This is not going to be a polite article. Today is not a formal language day and we’re going to have a silly time together. I am not scrounging for ad revenue or reliant on an algorithm not to screw me over if I say something cruel. This is a newsletter with a handful of people and if I want to clown on billionaires then I get to do so wholeheartedly.

A couple months ago, I was on the Culture series¹ wiki because I was trying to convince myself that the term ‘orbital’ (for the superstructure resembling Niven’s Ringworld, but orbiting a star rather than ringing it) was standard and that I could freely use it in my Pilot universe (I could not. That is pure Banks). While deep in my rabbit hole, I ran across something that set my teeth on edge—an article talking about Musk’s newest spaceship transport, You’ll Thank Me Later.

Now, if you’ve ever read a Culture novel (or been around me when I’m doing my ‘ever since I was a little girl I knew I wanted to me a demilitarized rapid offensive unit’ bit) you’ll know that one of the stand-out facets is the super intelligent AIs (called Minds) and their ridiculous names. Best among these being, of course, the Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Mere Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath, or the Mistake Not… for short. That is something I stole a bit for WARftS, I will admit.

Anyway, point being, why in the ever loving fuck is Elon Musk naming his goddamn drone platforms and shit after the fucking Culture?

Look, I’m not going to say that Banks’ works are without their problems—the early books especially suffer from ‘straight white man’ writing, as well as some rather ‘interesting’ depictions of fat people…yeah, definitely not perfect, though I do think that the later books moved away from some of these issues (let’s not talk about the guy with 40 penises in The Hydrogen Sonata. Just…let’s not). All that aside, the thing that set my teeth on edge was the fact that the Culture is explicitly an incredibly technologically advanced anarcho-communist society. The Culture is a post-scarcity society in which the means of production are managed by the hyper-intelligent Minds, all of its citizens have access to unlimited resources, and are able to spend their lives in whatever pursuits they desire. Culture citizens can change their biological sex at will, produce various drugs with a thought, and live for hundreds of years. There is no private property, no system of governance, no true overarching culture despite the civilization’s name. The technology is so advanced as to be true fantasy to our modern selves.

‘[This leaves] the humans in the Culture free to take care of the things that really mattered in life, such as sport, games, romance, studying dead languages, barbarian societies and impossible problems’

-Consider Phlebas, pg 87

We may joke that Star Trek is ‘luxury gay space communism’, but quite frankly, the Culture has the Federation beat out on the luxury, space, communism, and gay aspects.

In Anthony Gramuglia’s video Elon Musk Doesn’t Understand Cyberpunk, he expresses the ways that the cyberpunk genre as a critique of the systems we live within have been watered down to little more than ‘aesthetic’. That it is this aesthetic that these billionaires are so obsessed with, the blocky cars, the intricate machinery of cybernetic prosthetics, jacking in to the net—and I mean, can you blame them? Those things are genuinely really fucking ‘cool’. I’ll say it. It’s cool.

BUT YOU CANNOT TAKE THE AESTHETIC AT THE EXPENSE OF THE EXPLICIT COMMENTARY BEING MADE BY THE ENTIRE GENRE.

You know that joke about ‘we made the torment nexus from hit book Don’t Create The Torment Nexus’? That book is goddamn cyberpunk. Every time. Turns out when you have a genre built on critiquing aspects of our modern capitalistic society in the aesthetics of the technological boom of the late 80s, you get a lot of rich fuckwads with no media literacy who desperately want to make Cool Thing On TV without considering that The Torment Nexus is not something that we should aim to achieve.

Ant is far more eloquent about this point than I can bring myself to be. I highly recommend his video.

The Culture series is not cyberpunk. In fact, the Culture is the closest I’ve seen to an exploration of a…well, utopian society in fiction. Every time I read a Culture book, I have to contend with a kind of deep-seated grief at the state of the world. I don’t know if I’d want to live in a world where I had nothing to do, but I would choose a world without poverty, illness, pointless wars, and an oppressive ruling class any day. It is so rare to see a piece of science fiction, especially these days, that isn’t a look at a deeply flawed world, collapsing at the foundations. After all, science fiction is an inward-looking genre. It has always been a vehicle to explore our current society.

The thing with billionaires like Musk or Bezos (because this isn’t just Musk! Bezos has regularly talked about his love for Consider Phlebas!), is that they are explicitly unconcerned by the human cost of their far-future ‘ideals’. They will destroy the earth, oppress their workers, weasel their way into a government and claim it all to be in service of some future interstellar empire. One of the issues is that these tech bros seem to view the culture (and other similar novels) as predictive, as a shining goal to reach in the future. To quote Le Guin,

“you can read it, and a lot of other science fiction, as a thought-experiment…Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.”

“Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.”

-Ursula k Le Guin in the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness

The point of the Culture novels is not ‘hey, let’s spend a couple trillion dollars to get to Mars and make AIs and fry people’s brains with machine-brain-interfaces and then in five thousand years we’ll have Minds and orbitals and sassy drones with cutting fields’. It’s a thought experiment exploring the final stages of a society that is structured in a way that is completely alien to our modern capitalistic, hierarchical society. Indeed, something that I consider to be a key factor of the structure of the Culture series which many people forget to mention is that: this is not the future. Consider Phlebas takes place around 1200 CE. Earth and humanity exist in this universe, and we are not part of the Culture. How could we be.

I realize that I’ve actually neglected to properly describe the Culture—yes, I’ve told you the baseline facts, but these books were the ones that got me into science fiction back when I was…thirteen or fourteen. Banks’ works are foundational to my understanding of the genre and it’s too easy for me to assume that, well of course everyone has an understanding of the hypocrisy at the heart of the Culture. When people try to discount the Culture as a utopia, they most often do so through the lens of ‘the Minds control everything, leaving humans with little control and no purpose’. Indeed, On the very same page as the last quote from Consider Phlebas:

a case could be made for holding that
the Culture was its machines, that they represented it at a more fundamental
level than did any single human or group of humans within the society'

-Consider Phlebas, pg 87

Oh no, humans aren’t the centre of the universe. They lead meaningless lives full of satisfaction and bereft of struggling every day just to keep themselves housed and fed. I saw someone online say that the average Culture citizens life more resembles that of our modern-day billionaires than the lives of you or I, minus the whole ‘the only way to make a billion dollars is to exploit the people who work from you’ etc. Sorry, next week will be back to your regularly scheduled dreamy literary discussions. Anyway, point being, the tech bros who proclaim to love these books and use them as their guiding vision of the future do not view the books as having anything to say about collective action, the discarding of hierarchical systems, the distribution of wealth. See, they don’t see themselves as part of the human masses, content to have power only over themselves. They see themselves as the Minds.

Of course they do. No wonder they miss the point so entirely. They expect to be the guiding hand, uplifting the faceless masses and pulling all the strings of a society that they are outside of, with infinite power and clever little puns for names.

Did you miss it? The point I just made?

’The Culture was its machines’. The Minds are not outside of the Culture. They are the Culture. Maybe the civilization doesn’t revolve around humans, but among the Minds there is an expectation of a certain degree of communal action, of participation in the tasks and the developments of the Culture. Those who take themselves outside of it, who ostracize others, who exploit or are needlessly cruel, are labelled Eccentric, cast out, or ostracized in turn. You’re welcome to fuck off into the sunset, but there are still consequences if you try to come back like nothing happened. The Culture has a great deal more similarities with the anarcho-communist society of Anarres in Le Guin’s The Dispossessed than you might expect, it’s just dressed up in big guns and multi-dimensional travel. They got distracted by the goddamn aesthetics again. Stop naming your drone platforms after the Interesting Times Gang oh my god. You’re not cool. You are, in fact, very very lame, and Iain Banks wrote an entire book about how lame you (not you, Musk, but you, billionaire tech-bro ‘inventor’) are, and yet you still cite it as your favourite because you cannot conceive of a world in which a critique of a mad, power-hungry billionaire destabilizing the society you claim to view as the ideal could possibly be a critique of you.

Even the Culture is not without its critiques—hell, many of the books circle again and again around various critiques of the Culture! That first note, of the Culture humans as impotent and useless comes straight from the books themselves. The entirety of Consider Phlebas contrasts the Culture against an expansionist alien theocracy through the Idiran-Culture war, showing the ways that the influence they exert over other societies may take different forms but is still very present. The Culture still interferes with other civilizations, they’re still a group that has committed atrocities on the other side of the war, and from the outside they begin to resemble the Idirans. The Culture citizens and the Minds must reassure themselves that they aren’t morally bankrupt because the entire civilization is built on the faith that the Culture is doing things ‘the right way’, and without that faith the entire venture would crumble. The Culture doesn’t win the war because of ideological superiority. They win the war because they have bigger guns. Do not mistake technological superiority for moral superiority.

Who am I to say anything about billionaires and why they like the Culture series. Maybe they just want the 10 minute orgasms (yes, that’s a thing).

While I haven’t quoted too many things directly, here are the videos and texts that influenced this mess of an essay:

[1] Generic Entertainment. (2026, February). What does Utopia Look Like? (Or: why tech bros don’t understand the Culture series) [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7wrGM9r2x4

[2] Anthony Gramuglia. (2025, February). Elon Musk Doesn’t Understand Cyberpunk | 2025 and Sci-Fi [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGhsEADnbOU

[3] Brown, C. (1996). UTOPIAS AND HETEROTOPIAS. THE “CULTURE” OF lAIN M. BANKS. In Impossibility Fiction: Alternativity – Extrapolation – Speculation.

[4] Schiller, K. (2021, March 9). The Culture War: Iain M. Banks’s Billionaire Fans. Blood Knife. https://bloodknife.com/culture-war-iain-m-banks-jeff-bezos/

What I’m reading right now:

I literally just picked up and read the first two pages of Slow Gods, the new Claire North book, before this essay took over my entire brain. Otherwise, The Monster Baru Cormorant, but Seth Dickinson, because I absolutely tore through Traitor.

An album to listen to:

Let’s go with -!- by Dead Poet Society. Yes, the album title is -!-.

What I’m working on:

Finishing up edits on my short story Revelation Station, which I sadly won’t share any more of right now! Maybe at some point. However I think it’s pertinent to note that the main space station is called Don’t Want To Get Lost All The Way Out Here, or the Get Lost for short.