Flashback: How Science Fiction Helped Get Us into this Mess

The historical roots of Elon Musk and his fellow tech bros with poor reading skills and radical libertarianism, as seen in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine

Elon Musk has terrible reading comprehension skills.

So do Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, and all the other tech bros who cite their favorite science fiction and fantasy novels as their inspiration for running roughshod over the country in their pursuit of wealth and power.

Musk has cited Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels as an inspiration for many of his companies but seems to have missed the point of a post-scarcity future where humans routinely change their gender to experience more of what humanity encompasses. Thiel takes the names of his companies from The Lord of the Rings then makes Palantir into the real-world equivalent of the Eye of Sauron. Bezos loved the hard-SF series The Expanse so much he saved the TV adaptation from cancellation but never seems to have comprehended the deeply humanistic themes contained in the meticulously realized physics of space travel. Brin (along with Mark Zuckerberg) read Snow Crash and took it as aspirational rather than cautionary.

I could pr…