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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8504 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

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Interestingly, even Banks doesn't see mass migration as a feature of the Culture.

It's always fun to see just what a person given free reign to create their personal utopia leaves out or insists on. Banks stacks the deck with basically infinite material wealth but then goes back and insists that certain cultural traits (also including sex-swapping and universal promiscuity) are apparently necessary

In general the Culture doesn't actively encourage immigration; it looks too much like a disguised form of colonialism. Contact's preferred methods are intended to help other civilisations develop their own potential as a whole, and are designed to neither leech away their best and brightest, nor turn such civilisations into miniature versions of the Culture. Individuals, groups and even whole lesser civilisations do become part of the Culture on occasion, however, if there seems to be a particularly good reason (and if Contact reckons it won't upset any other interested parties in the locality).

A Few Notes on the Culture

YMMV on whether Banks is letting himself off the hook with "it's colonialism". And why.

Well, that’s the tension, isn’t it? The Culture wants to spread its memes, but one of those memes says they shouldn’t. All their material excuses are gone. Contact is their way to either resolve or dodge the contradiction, depending on how cynical Banks was feeling about America that year.

So “it’s too much like colonialism” is precisely in character. Any intervention has to be laundered through appeals to principles, plausible deniability, and maybe a historical study.

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