February 26, 2025

SFitze Vogons DoDging the DOGE

Hello dear readers. This newsletter wants to ask a question that is on everyone’s mind these days: Who’s Afraid of the Galactic Bureaucracy and the Vogon Constructor Fleets? But here are a few special quotes:

“2024 was a good year for African Speculative Fiction.”~Wole Talabi

“The great efficacy of this cyberpunk imaginary probably had something to do with the way it transformed the growing activities of this Silicon Valley that was nevertheless a place where lobbies of the arms industry were already crowding, into a subversive subculture opposed to hostile government interests.”~(my translation) Michel Nieva

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams reserves some of the deepest scorn and sarcasm for the fictional alien race of Vogons - the galactic government’s mind-numbing bureaucrats. He makes these slug-like bulky and vaguely humanoid creatures display an especially vile combination of the unpoetic with the strictness of “rule-based order”(?!). Shortly said - Vogons are obnoxious nitpicking assholes. One could imagine them as the alien counterpart of an unduly repulsive galactic employment agency. In his inimitable way, Adams assures us that they are “not actually evil” but are rather “bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous”. Practically like any other member of the public administration, right? Well, here is a longer quote of the Vogon entry from the Guide:

They wouldn't even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders – signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters. The best way to get a drink out of a Vogon is to stick your finger down his throat, and the best way to irritate him is to feed his grandmother to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. On no account should you allow a Vogon to read poetry at you.

Of course, how can one forget the frustration of applying for financing, doing your tax declaration, or even begging for some money from your health insurance? There is probably nothing more inimical or divergent to this ghastly image of bureaucracy than the space pirate figure, think Jude Law as Jod Na Nawood (Star Wars: Skeleton Crew)to take a recent example, but there are countless others. One could even say that the entire beloved SEVERANCE series is built around such antipathetic bureaucratic tropes of workplace personalities grown inside vats that exhibit the “confusing and crushing nature of typical bureaucracy”. So, my not-so-subtle point here is that there is a certain SF bias against anything that smacks of file-pushing and paper-shoving that goes hand-in-hand with shock therapy measures and privatization policies. OK, there is criticism of bureaucratic excess say in The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (2015) by David Graeber, and there is exhibitions poking fun at German bureaucracy. Yet politically, such innocent fun has been more often than not - aligned with a crusade against the public sector, equating it with waste, inefficiency, a burden on the citizens or some parasitical ‘non-competitive’ structure.

My impression is that SEVERANCE season one somehow missed its target. In the age of flexploitation, societies of control and irregular work regimes, with “fewer and fewer people working in steady, long-term positions for one employer” (Andrew Ross, Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times), Lumen Industries somehow looks dated, a frozen chapter in the history of the “permanent revolution” of capitalism.

In our age of pervasive co-working spaces and unsustainable digital nomadism promises, such smart and well-made Science Fiction series seem systematically disconnected and incapable of reckoning with the final demise of “hyperorganized puritanism” already celebrated by the 1960s advertising industry or even dealing with the mass layoffs that followed. If Douglas Adams is indeed Elon Musk’s “favorite philosopher”, I feel obliged to recognize that such anti-bureaucratic and galactic-wide cost-cutting fervor is another blatant example of capitalist science fiction. Whether we are witnessing the shackling or smashing of the state today in the US or the DoD for that matter, what Palantir and DOGE are asking for is the run-of-mill shock therapy quite familiar to us in Eastern Europe (since we experienced the brunt of it). One might argue that this ludicrous DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) has a historical precedent in Treuhand - the pop-up institution responsible for privatizing ex-East Germany’s state enterprises overnight.

As someone said in a perceptive and historically revealing TW, instead of an American Deng Xiaoping they got a US Bo Xilai. So, instead of chaotic destruction without a measure or a plan, I would follow here Gabriela Gabor’s accurate analysis of trends outlining a new Wall Street Consensus (poetry) that aims to fully unlock the potential of “private capital”:

the state as a facilitator of private investment through various subsidies to investors that are often described as “derisking.” Development is no longer a public good to be directly financed by states, but a market opportunity to be unlocked through the alchemy of public-private partnerships (PPP) into “investible”, privately-owned projects.~Gabriela Gabor

This adds to my reading of young Argentian SF “gauchopunk” writer and philosopher Michel Nieva’s in its French translation - Ciencia ficción capitalista: Cómo los multimillonarios nos salvarán del fin del mundo (Editorial Anagrama, 2024). “Derisking” or rather (D)X-risking means here embracing the billionaire fascistoid Techbruderschaft capitalist science fiction that aims to lead a worldless humanity to its next exoplanetary capitalist investment boom.

Looking from my Die Linke enclave in Berlin after Germany’s elections, one can simply say it is undeniable that the SV Big Tech and cryptobros, not the so-called Axis of Evil, were the ultimate tech terrorists hitting the Pentagon, the Treasury, and election campaigns all over in Europe. Who can suspect the champions of the economy? In some really sick yet very slick 18 theses - Palantir company adjacent disruptors accuse the military-industrial entertainment complex of slacking off, and of being examples of non-competitive “communist conformity”(!!?).

My pet theory is that such lobbies seem to have taken Jameson’s An American utopia : dual power and the universal army at heart and responded in kind. One cannot simply deny that “universal conscription” here means that one is shepherded by a very effective and virulent offshoot of Hayekian neoliberalism. Under this anarko-capitalist guise, selecting winners and brandishing chainsaws means pushing a virulent right-wing xenophobic agenda and rollback of Green New Deal and DEI as an ideological whip for an all-out assault & gleeful gutting of all public hard-power and soft-power US institutions with the final aim of empowering the rich and powerful. Please don’t count on hard SF to come to your rescue!

To move on, yes indeed, not all SF is capitalist SF, and one is advised to learn more and consider all futural anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggles, as outernational science fictional critical utopias. For sure SF isn't just a jingoistic playbook for space billionaires, but has in turn influenced progressive agendas, and liberation movements as well as shaped the developmental programs of many Global South countries. In particular, Jules Verne was avidly read in revolutionary modernist circles all over the world and inspired such key writers as Lu Xun. There are indeed pre-Julesvernian non-Western authors such as Kylas Chunder Dutt (1817–1859) who wrote revolutionary futuristic literature. Colonial governments could not dictate political futures indefinitely. No wonder Indian journalist and historian Vijay Prashad records the early Chinese Jules Verne translations (Liang Qichao’s Qing era translation) in his Tricontinental newsletters dedicated to What new worlds can science fiction imagine? From clean energy to ecological transitions, this newsletter explores how Global South writers and policymakers alike imagine – and create – futures beyond colonialism, pollution, and environmental destruction. The 7th newsletter titled Clean Waters and Green Mountains Are as Valuable as Gold and Silver Mountains - brings together and confronts some early fictional examples of how the “late Qing period imagined underwater travel, wind-powered railways, and hydrogen balloons as the means to liberate China”. Sound familiar?

Feeling thankful to have such a guide through such a bounty of “Flash. Short Stories. Novelettes.” by Wole Talabi the one behind creating the African Speculative Fiction Society’s Database of published African SFF.

New book coming out in March: https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/zer0-books/our-books/uninhabited-science-fiction-decolonial #sci-fi #decolonialism #sciencefiction

— Ben Woodard (@naughtthought.bsky.social) 2025-01-26T21:43:53.252Z

Also, can’t wait for this last oeuvre by bio-philosopher friend and SF aficionado Ben Woodard Uninhabited: SF and the Decolonial out by Zero Books end of March. I will include here a publication teaser: “Is it inhabited? This question makes the shared stakes of science fiction and colonialism obvious, wherein the wide imaginaries of empire and what counts as life - scientifically, ethically, politically - and the moral and technological possibilities of terraforming and the impulse for exploration are all fused.”

That's why I made this sign for yesterday's protest in #Berlin. I can confirm that I've been flooded by ads for far-right party Afd lately. [contains quote post or other embedded content]

— Stefan Tiron (@tironstefan.bsky.social) 2025-02-21T00:28:44.164Z