Today’s Silicon Valley billionaires grew up reading classic American science fiction. Now they’re trying to make it come true, embodying a dangerous political outlook
I guess they missed the heavy implications in much of science fiction as a grave warning to NOT DO THINGS THIS WAY and instead read things like Brave New World, Starship Troopers, Neuromancer, and others with distopian corporate oligarchies or fascist space empires as aspirational. I guess your perspective is a little skewed when you’re born wearing the boot versus being the ground into the muck by it.
If only they’d read a little more Ursula K. LeGuin and Octavia Butler instead of Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein. But then again, I guess if they had then they might not be billionaires today.
Starship Troopers
There a good argument to be made Heinlein wrote this during his “I love authoritarianism” phase, and was at the time, a big fan of the government in the book.
For the record, that’s fucking stupid.
Yeah there’s a bunch of vintage sci-fi like that. I tend to forget which ones are doing it sarcastically and which ones have just drunk the nationalistic Kool aid. There’s another one like it (blanking on the author and title at the moment, maybe Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper or something very much like it) where it starts with some leader on a colony on some new planet in the empire. And it’s written from his perspective, so it feels like he’s the hero protagonist. But then, the perspective shifts and you realize that he’s just the worst and it’s basically Fern Gully in space. It must have been one the stories James Cameron plagarised for Avatar.
