, shelter, sanitation, water, etc all sprang into existence spontaneously, or that you had slaves to do things for you, then say that. If you don't think either of those things, and, say, we all need to work to provide value to exchange with others to create a life, then that would be approximately what we have today. That's not serfdom.

Serfs are legally a part of the land, they are not free to move and they own labor to their liege lord.

Right, but when serfdom was abolished and people were free to move, some of them were forced to move looking for work and poorer because of that. So were they more free? Just because they were not attached to their land? Or were they less free because they had less and nobody anylonger cared if they live or die?

We are also attached to land. Just a bigger piece of land. I can't freely move to work anywhere on the planet.

Maybe fair to say that the most we can say is that one form of unfreadom was replaced by another form of unfreadom. Along the lines of - is "freedom to starve" a freedom, how much freedom, and is a +ve or a -ve freedom? I think this is a ongoing and long discussion with not a final straightforward answer. In philosophy that is. It maybe that the technology provides an answer by creating new reality at some point.

Most people over the last 500 years _absolutely did not retire_. But in any case I think the general idea holds; prior to the 20th century, for the _vast_ majority of people, even in developed nations, the course of their life was pretty much laid out at birth by their social station. They weren't literally serfs, usually, but in practice they'd be doing what their parents and their parents' parents did, usually agriculture. This _started_ changing in the 19th century, but the really big shift was in the 20th.

not in space tho

> "The website design is unreadable, except if you highlight sections of the text which make it straightforward to read. No idea how you'd read this on mobile, though."

Readwise Reader FTW

The site design worked fine for me on Vivaldi Linux, but since you mentioned it, I tried reader mode ... and for the first time, it completely destroyed the site! Astoundingly bad!

To the rescue: Firefox reader mode, or NoScript block (default) JS for domain www.sciphijournal.org - makes it readable for me again. What were the site creators thinking??

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