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Friday
Sometimes I think our greatest prophets are our authors of dystopian sci-fi. Figures like Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood (who prefers the term speculative fiction), and Octavia Butler have proved remarkably accurate in their predictions. And then there’s George Orwell, whose 1984 captures Trumpism so well that some rightwing book banners have been targeting it.
Recently joining these luminaries is Chinese engineer and novelist Cixin Liu. As described by the website The.Ink, Liu has disturbingly anticipated an Elon Musk style takeover in his novel The Three-Body Problem.
The novel is about an advanced society that must leave its collapsing planet and so sets out to take over Earth. To make sure that they don’t meet effective resistance, the inhabitants “monkey wrench human progress by distributing viral propaganda, recruiting allies in the gaming community, cutting sweetheart deals with oligarchs, and interfering with scientific research.”
This pretty much describes Musk’s DOGE initiative, which is treating the federal government like a video game, even as it steers lucrative contracts to Musk enterprises. Scientific research is especially taking a hit as funds are being cut off and people fired by Musk’s youthful tech vigilantes.
Having described the book, the article then quotes physicist Michael Lubbell from City College of New York to show the depth of the Musk attacks:
Musk has access to all the data on federal research grantees and contractors: social security numbers, tax returns, tax payments, tax rebates, grant disbursements and more. Anyone who depends on the federal government and doesn’t toe the line might become a target. This is right out of [Hungarian prime minister] Viktor Orbán’s playbook.
According to the article, Three-Body Problem “was received (and possibly intended) in China as a critique of the forced transformation of Chinese society during the Cultural Revolution.” Americans, however, are applying it to their own situation:
It’s as if the tech oligarchs who’ve journeyed from South Africa to remake America — the guys who, as therapist Daniel Shaw remarked, “read Orwell’s 1984 and decided the hero was Big Brother” — read Liu’s trilogy and decided the San-Ti (the alien invaders) were the heroes.
I haven’t read Three Body Problem but came across one passage that explains how the extraterrestrials—and how Donald Trump—have managed to scam the public and seize power:
You must know that a person’s ability to discern the truth is directly proportional to his knowledge.
No wonder Trump and Musk want to close down the Department of Education.
