Science has been from the beginning what it most spectacularly is now, the handmaiden of capitalism. SF has all along been the handmaiden to, as well as the parasite on, science. This is a treason to the profession of writing, which in its serious forms can be a handmaiden of nothing but disdain for, and assault upon, that-which-is.They will, of course, improve their dream monitoring in order to make their cremations more strategic. With the technical assistance of the for-anybody's-hire scientists. And the gleeful sidelines cheers of their sf votaries.
If you detect pretension, you're not wrong. If you've seen Richard Linklater's Slacker you may remember the old anarchist who insists that he was fighting Franco in the civil war when really he visited Spain once, in the fifties. That's how Wolfe tends to come off.
But consider Silicon Valley and AI accelerationism. The congressional moratorium on states regulating AI is plainly unconstitutional, for all anyone lets that stop them. But it's the kind of thing that organized science and technology demands. You might think of it as the aggressive counterpart to defensive COVID panic, which was equally based on scientism.
Where both science and science fiction have gone wrong is in imposing an eschatology on both the social and natural world. An inexorable progress, resisted only by fools. But it's incumbent on us to ask, "Whose progress? Whose goal? And why should it be inevitable?"
2 comments:
From what I've read about him Bernard Wolfe was an exceptionally gifted writer but you're correct in your opinion he actually does sound extremely pretentious in his conclusions about the science fiction form. We haven't seen Slacker but I get the idea of people who embellish their personal histories when there's little chance anyone will investigate - or believe them for that matter.
Isaac Azimov suggested that science fiction adventurism of the Golden Age died after Hiroshima and Nagasaki:
https://youtu.be/YVGeZsBThRs?si=mGCj3_DWOWIpxwes
Goodness knows there were a lot of magnificent novels written before 1945 and, indeed, since then that had little to do with Capitalism.
https://www.hilobrow.com/golden-age-sci-fi/
Accelerationism - an elaboration of 'accelerant' - in other words: Putting Out the Fire With Gasoline - or it could be the regular thought processes of multi-billionaires. It doesn't sound like a good or principled idea. It appears there are people (see above) who live by the concept 'Move fast and break things' haven't thought things through.
Currently AI is being used to flood the Internet with misinformation and garbage fake images and videos. What's more likely, that it will be used for the benefit of people or that it'll mostly be yet another tool in manipulating and surveiling the populace? So far it hasn't been able to figure out that George Washington was white, so let's not put the cart before the horse with our faith in these tools. We worship scientism at our peril.
In case my point got lost in excessive nuance, a frequent pitfall for me, I agree with much of what Wolfe says in his afterword, which is worth reading in full. For that matter, so are the two stories he wrote for the anthology. His tone is more than a little arch but I think he saw a lot of what was coming.
While a lot of them are proudly illiterate--a condition they've managed to make contagious--tech barons do tend to have this image of science fiction providing grand visions for humanity's development. They see themselves as those chosen to fulfill said visions. Meanwhile science itself is has been reduced to a handmaiden, as Wolfe calls it. Not so much of capitalism, but of managerialism, of which contemporary capitalism is just one guise. This is, as you put it, scientism rather than classic science. While science is a method of learning about the world that's accessible to all and open to contradictory evidence, scientism is a series of assertions that one is expected to simply accept. You can think of examples, I'm sure.
Anyway, if accelerationism signifies anything it's that the sales pitch is becoming more desperate. There's no time to make the product sound appealing, so you have to convince the customers that they can't avoid buying it if they tried. Of course the George Washington thing was amusing, and an indicator of the level of craftsmanship we're actually dealing with here.
Isaac Asimov was one of the greats of science fiction, an underrated mystery writer, and the keeper of one of the most unlikely sets of muttonchops ever grown. I guess in the video I was hoping to hear him speak instead of just the English guy doing the voiceover.
If you and Jerry get the chance to see Slacker I think you might like it. It's very low-key and just a little over an hour and a half.
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