Comment by rsynnott | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rsynnott | Hacker News Reader

> There are apparently no sociopaths – Culture has to recruit an outsider when they need one

Eh, I mean Gurgeh was borderline, and a number of other Culture characters are extremely maladjusted (particularly the drones, actually).

> But the existence of post-scarcity in-vitro development means you could raise an army of clones if you wanted, and would be free to isolate them and indoctrinate similar beliefs. The fact that grabby citizens haven’t overrun Culture shows that these actions are blocked, either tacitly or overtly.

Or just that that would be an absolutely _bizarre_ thing to do and that someone unstable enough to do it probably wouldn't last long.

> and would be free to isolate them and indoctrinate similar beliefs

IIRC that sort of thing _wouldn't_ be allowed; the Culture was pretty big on individual rights. You wouldn't go to jail, but you would get a drone that would stop you from doing it.

> or is interested in simulating sentient life.

There are at least two storylines about that and significant discussion of the ethics (the Culture at best doesn't approve and may see it as a crime).

> The Minds are perfectly capable of creating avatars which would be more effective than any of the characters shown.

Again, it's explicitly mentioned at least once that the minds struggle with doing extremely nasty stuff (which makes sense; there's definitely _some_ alignment going on), and that SC is a tool for that.

I don't disagree that you can read the Culture as a dystopia (though it's a lot less obvious a reading than it would be for, say the Star Trek Federation, which could easily be read as a military junta with good PR), but most of their points aren't particularly compelling.

> minds struggle

I never believed this explanation for SC as provided by Culture-aligned unreliable narrators. It seems far more likely that it's an outlet for people who desire to have control over others, a supermajority of the West which is conspicuously absent from the novels.

I recently finished Inversions and I think this novel supports my hypothesis by featuring citizens whose needs in this direction are being fulfilled directly or indirectly via SC.

Incidentally when Minds actually want to get things done urgently, they go beyond SC; see Excession. This supports that SC is a playground for human (and drone/other AI) expression rather than an actual power-center of the Culture.

If you watch Star Trek and focus on how they treat simulated sentients it's incredibly callous. Civilization like Culture might name Federation way worse than Affront.

> IIRC that sort of thing _wouldn't_ be allowed; the Culture was pretty big on individual rights. You wouldn't go to jail, but you would get a drone that would stop you from doing it.

In one of the stories we spend quite a bit of time with an outright cult that has its members eating literal garbage and getting very sick because the AIs didn't want to infringe on their personal liberty.

I read that bit as a critique of allowing such self destructive behavior in the name of personal freedom. Sometimes people just need a dope slap before they get themselves in too much trouble.

That cult wasn't in the Culture. It was on an independent orbital (Vavatch) that the Culture was attempting to evacuate before destroying it to prevent it from being conquered by the Idirans.

I read Vavatch as anarcho-capitalist in contrast to the Culture's anarchism.

Vavatch had a lot of stuff going on that wouldn't have been allowed in the Culture. Certainly the Culture wouldn't have allowed them to non-consensually eat other people. The other stuff probably wouldn't have been prevented by force, but they would vigorously try to convince you not to do it and to prevent you from convincing other people.

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