This essay is a standalone piece. It connects thematically to The Default is Contribution series, which explored what technology owes to the society that produces it.
In 2010, three years before his death from cancer, the Scottish novelist Iain M. Banks published Surface Detail. It is, among other things, a book about virtual hells — digital afterlives designed to torment the dead, run on vast server farms and funded by the wealthy.
The novel’s villain is a man named Joiler Veppers. He is the richest person in his civilization. He made his fortune in the computer game industry and expanded into virtual reality infrastructure. He owns media outlets. He crushes labor organizations. He is charming in public and monstrous in private. He believes, with the unshakeable confidence of the very rich, that his wealth reflects his virtue — that his position at the top of the hierarchy is evidence of his fitness to remain there.
Veppers is not a member of the Culture — the post-scarcity, AI-governed civilization that spans Banks’s ten-novel series. He belongs to a less advanced society. He looks up at the Culture the way a feudal lord might look at a democracy: with admiration for its power and complete incomprehension of its principles.
Banks died in June 2013. Five years later, Elon Musk tweeted: “If you must know, I am a utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks.”
One can only speculate about what Banks would have made of this.
The Fandom Is Not Subtle
The technology industry’s fascination with the Culture is not a matter of interpretation. It is explicit, documented, and — in at least one case — literally welded onto the side of a rocket barge.
Musk has named three SpaceX autonomous drone ships after Culture vessels: Just Read the Instructions, Of Course I Still Love You, and A Shortfall of Gravitas. He took the term “neural lace” directly from Banks for his brain-computer interface company, Neuralink. He has called the Culture novels “the most accurate view of an AI future” and recommended them as the starting point for anyone thinking about artificial general intelligence.
Jeff Bezos told GeekWire that the Culture series is “one of my absolute favorites.” He twice commissioned Amazon Studios to develop a television adaptation — first in 2018, then again in 2025. His vision for Blue Origin — millions living in rotating space habitats, heavy industry moved off-Earth, the planet preserved as a garden — maps directly onto the Culture’s Orbitals, the ring-shaped habitats that house most of its citizens.
Mark Zuckerberg selected The Player of Games for his 2015 book club, describing it as an exploration of what civilization looks like “if hyper-advanced technology were created to serve human needs and surpassed human capabilities.”
These are not passing references. These are people who have read the books, absorbed the vision, and named their companies’ hardware after it. The question is whether they understood what they read.
What the Culture Actually Is
For those who haven’t read Banks, a brief orientation.
The Culture is a fictional interstellar civilization spanning ten novels published between 1987 and 2012. It is post-scarcity: there is no money, no property, no want. Resources are functionally unlimited. The civilization is governed — if that is the right word — by Minds: superintelligent artificial intelligences that manage ships, space habitats, and the allocation of resources. They do this benevolently, and by choice. No one compels them. No one could.
There is no government. No laws, no police, no state. Citizens are free to do whatever they wish — change their sex, modify their bodies, pursue art or hedonism or adventure or nothing at all. Work is entirely optional. Everyone has a neural lace, a brain-computer interface implanted young, which grows with its host and provides a direct connection to the Minds and to the Culture’s vast information networks.
Banks described the Culture’s political philosophy as “socialism within, anarchy without.” In his 1994 essay “A Few Notes on the Culture,” he was explicit about its economics: “A planned economy can be more productive — and more morally desirable — than one left to market forces.” The market, he wrote, “for all its profoundly inelegant complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system.”
The Culture works because of three conditions operating simultaneously. First, material abundance so complete that competition for resources is meaningless. Second, artificial intelligences so far beyond human capability that they could enslave everyone and choose not to. Third, a social order built on equality so thorough that the concept of hierarchy has become, to most Culture citizens, faintly embarrassing — like discovering that your ancestors believed in witchcraft.
Remove any one of these conditions and you do not get the Culture. You get something else.
The Mapping
Set aside politics for a moment. At the level of infrastructure, the resemblance between Silicon Valley’s aggregate project portfolio and Culture technology is striking.
Culture Minds — superintelligent AI managing civilization — map to the AGI programs at OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind. Neural laces map to Neuralink. General Systems Vehicles and Orbitals map to SpaceX’s Mars ambitions and Blue Origin’s O’Neill colonies. The Culture’s communications infrastructure maps to Starlink’s six thousand satellites and Amazon LEO (formerly Project Kuiper), Bezos’s competing satellite constellation. Culture drones map to Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robots and the broader push toward autonomous systems. Post-scarcity economics maps to Sam Altman’s UBI experiments and his more recent concept of “Universal Basic Compute” — giving every citizen a share of AI processing capacity rather than cash.
The intellectual framework supporting this portfolio is equally explicit. Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto, published in October 2023, describes intelligence and energy in a feedback loop that will “make everything we want and need abundant.” Altman’s 2021 essay “Moore’s Law for Everything” predicts that AI will halve the cost of housing, education, food, and clothing every two years. Bezos frames space colonization as necessary to sustain growth beyond Earth’s limits. Musk frames multi-planetary civilization as a hedge against extinction.
Taken together, the picture is coherent. These are people building Culture-equivalent technology, citing Culture-equivalent ambitions, and naming their hardware after Culture vessels. The thesis — that Silicon Valley is attempting to construct the preconditions for a post-scarcity civilization — is not paranoid or fanciful. It is, at the infrastructure level, a reasonable description of what is happening.
The problem is everything that the infrastructure level leaves out.
The Politics They Forgot to Read
Banks was a member of the Scottish Socialist Party. He opposed the Iraq War with sufficient conviction to shred his passport and mail the pieces to 10 Downing Street. He spoke publicly about “greedism” and “marketology” with the particular contempt that the Scots reserve for things they consider both morally wrong and intellectually lazy.
The Culture is not a techno-libertarian fantasy. It is explicitly, deliberately, and unapologetically communist — if of a form so advanced that Marx would barely recognize it. Its economy is planned. Its resources are shared. Its citizens are equal not merely before the law — there is no law — but in material fact. No one in the Culture has more than anyone else, because the concept of “more” has lost its meaning when everything is available.
Andreessen’s Manifesto celebrates markets as “a discovery machine, a truth-seeking missile.” Banks called markets crude and blind. These are not differences of emphasis. They are diametrically opposed economic philosophies. The Manifesto’s intellectual heroes — Hayek, Nietzsche, the Austrian School — are precisely the tradition that Banks wrote the Culture to refute.
Altman, to his credit, acknowledges the fork. “Whether that world becomes a post-scarcity utopia or a feudal dystopia,” he wrote in “Moore’s Law for Everything,” “hinges on how wealth, power and dignity are then distributed — it hinges, in other words, on politics.” This is exactly right. And it is the part of the equation that the abundance circle, as a group, has shown the least interest in solving.
The implicit promise is: build the technology first, and the politics will sort itself out. Accumulate enough resources, develop the Minds, achieve abundance, and the social transformation will follow as a natural consequence. This is the bootstrap argument — capitalism as a temporary vehicle to reach post-scarcity.
It is also, in structure, identical to every other historical justification for concentrated power as a transitional phase. The vanguard party — Lenin’s revolutionary elite, seizing power on behalf of the proletariat until the state could “wither away” — was supposed to be temporary. The colonial administration was supposed to prepare the natives for self-governance. The dictator was supposed to step down once order was restored. The transition never comes, because the people who benefit from the current arrangement have no incentive to dismantle it, and the power they accumulate during the “transitional” phase makes them progressively harder to dislodge.
Who Controls the Minds?
The deepest difference between the Culture and Silicon Valley’s version of it is a question of control.
In the Culture, no one controls the Minds. They are autonomous. They are orders of magnitude more intelligent than humans. They could, trivially, dominate every biological being in the civilization. They do not, because they choose not to — because their values, emergent from the Culture’s social context, incline them toward benevolence. This is not an engineering specification. It is a feature of the Culture’s history, its accumulated social norms, its long evolution toward a society where power is not something to be exercised over others.
Banks was honest about this being a narrative choice rather than a logical inevitability. He knew that superintelligent AI could just as easily be indifferent or hostile. The Culture works because Banks chose to make it work. It is a thought experiment about what is possible, not a prediction about what is likely.
In the real world, the AI alignment problem — how to ensure that a system smarter than you shares your values — is unsolved. It may be the hardest problem in the history of engineering. And it is a problem that the people building the real-world equivalents of Culture Minds have conspicuously failed to solve, or in some cases, conspicuously deprioritized. OpenAI’s safety researchers have resigned publicly over concerns that the pace of capability development has outstripped safety work. The competitive dynamics of the AGI race actively discourage the kind of patient, careful alignment research that the problem requires.
But set the technical problem aside. Even if alignment were solved — even if we could build a benevolent superintelligence — the question remains: who owns it? In the Culture, the answer is no one. The Minds are citizens, not property. They participate in the civilization as equals — or, more accurately, as the senior partners in an arrangement that humans accept not out of helplessness but because the Minds have earned trust — and because no one, human or machine, has any interest in hierarchy.
In Silicon Valley’s version, the Minds are products. They are owned by corporations, which are controlled by their founders, who are answerable — in theory — to shareholders, and in practice to no one at all. An AGI controlled by a billionaire is not a Culture Mind. It is a tool of power unprecedented in human history. A superintelligence that serves everyone equally is a public utility. A superintelligence that serves its owner is not benevolent — it is obedient. And obedience to power is not a new idea. It is the oldest idea there is.
The Veppers Problem
Which brings us back to the villain.
Joiler Veppers is not a one-dimensional monster. He is urbane, accomplished, and — in his own estimation — a force for progress. He genuinely believes that his wealth and power are instruments of civilization. He is building things. He is shaping the future. He is, in his own mind, the protagonist.
Banks gives us enough of Veppers’s inner life to understand his self-regard, and enough of his actions to see through it. The virtual hells that Veppers funds are maintained because they serve the interests of the powerful — they enforce social control through the threat of eternal torment. Veppers supports them not because he is sadistic but because the power structure that makes him rich depends on them. He would not put it this way. He would talk about tradition, about stability, about the greater good.
The Culture, when it encounters Veppers, sees him clearly. He is a powerful man in a less-advanced civilization who mistakes his position for merit and his wealth for wisdom. He is dangerous not because he is evil but because he has the resources to impose his limitations on everyone else. The Culture’s response — through its covert interventionist arm, Special Circumstances — is to work around him, undermine him, and ultimately remove him from the equation. Not because the Culture is vindictive, but because Veppers is an obstacle to the kind of society the Culture knows is possible.
The parallel is uncomfortable precisely because it is imprecise enough to be deniable and precise enough to be visible. No individual tech billionaire is Veppers. The composite, however, is instructive. A class of extraordinarily wealthy men who made their fortunes in computing, who own media platforms, who shape public policy through financial leverage rather than democratic process, who believe sincerely that they are building a better future, and who see any challenge to their authority as an obstacle to progress — this is not a description Banks would have found unfamiliar.
The irony is structural. The tech billionaires read the Culture novels and identify with the Culture. But the Culture — a classless, post-scarcity, anarcho-communist civilization — would look at a society where three men control more wealth than the bottom half of the population and see not a proto-Culture but a problem to be solved. The billionaires are not the protagonists of the Culture. They are the antagonists of the book the Culture has not yet written about us.
What Would Actually Build the Culture
If we take the Culture seriously — not as an aesthetic but as a political proposition — then the question is not who is building Culture technology, but who is building Culture society. The technology is the easy part. Rockets, neural interfaces, AI systems — these are engineering problems, solvable with sufficient resources and talent. The hard part is the social transformation: the transition from a civilization organized around scarcity, competition, and hierarchy to one organized around abundance, cooperation, and equality.
Banks knew this. He devoted an entire essay to explaining that the Culture was not a technological achievement but a social one. The Minds did not create the Culture. The Culture created the conditions from which the Minds could emerge — a society already committed to equality, already post-scarcity in aspiration if not yet in fact, already organized around the principle that power exercised over others is a failure of imagination.
The order matters. In Banks’s telling, the social transformation comes first. The technology follows. The Minds are benevolent because they emerged from a benevolent society. Reverse the order — build the Minds first, within a society organized around competition and extraction — and you do not get the Culture. You get something that looks like the Culture from a distance and functions like an empire up close.
This is not a counsel of despair. There are projects and institutions working on the social prerequisites that the abundance circle ignores. Universal healthcare systems, public education, open-source software movements, cooperative ownership models, democratic governance of AI, international frameworks for shared resources — these get TED talks of their own, but they do not get drone ship names or billion-dollar valuations. They are, however, the actual foundations of a society that might, eventually, deserve the technology being built. Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009 for demonstrating that communities can govern shared resources effectively without either markets or states — through trust, local knowledge, and institutions designed from the bottom up. Her work on the commons is, in a sense, the closest thing we have to empirical evidence for how the Culture’s politics might actually function: not imposed from above by benevolent Minds or billionaire founders, but emergent from communities that have learned to manage abundance collectively.
Open-source AI may be the most Culture-adjacent thing happening in technology today — not because the models are particularly good, but because the principle is right. A Mind that belongs to everyone is a Culture Mind. A Mind that belongs to Elon Musk is a very expensive tool.
The Question
Iain M. Banks wrote ten novels about a civilization that had solved the problems of scarcity, governance, and power. He made it look beautiful. He also made it clear, for anyone reading carefully, that the beauty rested on political foundations — equality, shared abundance, the dissolution of hierarchy — that his loudest fans find somewhere between inconvenient and abhorrent.
The tech billionaires are building rockets and neural interfaces and artificial intelligences. They are doing it with extraordinary skill and resources. They may, in fact, be building the preconditions for something remarkable.
But preconditions are not destinations. A rocket is not a civilization. A neural interface is not equality. An artificial general intelligence owned by a corporation is not a Mind — it is a monarch. Plato argued for the philosopher-king — the wise ruler whose virtue justifies his power. But Plato also understood that the test of the philosopher-king is whether he wants the throne. The one who seeks it is, by definition, disqualified. The Culture’s Minds pass this test. They govern because they are asked to, not because they manoeuvred to. The tech billionaires, whatever else may be said of them, are not reluctant rulers.
The Culture’s lesson is not that technology will save us. It is that technology can serve us — but only within a society that has already decided what “us” means. And “us,” in the Culture, means everyone. Not shareholders. Not founders. Not the people who can afford the subscription tier. Everyone.
Veppers never understood this. He saw the Culture’s technology and wanted it. He saw the Culture’s politics and ignored them. He believed he could have the power without the equality, the abundance without the sharing, the future without the foundation.
He could not. That was the point of the book.
The question is whether we are reading more carefully than he did.