Culture warring over The Culture

Lighthearted observations on midwit political chatter + some pretentious musings

The level of humour chez moi

Rarely Certain's 2 Iron Laws of online chatter:

"Any online discussion, on any topic, however benign, will instantly regress to the exact content and structure of a spat which first happened on Twitter"

"Every topic, no matter how philosophically fascinating, will be swiftly flattened to a simple proposition that brooks no further investigation."

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Probably the most stupid thing I've seen anyone post on Facebook this year popped into my feed last week.

"Conservative Sci Fi fans are a walking oxymoron."

This was in a group that discusses the magnificent Culture novels of Iain M Banks. I read them back-to-back two years ago and when the algorithm suggested it, I signed up.

What I expected was enthusiastic exchanges about Culture Ship names¹, observations on the breathtakingly imaginative portrayal of genuinely alternative worlds and intelligent lifeforms, chatter about how the book's Minds make us think about current developments in AI.

Maybe even some philosophical discussion on whether life in a world where you never actually have to die is really that desirable.

And, yes, a bit of politics. Because Banks was some form of socialist portraying a post-scarcity society in which suffering of any kind is preventable.

Reading the Culture series (if you like this sort of thing) is to be transported so far outside yourself that there's no touching the sides. It's like being dropped into the middle of an ocean of imagination.

Whoever you vote for, we can all agree that this is fun, right?

No. Apparently it doesn't make sense at all, if you're not a lefty. According to Gary and the seven people who liked his comment. Gary and his compadres think conservatives liking science fiction is a kind contradictory phenomenon.

Gary is not the only Culture fan professing confusion that non-socialists might like the Culture series.

Hank announces: "Right wing Banks fans make me scratch my head as much as right wing Star Trek fans."

Thanks, Hank, for your perspicacity.

And Alan chimes in, complaining about some silly stories in the Daily Mail and warning everyone that the group is under attack from an 'emboldened Right'.

Part of me wishes that I was making this up. But here's his comment in full.

Anyway, you'll see that 57 people like Alan's analysis and 6 people love it.

The whole thread has begun with a very familiar theme, which I recall being popular when I was immersed in anti-Brexit Twitter.

People like to feel that they are being active in defending their principles. Because, for most of us, this is limited to decorating our online presence with the trappings of political affectation (slogans, #IStandWith, snarky ripostes to people they don't actually understand etc) and voting every few years, we need to beef up the significance of this in some way.

So we invent the idea of the siege.

Being under siege in this context means that the Facebook group that likes the Culture series must mount a resistance against fans of the Culture series who are the wrong type of fans of these novels.

You remain sceptical. I understand. Here's the receipt.

I asked Anonymous member to provide some evidence for psychotic messages. None were forthcoming.

Back in the day, when Brexit happened and people on Twitter wouldn't shut up about it a trope emerged of the false anti-Brexit account.

This arose from the ludicrous behaviour of people sporting the #FBPE (follow back pro Europe) badge, which quickly earned that 'movement' (scare quotes because it's only a movement insofar as it's how they see themselves) a reputation for being full of dickheads.

So these conspiracies emerged about there being a dark right wing shadow operation inserting fake pro-Europeans into their midst to discredit them.

And lots of talk about 'resistance'.

It's an attempt to glamourise what is essentially just idle posting. Cheap talk.

My one attempt to join in with a discussion on one of the most interesting aspects of the Culture series meets with conversation-ending short shrift from someone with a brain that is so obviously more gargantuan than mine that I should really have known better.

Among the things I love about the Culture series is wondering whether you'd want to live in such a world.

Banks doesn't do very much character development and you rarely get anything approaching a rich portrayal of anyone's inner emotional life. With a writer of his calibre this is clearly intentional and therefore not a criticism.

He is sketching something of epic proportions, in which billions of people can live on one Ship and space battles that take several pages to describe turn out to have taken place over the course of less than one second.

It's beautiful and majestic in scope.

The richness of the reading experience, though, flows from placing yourself there and wondering how it would really be to never want for any material good, experience, feeling - and to be able to live for all eternity by downloading the contents of your mind so that they can be uploaded into a new body.

So, eternal philosophical questions arise around identity and the meaning of life. Right up my street.

But, when someone posts the thoughtful question 'are there any negative aspects to life in the Culture' I make the mistake of suggesting one.

I suggest that suffering plays an important role in human happiness and that in a post-scarcity life it might be more difficult to find meaning.

But Jim is confused by this observation. He doesn't see how negative things can be relevant to finding meaning in life.

So I explain some bits about how we cannot help but compensate for conditions, how getting high is only great until you've got used to getting high, stuff like that. I mention the various thought traditions, like Buddhism and the Tao, that grapple with finding purpose and fulfilment.

Jim thinks that everyone can find something to enjoy, even if they have to keep finding new things when they get bored of the others.

I don't want to slag Jim off. He just hasn't understood the difference between meaning and fun. Or I haven't successfully conveyed it. Or something.

But it's vaguely mood-flattening to waste one's time with exchanges such as this, so I guess I won't be discussing the Culture much there in future.

(Can you imagine how much they hate that there are SpaceX drones named after Culture Ships)

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A thought about music and how people think they like it when really they like something tangential

In this moment I’m listing to a beautiful track called L'Alarmante by an artist called Tresque. This piece is more or less on rotate this morning. It's possibly the best thing I've heard since chancing upon knotting spheres of higher dimension by c_c.

These pieces are on a label that was founded in Bristol, UK, before relocating to France. Zamzamrec.

Zamzamrec gets funding from the Région Centre-Val-de-Loire because France seems to appreciate the importance of music that most people would hate.

Yes. I'm a pretentious asshole. But you need to trust that I'm a sincere pretentious asshole and that the music of c_c (who I'm going to see play in Cherbourg tonight) and Tresque really does move and excite me.

There's no explaining this, because it seems to be primal. Something in the quality of sound itself that touches what I'll unapologetically refer to as my soul.

Because I think too much, I'm always noticing things about my reaction to music.

A friend shared a tune to a WhatsApp group I'm in and for the life of me I didn't understand why.

Until I did.

It was a version of Bohemian Rhapsody played on classical guitar.

All I could think was two things:

1. Wow. That took some figuring out and manual dexterity to execute.

2. This is shit.

I tried to imagine wanting to hear this music ever again and couldn't.

My friend watches a lot of guitar tutorials and often shares them. But he doesn't play guitar.

Having thought about this a lot, I came to a crushingly awful conclusion.

I have been guilty of exactly this myself.

Which is thinking that I liked music but really liked something else.

In a deeply unhappy former life I would forever play air guitar and imagine that it was me playing Brian Robertson's achingly affective main solo in the best (if patched-together later) version of Thin Lizzy's Still In Love With You.

It was literally decades before I realised that the purity of appreciation for something in itself is what's fulfilling.

I stopped wanting to be Brian Robertson and his playing just became more beautiful than ever.

There seems to be something different going on when my friend shares things like that version of Bohemian Rhapsody.

I intuit that, for him, it's not really about the music. It's about admiring the skill of the player. The dexterity. The technical accomplishment. Perhaps the ability to change something familiar into something different that's still familiar (albeit, in my view, losing the point of the original).

But that isn't music, to me.

I don't know how to explain this to him, so I probably never will, because I don't think he likes music in the way that I do. He would probably just (correctly) think I'm a pretentious asshole. Or maybe that I'm just being churlish because my own guitar skills are basic.

We can like all sorts of things and often for the wrong reasons.

By wrong, I mean, for reasons that don't actually get to the essence.

I think that this is what is going on for a lot of people in the Culture series FB group too.

They're liking it because they mistake it as an exemplar of their socialist ideals in (albeit fictitious) action. And because lots of other people like it.

I liked it partly because it made me think about the horrors that lie at the end of any ideology taken to its ultimate conclusion.

I was liking Brian Robertson's playing because I thought I would get more girls if I was like him. And people would admire my talent. Sure, it sounded fantastic then, but it sounded better later - when I no longer cared.

It's no coincidence that most of the music I listen to now is made by anonymous people who even sometimes go so far as to make their artist name unpronounceable. Because all the other clutter about who is making the music just gets in the way.

It'll be fun to actually see who c_c is tonight.

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The big project thing

The project to create the first full history of the unit that liberated my town continues (Rarely Certain passim) and there is now an effort to raise some cash support from among the people who keep typing the goddamned care emoji under the project's FB posts.

Quelle surprise. It's one thing to type a care emoji and another to give $2 a month to the project you profess to care about. Most of them turn out not to care that much.

You can be not like most of them by going to https://www.patreon.com/24thCavRecon, reading about where the money is needed and then chipping in. You'll get some interesting stories in return, that the FB people won't get.

Alternatively, anything received through this button is also going toward that work.

I have all of the squadron field reports because I paid a researcher to copy them. The 24th Reconnaissance Squadron, Mechanized, turns out to have been losing 60 or so men - killed or wounded - every month in Europe. That's nearly ten percent of them. Each month. They're worth it and as far as I know, nobody else is dedicating a website and a book to their memory.

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Finally, I hope those readers who might enjoy it have signed up to P’s Substack about finding home. Here it is.

1. Like favourite songs, mine vary depending on mood. Today my favourite Ship names are I Thought He Was With You, Synchronize Your Dogmas and Very Little Gravitas Indeed.