On Reading Iain M. Banks - by MATIAS K SEIDLER

MATIAS K SEIDLER

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On Reading Iain M. Banks<br>Andreessen wrote the inversion. Musk kept the word. Amodei read the parable. The papers are still on the page.

MATIAS K SEIDLER<br>May 17, 2026

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The papers

In October 2023, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen published a document on his firm’s website titled The Techno-Optimist Manifesto. In 1994, the Scottish novelist Iain M. Banks posted an essay to a science-fiction newsgroup titled A Few Notes on the Culture. They share a genre, a positive case for what the future ought to look like, the enemies of that future, the institutions that would have to disappear. One inverts the other. The history matters because the history is what tells you which inversion is the diagnostic.<br>Andreessen’s manifesto is the better-circulated. The litany, We believe, repeats one hundred and thirteen times in the text, accumulating like a tide. The patron saints arrive in procession: Hayek, Schumpeter, Friedman, the fictional John Galt of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (author, in 1909, of a document that appeared on the front page of Le Figaro announcing that beauty existed only in struggle and that poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, and who ten years later co-authored the founding manifesto of the fascist movement) and the accelerationist Nick Land, a foundational figure of the contemporary “Dark Enlightenment.” The enemies follow: ESG, sustainability, stakeholder capitalism, trust and safety, tech ethics, risk management, the Precautionary Principle. The conclusion, named for the term Andreessen borrows from Land, is the techno-capital machine. Machine is the right word. The good life is what the machine will produce. Late in the text, the manifesto pauses (to paraphrase, the author says, “a manifesto of a different time and place”) and substitutes one word for another in Marinetti’s old sentence: Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man. The substituted word is Marinetti’s. The substituting one is Andreessen’s. The substitution names what the manifesto is. Between the writing of the original and the writing of the substitution, the fascist movement Marinetti helped launch in 1919 came to power, governed Italy for twenty-one years, fought and lost a world war, and was dismantled by other people. 1909 was not 1919. 1919 was not 2023. The sentence remained available. The Enemy section, elsewhere in the text, names among its targets Thomas More’s Utopia, the 1516 humanist book that, in naming a better political order, gave the word to the language. The manifesto thanks no one, defers to nothing, and admits no past. Its theory of evil is roughly that of an entrepreneur who has been audited.<br>Banks’s essay, written a generation earlier, is calmer; a function of having thought the problem through. Banks died in 2013, ten years before Andreessen wrote his manifesto. A Few Notes on the Culture sets out the conditions under which the Culture (his series’s pan-galactic post-scarcity civilization) could plausibly exist: collective ownership of post-scarcity material conditions, abolition of money, abolition of the state in any recognizable hierarchical form, deliberative coordination through Minds whose authority is consent rather than command. The Culture has no markets. It has no money. Money is a sign of poverty, runs an old Culture saying. Money is the instrument by which a society admits that it has not yet figured out how to share, and the instrument by which it learns to forget the question. In A Few Notes, Banks describes it as anarchist and socialist, terms used in the senses that fell out of American usage about the time Hayek and Mises stopped being read for what they were actually arguing.<br>The inversion is total. Andreessen names as enemies (by category, by institution, by professional class) almost exactly the political conditions Banks’s Culture exists by. The trust-and-safety apparatus that Andreessen calls a brake on progress is the kind of consent-mediated coordination the Minds run on. The “regulators” he calls parasitic are the deliberative bodies through which Culture citizens collectively decide what may be done with the energy abundance. The sustainability discourse he names as enemy is the operational form of a civilization that has decided not to externalize its costs to anyone, including the unborn. The asymmetric returns to capital the manifesto treats as natural law are the mechanism Banks’s novels identify as the central political pathology of any society that has not yet completed the transition out of pre-Culture barbarism. Andreessen names as the future the conditions Banks names as the thing the future has to escape. This is documentary, on the page.<br>The two papers exist. One can read them side by side. And notice. The people now building the energy and intelligence...