A Few Notes on A Few Notes on The Culture

When I post a link, I do it for two reasons.

First of all, it’s me pointing at something and saying “Check this out!”

Secondly, it’s a way for me to stash something away that I might want to return to. I tag all my links so when I need to find one again, I just need to think “Now what would past me have tagged it with?” Then I type the appropriate URL: adactio.com/links/tags/whatever

There are some links that I return to again and again.

Back in 2008, I linked to a document called A Few Notes on The Culture. It’s a copy of a post by Iain M Banks to a newsgroup back in 1994.

Alas, that link is dead. Linkrot, innit?

But in 2013 I linked to the same document on a different domain. That link still works even though I believe it was first published around twenty(!) years ago (view source for some pre-CSS markup nostalgia).

Anyway, A Few Notes On The Culture is a fascinating look at the world-building of Iain M Banks’s Culture novels. He talks about the in-world engineering, education, biology, and belief system of his imagined utopia. The part that sticks in my mind is when he talks about economics:

Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces.

The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what-works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is — without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset — intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.

It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both its present intellectual immaturity and — through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of others — a kind of synthetic evil.

Those three paragraphs might be the most succinct critique of unfettered capitalism I’ve come across. The invisible hand as a paperclip maximiser.

Like I said, it’s a fascinating document. In fact I realised that I should probably store a copy of it for myself.

I have a section of my site called “extras” where I dump miscellaneous stuff. Most of it is unlinked. It’s mostly for my own benefit. That’s where I’ve put my copy of A Few Notes On The Culture.

Here’s a funny thing …for all the times that I’ve revisited the link, I never knew anything about the site is was hosted on—vavatch.co.uk—so this most recent time, I did a bit of clicking around. Clearly it’s the personal website of a sci-fi-loving college student from the early 2000s. But what came as a revelation to me was that the site belonged to …Adrian Hon!

I’m impressed that he kept his old website up even after moving over to the domain mssv.net, founding Six To Start, and writing A History Of The Future In 100 Objects. That’s a great snackable book, by the way. Well worth a read.

Have you published a response to this? :

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This could a project for the next Indie Web Camp I attend.

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The whole point behind Pitas was, and is, being a simple way to blog. You just open the site, type something into the entry box, and click POST.

And now it’s coming back …if this project gets funded.

I guess if the site gets infested by Nazis we’ll probably not do anything about it for 10 years, then make a bunch of wimpy statements, do nothing, maybe finally request free help from the community and still do nothing about it.

Just kidding, their asses will be kicked off immediately.

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As I was leaving, Cope recounted how, early on, a curator had asked him why the collections website and API existed. Why are you doing this?

His retrospective answer wasn’t about scholarship or data-mining or huge interactive exhibits. It was about the web.

I find this incredibly inspiring.

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Previously on this day

6 years ago I wrote Greater expectations

Some anecdata about installation expectations for progressive web apps.

8 years ago I wrote Extensible web components

Web components are supposed to extend the web, not replace it.

9 years ago I wrote Podcasting the future

I’m doing a podcast series in the run-up to this year’s dConstruct.

11 years ago I wrote The United States of August

Road tripping.

19 years ago I wrote Sour Apple

Hot on the heels of the updated iBooks and Mac minis, Apple have announced an all-singing, all-clicking mighty mouse.

20 years ago I wrote Migratory patterns

I’ve mentioned before just how stressful and nerve-wracking it can be to move web hosts. That’s why I’ve been putting off the long-overdue migration of The Session from the hell that is WebServePro.

22 years ago I wrote Weebl and Bob

Want Pie now!

22 years ago I wrote Real World Style

CSS layouts, tips, tricks, and techniques.