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February 20, 2005
Iain Banks: The Culture is Inevitable
My favorite author of all time, Iain Banks, has an interview over at Salon.
Salon: But you've also written that something like the Culture may happen not as a result of individual, or even societal choice, but as a consequence of advances in technology.Posted by paul at February 20, 2005 09:06 PMIan: In the purest sense, you get to the Culture almost whether you like it or not. But it does involve getting out to space, and it does involve just a huge amount of manufacturing capability. Because what you end up with is entities, space ships or whatever, that become self-sufficient and free moving in space, and it's very hard to keep effective control of them.
The control a state can exercise is largely about the fact it can just go and get you if you are holed up in your ranch in Waco or wherever. It can surround you and attack you and go in and get you. That is going to be impossible when people can live in space or more or less anywhere. Once that becomes the case, the very idea of the state does start to wither away. But it does all eventually go back to technology. Technology determines the possibilities of society. So as technology progresses, the idea of something like the Culture is almost inevitable.
Not relevant to the article, but I can't find this mentioned anywhere online..
What is Salon's problem? Their pages are being served as, what, Java code? Something obfuscated to prevent local saving and source viewing, anyway. So much for my plan to show their article to other people and thus spread the name 'Salon' around a wider marketplace.
Pillocks.
On the other hand, if you can see it you can copy it, right? Here's a distributable version. It's not perfectly clean, but it's readable.
http://www.mharr.force9.co.uk/Iain%20Banks%20-%20Future%20Perfect.html
Posted by: Marr at February 21, 2005 01:59 AMmr.banks talks about "culture" as some benign galactic ubersociety that has transcent conflict.maybe that`s what the u.s. hegemony is all about.america is percieved by some as the enemy,yet american money,directed by individual americans funds a large proportion of the humanitarian work in the world.i think there is a lot of mythologising of what america is.what would the old russia have been had it survived?nazi germany?the holy roman empire?(christ,look at the comparisons i`m making!)we are war-like,territorial animals.what government do we expect?
i live in canada.interesting little socialist experiment propped up by a shared border with the largest economy in the world.it is unnerving to thing that we are living in an economist`s doctoral thesis but at least we aren`t being rounded up for criticising yet.