The Culture Doesn’t Save Us
How Iain M. Banks Warned Us About Detachment in an Age of Techno-Power.
Iain M. Banks’s The State of the Art holds up a mirror—both to its fictional utopia, and to the real-world techno-elite now drifting above us.
In The State of the Art, Iain M. Banks brings his post-scarcity utopia—the Culture—face-to-face with Earth. Not Earth as a ruin or a revolution, but our real, late-1970s, Cold War-plagued, inequality-ridden planet. It’s Banks’s most intimate and unsettling book. Because for all the Culture’s benevolence and moral superiority, it chooses not to act. It watches. It records. It leaves.
That decision—to do nothing—is chilling. And it feels all too familiar.
The Culture is often held up as a North Star for techno-optimists. Elon Musk named his autonomous drone ships after its starcraft. Jeff Bezos tried to bring the novels to screen. Mark Zuckerberg picked The Player of Games for his book club. But in their selective embrace, these billionaires seem to miss the point: the Culture isn’t a celebration of technology. It’s a mirror held up to power.
In the novella, the Culture sends a ship to observe Earth. On board, its agents debate whether to intervene. One wants to help. One wants to assimilate. The ship's AI—vast, godlike—finds humanity brutish but not worth the trouble. In the end, it recommends non-intervention.
Banks, ever the moral provocateur, leaves us in a void. Not with righteous fury or technological salvation, but with cold restraint. The Culture, for all its enlightenment, declines to uplift. It withholds not out of cruelty, but calculation.
In the real world, the tech elite have reached their own cultural orbit. With wealth and capability rivaling that of small nations, they too must choose: intervene, uplift—or walk away. Instead, they retreat into bunkers, buy social platforms, talk of Mars, or optimize the attention economy. Like the Culture’s Minds, they hover above—brilliant, maybe well-meaning, but detached.
To his credit, Musk has repeatedly framed his ventures in altruistic terms—saving the environment with Tesla, or making life multi-planetary through SpaceX. But over time, those ambitions collided with a different kind of gravity: regulatory inertia, geopolitical alignment, and the unpredictable logic of personality-driven power.
To admire the Culture while ignoring its central tension is to cosplay moral authority without accepting its burden. Banks gave us a utopia that questions itself. Our current techno-utopians embrace the aesthetics, not the ethics.
And that’s what makes The State of the Art so relevant right now. It’s not about whether utopia is possible. It’s about what happens when the powerful decide that humanity, in all its mess and pain, is just a passing curiosity. Something to study. Maybe to fix. But mostly—to leave alone.
We all live with contradictions. The point isn’t to scorn, but to reflect.
The Culture may be fictional. But its silence? We live in it every day.
This is the first post in what I hope will become a regular space to wrestle with ideas at the intersection of fiction, power, and strategy. If this resonated—or challenged you—consider subscribing or leaving a comment. Thanks for reading.