Utopia is a tricky thing. In this decidedly nihilistic era of plagues and ravenous empires that force us to protest for our most basic human rights, the idea can feel further from our grasp than ever. Stories of zombie swarms and post apocalypses are a dime a dozen, but hope is seemingly in short supply. All of which is not helped by the way any even remotely hopeful concept is dubbed as communism. Even suggesting that we feed the hungry, house the unsheltered, or treat the sick under this psychic landscape is enough to trigger comparisons to gulags, and woe betide you if you mention the means of production. This weird state of affairs creates a unique problem for that small subset of people that profit from looking utopian but by necessity must utterly disavow communist ideas.
I am of course talking about that favourite technocratic libertarian union busting power couple Elon Musk and Grimes. Like all of the vastly rich high profile capitalists, they like to paint themselves as the good ones. Not as sinister as Bezos or as lame as Gates — they are the cool guys’ choice of capitalist, presenting a vibe that’s equal parts mad scientist and messiah. This vibe was recently articulated in a TikTok published by Grimes in which they exclaim that when AI solves for scarcity nobody will have to work ever again, allowing us to reach full communism without ever having to go work on a forced labour farm. In the eyes of capital this is utopia done right. Reaching paradise through shiny innovation rather than messy revolution. The prospect of which gives you a micro dose of hope without the terrifying potential for a sudden red scare.
There is a genuine hopefulness to Grimes that when put in proximity to Musk becomes uncanny. Here is a person who quoted Stalin in their yearbook married to the second richest man in the world. It’s hard to even read her on-again, off-again radical energy as insincere — after all she’s willing to take a small stand against him over transphobic tweets. Grimes comes across as a person who, despite the fearful gestures towards that bogeyman version of communism, does seem to desire an end of work and a potential paradise on earth. They strike me as a hopeful sort taken in by a utopian promise. This is, unfortunately though, the utopia of Musk, and that is a deeply weird thing.
Musk is totally and utterly a creature of capital. His money and power is removed from any kind of labour and is instead generated by playing landlord over the very idea of a better world. His various shiny toy projects all promise to revolutionise our way of life but are ever careful to avoid promising a revolution. The image of paradise that Musk projects is one where flying to Mars is right around the corner, but only if the pesky workers at his factories stop asking for a living wage. What Musk offers is an easy kind of hope for the already comfortable. One that lets you sit back while the smart man fixes it for you. A utopia that only requires you to suffer in silence till the singularity hits.
If you only look at the surface details of the ideas Musk idolises it is easy to get drawn into this style of utopian thought. For example, three drone ships launched by SpaceX bear names sourced from the science fiction writings of Iain M Banks. Specifically their names are from his Culture series, which traces the weird and wonderful goings on of a post scarcity society in the far future.
The closest touchstone for someone unfamiliar with The Culture is the United Federation of Planets from Star Trek, but the Federation’s blissful worlds pale in comparison to the decadence of The Culture. The built in drug glands, total gender fluidity, and minutes long technologically enhanced orgasms would leave even the notably horny captain Kirk struggling to keep up with the average Culture citizen, and that is just the sex. Megastructures absorb the mass of entire solar systems to create giant ringed habitats around suns, allowing human artists to sculpt artificial tectonic plates larger than earth continents. The idea of bespoke planets, used as a punchline in the fiction of Douglas Adams, is small talk for frustrated art student parties. Even death is reduced to inconvenience, only really possible if you explicitly ask for all backups to be removed. It is one of the most thorough, fantastical, and luxurious utopias in all the science fiction canon.
The reference Musk is making when he names his rockets is more specific than that though. Names like “Just Read the Instructions” and “Of Course I Still Love You” are drawn from the AI minds of The Culture. These god-like mechanical entities are what make the paradise of The Culture possible. They are responsible for piloting its ships, for running the stations, and getting enough drinks to the latest all night board game exhibition match. They are the shiny toys that make paradise possible. Less gods in the machine and more god as a machine. That comparison is even made explicit in the book Surface Detail, when its revealed that some select societies in the universe have manufactured afterlives. The Culture is so advanced they have no need for this — they are past the point of even trying to make heaven a place on earth because they have made it a reality among the stars. So utterly powerful is the intellect wielded by these AI that they have made the very concept of an afterlife obsolete.
To technocrats and egotists like Musk, such a prospect is overwhelmingly enticing. The Culture represents a form of society where all that paradise needs to get going is a sufficiently clever mind in charge. The complicated issues that communist thought tries to solve, like the monopoly over violence or how workers relate to the means of production, can be comfortably ignored while you get to work constructing a new perfect god-machine. Sure, you might need to cause harm now, but when the future is an eternal party without death or pain or strife, that harm is very easy to justify. Through a particularly sick lens you could even see the suffering as noble. A worldview where dying in an exploitative lithium mine isn’t a tragedy of capital, but a necessary and heroic act.
By positioning himself as the herald of an artificial intelligence era, Musk can cash in on our desperate need for hope without ever dealing with the cruel practices that earned him his cash in the first place. His brand courts those who long for utopias like The Culture, channeling what radical energy they might have away from trying to change the world and towards distant promises that are perpetually a few years down the R&D pipeline. With Musk at the helm there is no need for revolution, social justice, and messy mass political movements. Once his tech is sufficiently advanced we’ll just buy our way into heaven.
In that context it’s easy to see how a radically minded person might fall for the promise of SpaceX or Tesla or any other sci-fi adjacent trinket Musk offers. The actual things are almost irrelevant — the appeal is the possibility that capital can build a better world. That just like heaven, communism is obsolete and you can be hopeful without needing to change a thing. Tell the AI to solve for scarcity and it will be just fine.
All it takes to unravel this approach is a slightly closer reading of the Culture novels. Banks clearly loves the place and illuminates it with luscious detail across the series, but the plots of the stories frequently take Culture citizens far from its idyllic orbital habitats. The artificial afterlives found in Surface Detail were not built to replicate heaven — they were built by a cruel theocracy so that they could ensure the souls of their unworthy citizens were adequately punished in an artificial hell. The Culture, being a powerful moral society, tries to intervene when other societies commit such atrocities, and in doing so often create atrocities of their own. A meddlesome interventionist approach led to the full scale war forming the backdrop of the first book of the series.
Consider Phlebas — it is told from the perspective of an alien shapeshifter fighting against the Culture. He loathes its machines that control their lives and sees them as the end of biological life in the galaxy, going so far as to ally himself with fundamentalist zealots that destroy entire stars in attempts to bait The Culture into surrender. The war does not end in the book — the end of the book is a tragic farce with no impact on the conflict whatsoever. It is only in the epilogue that the history of the war is recounted in the dry tone of a textbook. Eight hundred and fifty one billion dead in the fictional conflict including sentient machines, biological slaves, and non-combatants. The Culture, having won the fight, now seemingly justified for their future moralist interventions on behalf of less ethically developed societies.
Length of war: forty-eight years, one month. Total casualties, including machines (reckoned on logarithmic sentience scale), medjel and non-combatants: 851.4 billion (± .3%). Losses: ships (all classes above interplanetary) — 91,215,660 (± 200); Orbitals — 14,334; planets and major moons — 53; Rings — 1; Spheres — 3; stars (undergoing significant induced mass-loss or sequence-position alteration) — 6.
In future books like The Player of Games or Look to Windward we are assured that the minds of the Culture only intervene where it is justified. The AI solving for problem of utopia and only meddling where they know it is truly the most kind and compassionate option. The means are mercenaries, knife missiles and ultimatums, but the end is always yet more people under the wing of the merciful Culture. To live in it is to live in total paradise, to live in a society that its minds have deemed cruel is to live in the firing line of progress. Your only comfort that your death, while regrettable, was actually optimal and therefore, through a particularly sick lens, both noble and necessary. This sets up the core question asked across the series — can there ever be an end so fantastic that it justifies any and all means?
For people like Musk and Grimes the answer is an enthusiastic yes. If, as the TikTok says, an AI can just solve scarcity and create heaven on earth then of course it’s fine for a Stalin quoting radical to marry an exploitative billionaire, as long as he is the one building the AI. If you earnestly believe that a utopia even a fraction as luxurious the one depicted in the Culture novels is possible then you can justify anything to reach it. You can justify union busting, wars over mining rights, any number of deaths, and the destruction of the stars themselves. The problem is that The Cultures utopia never arrives. In the same way that Musk’s AI is always a few years out, there are always new exceptions or out of context problems that demand the intervention of the Culture’s minds. This is not the Federation of Star Trek, there is no final frontier — the frontier is endless, stretching out to the infinite reaches of the universe and down into depths of new discovery. Every entity or society that The Culture discovers is another moral imperative to spread civilization and that imperative can justify any amount of bloodshed. The infinite pleasure of its citizenry is rivalled only by the infinite violence that that pleasure justifies. The ends and means of paradise do not exist isolated of each other, and the continuation of one necessitates the continuation of the other.
That is the function of utopia in the hands of Musk. It is an eternal, unreachable ends that can justify any horrific means that might grant him power. It is a bottomless vessel for our hope trying to re-justify the flailing appendages of capital. In a world where the most basic kindness preached by religious texts is dangerously close to that bogeyman form of communism, tech fanaticism preached by Musk becomes a new and innovative opiate for the masses. A cult to a science fiction god willing to bleed the world dry while waiting for a Deus Ex Machina that can never arrive.
