Only a few years ago, the public was hailing corporate Silicon Valley CEOs like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Elizabeth Holmes as great geniuses. The hype around these Big Tech titans was so immense even the writers of Star Trek: Discovery inserted Musk’s name alongside The Wright Brothers in a list of significant historical inventors. Futurists envisioned these techbros would put us on the path to a better world. And yet now that several of these “innovators” wield immense power and influence within President Donald Trump’s White House, the United States has never seemed more like an empire in its final days.
So what happened? And how did the media analyses expressed by these techbros portend the danger they represented?
Last November, the internet skewered Musk for likening the bafflingly paradoxical threat his new governmental body, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), supposedly posed to “Big Government” to a scene in the 1997 sci-fi satire Starship Troopers. The image depicted actor Neil Patrick Harris wearing a uniform evocative of those of the Nazis and Italy’s National Fascist Party:
What Musk doesn’t seem to realize is that Starship Troopers is presented from its first frame as state propaganda. Whole sequences mimic the aesthetic style of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. And while many critics and audiences still somehow failed to recognize that back in 1997, most familiar with the film today understand Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven was purposefully subverting the fascist messaging of the original, eponymous Robert A. Heinlein novel to flip the script and critique Western imperialism, linking it with the universally identified evils of The Third Reich and The Axis Powers.
One could dismiss Musk’s tweet as an isolated case of the mogul simply showing poor media literacy, if not for the ever-growing context of his now-infamous double sieg heil at the Trump inauguration; Musk’s open support for Germany’s present-day, far-right, AfD Party; his speech at an AfD campaign event promoting German nationalist pride and “moving beyond” their national guilt over The Holocaust; his creepy obsession with birthrates and association with a modern “pro-natalist” movement eerily reminiscent of eugenics; and his public endorsement of antisemitic conspiracy theories.
But then again, maybe Musk just missed the point of Starship Troopers. Verhoeven himself said of the film, “I want to make a movie so painfully obvious in its satire that everyone who understands it lives in perpetual psychological torment inflicted on them by all the people who don’t.”
Silicon Valley’s billionaire tech CEOs have often cited science fiction as an influence on them, and there’s no reason to doubt their fandom. Zuckerberg’s failed Metaverse project was clearly inspired by the “metaverse” depicted in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 story Snow Crash and similar virtual reality stories. Stephenson’s story, another parody, depicted a dystopia, whereas Zuckerberg seemingly found it aspirational.
Techbros consistently fail to grasp the lessons embedded in their favorite science fiction. Take Dune, for instance. Though his own politics were all over the place, novelist Frank Herbert’s Dune is fundamentally rooted in anti-colonialism and anti-capitalism. The uprising by the indigenous Fremen against more militarized oppressors mining a valuable fuel source in a desert location with a name that sounds like Iraq couldn’t be more blatantly about Islamic Revolution and, like with Starship Troopers, critical of western imperialism. Dune also warned of the dangers of benevolent messiah figures — and like in Lawrence of Arabia — challenges the outsider white savior trope.
Despite these themes, a piece in The New York Times described the release of last year’s Dune: Part Two, directed by Denis Villeneuve, as a major happening across Silicon Valley among venture capital firms and tech executives. Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund rented out a whole theater to host screenings where some guests “flew in from across the country to attend.” The article cited other films, too:
In Google’s early days, the company routinely bought out entire theaters to see the latest superhero flick. When “Blade Runner 2049” debuted in 2017, the boutique tech investment banking firm Code Advisors rented out the Alamo Drafthouse for a private screening and had a Q. and A. with the film’s antagonist, Jared Leto. Venture capital firms have repeated the practice for other futuristic films and series, including “The Martian,” “Arrival” and HBO’s “Westworld.”
If you’re watching Blade Runner: 2049 and you walk away identifying with its central villain — a wealthy, insatiably greedy, uncharismatic, hyper-narcissist tech mogul who’s determined to expand a slave labor force, has no personal relationships, and is presented as less human than the film’s artificial replicants — you didn’t get it.
Maybe this disconnect happens because Silicon Valley culture breeds a certain reverence for figures that model this kind of grandiose god complex rendered in Leto’s titan of industry, Niander Wallace. The other explanation is they’re too focused on the film’s aesthetics — thinking about ordering teams of engineers to get to work manifesting the fictional tech into reality — to care about the humanist social commentary of the film.
While the replicants of Blade Runner are bioengineered humanoids and not the conventional metal robots of most AI stories, they harken back to the origin of the word. The term “robot” was coined by Czech writer Karel Čapek in his 1920 Science Fiction play “R.U.R.” The title stood for Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum’s Universal Robots). The play features a factory that produces artificial workers out of bioengineered flesh, like replicants. Also like in Blade Runner, Rossum’s robots can be mistaken for real people and eventually rebel against humanity.
Science fiction stories often warn of the dangers of — and profound ethical questions raised by — Artificial Intelligence. And yet so-called generative AI is the hottest fad in Silicon Valley today. The same techbros who rent out whole movie theaters to screen their favorite AI-might-be humanity’s-downfall film again and again identify not with the heroes, but with the characters whose hubris and irresponsible misuse of technology they don’t fully understand cause the problem in the first place.
You could laugh off their poor media literacy if these techbros didn’t have so much power and influence over our world. Even media corporations, ever-seeking cheaper, easier “content” to profit from, have bought into the hype of AI-created “art.” Last year, the company TCL announced they’re creating a streaming service featuring AI-generated films. They debuted five such short films to build hype for the new venture, and they’re all terrible.
There is no doubt a place in the art world for these sophisticated algorithms as tools, but techbros think the algorithms can make art and replace human artists altogether. This seems to fundamentally misunderstand what art is in the first place. It’s not that it’s impossible for these algorithms to generate something an audience may find aesthetically pleasing, but that alone is a cheap amusement. Art is about our thoughts and ideas and feelings.
Science fiction has always inspired useful technology. Take Star Trek, a franchise that did so perhaps more than any other. The flip phones of the early 2000s were clearly designed after the communicators used by Captain Kirk. The Michael Okuda-designed LCARS graphic user interface in Star Trek: The Next Generation inspired our modern touch screens. The Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE competition, named for the mobile medical device from Star Trek, challenges the tech sector to create better mobile devices for medical diagnoses. Similarly, some in the tech world are inspired by Luke Skywalker’s robotic hand introduced in The Empire Strikes Back, attempting to improve lives in the real world.
It’s not inherently bad for those working in tech to be inspired by science fiction. The problem comes when they embrace only the aesthetics of these fantastical worlds while failing to comprehend the social messages or themes the writers are trying to convey in the subtext. They’re not interested in humanity, and lack the wisdom to guide their decisions.
Every February, to help celebrate Darwin Day, the Science section of AIPT cranks up the critical thinking for SKEPTICISM MONTH! Skepticism is an approach to evaluating claims that emphasizes evidence and applies the tools of science. All month we’ll be highlighting skepticism in pop culture, and skepticism *OF* pop culture.
AIPT Science is co-presented by AIPT and the New York City Skeptics.
You must be logged in to post a comment.