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
What a crap opinion piece. If we didn’t have rich people dreaming of how to do scifi things we probably wouldn’t have all the shit we have now. Going to space. Computers. Medical advancements etc.
Absolutely, however without wishful thinking rich people backing those moderately paid much smarter people we would have far less. I’m not for billionaires… but if we did get rid of them we’d need a serious overhaul on funding for those ventures.
There are twice as many billionaires now than there were in 2008/9. We didn’t have billionaires and wealth concentration in the 60s like we do now. Yet we still accomplished all that.
Rich philanthropists have been funding universities and colleges, which is where most of this technology actually comes from. You’re speaking of the government sector and you’re not wrong but is the wealthy that have been funding most of the private sector advancements. Again, I have no love for billionaires. You’re right, we don’t need them. This makes it sound like we shouldn’t be aspiring at all for the stars.
Rich philanthropists have been funding universities and colleges, which is where most of this technology actually comes from.
And they wouldnt have to if everything wasnt as commodified to press the last cent out of it just so they can make a profit. Philanthropy is a scam invented by rich people to give back crumbs of the riches they stole to feel good about themselves and "justify" their existence.
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.
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.
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.
In the Trek timeline the Bell Riots seem more plausible than ever these days. And they have to go through WWIII before humanity collectively pulls its head out of its ass and manages to finally do better. The more I think about it lately (due to watching a lot of ST shows) the more I think we stand no chance of changing until after we totally ruin everything…assuming we survive, of course.
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