Tech Won't Save Us - Science Fiction As Tech Criticism w/ Brian Merchant and Claire Evans

Episode Date: September 22, 2022

Paris Marx is joined by Brian Merchant and Claire Evans to discuss their new science fiction anthology, how it uses the genre to critically interrogate the technologies being rolled out around us, and how it pushes back on the desire of tech billionaires to use science fiction to get the public to buy into their corporate futures.Brian Merchant is a tech journalist and author of The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone. Claire L. Evans is the author of Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet and singer of the Grammy-nominated pop group YACHT. They are the cofounders of Terraform at VICE's Motherboard and the co-editors of Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn.  Follow Brian on Twitter at @bcmerchant and follow Claire at @TheUniverse.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.Also mentioned in this episode:Brian and Claire wrote about their science fiction anthology and what you can expect from it.Some of the stories mentioned in our conversation are “Busy” by Omar El Akkad, “One Day, I Will Die on Mars” by Paul Ford, and “Devolution” by Ellen Ullman.Brian also wrote about the metaverse and the science fiction that inspired it for Vice.Langdon Winner wrote about the concept of epistemological Luddism in his book Autonomous Technology. Zachary Loeb expanded on it in a great essay called “Luddism for These Ludicrous Times.”Cory Doctorow wrote about science fiction being a Luddite literature.Support the show

Right now, tech companies are trying to sell us all this stuff, you know, the metaverse namely, but they're using the mechanism of science fiction to sell it to us, right? They're like presenting us this idea of a future, which they've basically cribbed from science fiction novels, you know, from the 80s and 90s, which they've like conveniently excised of any political criticism or context and just taken the sort of surface trappings. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks. And this week, I have two fantastic guests, Brian Merchant and Claire Evans. They are the co-founders of Terraform at Vice's Motherboard and the co-authors of the science fiction anthology

that brings a lot of those stories together, along with some new ones, Terraform, Watch Worlds Burn, which is out now. I think you'll be familiar with Brian Merchant. He has been on the show a number of times. He's a tech journalist and the author of The One Device, The Secret History of the iPhone. Claire Evans is a writer and musician. She's the author of Broadband, The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet, and the singer of the Grammy-nominated pop group Yacht. I was so happy to have both Brian and Claire on the show to talk about their new science fiction anthology,

what was behind it, where the idea from this originally came from back when they started Terraform at Vice back in 2014, and what we can really learn from these stories of science fiction that challenge the conventional wisdom that we have around technology and that present these technologies in a really critical light. You know, is this really illustrating the way that we think about the future in a different way? Or is this about having us reflect more on the way that we think about technology in the present, the way that it's implemented, so that maybe we can stop some terrible futures

from coming into being? I really enjoyed this conversation. I think you're going to really enjoy it too. We touch on so many different angles of, you know, science fiction and the future and these tech billionaires and everything else. It's a great show. Now, if you like this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review

on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. If you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and become a supporter. Thanks for listening and enjoy this week's conversation.

Brian, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us. Thanks for having me as always, Paris. Once again, you're obviously the person who's been on the show more than anyone else. I have to defend my title. I have to keep that being the case. So I have to make my repeated guest slot. Yeah keep that being the case. So I have to make my repeated guest slot. Yeah, I don't want to let the people down. You know, they've come to hear that rich baritone. Is it a baritone? I don't know. Maybe it's a... Anyways, I'm here.

Welcome. And of course, you know, we not only have the most frequent guests, but also a new guest as well. Claire, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks so much for having me. It's an honor. Absolutely. I'm very excited to speak to you both because you had this new science fiction anthology with like a ton of short stories that you've edited that is out there now. And that is really fantastic. Like I love the stories in this, I've read the whole thing. But this is a project, Terraform, that did not just begin with this book that you've been working on for a number of years. So what was the impetus for Terraform? How did you decide to collaborate on this project? thing that happened back in sort of the vices wild west year days where claire and i were both working for motherboard in different capacities and we'd met i was a staffer there at the time and claire was doing we call it she was the futures editor which is the cool title and i

would love to have that title someday but we were doing you know mostly just you know journalism and some you know some culture investigation, tech culture stuff. But there wasn't a lot that we it should have been sort of playing a more dominant role at this point where we were seeing all of these wacky tech ideas, all of these sort of frontiers being pushed, both good and bad leaps in science and innovation. And, and then all the bad stuff on the labor front, it seemed like a ripe moment for speculative fiction to come help make sense of it. And we decided that we should, I don't know, try to make some of that happen. Vice was a big platform. It still is a big platform. It's a great platform for taking a swing like that. So

Claire and I started talking and we just decided to make a full go of it. I think that's the gist of it. Would you say, Claire? Yeah, I think the only thing that I would add is that the stories that we were seeing run on Motherboard at the time that we started Terraform and the stories that Motherboard still runs kind of read like the opening pages of a science fiction dystopia. And so it was sort of the project of taking these headlines and thinking like, what happens five years down the line, 10 years down the line from this story? And wouldn't it be really constructive to workshop some of these futures so that we could potentially anticipate and prevent the worst outcomes? I mean, that's a very kind of utilitarian view of science fiction, but in the context of the kind of short form stuff that we were running and the fact that

it was always in response to what we were publishing on the nonfiction side, it just felt like a piece of a larger kind of critical puzzle for understanding the world. No, I love that. And I think it contributes really well to doing that, like, you know, reading the book and having read some of the Terraform, you know, stories in the past. One thing that I was thinking about as I was reading the book, and certainly my knowledge of science fiction isn't like, you know, I'm not a historian of science fiction or anything else, but I feel like short fiction used to be very important in science fiction and having these, you know, magazines of short fiction and things like that. Is there less of that today? And do we lose out by not having so many of those short stories that can respond to things as you're

saying? No, short stories are still very much, you know, part of sci-fi. I just think like, like all literature and like all media, it's just more sort of marginalized and siloed than it used to be. Obviously we're not getting paperback magazines of amazing stories. You know, we're not buying those at the bus stop like kids used to in the fifties, but it's all out there. It's just much more distributed and diffuse than it used to be. It is. And it is also that I do think that you used to be able to, you know, crank out short stories and you could scrape by, right? Like Philip K. Dick style or, you know, some of these guys that were, you know, sending

their stories all over the place and making a, you know, maybe you aren't going to get rich usually, but it was like a viable mode. And now it's a lot less so. Like most science fiction short form publications, you know, the rates are low. So I would say that like as, you know, there's been more of an expectation to see this stuff on your streaming platforms, in theaters, in bigger budget arenas. I do kind of feel like the short form area has, like Claire said, has been siloed and kind of been, it's become more of a niche practice. And it doesn't still enjoy sort of the having the benefit of like sort of like a literary machine where like, you know, the New Yorkers still has literary fiction, and you've got the Iowa's writer work. And you can still there are like viable ways to

kind of still do short fiction. If it's literary fiction, it's a little bit less so for science fiction. It's a more of a wacky sort of prospect. And I would still love, as great as Terraform is and was, I would still love for there to be like, you know, like a big sort of marquee, another like huge that puts this stuff front and center, because Terraform was part of Motherboard, which is part of Vice, another like, you know, big like omni saying omni saying like you know we're gonna we're gonna do short form science fiction we're gonna do it you know so you can't look away and in many ways like terraform that that was what we did but i still think there's room for more of this and i this is like a reminder it's a time that we get to like drop this big brick of a book and say like look this is out there like these

stories and it's really fun. I mean, I'm biased, obviously, but to just like, spend 1015 minutes, like, boom, that was that future. Let's think about it for a second. And boom, here's the next one. Like, oh, in this future, like Omar Al-Akkad's Busy, the very first story in the anthology is about a future where most people are unemployed, and you can only get a job sort of at like a, you know, an old New Deal style, they call them entropy mills, where you go and you generate randomized data for tech startups to use. It's such a brilliant idea. The story, it packs in a narrative. It's really compelling. It's got a, we learn more about this protagonist and why he's

showing up at this entropy female at this given day. And then it weaves the story, but you also get this window into this world. It offers you the texture and the tools to think about it in a different way that, you know, a think piece or a news report or even like a full episode on whatever a Black Mirror episode would. It just inhabits that space. And then you can move on to the next one. And I think it's a really exciting prospect to be able to drop this thing out there. I think you've described that really well, Brian. And, you know, reading through the book, like there's so many of these stories that are just fantastic and like have this way of making

you, I guess, think about these technologies in a different sort of way. Like I'm sure some of the people who will be reading the book will be very critical of these things anyway. But even if you are, and especially if you're not, like, it does give you another way into thinking about the technologies and the futures that they are kind of pushing us toward. And, you know, before we talk broadly about those futures and how we should think about them and what role science fiction can play in getting us to think through them. I guess that part of the reason this was able to exist in the moment that it did, was it because Vice was at a particular moment where it kind of had the money and wanted to look to be doing kind of innovative things? Like, do you

think that this thing could get started in the way that it did today? Or, you know, is it very much of a moment that offered you a unique opportunity to do this? There definitely was a lot of things that went right and allowed us to do it. And we had a publisher, we should I should shout him out, Toby, Toby Campion, who was a kind of a big sci fi nut. And he loved to take big swings. And he was very good at making the case for this stuff and it turned out that it actually was a very good business proposition for motherboard and for vice because sci-fi is cool you could sell ads and packages and stuff around sci-fi so it does take having the right person who's interested in this stuff in the ecosystem to be able to do it and i don't know how much we need to go behind the scenes here,

but just briefly, Claire and I have had some talks with folks about maybe trying to spin off or do a Terraform-like project if and when the Terraform project concludes at Vice or do something similar. It is a really interesting prospect. It is. And I've actually, we had some conversations with some Silicon Valley investor types who see this in their terms, like talking about efficiencies. And they're looking at the market going, wait a minute, like short form market of science fiction is really being underserved. There's this huge value gap between like a, you know, a short story that somebody is going to make $200 for writing. And then it's just like, you know, Black Mirror, where it's this multi tens of millions of dollars proposition, and a mark them MCU. And it's like, where,

how do we connect these two, like, even from a business perspective. And then we heard some feedback from some folks that were just like, well, it's an interesting idea. But how do you get that to a unicorn status? And it's like, well, the reality is something like a science fiction magazine is very unlikely to ever become, you know, like an Uber style. Nor would we want it to, for the record. It was really interesting to hear these. So like, what would it look like if you were really going to start a science fiction project? And that's still, I would say that's kind of just, it's simmering and we still have those conversations and we're still feeling around for a way to do it. But it's a long way of answering your question, which is, it is hard. It's hard to find money for any publication, right? Science fiction, short form, you know, speculative fiction is a pretty niche subject, but it has this huge and

robust case that can be made for it also. So I think that it's still possible. I'm sure somebody will come along and do it well again. All right, we'll have new science fiction A16Zs, you know, along with Future will be their new science fiction vertical run by you two, I guess, in the future. I mean, science fiction is useful. I can imagine too i guess in the future that's right i mean science fiction is useful i can imagine that there is a value proposition here in having a think tank full of people who are imagining the worst case scenario of all the technologies that are being developed you know like i think that's that's worth whatever you can pay for it uh that would be it yeah but we all wish you know like facebook ubers amazon all had people doing that like 10 or 15 years ago

and they're easily yeah foresight work they're like science fiction writers call it foresight work when the company comes and says like hey like we write a report or write us a story um it's this fascinating little sort of neck of the science fiction industrial complex i guess where the people are doing sort of this work for marketing agencies, like Lowe's has like a whole division that's all about, you know, you're trying to, you know, use science fiction as a predictive or analytical tool. So it is, yeah, there is, there's absolutely room for, for stuff like that out there. But i would say like oh yeah what we're mostly focused on is you know tearing apart the the here and the now and what the technological tools that surround us every day really stand to do for you know in in a given scenario or to the average

person's life i'm curious so you read the whole so when when Jeff Vandermeer got galley of the book, he described this as thick. It's true. And we've had a lot of great folks in the field say really nice things about it. I'm curious to see what did one story stand out to you? You're used to interviewing me and now you're back at it. It's just instinctual. It's tough to like point to just one because i've been reading it like over the course of a number of weeks and so i feel like at this point like if i were to point out a story it would be like from closer to the end of the book because i'm probably like off the top of my head like forgetting something that's earlier on that like i really liked i don't know

if i want to like specifically point to one and say like, this was one I liked. I will say like the zombie capitalism one I really enjoyed. I read that one earlier today. I won't dig into it. People can go read it. But like, I think it was great. And like, it was kind of what is so great about the book, like using these kind of, I guess, more fantastical or like future oriented settings in order to get us to like reconsider things or think about things critically. And I think that's something I wanted to ask both of you as well. Like, you know, obviously, you've put together this anthology, you've been working on these science fiction stories for years now and editing them and putting them together. What role do you see for science fiction in helping us to think critically about the future that could exist and the technologies

that surround us and that are increasingly being rolled out in the world that could exist and the technologies that surround us and that are increasingly being rolled out in the world that we exist in. Yeah. I mean, I think we talk about this a lot, but one of the things that people think about science fiction is that it's about the future, right? That's like the default assumption that science fiction is going to be about the future. It is. But of course, it's very much about the present.

And I think the people who are the most competent at writing sci-fi, really powerful science fiction, are people who are looking very, very closely at what's happening around them at all times and who are looking in unexpected places and who are looking for the unexpected overlaps of certain important things that are happening around them that might not be in the same domain as one another

and tracing where those overlaps are going to happen and anticipating them. So it's really like, it's not so much about imagining the future. It's about finding where the future is already kind of latent in the present and like pointing at it and being like, this matters, this is going to matter. And here's why. The fact that it's like played out in a story is just like for us, plebs to wrap our heads around it. Everything that's important, everything that's vital is already here. I think that's part of the reason that I think like Terraform is such a thick volume

is every single writer has a different perspective on what they think is going to be important in the future. And what they think those kind of nodes are going to be that are going to have lasting import. And they're going to touch one another. And the more eyes we can get on that, the more we can spot all the things that are happening around us that we might be blind to. And then we get this kind of collective vision of like, okay, here's like, it's like what 60 people think matters now, ranging from, you know, all the things that we are aware of, but you know, in more nuanced detail, I think. One good example, as Claire's talking about, I was just thinking of is like the maybe I think it's maybe the second story in the whole volume is Paul Ford's story about sort of the very near term future of using of using uber basically an uber eats kind of thing i don't even know if uber eats really even existed yet when he wrote this story it didn't so but it was like right when uber was first sort of like coming to like sort of national consciousness

and was become it was attracting all this investment and it's a really clever story that follows three threads it follows one sort of wealthy-ish or upper class or whatever middle upper middle upper class guy in a Manhattan apartment who's trying to get cat food delivered and is frustrated that it's not taking longer. One perspective is from this like beleaguered delivery driver who has to, you know, makes his way through the city to try to get there on time or as we know now, it's written. Everybody knows now what happens if the delivery to try to get there on time. Or as we know now, it's written, everybody knows now what happens if the delivery driver fails to show up on time, they get penalized, they all these consequences, you know, that really affect their livelihoods. And then we sort of he does a fun

sort of POV inside like the actual mind of Uber itself, the algorithm, and it really sort of serves to underscore like, what is dictating this, It's this code that is operated and owned by the corporation Uber that is sort of like facilitating this interaction between two people and everything is going wrong. The one guy, the upper class guy is frustrated and mad because his cat can't get his food because he's been conditioned by these apps not to like just go get it. Or he's exploiting the labor of this other guy who, you is rushing through a flood or a rainstorm i think right yeah and there's like people protesting because it's a and when i it's funny paul ford doesn't he's another writer who doesn't do a lot of fiction but we asked him to do fiction which is one of the joys of doing this project and doing terraform is that you can ask a tech writer or a coder or a scientist or somebody who might not have a bunch of fiction bona fides to experiment and put their ideas into

play here. And that's what Paul did. And it was, it's just such a great story. And I emailed him to say that he, we chose this story for the anthology and he said he reread it. And he's like, Oh, God, it happened. It did are so much of our life is now mediated by these, you know, these interactions, and these transactions between, you know, user and platform, and invisible or semi invisible laborer that we expect to do this work. And having the opportunity to sort of examine that at the sort of the point of this, you know, this nascent relationship growing and developing, like, you know, I think it sure helped me think more critically about what the ramifications for this technology were. I think we see now that time and again, we wish we were more critical. We wish we could just burrow more deeply into those node points. And I think Terraform, well, you'll find at least 52 of those,

probably more because some of those stories, you know, overlap and or have myriad node points they've identified. And to that end, while I'm talking about the gig labor one, the other one that's great is about, I don't know how much I should spoil about any of these, but there's a story called Dream Job that features a student who takes on some work on the side through an app. And they're basically giving their dream space over to someone else while they, so that you can pay to sort of, you go on the app and you sort of log your sleep time. Somebody else inhabits your headspace. So you don't ever actually get to sleep for yourself, but it's just kind of pulling their life force out of them. And it was a really vivid illustration of sort of the effect of sort of giving yourself over to these platforms and say, okay, I'll do this as a part-time thing. And then the companies,

you know, this is all subtext in the story. It's not explicit and it's more powerful for it, but you slowly give more of yourself over to these arrangements. And then companies find really tricky ways of keeping you motivated to log on more. And before you know it, it's a real burden and it is a real burden for a lot of working people. So having stories that can sort of drive these points home and underline them and emphasize them in ways that, you know, are not the same op-ed, polemic or whatever, I think is really useful. Yeah, it's like the emotional piece that's missing from other forms of critique about technology and the contemporary condition, like connecting it to people's lived experiences,

making it relatable, making it visceral, you know, making it something that kind of haunts you. I think that's a really powerful thing. No, absolutely. I completely agree with that. And I'm wondering, you know, you brought up there that some of the people who you got to write these stories, obviously, there are people who very clearly write science fiction quite often. Tim Mon is in there, Jeff Vandermeer, among others. But then you also sought out people or, you know, there are people who wrote science fiction stories who don't usually write science fiction. So was that like something conscious that you sought to seek those kind of people out? Or, you know, as you were working on the project,

did you find that people were coming to you and being like, you know, I'd like to write something about this? And then, you know, you kind of went with it? Well, there's a couple things to that. One is that if you reach out to like a literary fiction writer, someone who's normally just writes, you know, real fiction or whatever, and you tell, ask them to write a science fiction story, a lot of the time they'll, they'll want to do it because they've never been asked. And it seems like fun. Doesn't sound like work. You know, it's like an easier, a lighter ask in a weird way, because it's something they want to try or that's something experimental. Like for example, we asked Ellen Ullman, who's like this great technology writer and essayist who writes novels and stories about her personal experience as a coder in Silicon Valley in the 80s.

She's never written a sci-fi story before. She wrote a sci-fi story for us. And it took her like three days to do it. And she was so excited about the possibility of doing something totally out of her wheelhouse. and scientists that Brian alluded to earlier, who have a lot of specific knowledge about something, but have perhaps struggled to make an emotional connection with people on, you know, the subjects of their discipline, or they're so like siloed in their academic or journalistic worlds that they're not able to kind of connect the broader implications of the stuff that they're reporting, like, you know, climate change, for example, and fiction allows them a new way to reach people and

a new way to communicate the stuff that they're really passionate about. So there's a couple of different manifestations of the non-sci-fi writer trying their hand, but it always turns out interesting. And I think for a lot of writers, it's like kind of, it's kind of liberating and fun for them to take it on. Yeah. And some of them turn out to be really good at it and really, like Sam Biddle, who was, he's at the Intercept now, but he ended but he ended up i think yeah it was just on a lark because he was that i saw him make some funny tweets about ces the consumer electronics show that for a long time like the whole tech journalism apparatus like revolved descended upon every year and he was just kind of making fun of it and i just said like hey like do do this but

like 50 years into the future, it was just so funny and like, so on point. And he had a blast doing it. And he just became sort of a regular writer. I think he wrote three or four different speculations for us. And one of them's in there. One of them is about when word leaked out that Slack was not ever deleting any chat logs. They're just being like stored forever. So it's like the story on the premise of like having to like sort of like a coworker having to relive some of these permanent chat logs and trying to go through the steps of deleting them, which, you know, are magnified for comedic and narrative purposes. But it really sort of, again, you get to embody

this thing that Sam had written about and reported on in one capacity. But now it's like, OK, like, you know, like, what does this mean? And you really get a sense of like sort of the distress and the anxiety over this prospect that like anything you've ever said, one off remark, gossiping with your colleagues or your coworkers and you can't delete it. You can't like, what does that mean? Like, what does that mean for the future in like 10 years or something? I mean, now we're seeing that all over again, like with the tech platforms and the overturning of Roe v. Wade and these texts that are now permanent. Like, there are so many people now who just are living with this possibility that these electronic records that are not controlled by them anymore are in the hands of tech giants who can turn them

over to the authority. I mean, there are things that, again, like it really, the more ways that we can come at these issues and really think about them and get people to sort of empathize and embody, you know, the threat as well they can, the better, especially at this juncture where things are bad, but there are also so many points where they could get worse. So, yeah. And that's always the way it is. Right. But I think it's fascinating how, you know, it gives you a new medium through which to think about these issues and, you know, the ways that technology is affecting the world. And I think on that point, you know, the book, through the introduction written by Cory Doctorow, also makes a provocative point, I think, to some people that science fiction itself

is or can work as a form of Luddism. And certainly this is a concept that has re-emerged, I think it's fair to say, in recent years, or, you know, has had a renewal. And I know, Brian, you're working on a book on this very topic, not science fiction and Luddism, but, you know, the history of the Luddites and Luddism. Can you expand on that idea, I guess, that this science fiction is actually engaging in this form of Luddism to make us think critically about, you know, these technologies and the role or, you know, the effect that they're having on our societies? Yeah, a quick funny side note about that is that when we asked Corey to write the introduction, I hadn't told him at that point that I was even working on a book about the Luddites.

This was like years ago, plus a year and a half ago. These books take a while to make. But it came in, and the headline of the essay that he wrote for the introduction of the book is like, you are a Luddite. And I immediately called him. This is perfect. And then the first story that we slated is also kind of, you know, theuddite. And I immediately called him. This is perfect. This is so. And then the first story that we slated is also kind of, you know, the Omar al-Akkad story that I mentioned earlier is basically an act of Luddism. I guess we'd go ahead and spoiler alert because he goes in and pretends that he's an IT guy and they call it God's tongue.

All these, you know, numbers that people are generating by doing meaningless tasks. And he goes in to destroy it, basically, just to shut it down. And, you know, we've had varying degrees of tech critique for the last five or 10 years and beyond, you know, people are always been doing it, but that has reached enough of a mainstream consciousness to be called something like a tech clash or something. But there is a difference in Luddism. And, you know, someone like Langdon Winter would call it like epistemological Luddism, where you know, someone like Langdon Winter would call it like epistemological Luddism, where you just are deciding to critique something and whether, you know, saying this technology should be rejected for this reason, or considering it in full and actually sort of

going through and making sort of intellectual case for shutting it down. You know, Luddism proper was using force to physically destroy sort of the implements of exploitation when it came to machinery. And that Corey would kind of connect these two things. And we really do have this, I think, you know, this podcast, some of your peers' podcasts, like This Machine Kills, and we got Ed to even blurb the book because it is sort of in the same kind of wheelhouse. And we, as we've been talking about, we hope this sort of further does help arm people with these tools to be critical

and to take it like a step further. I think it's interesting that even though the tech lash quote unquote has died down, we're seeing this new wave of like metaverse and web three and cryptocurrency things that people are not saying like, Oh, I don't know about this. Some people feel free to say, fuck this. Like, no, just no. And that really wasn't, even like when Uber came out, it wasn't like, oh, how exploitative is this? It's like, oh, let's check it out and see how it goes. Maybe it's a sharing economy. Or, oh, look at this technology. WeWork? Oh, that sounds like it could be something. Let's give it a go. And now that Luddism, I think, that you're referring to, that's kind of in the air. And as Corey says, science fiction can be a tool for doing Luddism is sort of that ability to say no. Because for a long don't want facial recognition tech to like sort of capture everybody's face all the time can we do that is that an option can we just say no and i think

our book and all these amazing writers that are you know making variations of that case time and again that are just like there's eric holthaus who's the meteorologist who wrote a story kind of about climate change has gotten so bad that there's a new class of hurricane called a hypercane and it his protagonist and maybe i won't spoil that one is doing an act of letting them as well there are a lot of these stories and it was funny i don't but it feels culturally like we are at a moment where the more that we can encourage that not just blanket denial of every technological development but critical evaluation where denial is a possibility where we can say, no, this is maybe a goofy thing to compare it to. And I'm going to probably sound like a dork doing it, but that Ryan Reynolds movie, the time travel movie, did you, did you,

either of you see this? It was like the biggest one on Netflix for a while. He's a time traveler and they find out that he like goes back to his childhood home, but it becomes clear throughout the story that like time travel was sort of deployed for commercialistic gain. Some mega corporations like benefited from time travel, you know, they exacerbated inequality, blah, blah, blah. And his dad, it turns out was one of the inventors of the technology that made time travel possible. And instead of like, you know, just like going like, well, let's reign this in. Like the movie was just like, let's go and destroy it so nobody can do time travel because it's bad because

no good can come of it. That to me, it felt not, I mean, it was whatever, it was a dumb movie, but it was novel to me. Like the, the extremes, just shut it down. You just like just say no like just walk away from it just say no just say no right it's the Luddist PSA just don't just say no yeah in a lot of ways I hope that that this book can give people the tools to sort of execute science fictional or technologic Luddism more thoroughly and readily to Brian's point about like the refusal that we're experiencing, it's kind of like this weird, like snake eating its own tail, too, because right now tech companies are trying to sell us all this stuff, you know, the metaverse, namely, but they're using the mechanism of science fiction to sell it

to us, right? They're like presenting us this idea of a future, which they basically crib from science fiction novels, you know, from the 80s and 90s, which they've like conveniently excised of any political criticism or context and just taken the sort of surface trappings. Same thing happened with cyberpunk, right? Like just take what's cool and then get rid of everything else that criticizes, you know, corporate power. But we're being sold this fantasy of the metaverse by these companies, then they're using science fiction against us. And the fact that we have like, we've learned enough, I guess, in the last 20 years that we can learn to say no to that is really inspiring to me. I just like I got an Instagram ad the other day for some meta thing of like, gardening in the metaverse, like, oh, let's all get together and garden in the metaverse.

And I just for fun, looked at the comments, which I love to do on all meta sponsored posts. And it was like 5000 different like, fuck, you know, basically, like, it was so incredible to see just all every single person just being like, absolutely not. No, like, absolutely not. I want to go outside. I hate you for even trying to push this on my throat. And that's true. I feel like I haven't seen that before that level of just outright refusal. So, you know, even when they use the tool, our own tools against us, I think we have the equipment to just to simply say no and to look towards more realistic and critical analyses of the future, which hopefully Terraform puts together for a broad audience. You know, I think your point on the different uses of science

fiction is so important, right? Because when we think about these tech companies, like they're so often using, you know, whether it's science fiction or ideas from science fiction to inform the kind of futures or products that they're trying to bring into being or to justify the like terrible things that they're trying to do, like Jeff Bezos comparing his space projects to Star Trek and the sort of things like that, you know, I'd like to dig into it further. Like, I wonder how you think about these kind of dual uses or multiple uses of science fiction in this way that can, as Terraform does, and as all of your authors are doing, getting us to think critically about these technologies and the impact that they have on society, but then at the same time, how these tech companies so effectively also utilize that in order to get people to buy into these corporate visions that

they have for society, for the future, for the present, what have you, and how I feel like that also really helps them to get past a lot of people's maybe reservations about some of the things that they might be doing because they say, look, we're going to deliver this incredible science fiction future for you if you just let us roll out these technologies. Yeah. I mean, that's a really complex question. I mean, I think that when the tech companies are presenting us with the shiny new futures, they're exploiting our sentimentality and our emotional connection to the science fiction stories that we grew up watching. They're exploiting our love of Star Trek, for example, but they're removing anything about those texts that was actually positioned in society in any way or said anything about society. And that's super insidious. And it's

rough because I think, you know, we assume they get it. If they're talking about all these things that we love and they're comparing what they're going to offer to us with these texts that we're so familiar with, we just assume that they must get the whole thing. But really, it's, I think, a very blatant and intentional missing of the point. And it's not dissimilar from using any, you know, using a fond and beloved celebrity as the face of your dark dystopian company. It's these kinds of emotional associations people have. It's just marketing, right? But we have to question what the source material is and if they're reading it closely enough, for sure. Right. Yeah. And I mean, that's what it is. I mean, this is I think there's a case to be made that like the 21st century is like maybe like the most science fictional or the first to be like to be shaped most wholly by extremely wealthy men and their ideas pulled straight out of the science fictional universes that they grew up with. I mean, we have people worth upwards of $200 billion who are getting their ideas from science fiction books they read in the 90s or the odds. And they're encouraging their teams to read these books,

to explicitly sort of replicate pieces of this. And they're bringing this visions to life with like immense resources and immense power in ways that, I mean, if it wasn't kind of alarming, it would be pretty fascinating because they are, they have effectively been able to marshal these resources to make chunks of their visions. They run into reality quite frequently and we get to laugh when they do, but they also cause a lot of immiseration and they cause a lot of conflict and chaos in sort of implementing these. They also are paving over, as you know, we just talked about with your book, they, you know, it's such a great example in the transit sector, explicit where they have all these visions that they don't have the patience or the know-how or the ability to

implement their transit solution. So after all the money gets funneled into them, sort of what we really need, which is like trains, you know, like, but like, but things that are not so futuristic get left in the wayside. So I do think that it's a really interesting time to be looking very carefully about like, sort of who gets to use science fiction to sort of bring the future into being and who has to sort of use it as luddites and then sort of to turn it down when we can because it you know from mark zuckerberg in the metaverse jeff bezos and his rocket ship fantasies and elon musk and his rocket ship fantasies you name it you know like they're just pulling from the source material and they're

trying to make you want to understand where we're going read read science fiction from the 90s like that's that is oh you could get a lot of understanding about sort of the worldview of a lot of these tech folks from just mining that source material i think it's interesting to think about like a book like terraform or a book like about stuff that a lot of the stuff that mcd publishes or those a lot of our authors publish as sort of like counter futures to sort of like the retro future, the sort of current slate of tech giants and folks are attempting to build and bring into being. I think a lot of the Terraform stories are approaching this from sort of a hacker perspective where it's like, we're kicking the tires of these futures.

I mean, sci-fi is a really powerful tool, right? It can be wielded for good or for evil. It can be just like technology, you know, like it's what we do with it that matters. And I think there are many different positions you can take within genre to do lots of different things. And it kind of depends where you are, what level of granularity you're looking at it from what position you're wielding it. I think the Jeff Bezos is in the Elon Musk of the world. Like they're thinking about it full God mode. They're just thinking of being world builders, like imagining a world and making it become, make it so, you know, like engage that my vision is, is reality. Like that's the level at which they're thinking about

science fiction. They're not thinking about like fan cultures. They're not thinking about like a close read of the text. They're not thinking about like the many different ways in which characters are like queer coded. Like they're not approaching the text with any level of like close reading. And even within the same text, you can look at it from a different perspective. So it's, it's really what we do with it and how we read it and how we use it. Yeah. I guess for many of them, it's like the aesthetics look interesting. So let's just try to replicate those and ignore like everything else in the story that says don't do that. Yeah, exactly. I think it's the aesthetic.

It's the shiny tech. It's just like taking that. But it's also the often and even sort of astute and layered cyberpunk sort of narratives like from Gibson and so on are sort of guilty of this, too. It's of like sort of the young man's hero journey where they like in Stevenson, where they get to like, yeah, like the world is fucked up, but they get to like have all these adventures through the technology and they get to sort of like emerge victorious somehow and you know obviously the hero's journey is pretty universal but the way that it is sort of often carried out like a lot of these books like the the critique especially

in something like snow crash it turns out to be kind of pretty flimsy. You know, I think Gibson's is, I was just reading Neuromancer and I was actually pleasantly surprised with how well, how he actually does talk about like how the evolution of technology actually happens. And it's like outside sort of the cloistered and rich places where like people actually hack together technology. And he does spend some attention to detail on the divide, but yeah, like going back to like Snow Crash, crash for instance that you'd get a sense that like yeah like it's it depicts a world where a lot of things have fallen apart but a lot of that is just to the benefit of the protagonist who gets to have kind of a kick-ass time using his crazy tech and

beating the bad guys and like that sort of like simplistic mentality, it's the same in Ready Player One, where like any nub of critique by the end of the book or the end of the narrative has completely been sanded away in the mold of like sort of the video games that it represents. Like it's just about either conquering or just like the badass tech itself or the friends they made along the way so like

yeah i think it's like they may be using that as a reference point but it's also worth asking like what pieces they are drawing from i think there's also an element of context collapse too because i mean someone like bezos like citing star trek it's not that different from like you know ymca playing at a trump rally or hearing born in the usa at a monster truck show. It's like, we forget what these things are actually about. It happens to us across all levels of culture. Yeah, I think it's a really good point. Well, I think this was a fantastic conversation to, you know, get some insight into the book and what you've been doing, as well as, you know, thinking more broadly about the role that science fiction plays and how we think about

these technologies. I'm wondering to close, any final thoughts on the book that we didn't get to that you wanted to ensure that the audience knows? And do you have any recommendations, whether it's favorite stories in the book or any other science fiction you've been reading recently that you might want to recommend to the listeners? I'll go first and clear the final word here, but I'll just be brief. And I would never dare playing favorites. So I love each and every one of these stories that's in here. They cover topics that we didn't get to today. We do have a lot that's sort of about AI and there's a lot about climate. I guess we touched on that briefly and about social justice.

They are all tied together by sort of what we feel was always Terraform's main mission. And that was that it wasn't just going to be a fantasy space opera where you could read the thing and forget about today. If it was going to be a space opera, it was going to tell you something about sort of the dynamics of what's at play in sort of tech or politics today. So we hope that each of these stories sort of embodies one of those nodes. I love that word that Claire has been using, so I'm stealing it.

Instead of citing just like one story, I would just say that you could read this thing from beginning to end because it does sort of vaguely sketch out this arc where we have it, watch worlds burn separated for a reason. And that's the first stories are sort of about platform capitalism and entertainment and navigating these digital systems. The next are sort of about alternative realities and AI, maybe the next stages of that in a lot of cases. And then we end with burn, where if we don't let the issues and

the tensions and the conflicts sort of raised in the first to go untended, this is what we get. A lot of people think we're already here. We are here in varying degrees, but we are having issues with vast inequality, with climate crisis, with, you know, racial injustice, tons of things that are burning. so I would say that you could read this thing from point A to point B and really get an interesting experience that's the hope anyway is people will have their favorite stories I love them all and I hope everyone will go pick this thing out see if I'm right and yeah I think it is always fun to talk about your favorite story but I edited it I'm opting out can't say same I kind of want to say the same I mean we've already spoiled like four stories by talking about the full plots of them so I don't want to do the same thing either. I think there's really something for everyone in this book. Like, there's truly experimental literary style fiction, there's a comic, there's a story told entirely through text messages, there's, like fun, rompy stories. They're really dark, dystopian stories. There's these kind of like near term, like mundane, banal stories where like, you know, it's only very, it's very slightly different from our reality. So whatever flavor of sci-fi you're into,

I promise you there's something in there for you. I love that. And I completely agree with what both of you said. I think it reads really well. There's so many different types of stories in there to get immersed in. And I would just say, I respect your desire not to pick a favorite because all of my podcast episodes are my favorites as well, because, you know, I can't pick like that. So I totally get it. But, you know, Brian, Claire, I thank you both so much for coming on the show, for talking about the book and for putting this thing together. It really is fantastic. Thanks so much for having us. Thanks, Paris, as always. Watch Worlds Burn, which is out now. You can follow Brian on Twitter at at BC Merchant,

and you can follow Claire at at The Universe. You can follow me at at Paris Marks, and you can follow the show at at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is produced by Eric Wickham and is part of the Harbinger Media Network. If you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.