Tech Won't Save Us - Silicon Valley Doesn’t Get Science Fiction w/ Annalee Newitz

Episode Date: December 23, 2021

Paris Marx is joined by Annalee Newitz to discuss what’s wrong with Silicon Valley’s understanding of science fiction, and how tech leaders use it to justify terrible futures.Annalee Newitz is the author of Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age and The Future of Another Timeline. They are also the co-host of Our Opinions Are Correct and a writer for NYT Opinion and New Scientist. Follow Annalee on Twitter at @Annaleen.🚨 T-shirts are now available!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.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:Annalee wrote about what tech companies don’t get about science fiction for New Scientist.Paris wrote about the dystopian future proposed by the metaverse.The Verge spoke to Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss, but the interviewer suggested The Matrix was trying to predict where technology was going.In 1985, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote about science fiction and the future.Facebook is already failing to combat harassment in VR, and its incoming CTO thinks doing so in the metaverse is “practically impossible.”People mentioned: Frankenstein author Mary Shelley, JPL engineer Jack Parsons, and Trekonomics author Manu Saadia.Annalee’s reading suggestions: Ring Shout by P Djeli Clark, Murderbot series by Martha Wells, Infomocracy by Malka Older, An Excess Male by Maggie Shen King, Rosewater by Tade Thompson, Waste Tide by Chen Qiufan, Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, and Broken Earth by N.K. Jemisin.Support the show

If you want to have a skeptical engagement with Silicon Valley rhetoric, it's really important to look at what isn't being shown, and inevitably, it is the workers. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Anna Lee Newitz. Anna Lee is an author who's written a bunch of incredible books. Their most recent nonfiction book is Four Lost Cities, A Secret History of the Urban Age, and their most recent fiction book is The Future of Another Timeline. Anna Lee is also the co-host of Our Opinions Are Correct, and they write for New York Times Opinion and New Scientist. Since Anna Lee is not only an author of science

fiction, but also has a great knowledge of the genre and its history from their journalistic and research work, in this week's conversation, we decided to dig into the relationship between Silicon Valley and science fiction and how, you know, some of these powerful people in the tech industry think about science fiction and use science fiction to justify their companies, their business models, and the futures that they're trying to sell us. You know, obviously this year we saw Mark Zuckerberg promoting the metaverse, which is based on ideas from Neil Stephens's 1992 novel Snow Crash see people like Peter Thiel drawing from The Lord of the Rings, a fantasy series, in naming his businesses and inspiring some of his worldview.

And we even see it in smaller companies like Soylent, which you may remember from a few years ago. That was essentially like a meal replacement drink. So you could drink this, keep working and not have to cook anything. And the name of that came from a science fiction film called Soylent Green from the 1970s. So you can see that there are a lot of connections between the tech industry and Silicon Valley. And that is probably not a surprise, given that a lot of these people grew up reading science fiction. And given that they are interested in technology and where technology might take us in the future, it's probably no surprise that they also find science fiction really interesting in the ways

that it envisions technology shaping or informing future society. But along the way, and we get to this in the conversation, I think in reading that science fiction, they might focus a bit much on the technological aspects and not so much on the social aspects, right, of what is actually going on there and whether a science fiction book is actually trying to predict where technology is going to go or whether it's just using technology in a future setting to make a comment on their present, like when one of these books was written. So that's just to say that I had a wonderful conversation with Annalie. I think that you are really going to enjoy it. We get into some really interesting topics and Annalie brings a ton of knowledge about science fiction and the history of science fiction to inform our conversation. And at the end, Annalie also has some science fiction and fantasy reading suggestions if you're looking for something to read over the holidays. Before we get into the episode, I just want to say that 2021 is coming to an end. I think this will be the last new

episode for the year. I will still post something next week, even if there's not a new episode. But it has just been so fantastic to see how many more people have come to the show and have been listening to the show throughout 2021. You know, the interest that you the listeners have shown to the show, as well as you know, the support that you've given it through sharing it through suggesting it to friends, and through supporting the work that goes into making the show every single week on patreon.com. So I really appreciate all of those things. There is so much cool stuff coming in 2022. For the show, the guests I have lined up are fantastic. And you know, they're just a bunch of great things coming. And the second anniversary of the show will be in

April. So you'll want to stay tuned for that. Now with that said, tech won't save us as part of the Harbinger Media Network, a group of left wing podcasts that are made in Canada. And you can find out more about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. If you like the show, make sure to leave a five star review on Apple podcasts. And if you're listening on Spotify, you can also now leave us a five-star review on Spotify as well. You can also share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And this episode of Tech Won't Save Us, like every episode, is free because listeners like you support the work that I put into making it every single week. So I can have these conversations,

research them, edit them together, and release them and promote them so that you and many more people can listen to them. So if you appreciate the work that I put into making it and if you enjoy these conversations, please consider joining patrons like Dylan Phelan in Arlington, Massachusetts, and Tanya Finder by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and becoming a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Anna Lee, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thanks so much for having me. I am really excited to chat. You had a great article in The New Scientist recently about, you know, science fiction and how some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley are so

drawn to it, but also misunderstand what comes out in it. And, you know, I think it's fair to say this is building on many years of your work in science fiction, writing about science fiction, understanding of what's going on in these two domains. And so I'm really excited to explore that further with you today. And I was hoping that we could start by maybe getting a bit of history on this. You know, history may be something that Silicon Valley doesn't always like or doesn't want to pay much attention to. But I think it's interesting to look at the history, you know, when we think about today and how people in Silicon Valley are so interested in science fiction and draw from it.

This is not something that is just unique to this period. But throughout history, we can see this kind of relationship or discourse between what's happening in science fiction and kind of the discussion of the ideas in that. But then also what's going on in kind of scientific and engineering communities as they are working toward, you know, I guess, different innovations or visions of the future on their end as well. So can you talk about that relationship, you know, as we see it maybe through the 20th century? Sure. Yeah, I'm going to cheat a little bit your question, and start us in the 19th century, because... Yeah, all good.

Yeah, with the dawn of sort of industrialization and kind of modern mechanization. And, you know, the birth of science fiction, as most people know, is really generally traced back to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which is early 19th century. And the reason I bring that up is because the origin story of that novel is that Mary Shelley attended a scientific demonstration where a scientist who'd been working with electricity was showing off this like brand new thing that no one had ever really seen this invisible force that could go through the air and go through metal, and also could go through nerves. And so there were several people who were doing these kinds of demonstrations. But what she

saw was a demonstration where this scientist would run electrical current through a corpse and cause it to kind of twitch and seem to reanimate. And it was a way of, again, demonstrating the power of this crazy new thing, electricity. And, you know, that image really stuck with her. And it was, again, the dawn of this novel that continues to haunt us today and has been told and retold a story that, you know, continues to feel relevant. And I think that's also really the dawn of this idea that we have that science inspires science fiction and vice versa. That unlike other kinds of literature or other kinds of entertainment, science fiction is sort of like the cultural wing of this larger scientific project. And the scientific project is all about turning everything that we know into a rational and knowable and

quantifiable object. And so we see a continuation of this idea all the way up through the 20th century and into our day where you have these moments like in the 20th century where, again, there are these really spectacular connections between science fiction and science. I think one that is also really underappreciated is that Jack Parsons, who was the founder or one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Lab, where a lot of our spacecraft are still built today in Southern California. He was an avid science fiction fan. And in his 20s, when he was developing solid rocket fuel, which eventually blew him up, he was hanging out in LA with science fiction writers of the day. With the money from working on JPL stuff, he bought this big mansion and he would have huge parties where he would invite people over like Isaac Asimov. And he was a Satanist and a hippie, as one of them science fiction writers, including L. Ron Hubbard, who at the time had not yet become of sex rituals, which is, you know, very delightful,

very reminiscent of many other periods in history when, you know, radicals have kind of gotten together and partied. But it was also, you know, this extraordinary moment in US history where, you know, we were about to enter the space age and the atomic age, and science fiction's golden age was just getting underway. And I think it's important to think of that moment as a real turning point. And again, a kind of myth-making moment for science fiction where, you know, there's this sort of hotbed of idea exchange between scientists and science fiction writers. And it's connected to this radicalism around sex and around spirituality, where they're just experimenting with everything. And we really don't see, I think, another

moment like that, really, until kind of the dawning of what now everyone's calling kind of the cyberspace age or the meta age, if you're kind of on that train. So really, with the dawn of, you know, things like cyberpunk in the 1980s, you see another moment where science fiction and this time, you know, computer science are kind of cross fertilizing. And you see movies that like things like in the 80s, like War Games or Blade Runner that really start to set the tone for what people imagine technology is capable like, I feel like the the metaphorical toolkit that we're working with as science fiction writers, and also as people who are trying to innovate in technology, like we're still kind of playing with the cyberspace metaphor or the meta metaphor, you know, a movie like the Matrix, which came out at the end of the 20th century, still feels weirdly relevant. And, you know, we're about to witness the kind of sequel

to the Matrix trilogy, which I'm actually kind of excited about. So I think it's interesting that we have this long history, but at the same time, this innovative genre of science fiction, this industry that's based on innovation, like the tech industry, they do kind of look to the future, and they are all about kind of changing the way things are. But we also still get bogged down in older metaphors. We get bogged down in like the language of industrialism or cyberspace, when in fact, maybe those metaphors aren't working anymore. Maybe we should be looking for something else. I find that to be a fascinating answer. But I think there's several things in there that

that really stand out to me, especially when you're talking about the comparison to what is going on now, right? And in particular, you talk about how those kind of ideas from cyberpunk from from that era kind of still remain relevant today. And as you say, you know, the Matrix, the fourth film is coming out very soon. It might be out by the time this episode goes live. And I was watching an interview recently that The Verge did with Keanu Reeves and Carrie Ann Moss. And there was something really interesting that kind of stood out in the questioning that I thought that the interviewer was doing, where he was kind of framing it as though the Matrix, the original films, were trying to predict what the future of technology was going to be.

And I felt that, you know, that kind of seemed like a misunderstanding of what science fiction, or at least what these films are doing. Like, it feels like science fiction is usually trying to, or, you know, at least this type of science fiction, make a comment on particular things that are happening at the time that those works of science fiction are being made rather than trying to predict a particular future of technology. I wonder how you feel about that. I completely agree with that idea. I mean, unfortunately, I am not a wizard or I don't have precognition. That would be super great. I'll let you know if that happens. But no, I mean, all science fiction is really about the present. And I think that's why it's interesting to look back at something like Frankenstein, or look back at something like,

you know, Jack Parsons's group of friends in the 1930s and 40s, because these are, you know, reflecting anxieties about technology and industry of their day. And it's the same thing with cyberpunk. The Matrix is not, sure, I mean, it's set in the future, but it's really about, I think, especially the original trilogy, it's definitely about anxieties about the tech industry and about what happens when people are just treated like batteries, which is exactly what we're seeing right now in the gig economy. It's like, take a person, stick them in a car, plug them in, make them go, don't give them money, they are a battery. I just don't really buy into this idea that science fiction predicts the future. I think it spins up potential scenarios

for a future. And I think it's important that we pay attention to those. But really, what we need to be doing is paying attention to the present and the conditions in the present that are giving rise to these anxieties. I couldn't agree more with that. You know, another thing that comes to mind when you talk about how these ideas from, yous, from around cyberpunk, are still relevant today is kind of these discussions that you hear both from Peter Thiel, but also from people on the left of these technology discourses, where they talk about how there has kind of been a stagnation of, I guess, a certain type of technology, at least, right? That there's this focus on digital technology, but there's this perception that these kind of big feats or big inventions that really transformed society in the past, like, you know, electricity or even going to space in the space age, aren't really happening or we're not seeing as many of these big changes. And I wonder if that is maybe why, you know,

the ideas from the 1980s from cyberpunk still remain relevant today. And there hasn't been kind of a new paradigm to replace them. Or maybe you could say a new paradigm is starting to emerge with, you know, climate science fiction and things like that. I think you're right to kind of point to this idea of no more big inventions as kind of a rhetorical strategy. It's not true. And I think absolutely that what we're seeing is that innovation and development of new tech is moving into other areas. It's moving into areas around infrastructure, around sustainability and energy. And I think we're reaching a point where it's hard to deny that the technology infrastructure we've set up, all the servers that we use to host the cloud and to host the internet, and all of the mobile

devices that we use, these are all things that are destroying our environment, and they are not sustainable. And I'm not saying that we should make the internet go away. I love the internet. I grew up on the internet. But at the same time, yeah, I mean, the reason why we're not seeing big innovations in the tech industry is because a lot of the richest corporations and leaders in tech aren't willing to say, oh, wait, maybe the path that we're on isn't the right one. Maybe we shouldn't be burning fossil fuel in order to let people mine cryptocurrency. Maybe we should be developing, you know, technologies for drawing down carbon out of the atmosphere. Maybe we should apply machine learning to that problem.

And people are doing that. But I think that in Silicon Valley, a lot of the richest people, a lot of the decision makers are still kind of stuck in this paradigm of the matrix. Like they probably grew up watching the matrix and they're like, that's what I want. I want a virtual world where my body is like stuck in like a little capsule full of garbage, but I can eat a steak in virtual reality. So like, isn't that awesome? And, you know, that's obviously the darkest possible future. You know, that's, that's a horrifying idea, like the idea that we have to retreat into a virtual world because we've wrecked our physical world. And I will say one more thing about that that I think is so weird, which is that so much of 20th century science fiction was about exploring the physical world and going into outer space and exploring other planets and other dimensions. And I find it so weird and depressing that now so much of our science fictional imagination is basically about going into virtual worlds and not leaving the planet and not acknowledging the importance of physical space and the physical

world. And that's why I think, you know, Facebook rebranding as meta is so symptomatic of what's going on right now, because they're like, Oh, great, we'll retreat into a golden world made entirely of technology, because we we've screwed up so much in the real world. So, you know, it's it's the classic kind of retreat into the dream world of ideology, instead of dealing with our problems that are very physical. I love that the dream world of ideology instead of dealing with our problems that are very physical. I love that the dream world of ideology. It also makes me think of Slavoj Zizek and what he calls the trash can of ideology as well, right? Yes.

Which I think is very appropriate in this case. But, you know, I completely take your point. And I agree with you that, you know, I think that these are perceptions in some sense of innovation and what is seen as innovation through fiction, and in many cases are, you know, trying to replicate them through the companies and the technologies that they are so interested in? Yeah, I mean, I think it's super complicated, because one of the big questions that's been coming up, especially in recent weeks, after the rebranding of Facebook as meta. So meta, of course, is a term that comes from Neil Stevenson's novel Snow Crash, which is an early 1990s novel that has a place called the metaverse, which is kind of virtual reality and kind of augmented reality. And it is under monopoly control of a telecommunications company that charges tons of money to give people access to it

and exercises all kinds of control over what people are allowed to do there. So the Neal Stephenson novel feels not just realistic, but also pessimistic. And so why would this rich Silicon Valley company that's trying to suggest that it's going toward a better future, why would they pick this metaphor for where they're going to this monopoly-controlled distraction machine? I think it's because, and I said this in my new scientist piece, I think it's because a lot of Silicon Valley's investment strategy involves a profound lack of irony and a profound inability to imagine many different outcomes from one particular technology. What you see over and over in

Silicon Valley investment and product development is, you know, bright eyed, excited people wanting to develop an application or develop a piece of technology for one specific thing, like, I want to make something that will allow me to stay in touch with my friends, or, you know, I want to create something that allows me to share pictures with my family. And they only think about that one use case. Remember, lack of irony. So they're very earnest, they're very focused on the one thing they would do, or that they would prefer for people to do with their tech. And they never think, wait, but there's millions of people who might use this. What are all the other ways

that people might use it? You know, how might someone very different from me use this device? How would a bad guy use it? How would a person use it who doesn't want to stay in touch with their family? You know, what would happen if they got into this service that was all about staying in touch with your family? And so as a result, we get these applications, like I'm just going to keep picking on Facebook because it's fun. That's okay. Right. I mean, and it's very much kind of what we're talking about here. So you get an application like Facebook where enough people around the world are on it that there's absolutely no way that everyone is going to be using it in the exact way that the company planned for them to use it. Which, you know, might have been quite wholesome and nice if everyone had kind of stuck to the program and given all of their personal information to Facebook and then never did anything wrong. You know, it would have would have been a big

win for Facebook. And we wouldn't be, you know, looking at, you know, the horror that we're looking at now. So that isn't how it works. That's not how the world works. That's not how humans work. And indeed, you know, we've seen every possible illegal or unethical use of Facebook, including on the part of the company, right. And that is because the companies, I think, Facebook, in particular, they put all of their resources into planning for the quote, unquote, good uses of their technology, you know, they want to boost all of these ways that people use the technology that they want them to, which is in Facebook's case, engaging with content, sharing content, staying on Facebook, inviting more people onto Facebook and trading information that Facebook can then mine and sell to advertisers.

But people are using it for all these other things. And when people start using it for, again, everything from stalking or crime or terrorism or any other name your favorite terrible thing that people have done on Facebook, Facebook doesn't want to put any resources into dealing with that because that would be to admit, first of all, that Facebook can be used for nefarious purposes, but also it takes away from this non-ironic investment in whatever it is that Facebook is supposed to be. And so as a result, the application becomes more and more problematic.

It becomes more and more difficult to deal with all the abuse on the platform. And the problem metastasizes and becomes more complex and harder and harder for the company to deal with. And I'm not saying this to make anyone feel sympathetic to Facebook, like, oh, the problems got away from them. No, they foolishly built a social space with no understanding of how social interactions and social relationships work. And so they got something that reflects, you know, an incredibly horrifying aspect of social relationships that reflects propaganda and conflict and warfare

and political oppression through the use of propaganda, as well as other things. This is my long way of saying that I think what happens is that Silicon Valley investors and leaders read science fiction in a very non-ironic way. So they approach a novel like Snow Crash, say, and they think, oh, the metaverse as described in this book, well, that's kind of bad, but I would never do that. So because of the way I've built meta or Facebook, none of these bad things will ever happen. And besides, perhaps these things aren't really that bad. Maybe it's not that bad for one corporation to control the metaverse if it's a nice corporation, if it's my corporation. And I think, again, this touches on the famous sort of slogan of Google in the early years,

which was, don't be evil. And I think that's kind of the guiding principle for a lot of these company leaders is that they're like, well, we won't be evil. That's all we have to do is just sort of do this incantation of don't be evil. And then none of these predictable, terrible things will happen, even though they are things that have happened before in other social scenarios that weren't online, even though they actually are very predictable. And even though any kind of person who had any glancing familiarity with sociology could tell you, you know, if you build a public square, whether it's in metaverse or, you know, literally down the street from your house, you're going to have to think about how you regulate the use of that public square. And you're going to have to be prepared for people to shit in the public square. And you're going to need to have an algorithm that deals with what happens when people shit in the public square. And you're going to need to have an algorithm that deals with what happens when people shit in the public square. But if you're Facebook, you're like, but no one would ever do that. Oh, well, if someone shits in the public square,

we'll just issue a press release and say, it's not actually shit. It's actually something that we're optimizing for. And if you like that shit, we can show you some other shit. And like, it's okay, because some people just really like shit. And, you know, obviously, that doesn't work, because eventually, the square is full of shit. This is like the tragedy of the commons, as told by a nine year old, I apologize. That's okay. But I think it's such a good point, right? Like, because we can see in the history of Facebook, how, you know, it was, it was kind of founded or at least promoted this idea that connecting people was this inherent good, and that only good things would come of that. And then when, you know, they found that that was not true, and that there were a bunch of consequences of this that they

didn't plan for, they were unable to deal with it. And I think, you know, this has been known for much of Facebook's history, but it's really coming to a head, it seems this year, you know, with the revelations from Frances Haugen and before her, Sophie Zhang. And, you know, I think it's so important for us to recognize this, especially as, you know, their response to this kind of crisis for their company seems to not be, okay, we need to actually address these things. But hey, look at this other flashy future that we want to try to sell you. Instead of addressing these problems with our current product, we are going to try to sell you on this new product, where, you know, we do not have the measures in place to actually protect from the same problems happening once

again. And if you read interviews with some of their, you know, top executives, they're already admitting that in these virtual reality spaces already, which are, you know, very small, not very many people use them. They're already running into the same problems that they're seeing on Facebook, pretending it's not going to happen as they make it this like massive space where they want all of us to interact. Yeah, that's right. And I mean, once you have people in a virtual space, if we're going to be embodied avatars, some of the demos of meta have been quite hilarious, where it's people with no legs. And I was like, okay, so maybe if we just remove everyone's genitals, like there won't be all the things that we're afraid of.

But of course, you know, we know for sure that if people are embodied, all of the kinds of abuses that we see on Facebook can be magnified because now you can actually, you know, grab someone's. Well, you can't grab their butt because we are not allowed to have butts in Metaverse, but you can grab them. You can get into their physical space. And it's true, it's not your actual real life physical space, it's your virtual physical space. But there's plenty of evidence that people who are in a virtual environment like that do respond to virtual physical assaults as real physical assaults, you know, it's it's not going to break your arm. But it could cause the same kinds of psychological problems and, and distress. And it could still be used to harass people in a brand new way. I also think it's funny that like a company like Facebook, as the movie, the social network wisely rubbed in our face, like it's based on a system for like automated sexual harassment, basically.

Like that was Zuck's like big innovation was like, how can we harass women at scale? And so it's, it's no surprise that, you know, they kind of grew a network that is like optimized for harassment. Yeah. That's a good point actually, to, to talk about the origins of it and how that still defines so much of what is going on and, and, you know, within the text itself, you know, as you say, because there can't be kind of two different ways of understanding something, it either has to be cool or bad, and they have chosen or Zuckerberg has chosen the cool route, right. But I wonder at the same time, one thing that I find really interesting is, you know, if we if we look at Jeff Bezos, he is someone who talks a lot about how inspired he is by Star

Trek and how that has really helped to inspire how he sees the future of humanity and humanity's kind of future in space. But then at the same time, kind of the vision of the future in space that he puts forward is one that is incredibly capitalistic and based on the same kind of exploitation that we have here on Earth just moved into space, which is completely divorced from what we would see in Star Trek. So it's looking at and taking from the science fiction, but in a way that seems also quite different from what we're seeing with Zuckerberg in the metaverse. Again, I would say part of it is an intentional or maybe unintentional misreading

of what Star Trek represents, right? I think what someone like Bezos does is he looks at Star Trek and he's like, what I see here is a version of the United States in space. And I don't want to think about what might be wrong with the United States right now. You know, obviously, he's pretty familiar with with what's wrong, since he's been kind of caught up in international politics a couple of times now. But he wants to look at Star Trek divorced from its current context, and also to not think about all of the human stories that kind of take place in and around the spaceships, which allow interstellar travel, and to a certain extent, interstellar commerce. We do see commerce happening in Star Trek. And it's handled

differently in different series and at different points in the Star Trek timeline. There's actually a great book by Manu Sidiya called Trekanomics, which is all about kind of the shift from early Star Trek to next generation and beyond and how it kind of transitions into a post-capitalist utopia in some ways because of the replicators and other things. Manu's been on the show. He's fantastic. Yeah. He's an inspiration to us all. So I think maybe Bezos should read Trekinomics and kind of take it to heart in some ways, because yeah, it's really the same exact problem that we see with how Mark Zuckerberg reads Snow Crash, if indeed he even did read Snow Crash, because it's looking at the technology and not thinking about all of the social relationships that go into that technology. And for Bezos, you know, I think his vision of the future really does rely heavily on some kind a way to destroy unions, a way to devalue

manual labor, a brand new way, I think, to erase how labor is taking place. You know, they're always making these claims that their warehouses are completely robots and, you know, everything is algorithm. And it's like, except for all the people who are actually working in your warehouses and, you know, who are being forced to like ignore tornado warnings in order to keep laboring so that they can get their pittance per hour. And so it's exactly what we were saying before about kind of Facebook reinventing itself by pointing everyone at this like shiny vision of meta. Amazon wants to kind of point our faces at the shiny vision of the

space future where packages are delivered to you on Mars and like drones deliver things to your front door. When in fact, you know, the reality is that it's just an amazing system for devaluing human labor. Like, I really think that Amazon's lasting contribution to humanity is going to be that, you know, it's how did we figure out a new way to destroy unions, devalue human labor, and basically mainstream and normalize this gig economy that's robbing people of benefits and living wages. I think that's so well said. And we've talked many times in the show about the problems with Amazon's business model, everything that it's doing and the future that it's actually creating, even though, you know, Jeff Bezos is promoting this other idea of the future. And I think that

this is something that kind of stands out to me as well, right? When you look at how people like Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos kind of pull from science fiction to, I think, in some ways, like legitimize the actions or the things that they're trying to do, the things that their companies are trying to do, so that we say, oh, okay, they are trying to, you know, replicate this idea from science fiction that many people feel is interesting, if not desirable. But then in, I guess, cloaking their actions within those stories that people are familiar with, they're taking actions that are incredibly negative, that in some cases are not reflective of the science fiction, or in some cases, like we might say with Snow Crash, probably will be

reflective in a way that are really negative, right? And so I wonder how you see that kind of use of science fiction as a way to maybe justify or distract from actions that are being taken that are incredibly negative and damaging to human society today. That's such a good question. Yeah, I think that that's absolutely what's going on. One thing I would say, first of all, is that I think if Bezos were being honest about the future that Amazon wants to build in space, probably the Dune books and the new Dune are much better analog because, of course, those are all about sort of reinventing monarchy

and reinventing old fashioned imperialism in space. And I think that the reason why Silicon Valley investors and billionaires are so attracted to wrapping their products in science fictional stories is the same way that, to go back to picking on imperialists, the same way that imperial powers during early industrialization used Christianity, you know, it's like, it's a fun story. It has like superheroes in it. And like, I mean, obviously, it's more like the Old Testament that has all the superheroes. But my point is, there's like a package that you get with like the Judeo Christian tale, that like, you know, kind of allows you to wrap everything you're doing in this like glowing narrative of like, everything becoming better and more holy and becoming,

you know, more in line with moral values. And, you know, you can sort of justify any kind of, you know, murderous rampage with this story. And I really think that for Silicon Valley, where maybe the Judeo-Christian narrative is not as exciting. Things like Star Trek, but also Star Wars are those heroic narratives, right? That it's it's the heroic narrative that many of us have invested in our whole lives. Like a lot of people running around today investing in companies grew up watching Star Trek, or grew up watching Star Wars. And they're like, this is the future I want. It has shiny ships in it. It has like cool armor. It has like, awesome computers that can talk to me. And that's the beautiful tomorrow.

I mean, the thing about Star Trek that makes it a really good narrative to kind of replace that Judeo-Christian narrative is that it does have this very strong sense of what progress looks like, you know, how we should evolve as a civilization and like what kinds of technological breakthroughs will happen along the way. Like, you know, we'll get, you know, space travel, and then we'll get warp, and then we'll get, you know, all these other things, programmable matter or whatever they have in Discovery. But the thing about Star Trek is that everything goes to shit as soon as you land on a planet, unless it's like a really good planet, you know, like Earth or like one of our favorite planets. But most planets are more like Bajor, which is the horribly oppressed and colonized planet that we spend a lot of time hanging out

on during Deep Space Nine days. Because Deep Space Nine, the space station is right next to Bajor. And the Federation is occupying that space station because Bajor has been recently decolonized. The Cardassians were occupying Bajor. And so the Federation is there kind of overseeing the pullout of the Cardassians and the rebuilding of Bajor is really fucked. Like, it's a planet that is recognizable to anyone who's lived on Earth and witnessed what happens in post-colonial times in places that have been, you know, horribly abused starving. They don't have a system of government that's stable. They have, you know, factionalism and terrorism. And, you know, their future is very uncertain. And like, the Federation is kind of there being like, well, like, okay, we'll like send you some aid or whatever. It's very much kind of revealing the thing that Star Trek normally covers up, which is like all of the terrible social relations that we leave behind when we get on the Enterprise or on the Discovery and kind of can travel between worlds. And, you know, that's the same thing that Jeff Bezos is doing when he talks about Star Trek. He's like, focus on the pretty ships, focus on leaving Earth behind, you know, don't focus on like what we did on Earth to get the ships like just don't look at that.

Yeah, I think it's really interesting when you look at Jeff Bezos vision of the future and how he presents it. He kind of says that, you know, we're going to take the best of us into space. Right. And kind of I guess the assumption that is that the worst of us is like left behind. Oh, my God. Yeah, it's very wild. You know, because he won't explicitly say, you know, what is going to happen to all the workers. He just talks about how, you know, we're all going to move into these space colonies, and then there are going to be a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts and all this kind of stuff, right?

But there's never anything explicit about what's going to happen to the workers who are, you know, mining all of the minerals to make these space stations or, you know, actually constructing them or anything like that. He's assuming that's all done by technology, but we know that's not going to be the case, you know, as you have outlined with Amazon itself. Yeah. But as you were explaining there, and especially in your reference to Star Trek, as I was preparing for the interview, I reread an essay by Ursula Le Guin on science fiction. And I wanted to read a paragraph from that and kind of get your response to it. And As I was preparing for the interview, I reread an essay by Ursula Le Guin on science fiction, and I wanted to read a paragraph from that and kind of get your response to it.

And she wrote that when we look at what we can't see, what we do see is the stuff inside our heads, our thoughts and our dreams, the good ones and the bad ones. And it seems to me that when science fiction is really doing its job, that's exactly what it's dealing with, not the future. It's when we confuse our dreams and ideas with the non-dream world that we're in trouble, when we think the future is a place we own. Then we succumb to wishful thinking and escapism, and our science fiction gets megalomania and thinks that instead of being fiction, it's prediction. And the Pentagon and the White House begin to believe it, and we get true believers conquering the future by means of SDI, which is also known as Star Wars, the program set up by Ronald Reagan.

And of course, it makes me think of what Trump was doing with the Space Force. But I wonder what you make of that paragraph by Le Guin. That is so great. I've never heard that before. And it is it's really fantastic. that quote is, I mean, first of all, this notion of colonizing the future and trying to use stories about the future to justify, you know, basically greed and spreading, you know, corporate control further. But I also think when she talks about when we look at things that we can't see, we fill it in with our imaginations, I'm now paraphrasing. I mean, I think that's such a wise thing to say, not just about the future, but about what is happening in the present. You know, it's what we've been talking about, right? Where I imagine Bezos, you know, looking at an

Amazon warehouse, and he just can't see the workers inside. He's blinded himself to it. He sees the machines. He sees this weird image of the future that he has internalized from science fiction. And he just fills those workers in with his imagination and he imagines them as robots. He imagines them as inanimate objects that he possesses and that do labor for him. And I really think that if you want to have a skeptical engagement with Silicon Valley rhetoric, it's really important to look at what isn't being shown. What can't these corporate leaders see? And inevitably, it is the workers. Inevitably, it is the users whose data they are plundering. And again, this goes back to our question at the beginning about why does Facebook suck so much?

And it's because there's this willful blindness when it comes to how people will use the product. Who are these people? How will they use it? Who are these people who are not white guys who might have other agendas going into a social space? And so, yeah, I just love that idea. I always encourage people to look at the things that aren't shown. Because once you see what's in that space that's been filled up with imagination and filled up with golden Age science fiction tropes, and you clear those tropes away, what you see is union busting or indentured servitude. presenting this future of like how connectivity is a good thing and now a future of the metaverse, we see Bezos and Musk presenting visions of, you know, what our future in space is going to look like that is inspired by very particular ideas and motivations on their part. I wonder if you see science fiction responding to the visions that these tech billionaires are putting forward in a critical way, you know, as you're talking about by kind of pushing these things to the

side and looking at what is not present in their visions and the things that they are ignoring. Absolutely. I mean, I think a great example on television is The Expanse, which is a show that's based on a series of books. And the authors of the books actually are in the writer's room on the show too. So it's kind of their ongoing project. It focuses almost exclusively on workers in space. I mean, there's been six, seven seasons now. And so it's gotten quite complicated. But the central conflict in the series is that there are workers in the asteroid belt

who are mining to produce all of the raw materials for the wealthy people of Earth and to a certain extent, the people of Mars. And they have an uprising and they begin to fight back against their capitalist bosses. And the arc of the series is about what happens to their uprising and where the revolution leaves the solar system and sort of what happens to Earth when they have refused to deal with the mistreatment of these people in the asteroid belt who are being, you know, like, they have to pay for gravity. And if you can't afford to pay for gravity, it creates all of these health problems. People don't live for very long. And, you know, that's just one of many problems that they're facing.

And so I love that. I love that science fiction is trying to kind of bite back and say like, yeah, Elon Musk's vision of the future is basically like the 19th century coal miners in the southern United States. It's going to be people who have health problems, who have no recourse to the law, and are in these distant remote places where death comes quickly if any little mistake happens. So I think that's a great example. I think there's a lot of folks writing science fiction books that are thinking about these issues. N.K. Jemisin, who is a much

awarded, brilliant science fiction writer, she has a trilogy called The Broken Earth. It's set on one planet, but it's a history of sort of colonization and planetary domination by different forces. And we see in those books, again, even though it's this incredible far future world, they still are dealing with racial oppression. They're still, you know, doing enforced labor. And so right alongside these incredible machines that they have and incredible powers they have to remold the surface of their planet, they're still relying on enslavement, basically. So I think

those are two really good examples right off the bat. Personally, I really like the Expanse series. That's something that I observed in watching, especially the early seasons as well. You know, the focus on the workers who are out in the belt and what you're describing there about needing to pay for gravity reminds me of something that Manu Sadia said when he was on the show. And he talked about how, you know, going into space, it is this kind of techno utopian dream in a way because you're completely reliant on the technologies to give you air to breathe and, you know, everything else. Right. It is really a technological fantasy in a certain way. I've really enjoyed this conversation. And I feel like I think the listeners will have a lot of insight into the relationship between Silicon Valley and science fiction, but also how science fiction can push back on the ideas that they are

kind of taking from science fiction to kind of illustrate where these things might go wrong and how we should think about them in a critical way. And as we close, I know that you just gave us a recommendation for the Broken Earth series, but I wonder if you have any other recommendations for critical science fiction or fantasy that the listeners might look to if they're looking for a bit more reading material. Yeah, I have a big list and I'm going to just give you a couple little nuggets from it. One series that I think everyone should be reading right now is by Malka Older. It's called the Sentinel series. And the first book in it is called Infomocracy. It's about a near future crisis in democracy after the earth has created

a global democracy, which is underpinned by a lot of technological innovations that ultimately feel like a futuristic version of Google. So they have these global elections where people are grouped together into sentinels, which are 100,000 people, and each group of 100,000 people can elect a representative. And then they form a supermajority. And there's hundreds of different parties that people can choose from. And elections are kind of just this crazy parliamentary chaos, I guess I would say, crazy parliamentary chaos. But the thing that's fantastic about these books is Malka Older has a deep background in political

science. She worked for years as a humanitarian worker in disaster zones. And she's seen every possible face of democracy and its erosion. And it's an incredibly well-observed story about all of the ways that democracy can be undermined using technology and using not just propaganda, but all kinds of other sneaky ways to influence people to vote against their own interests. And it's very action packed. It's a thriller. The election is being corrupted. And so part of what our characters have to do is figure out how to prevent the election from being stolen. And she does an excellent job

kind of filling in the cracks and saying like, no, this is actually how it would work. Like we could actually do this. It would have lots of problems, but we actually could get there. And so it's a great look at an alternate world that has many problems, but it also has solved certain problems as well. So that's a really good one. Another book that I would really recommend people read, and this is not science fiction, it's fantasy, a sort of horror fantasy. It's a new novella by P. Jolly Clark called Ring Shout. Clark is a history professor, and he studies particularly the history of enslavement in the United States. And he has written a fantasy about the rise of the second clan. It's basically about how the movie Birth of a Nation has a supernatural property. And there's a group of badass women and BIPOC folks who are fighting against the monsters that are being unleashed by

Birth of a Nation. And it's funny and action packed. It's like full of like our Scooby gang kind of exchanging quips as they they kill monsters. But it's also a very thoughtful exploration of a historical period that I think a lot of people in the United States aren't really familiar with. And it's also an exploration of media and how media can transform the political landscape much more quickly than, you know, other kinds of social movements might. So I highly recommend Ring Shout by P. Jolly Clark. And then I think my final recommendation out of my long list is going to be Martha Wells' Murderbot series. So Martha Wells has written a number of books in this series. The first one is called All Systems Red. It's a novella. Most of the books in the

series are novellas, so you can get through them in an afternoon, and there's plenty more if you start and you're excited. And this is a series of books that are a direct critique of the Jeff Bezos vision of the space future. It's all about a future where laborers are indentured. The main character, the self-named murder bot, is a cyborg who has been built as a security bot. And it is partially biological, partially technological. And it has figured out a way to hack its governor module, which is basically the thing that allows the corporation that owns Murderbot to control it. And things are so bad in this future, in terms of freedom, that Murderbot doesn't want to like run away. It's not like it hacks its governor module so that it can have a daring escape. It just wants to watch TV. And it's so alienated that like the only thing it can imagine doing with its freedom is just downloading a bunch of pirated media and kind of immersing itself in this escapist fantasy world. And as the series goes on, Murderbot gets entangled in a bunch of cases of corporate malfeasance where workers have been

killed and helps to solve a bunch of mysteries and bring down some of these corporations that are abusing people. It's a pure space opera. It takes place across many worlds. There's alien technology, there's cool space stations, but there's always a focus on how do the most marginalized people in the society get by and what are their lives like? Again, like all of the things I'm recommending, it's a thriller. It's very exciting. It's really funny. They're told from the point of view of Murderbot and Murderbot has a really great voice. It's very sarcastic and angry and makes incredibly funny observations. These books are just a really amazing rejoinder to, I guess, what you could call techno space utopianism. They're not dystopian. They're just realistic. And you

will definitely recognize problems from the real world projected into space. So those are my three recs. I think they sound like great recommendations. And, you know, I think all the listeners would benefit from picking them up. And I'd also be remiss if I didn't also say that they can pick up your great books, Autonomous and the Future of Another Timeline, and your co-host on Our Opinions Are Correct, Charlie Jane Anders. I haven't read all of her books, but The City in the Middle of the Night is fantastic as well. So I'd highly recommend those two. Annalie, it's been great to speak with you and to get some of your insights on these important topics around science fiction and Silicon Valley. Thanks so much for taking the

time. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. It's been a real pleasure. Annalie Newitz is the author of Four Lost Cities, A Secret History of the Urban Age and The Future of Another Timeline. They are the co-host of Our Opinions Are Correct. And you can follow Annalie on Twitter AnnaLeeN. You can follow me at Paris Marks, and you can follow the show at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, and you can find out more about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. And if you want to support the work that I put into making the show every single week, you can go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and become a supporter. Thanks for listening.