Superman, Wooly Mammoths, and the Art of Progress
Film and fiction offer ways of reimagining science and technology policy. Two cool events I went to this week painted different cinematic paths to progress.
Top Gun wasn’t just a hit movie - it was an HR masterclass.
Though actual figures are not clear, the US Naval Institute claimed that applications to naval aviator positions increased by 500% in the wake of the 1986 blockbuster.
Now this isn’t me saying that Miles Teller is about to get a whole generation of young yanks committed to patrolling the South China Sea. What I am saying is that art (and in particular, film, TV and fiction) has been underrated in policy circles as a medium to shift societal decision-making.
I am not the first person to make this claim. FTX Future Fund, the social impact philanthropy organisation led by crypto lord Sam Bankman-Fried, includes funding ideas for new movies and documentaries such as Contagion and An Inconvenient Truth. Similarly, Matt Yglesias wrote about the power that films like ‘Don’t Look Up’ could have in making the public take existential risks more seriously.
Yet being at a couple of events in the last couple of days has reminded me of this fact. These events have spoken to two alternative utopian visions of the future, and two subtly different visions of the role that technology plays in securing such flourishing.
King of the cyberhippies
The first event was hosted by Stripe Press. The publishing arm of the payments giant have begun to carve out a space as thought leaders in the progress and innovation movement.
Publishing a swathe of books covering areas such as the history of science, open source, and scaling startups, Stripe have also ventured into documentaries.
We are as Gods, a feature length documentary that I was fortunate enough to attend a Stripe Press screening of, detailed the innovative, chaotic life of Stewart Brand.
Brand is an 83 year old who was one of the leaders of the early environmentalist movement. Starting the Whole Earth Catalogue (Described by Steve Jobs as “Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along”), Brand, inspired by a particularly creative acid trip, was also instrumental in getting NASA to take the first photograph of the earth from space.
Throw in a boatload more of LSD and laughing gas along the way, and Brand began to spearhead what is known as the ‘de-extinction’ movement. Here, the aim is to use genetic technology to revive species that are no longer with us, such as the passenger pigeon and the wooly mammoth.
Beyond this being simply very cool, Brand believes that reviving certain species could be crucial to maintaining planetary security and fighting the effects of long term climate change. The documentary goes into a lot of detail covering the challenges that melting Siberian permafrost could have on greenhouse gas emissions, arguing that recreating biomes replete with species such as wolves and mammoths could reduce soil temperature, thereby reducing the melting of these frozen laters.
Now any work with Brian Eno producing the score is going to be worth a look at - but this really was a superb production.
Brand lived a wonderful, varied and motivated life laced with starry ambition. He made valuable contributions in many different fields, having a lot of fun along the way. He was anti-cheems in every sense.
The feature itself was also self-aware. Not entirely being a love-in for Brand, it presented challenges to his position, with a range of de-extinction sceptics questioning his logic and theory of change.
In this sense, the documentary captured a lot of the key fissures in the environmentalist movement - between natural essentialists that were technology agnostic, and what you may describe as ‘solutionists’ who saw innovation as the central way to deal with our climate breakdown problem.
Mr Stark, I don’t feel so good
Ted Chiang probably sits somewhere in between these two camps.
The American sci-fi writer, who I saw speak at CogX Festival this week, is very interested in the role that well-governed technology can play in securing human flourishing.
Yet the author of Story of Your Life, in both his writing and interviews, is clearly mindful of placing enormous faith in technology.
A snippet from this interview with Ezra Klein has really stuck with me.
“Because one of the things that I’m always interested in, when thinking about stories, is, is a story about reinforcing the status quo, or is it about overturning the status quo? And most of the most popular superhero stories, they are always about maintaining the status quo. Superheroes, they supposedly stand for justice. They further the cause of justice. But they always stick to your very limited idea of what constitutes a crime, basically the government idea of what constitutes a crime.
Superheroes pretty much never do anything about injustices perpetrated by the state. And in the developed world, certainly, you can, I think, make a good case that injustices committed by the state are far more serious than those caused by crime, by conventional criminality. The existing status quo involves things like vast wealth inequality and systemic racism and police brutality. And if you are really committed to justice, those are probably not things that you want to reinforce. Those are not things you want to preserve.
But that’s what superheroes always do. They’re always trying to keep things the way they are. And superheroes stories, they like to sort of present the world as being under a constant threat of attack. If they weren’t there, the world would fall into chaos. And this is actually kind of the same tactic used by TV shows like “24.” It’s a way to sort of implicitly justify the use of violence against anyone that we label a threat to the existing order. And it makes people defer to authority.”
This is not like, I think, intrinsic to the idea of superheroes in and of itself. Anti-egalitarianism, that probably is intrinsic to the idea of superheroes. But the idea of reinforcing the status quo, that is not. You could tell superhero stories where superheroes are constantly fighting the power. They’re constantly tearing down the status quo. But we very rarely see that.”
Ezra Klein Show
Chiang’s riposte is essentially - why is Batman using his wealth to beat up petty criminals when he could be helping to improve public services and create city-improving technologies in a dysfunctional, unjust Gotham City?
And this fictional understanding of superheroes and their purpose is somewhat analogous to fictional and non-fictional debates over AI.
Superheroes, like fictional general purpose AI, are effectively magic. However, their powers are hardly distributed, often being embodied in the power of one individual. The risk is therefore that such power is not used on projects that could improve the material wellbeing and increase the autonomy of everyday people.
Chiang’s writing often laments that this power concentration will be a feature of frontier shifting technologies, masking itself as autonomous when the agency truly lies with its cadre of creators. Here, you can see a divergence between Chiang and Brand’s perspectives. In Chiang’s analysis, the gene-editing of the de-extinction theory is the superhero that evades tougher political questions. That being said, comparing CRISPR to Iron Man does seem to be overly dismissive of gene-editing’s potential population level benefits.
Utopia for anti-cheemsists
For what it's worth, I don’t think that Chiang is pro-cheems. He is aiming to remodel our conception of ‘utopia’ - to one where there are ‘clear mechanisms for people to deal with their problems’. His version of utopia probably requires a great deal more sacrifice than the Stripe Press/Stewart Brand view, but I actually think both these perspectives should be able to exist in a positive progress plurality.
Both Brand and Chiang embrace long term thinking. The Stripe Press film ends with Brand playing a hand in the creation of the 10,000 year clock, whilst Chiang’s short story Exhalation meditates on dealing with climate change to secure the future of humanity. Both are highly creative, imagining alternative societies in a world lacking in visionaries.
But more importantly, both are optimistic. It may be on a slightly different scale, and for slightly different reasons, but Chiang’s work and Stripe’s documentary offer reasons to be cheerful about our future. They make you think about the world and your role in it, inspiring you to take action and build new things.
And here, I can’t help but return to Top Gun and the military recruitment stations set up outside movie theatres.
Most artists do not operate as some sort of ‘social architect’ offering different visions of the future. But the greatest bits of art, the most thought-provoking cultural expressions, are what could tip us from one person’s utopia into another.
With this in mind, if you could find and fund the career of 10 more David Attenborough’s, each spending half a century doing inspirational broadcasting in fields such as animal welfare, global poverty, racial and gendered inequality, and pandemic preparedness, why shouldn’t we?
This would be a drop in the ocean compared to the shift in public mindset towards some of the world’s most pressing problems. You might not be able to test its effectiveness through a randomised control trial, but you can be pretty certain that there would be a seismic impact.
Of the Week - My Favourites
Youtube Video: F.D. Signifier - Dissecting the Manosphere
This is an excellent video essay that combines the sociology of incel culture with Nietzsche and Batman references.
Song: innaSelf - Summer Rio
When summer rolls round, I always get back into Sambasss, a Brazilian take on drum and bass. V good mood lifter.
Article: Robert Saunders - ‘Let them eat cake’: Conservatism in the age of Boris Johnson (Renewal)
Boris Johnson is often represented as an anomaly in Conservative history: an ‘unconservative’ figure who has transformed his party into something new. Yet this piece does an excellent job at showing that Johnsonism has clear roots in the Conservative tradition, and Johnson himself is as much a product as the architect of changes in the party.
Thanks for listening to the pod.