When I saw that someone had announced a shift in technological influence from Star Trek to Hitchhiker’s Guide, I was all set to spend a day cheerleading the mainstreaming of an observation I wish I could have made so succinctly.
Then I actually read the announcement, and realised that this was being proposed as a positive development—a “graduation”, no less.
I have said before that I find it genuinely amazing how totally certain people misread the great works of science fiction; indeed, my previous example was Elon Musk’s misreading of Douglas Adams.
It is easy to imagine a bloviating egotist like Musk misreading a work of fiction: anything in that man’s orbit must by necessity serve to reflect his own supposed glory back to him, and anything that cannot be made to do so is presumably ejected into the memory-hole.
It is rather more shocking to see people that I associate with what I still (perhaps unwisely?) think of as the “good old days” of the tech scene making the same mistake.
I’ll put it as simply as possible: to say that tech has gone from being influenced by Star Trek to being influenced by Hitchhiker’s Guide is to say that tech has gone from being influenced by a very naive but earnest and sincere utopian believe in the possibility of progress, to being influenced by a sharply observed satire of the hubris and stupidity of corporations against a backdrop of a universal absurdity that mocks any attempt to impose rationality upon it.
Like I say, that would be a fine thing… if it weren’t for the bit where the technologists were parsing a satire as a utopia.
Or, to put it in the terms of The Discourse: “They wouldn’t have written about the Torment Nexus if they didn’t think it was a good idea, surely?”
Look: I got my first copy of the Hitchhiker’s Guide books from my father. My father worked in computing when computers were still the sort of thing that took up an entire building somewhere in the “special weapons” divisions of state military apparatuses, worked for IBM in the late 60s and 70s, and then for Amdahl into the late 80s. That old IBM presentation slide about computers not being allowed to make a management decision? He had a copy of that deck, and many others like it, in his office full of dusty dead-tech tchotchkes and half-dismantled 8086 machines.
My father was as tech as it ever got. And he knew damned well that Douglas Adams was taking the piss out of the human hubris that gets projected onto technology, because he was at great pains to tell me so.
(He’d seen it happen at IBM; by the time it happened in Amdahl, he was too old—and, frankly, too committed a drunk—to avoid the collapse of the mainframe industry.)
If you can look at the technological paradigm of which you consider yourself to be a celebrant, and tell yourself it feels like Douglas Adams, you should be running for the exits (having taken care to take your towel with you, naturally).
And if you tell yourself that the best response to the increasing absurdity of technology (and of the society from which that technology is not and has never been separable) is to suggest we double down it, that we commit to unseriousness?
My friend, you are fiddling while your Rome burns down around you.
I have been thinking a lot lately about the Jungian concept of enantiodromia, which I first encountered in relation to Brian Aldiss’s Helliconia novels, but which is a pedal note for the lads on the Weird Studies podcast. Here’s a definition:
… the tendency of things to change into their opposites, especially as a supposed governing principle of natural cycles and of psychological development.
Oxford Languages
I remarked the other day (in response to a Kevin Kelly bit that was so tin-eared it felt like self-parody) that techie culture, so proudly and obsessively focussed on rationality, has reached the point of enantiodromic inversion, and become something quite literally mad.
You remember how the New Atheists spent so long looking into the abyss of religious unreason and dogmatism that the abyss finally looked back and welcomed its newest denizens?
That’s where we’re at with the tech people now.
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