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>"Science fiction is written by people embedded within a society with expectations and political assumptions that bias us towards looking at the shiny surface of new technologies rather than asking how human beings will use them, and to taking narratives of progress at face value rather than asking what hidden agenda they serve."

And be prepared for the most agenda ridden text you have read in a long time.




Would you mind explaining what the agenda is?


That's absolutely not what I associate science fiction with. Stanisław Lem for example couldn't be further from taking shiny technology at face value


Lem was disgusted at contemporary Western science fiction for the exact reason of it being techno-fetishistic. He was in opposition to sci-fi mainstream, not in it.


He was also all over the place.

But interesting ideas and if he can connect the ideas in a better way in his book I wouldn’t mind reading it.


That's not necessarily a bad thing; in fact, most works (and specifically blogs) online have an "agenda".


Not having any agenda is a deeply unhealthy mental state as it implies a complete apathy to all outcomes. It is just that most "normal" agendas are effectively invisible as a Huffman encoded to a 0 bit default. Not wanting to be tortured to death is an agenda technically but contributes so little information that it only makes sense to state the opposite.




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