🎰 The techno-optimist Up Wing lesson that William Gibson's 'The Peripheral' inadvertently teaches

Also: 5 Quick Questions for … economist Heidi Williams on metascience, DARPA, and moonshots

Quote of the Issue

“It seemed to me when I wrote Neuromancer that it was an act of optimism because so many intelligent, well-informed adults around me at that time thought that our fate was going to be mutually-assured destruction. And in Neuromancer that hasn’t happened. They had a little abortive nuclear war and the global multinationals said, ‘You’re not doing that again.’ They did whatever it is they did that created that world. So it did seem optimistic to me then. Even today, a huge number of the world’s population would happily immigrate to the world of Neuromancer and be way better off. I’d rather live in Neuromancer than Mogadishu. It’s got more potential. It’s actually safer.” - William Gibson

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The Essay

🎰 The techno-optimist Up Wing lesson that William Gibson's "The Peripheral" inadvertently teaches

There’s so much pessimistic, Down Wing science fiction out there that I have to scrounge whatever snippets of Up Wing, techno-solutionist optimism wherever I can. Case in point: The Peripheral, the Amazon Prime series based on William Gibson’s 2014 book of the same name. (Season one ended last December, and it’s been renewed for a second. This piece will contain spoilers and is based on both the television show and book.)

Dystopian? Eight episodes in and I think that’s a reasonable description. The story takes place during two periods, the early 2030s and the turn of the (next) century. At some point during that span came the Jackpot, an “androgenic, systemic, multiplex” catastrophe. A “polycrisis,” one might call it. Gibson:

No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves.

But from that cluster of catastrophes, which killed off 80 percent of humanity, emerged a world that has taken a technological leap forward. The Age of Nanotechnology arrived just as humanity pulled the Jackpot lever — nanotech as in the self-assembling, molecular machines kind, not the tiny particles in sunscreen kind. This is a (so far) sci-fi technology that’s been described as a potential “genie machine.” It would be a technology enabling us to “build almost anything that the laws of nature allow to exist,” writes Eric Drexler in his 1986 book Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology. And nanotech wasn’t even the only advance. Again, Gibson:

With everything stumbling deeper into a ditch of shit, history itself become a slaughterhouse, science had started popping. Not all at once, no one big heroic thing, but there were cleaner, cheaper energy sources, more effective ways to get carbon out of the air, new drugs that did what antibiotics had done before, nanotechnology that was more than just car paint that healed itself or camo crawling on a ball cap. Ways to print food that required much less in the way of actual food to begin with. So everything, however deeply fucked in general, was lit increasingly by the new, by things that made people blink and sit up, but then the rest of it would just go on, deeper into the ditch. A progress accompanied by constant violence, he said, by sufferings unimaginable.

To be clear, the Up Wing lesson I’ve taken from The Peripheral isn’t that it doesn’t matter what disasters befall us or we bring upon ourselves, we’ll be OK in the end as long as we keep progressing technologically. The world of 2100, at least the future Great Britain, isn’t OK. Of no surprise to readers of Gibson’s other novels, the post-Jackpot world is one of oligarchy where powerful companies and criminal organizations uneasily co-exist — and government hardly seems independent of either. Not a liberal democratic world that practices World Economic Forum-approved buzzwords such as accountability and transparency. “Essentially feudal,” as one book character puts it.

My primary Up Wing takeaway concerns the issue of acceleration. The name of this newsletter suggests the importance I place on accelerating discovery, invention, innovation, and growth. For instance: What might our world look like today if energy production had fully nuclearized — first fission and then maybe fusion — as many proponents in the immediate postwar decades predicted last century?