On reading Banks for thirty years and finding Joiler Veppers running half of Silicon Valley
Okay, long post, but I think this community in particular will get it.
I started reading the Culture when I was twelve. I'm almost forty now. Already as a kid I had the sense Banks had written the one utopia I was willing to commit to. Anti-imperial, anti-priestly, very funny, and willing to take its own moral expense seriously (which is why Special Circumstances exists). I've re-read most of them more than six times.
The figures building the technologies the Culture would presuppose (frontier AI, energy infrastructure, longevity, neural interfaces) are reading Banks and citing him by name. Naming SpaceX drone ships after his Minds. Quoting him as a self-descriptor on Twitter. And then building, carefully and at scale, the institutional conditions the Culture novels and Banks would diagnose as pre-Culture barbarism.
You all remember Joiler Veppers. Surface Detail, 2010. Richest man on Sichult. Made his money in entertainment, finance, infrastructure. Charming on television, describes himself when pressed as a kind of civilizational steward. Runs as a side business a network of virtual Hells, afterlife environments engineered for the eternal torture of digitized minds, leased to client governments and faith cultures for a per-soul fee. Banks's narrator says he does this not out of cruelty exactly, but because the business is good and the demand is real. In the novel the Culture removes him, of course
Banks wrote Veppers already in 2010. Before Brexit. Before the Techno-Optimist Manifesto. Before Anthropic existed. Before Musk's 2018 tweet ("If you must know, I am a utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks" which has been discussed much). The figure has since become several specific people. The same charm; the same stewardship-language; the same indifference to what is being engineered when the engineering is profitable. The Musk–Veppers parallel is the thing that made me write the essay.
The same people quote Player of Games approvingly, which is the part that gets me, because Player of Games is structurally a parable about labs running optimization games as political acts, and Gurgeh plays the imperial game to defeat the empire, not to scale it.
I wrote it down, around five thousand words, sourced, if you want to follow. The essay walks through Andreessen's manifesto, the Musk eight-year arc of keeping Banks's word and discarding the politics, the SpaceX ship-names, the harder Amodei case (he has read Banks; he is still building the lab). And it tries gently, with the books still on the table to take Banks back from the figures who learned his name and skipped Surface Detail.
I think the misreading will get worse before it gets better, and getting the diagnostic on the page now, with sources, felt necessary. I'm posting it here because if any community in the world is going to read this generously and also tear it apart accurately where it deserves it, it's this.
Banks's afterlife is one of the stranger things in contemporary tech culture. Nearly thirteen years after his death he's shaping more high-stakes institutional thinking than almost any twentieth-century novelist working in the genre. We see his villains' template get adopted, sincerely, by his most enthusiastic readers. He would have laughed and warned us. Wait, he did warn us. It's in the books.
https://matiasseidler.substack.com/p/on-reading-iain-m-banks