We are all science fiction authors now
literary fiction in the age of technocapital acceleration
I recently finished William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, a superbly crafted novel that captures a slice of 2000’s-era cyberpunk-lite aesthetics in a way that reminds me of Japanese electronics from that era.
I like to read older sci-fi because it’s both a time capsule of the past and also a divergent historical pathway: it’s inherently interesting to pose past predictions of how the future might turn out against how things did turn out.
These contrasts in predicted and actuated timelines are always very interesting.
One theme that I’ve repeatedly seen is the science fiction author’s tendency to underestimate the degree of meaning deflation driven by developments in AI. Writers of the past always seemed to wildly under-index on how useless the average person would be rendered by major breakthroughs in AI & robotics. To wit, the replacement of physical and cognitive labor wasn’t ever going to be a mere background feature of any world where that took place, like droids lingering around main characters in Star Wars for comedic effect.
It was always going to be much more serious than that.
Nick Land was right.
Relative to rapidly advancing machinic capabilities, human enfeeblement is now more or less a locked-in outcome. It’s very difficult for me to see a future where the dominant experience of the modal person is going to be anything other than the feeling of being left behind (for a literary rendition of this, check out
’s superb short story, Don’t Make Me Think).Now, some might argue that the position of relative disempowerment has always been essential to the human experience, but I would disagree. It’s simply a categorically different era when the top 0.1% can command non-human intelligent agents to enact the whims of capital instead of forcing them to do with with guns or knights or socioeconomic imperative.
Not only are we about to witness the death of popular politics (which only ever existed because of the power of labor and small arms), we are about to witness the death of the average person being able to do much of anything that matters at all.
It’s Ted K’s nightmare come to pass.
On a personal level, I don’t find this that depressing, because I think a parallel emotional experience is also going to define this era: simply put, it’s going to feel extremely interesting. That the process of meaning deflation can co-occur with incredible improvements in technology is a weird sort of juxtaposition to accept, but I think it’s important to take the long view of things. As
says, it’s a privilege to witness a real-time Cambrian explosion. Just take it as an early signifier of your own corporeal mortality.So the thing I’ve been working on, dear reader, is this idea of acceptance.
As part of my acceptance work, I’ve taken to listening to podcasts about the ongoing development of AI. Sadly, I do not myself have a technical background in computer science, but many of these conversations are surprisingly digestible so long as you look up the very basic concepts behind the structural design of deep learning algorithms, modern LLM’s, and so on.
Whereas some like
are bearish on AI being a transformative technology in the near term, I am not nearly so sanguine. Of course, it’s still an open question in terms of “where we are” on the “S-curve” of this generation of AI systems, but the pace of events in the past 12 or so months gives me the strong intuition that things are going to get extremely weird, extremely fast. Already there are plenty of projects that are are very nearly agent-level in the automation of wide swathes of the knowledge economy.To me, everything is screaming that our Gibsonian cyberpunk future is imminently about to collide with our present state of fragility.
Some have argued that we are already there.
In Yanis Varoufakis’s latest book, Technofeudalism, he describes our current system as something “beyond” capitalism, arguing that ours is an era of cloud-based fiefdoms, where monopolistic platforms exploit network effects to become functionally indistinguishable from feudal lords.
The essential characteristic of a modern techno-feudal lord is that he or she has eliminated competition (see Peter Thiel’s classic concept of “competition is for losers” in his book Zero to One for an explicit articulation of this strategy).
A dominant cloud-based platform fiefdom (e.g. Amazorg) can only be displaced very, very incrementally, and only by the rare entrance of another equally predatorial venture-backed hyperscaling player stacked with bleeding-edge cognitive elites (like OpenAI taking on Google). This is a process that generally happens only very gradually.
Thus, relative to human timescales, a company like AMAZORG functionally has a locked-in ability to extract rent more-or-less indefinitely, which leads them to systematically abuse vendors and users. The result is that while there is some degree of gradualist turnover between techno-feudal lords and their cloud-fiefdoms, serfs like me (i.e. writers) will simply migrate from one abusive monopolostic platform to the next one that usurps its position in 10-20 years (for another analysis of rentier-platform exploitation of artists, check out Rebecca Giblin’s and Cory Doctorow’s excellent Chokepoint Capitalism).1
Still, on a raw, aesthetic level, I understand why this present state of techno-feudal platform capitalism doesn’t necessarily feel particularly cyberpunk. There’s indeed something deeply banal about our current USSR-style meaning-collapse and decline in living standards. The present doesn’t look particularly different than, say, 20 years ago. A purely superficial view of a city street or shopping mall would not appear to be remarkably different than an image of any given city or place up to several decades ago. If anything, if you live in the US, you can see how badly our infrastructure is progressively decaying like end-stage imperial atherosclerosis.
I think that’s likely to change, and soon.
Let’s imagine a scenario where advancements in robotics and drones rapidly results in the proliferation of commercial drones in our daily lives (e.g. quadrocopters doing deliveries, humanoid robots unpacking boxes, suddenly, they’re everywhere).
This would create an enormous visual and psychological discontinuity in the appearance of the average city or place.
And a discontinuity of this magnitude, for the sake of contemporaneity, would need to be rendered in any published narrative work.
If we are indeed in the midst of a dramatic inflection point—if we are indeed in the liftoff phase of technocapital acceleration, it’s going to substantially affect the production of any kind of creative work that has a long incubation period.
Let me explain.
Timelines vary, but most novelists will tell you that it takes up to several years to complete a lengthy work of literary fiction. This is simply a function of the rate of human thinking as it is applied to a page, and the subsequent cycles of revision that are required to bring something to a publication-ready status.
This means that any reasonable-length novel that aims to describe the current era will be wildly outdated by the time that it is published.
Imagine a scenario where, two years into your draft, you have to rewrite half the scenes to include humanoid robots serving restaurateurs because that has suddenly become the norm, and without that depicted in a scene, the absence of the norm jars the reader, pulling them out of the story due to its lack of correspondence to their daily lives. Gibson, as an example, famously had to write 9/11 into the story of Pattern Recognition because the book no longer made sense without that critical piece of background information.
The brute fact is that we are all science fiction authors now. The world is moving so hard and fast that we are going to have to write faster, shorter books, and lengthier works will need to be embedded to a fixed point in historical time instead of the “general setting” of contemporaneity.
There’s no sense in complaining about this.
You, the artist, just need to accept that you were born onto a rollercoaster, and go along with the ride.
The optimist in me thinks that decentralized, cryptographic workarounds will eventually gain traction against our platform overlords, and I can see a future where alternative artistic ecosystems can achieve modest degrees of success, as we have already seen with some dissident/alternative writers in the literary space. Mainstream breakouts will likely become algorithmically impossible for alternative artists, but meaning will still be found.
"As Astral Codex Ten says, it’s a privilege to witness a real-time Cambrian explosion."
Indeed. I'm happy to sacrifice mundane "contemporaneity" for the roller coaster of living in interesting times. But I think a roller coaster is the wrong metaphor. A roller coaster ride starts static, builds slowly as the train climbs that first big hill. Then that potential energy is released in a big plunge. After that, the momentum from the big plunge dissipates as the train flows through its pre-ordained course to arrive back at its starting position. That's not the ride we're on.
I love and agree with most of these points. I especially found the idea of the death of popular politics really made sense, and I wonder how it never crossed my mind before. But there’s something nagging at me.
To my mind, your post applies only to a very specific brand of fiction, i.e. the literary novel which aims to explore the very present. Generally, when telling a story, one begins by (or eventually gets to) choosing a specific temporal setting for the work. If, say, I begin writing a novel today, and wish for it to be set in 2025 or at least 2024, then I will begin composing the story with this dataset in mind. If two years on, the world changes dramatically, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll have to change details about my book to fit current reality, as long as the temporal setting I have envisioned remains the same as when I started. So, to put it simply, if I am gripped by the idea of a story which naturally occurs in 2025, and it takes me 5 years to write it, what happens in the world during this time might not matter as much for the book, since the story is not meant to reflect reality as it happens, but rather a certain slice of reality (though book might become historical fiction, lol).
Your argument can be applied to pretty much any fiction written at any point in time, I should think, and yet has world progress ever affected the way fiction is written, as it’s written, that much over the course of history? My instinct says that it has not.
The best fiction, from Shakespeare to Rushdie to Willy Vlautin to whatever else you want, deals with human nature, which isn’t nearly as mutable as the exterior world. That’s why I doubt the way fiction is written will change that dramatically in the coming years, since humans nature is unlikely to change so very much.