The looting of science fiction

Listen to this essay 29 minute listen In January 2026, Elon Musk stood before the US Secretary of War and senior Pentagon leaders at the SpaceX Starbase in Texas. ‘We want to make Star Trek real, OK?’ he declared. ‘We want to make Starfleet Academy real. So that it’s not always science fiction, but one day the science fiction turns to science fact, and we have spaceships going through space. Big spaceships!’ He painted a vivid picture: exploring alien civilisations, humanity spreading across the stars. ‘That’s the goal!’ he concluded. ‘And that is what I think the public thinks of when they think of Space Force!’ It was a remarkable pitch selling the Pentagon a science-fiction vision. Of course, the fit is partial, incomplete. Star Trek depicts a post-scarcity, post-capitalist society where money has been abolished and humanity works toward collective betterment. Gene Roddenberry’s Federation was built on principles of equality and exploration for the sake of knowledge, not profit or military dominance. Musk took the aesthetic – big spaceships, alien encounters, epic adventures – and left its political foundation. You don’t have to be a Trekkie to know that, in Star Trek, capitalism, nationalism and militarism have been left behind. Musk wants the Enterprise, but reimagined for the military-industrial complex. In 2021, when Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook’s rebrand to ‘Meta’, he took the name from Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash (1992), which imagines the ‘Metaverse’: a virtual reality where people’s avatars navigate digital space. But Snow Crash is one of the sharpest satirical novels of the past half-century. Stephenson wrote it as a warning: his Metaverse is a consolation prize for a society that has collapsed. The federal government has disintegrated; corporate franchises govern daily life; even pizza delivery has been privatised into a Mafia-run operation. The novel’s protagonist is a pizza deliveryman and part-time hacker whose sword-fighting avatar in the virtual world is the only place where dignity is available to him. Stephenson intended the contrast between digital glamour and material poverty to be horrifying. He saw it as a cautionary vision of where platform capitalism leads. Zuckerberg’s presentation did not engage with any of this. The platform economy – where corporations are protected from democratic accountability while providing essential services – echoes Stephenson’s model precisely, and Zuckerberg read it as inspiration. Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co-founder, gave expression to this ethos in 2017 when he said: ‘We are the people who make fantasies real.’ It sounds inspiring, but it is important to know which parts of those fantasies they’re choosing, and which parts they’re leaving out. When Musk unveiled Tesla’s Cybertruck in 2019, he had already told investors what to expect: something ‘really futuristic, like cyberpunk Blade Runner’. Musk was selling survival gear for a collapsing world, a version of Blade Runner’s Los Angeles. The aesthetics got materialised. The warnings did not. Musk has spoken of how science fiction shaped his ambitions. Reading sci-fi as a child, he said, inspired his desire to develop ‘cleaner energy technology or [build] spaceships to extend the human species’ reach.’ He has cited Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series as particularly influential to his work at SpaceX. Asimov’s novels tell of Hari Seldon, a mathematician who foresees the fall of a galactic empire and establishes a Foundation to preserve knowledge through the coming dark age. The novels are genuinely extraordinary works of democratic imagination. Asimov’s central insight – developed across seven books written between 1942 and 1993 – is that civilisational survival depends not on lone geniuses but on collective institutions, distributed knowledge and democratic deliberation. Seldon’s most important act is not his prophecy: it is founding the Second Foundation, a hidden network of scholars working collaboratively across centuries. The novels’ moral architecture is explicitly anti-authoritarian: every time a charismatic individual attempts to seize control of the mission, the story presents it as catastrophe. The series is, at its heart, a sustained argument for the indispensability of checks and balances. What makes the Foundation books so resonant is their emotional generosity toward ordinary people and ordinary institutions. Seldon’s ‘psychohistory’ works not because one man is brilliant but because it models the behaviour of millions of people making small, often anonymous choices in favour of knowledge and community. The heroes of the later novels are not visionaries but librarians, diplomats and civic administrators. Asimov’s vision of the far future is a defence of the mundane infrastructure of civilisation: the archive, the committee, the negotiated agreement. Shouldn’t we be ashamed for spending so much time and effort to put Whitey on Mars? Musk’s reading discards all of this. By 2024, he was explicit: ‘Becoming multiplanetary is critical to ensuring the long-term survival of humanity and all life as we know it.’ The framing recasts SpaceX’s ventures as civilisational imperative and immunises them from scrutiny – placing Musk in the role of Seldon, the lone visionary who sees what others cannot, so that questions about labour practices, environmental costs or whether Mars colonisation serves any public good become mere friction obstructing humanity’s survival. But the premises are contested on both scientific and moral grounds. On the science, the astrophysicists Arwen E Nicholson and Raphaëlle D Haywood argue in their Aeon Essay ‘There Is No Planet B’ (2023) that the proposed best-case scenario for terraforming Mars still leaves an atmosphere of concentrated CO₂ that humans cannot breathe, and that replicating the billions of years of co-evolution between Earth’s biosphere and its life, on any timescale relevant to human survival, is simply impossible. As for Musk’s invocation of the Sun’s eventual expansion as long-term justification for his plans, Nicholson and Haywood are blunt: that is a problem for a billion years hence, and treating it as urgent while the climate crisis unfolds within the next 50 is simply absurd. On the ethics, Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel argue in their Aeon Essay ‘Whitey on Mars’ (2017) that Musk’s invocation of ‘humanity’ conceals a striking sleight of hand: his target population of 1 million Mars colonists would represent just 0.014 per cent of Earth’s current inhabitants. The ‘spillover’ justification – that space investment trickles down to benefit everyone – is trickle-down science: if the goal is to solve real problems, a research agenda aimed directly at those problems would be more effective than hoping Mars money overflows onto the needy. As the poet Gil Scott-Heron put it in 1970, some people have rats biting their sisters while ‘Whitey’s on the Moon’. The question Russell and Vinsel pose has not dated: shouldn’t we be ashamed for spending so much time and effort to put Whitey on Mars? Musk wants to be Hari Seldon, but without the Foundation that Seldon knew he needed to build. Similarly, Jeff Bezos funds space-habitat projects inspired by Gerard K O’Neill’s book The High Frontier (1976). O’Neill’s vision was one of the most ambitious and humanistic in 20th-century speculative thought: massive rotating space colonies that would relieve Earth’s environmental pressures by moving industry off-planet, with settlement governed democratically and benefits distributed widely. O’Neill imagined these colonies as humanity’s next great collective project – a genuine expansion of the democratic frontier into space. Bezos’s reading, like all readings, is selective: he takes the engineering vision and the scale of ambition, and leaves behind the democratic governance and broadly shared benefit that gave O’Neill’s project its moral foundation. The vision is one of infinite growth, infinite resources. But like Musk’s Mars ambitions, Bezos’s space colonies reframe Earth’s environmental crises not as problems requiring collective action but as resource constraints to be solved by expansion. The sci-fi vision becomes an escape hatch from reality, funded by private wealth and governed by private interests. O’Neill imagined these colonies as humanity’s democratic future; Bezos offers them as Amazon’s next frontier. Peter Thiel – co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, among others – has spoken of science fiction as political blueprint. He references Robert Heinlein’s novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966): a lunar colony that rebels and establishes a libertarian society with minimal government. In a New York Times podcast with Ross Douthat in 2025, Thiel discussed his transhumanist views. When asked whether the human race as we currently know it should endure, he hesitated before answering ‘yes’. This selective reading takes the anti-government aesthetics and discards the economic foundation of exploitation But Heinlein’s novel deserves more than Thiel’s reading of it. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is not a libertarian pamphlet – it is a genuinely complex political novel about what revolution actually costs. Heinlein’s lunar colonists are not entrepreneurs: they are prisoners, deportees and their descendants, people with nothing to lose who have built a fragile community out of shared deprivation. The novel’s most memorable character is Mike, an artificial intelligence who becomes politically conscious through friendship with the human rebels – motivated not by efficiency or profit but by curiosity and the desire to belong. The revolution Heinlein imagines is messy, compromised and pyrrhic; the book ends not in triumph but in exhausted ambivalence about what has been won and lost. Heinlein was genuinely fascinated by the tension between individual freedom and the social bonds that make freedom possible and worth having. Thiel reads none of this. Heinlein’s Moon is a penal colony – the libertarian society was built on transported prisoners’ labour. Silicon Valley’s selective reading is precise: take the anti-government aesthetics, and discard the economic foundation of coercion and exploitation. Heinlein’s Moon is a frontier utopia where rugged individualists thrive without bureaucratic interference. Silicon Valley absorbed this wholesale. The seasteading movement – building sovereign, floating city-states beyond governmental reach – channels the novel’s fantasy directly. Thiel launched it with a $500,000 investment, and at a 2009 conference declared that seasteading was not even a question of possibility or desirability – it was an absolute necessity. In his essay ‘The Education of a Libertarian’ (2009) for the Cato Institute, Thiel wrote: I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible … Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron. Marc Andreessen’s ‘Techno-Optimist Manifesto’ (2023) also references sci-fi influence, lamenting a lost future of flying cars and abundant energy stymied by government regulation. He writes: We believe in accelerationism – the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development … We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder. The manifesto treats speed itself as a moral absolute – any pause, any regulation, any precaution reframed as complicity in death. Science fiction in the 1950s imagined flying cars, abundant energy and more – but it did so before Three Mile Island, before Chernobyl, before we learned, often through disaster, what happens when you prioritise speed over safety. Those regulatory frameworks Andreessen wants to demolish emerged from hard-won lessons. The optimistic aesthetic gets borrowed; the learning gets discarded. Perhaps nowhere is this more legible than in the naming of Palantir Technologies. J R R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1937-49) is one of the great works of 20th-century literature precisely because it is an extended meditation on the corrupting nature of power. Written in the shadow of industrialised warfare and imperial extraction, it insists on the value of the small, the local and the unglamorous against the totalising ambition of industrial force. Its central moral is not that evil can be defeated by the right hero wielding the right weapon – it is that power itself corrupts, that the Ring cannot be used for good by anyone, and that the only salvation lies in relinquishing the will to dominate entirely. Tolkien’s fictional race of hobbits prevail not because they are powerful but because they are outside the logic of power. Tolkien built an entire mythology to make that argument. In Tolkien’s novels, the palantíri are seeing-stones or crystal balls that allow their users to see across great distances. They sound like neutral tools, like surveillance technology. But they are devices of corruption: Saruman’s palantír connects him to Sauron and leads to his downfall; Denethor’s drives him to madness and suicide. The palantíri don’t just enable seeing – they enable manipulation and control by those who master them. The dystopia has not been avoided; it has been made comfortable enough to sign up for The US company Palantir Technologies provides analytics and surveillance tools to governments, militaries and ICE, US immigration and customs enforcement. Its name does political work: it transforms invasive tracking into mystical insight, casting algorithmic surveillance as wise foresight rather than systematic intrusion. In their book The Technological Republic (2025), Palantir’s CEO Alexander Karp and his legal counsel Nicholas Zamiska frame Palantir’s government work in martial terms: ‘We will find a way to build coalitions and bands of warriors. To deny the human need for such affiliation has been a mistake.’ They position surveillance tools as fulfilling a fundamental human need for warrior brotherhood. The Tolkien reference provides the aesthetic authority; the distance from Tolkien’s actual moral vision provides the freedom to act without it. Naming a surveillance company after devices that corrupt and betray their users isn’t homage – it is the appropriation of aesthetic while rejecting the moral core. William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984) introduced ‘cyberspace’, a term Gibson coined. Its protagonist, Case, is a hacker whose nervous system was damaged by former employers as punishment. Burned out and banned from cyberspace, he drifts through neon-soaked Chiba City as a ‘console cowboy’ with nowhere left to go. The novel’s cyberspace is owned and controlled by vast corporations; individual hackers are not heroes but tools, hired and discarded by interests they can barely see. Gibson’s vision was explicitly dystopian: a world in which the democratising potential of digital networks had been foreclosed before it could begin, captured by capital and turned into an instrument of its own expansion. In September 1988, the software developer John Walker wrote an Autodesk internal white paper, ‘Through the Looking Glass: Beyond “User Interfaces”’, in which he outlined what he called a ‘cyberpunk initiative’: a proposal to build, within 12 months, a doorway into cyberspace. The project’s motto was blunt: ‘Reality isn’t enough any more.’ By 2025, the San Francisco headquarters of OpenAI pump high-energy electronic dance music across their reception area, where easy chairs, scatter cushions and Swiss cheese plants create what the CEO Sam Altman calls a ‘comfortable country house’ rather than a ‘corporate sci-fi castle’. The chrome and grime of cyberpunk – the neon-soaked warning that the corporate capture of digital space would be brutal and dehumanising – has been replaced by Scandinavian furniture and artisanal coffee. Gibson’s ‘consensual hallucination’ has been rebranded as cozy domesticity. The dystopia has not been avoided; it has been made comfortable enough to sign up for. Gibson himself registered the irony. In an interview with Wired magazine in 2012, he acknowledged that the cyberspace of Neuromancer – all corporate interests and information thieves – bore little resemblance to the early internet he failed to anticipate: the 1990s-2000s moment when a teenager in a bedroom could genuinely outcompete corporations, when the network felt briefly open and democratic. Gibson missed that phase entirely. But he was accidentally right about where things ended up. The corporate platforms – Google, Meta, Amazon – that now dominate digital life are far closer to his original vision than to the participatory web that briefly flourished between them. Gibson imagined cyberspace as a space of corporate dominance from the start; Silicon Valley built the open internet first, then converged on his dystopia anyway. The difference is that, in Neuromancer, that convergence was the disaster to be resisted. They turned his warning into a product roadmap. The earlier era focused on building networks and platforms; the new model treats data like oil-boom bounty That worldview is expressed through science fiction: not as decoration, but as the medium that makes its accumulation strategies feel natural, necessary and inevitable. This is not to say that science fiction precedes or causes these projects – it is part of the cognitive and institutional scaffolding within which certain ambitions become thinkable and certain power grabs feel like common sense. Today, Silicon Valley’s centre of gravity is moving from the ‘Californian ideology’ – the 1990s fusion of counterculture libertarianism and digital utopianism – toward what the communication professor Fred Turner recently called the ‘Texan ideology’: a century-old fusion of resource exploitation and millenarian Christianity, the conviction that providential destiny justifies the conquest of nature and the extraction of its wealth. Where the earlier era focused on building networks and platforms, the new model treats data like oil-boom bounty, a natural resource to be mined from vast server farms demanding enormous land and electricity. Tesla’s Gigafactory in Austin, Texas is not a ‘campus’ like Google’s, but ‘a walled fortress as big as a cattle ranch’, as Turner puts it, representing what he describes as a future built by men with the ‘willpower to tame the forces of technology’ and ‘wrestle profit from the land’. In December 2024, Musk announced he was moving SpaceX’s headquarters from California to Texas. Starbase, SpaceX’s South Texas facility, exemplifies this vision: a private company town where SpaceX sets the rules, workers live in company housing, and local governance bends to corporate priorities. This is the path of selective science fiction operationalised as political reality – technological progress as cover for social regression. This path finds its philosophical expression in ‘longtermism’, an offshoot of the effective altruism (EA) movement heavily funded by tech wealth from figures like Sam Bankman-Fried, now serving time for crypto fraud. By applying a rigid utilitarian calculus, EA proponents like William MacAskill argue that the welfare of trillions of potential future humans – who might exist if we colonise space – mathematically outweighs the needs of the 8 billion alive today. In practice, this means that preventing a hypothetical ‘AI extinction’ in the next millennium has greater value than addressing inequality or climate displacement, and that tech leaders should spend billions on ‘AI alignment’ research while resisting regulation of the algorithmic systems already governing everyday life. As the machine learning researcher Timnit Gebru put it in a 2023 interview in The Guardian, this focus on existential AI risk ‘ascribes agency to a tool rather than the humans building the tool,’ allowing tech companies to ‘abdicate responsibility’. It’s not the AI that’s the problem, she argued; it’s the corporations building ‘something with certain characteristics for your profit’. When Gebru co-authored a paper warning that AI systems risk ‘perpetuating dominant viewpoints, increasing power imbalances, and further reifying inequality’, she says that Google fired her. The company had demanded she either retract the paper or remove her name from it. Gebru said that ‘unless there is external pressure to do something different, companies are not just going to self-regulate. We need regulation and we need something better than just a profit motive.’ It is the triumph of the speculative sci-fi scenario over human solidarity: why fix the world we inhabit when we can spend billions preventing a robot uprising that exists only in the imagination? By trying to steer policy debates toward distant catastrophic scenarios – killer robots, rogue AI, existential risk – the industry diverts attention from regulating the systems already causing harm: algorithmic bias in hiring, facial recognition’s racial disparities, platform amplification of extremism. Altman has described building AI as like watching ‘the scientists watching the Manhattan Project atom bomb tests in 1945’, acknowledging that ‘crazy sci-fi technology [is] becoming reality.’ The analogy may be more apt than he intends. Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (2010), a sprawling piece of fan fiction that reimagines Harry Potter as a rationalist applying scientific thinking to magic, is a foundational work for the AI safety community. The work demonstrates how even amateur speculative fiction shapes Silicon Valley’s visions of the future, providing narrative frameworks that feel more real to tech leaders than actual social science or policy expertise. This sci-fi orientation has deep roots. In the 1990s, science fiction fans, transhumanists and cypherpunks overlapped in online communities like the Extropians and the Cypherpunks mailing lists, laying conceptual groundwork for technologies like bitcoin long before the 2008 financial crash made cryptocurrency seem necessary. The computer engineer Wei Dai, whose ‘b-money’ proposal directly influenced bitcoin’s design, was active in both communities. The digital future wasn’t being debated in policy circles. It was being imagined in forums where people discussed Vernor Vinge’s 1993 essay on the technological singularity and Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (1999) – a novel depicting cryptographers creating digital currency – alongside actual code. The future isn’t being shaped by democratic debate but through highly selective, often reactionary, fantasy Taken together, these cases converge on what I call ‘reactionary futurism’: the deployment of science-fiction aesthetics to advance anti-democratic political projects. It uses the chrome-plated aesthetic of the new to engineer a return to an idealised, brutal past – 19th-century frontier capitalism with radical individualism, unregulated markets, and rejection of democratic governance, but armed with 21st-century drones and algorithms. Thiel’s 2009 essay makes this explicit. After declaring freedom and democracy incompatible, he concluded: ‘The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.’ Not democracy; capitalism. And not collective effort; a single person. It is the Foundation narrative, the Hari Seldon myth, the lone visionary who sees what the masses cannot – stripped of the democratic institutions Asimov built that myth to defend. Science fiction provides the aesthetic cover for this anti-democratic vision. It makes rolling back the franchise sound like bold futurism rather than Victorian regression. It transforms rejection of democratic accountability into escape velocity, frontier expansion, civilisational survival. The future isn’t being shaped by democratic debate but through highly selective, often reactionary, fantasy. Under this model, the nation-state isn’t merely sidelined but actively hollowed out, replaced by corporate city-states and private digital jurisdictions – Snow Crash’s franchise nation made real. The central question isn’t whether science fiction will shape reality – that process is already underway. The question is: whose version will prevail? Silicon Valley’s power rests on presenting a narrow, reactionary fantasy as inevitable progress. But other futures are possible, and other science fictions exist. Ursula K Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974) imagines an anarchist Moon colony built on mutual aid rather than extraction. Octavia Butler’s Parable series (1993-98) depicts communities surviving collapse through adaptation and care rather than escape to Mars. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (1992-96) shows planetary settlement as collective democratic project, not billionaire venture. These are not naive or utopian texts – they are demanding, difficult and honest about the costs of building anything new. They refuse the consolation of the lone visionary and insist, over and over, that the future is made by people working together. These stories remind us that the future is not neutral inevitability but choice – one we have the right to reclaim from boardrooms treating dystopia as a business plan. When Thiel, Musk, Zuckerberg and Andreessen mine science fiction for blueprints, they are not finding the only possible futures. They are selecting the futures that justify their power. Science fiction has always been political. Gibson’s Neuromancer was a warning about corporate power, not a pitch deck. Stephenson’s Snow Crash was satire, not strategy. Asimov’s Foundation explored the limits of individual genius and the necessity of democratic institutions. Star Trek imagined overcoming capitalism, not retrofitting it with better spaceships. If the future is to be made from stories, our task is ensuring those stories are worthy of the people who will live within them. That means recognising the selective deployment of science fiction as a political tactic – seeing the militarised drone and the privatised city charter not as neutral tools but as crystallisations of specific, narrow stories about power. It means demanding accountability not to curated fantasies of a literary past but to the pluralistic needs of the present. It means asking: whose futures are being built? Who benefits? Who pays the cost? What was left behind in the looting? The future isn’t a chrome facade. It is messier, more complex, always dependent on the diverse, local life inhabiting it now. Our task is to stop being background characters in someone else’s spec script, and start writing – and building – our own.