{"text":[[{"start":7.2,"text":"Elon Musk took a giant leap into a science-fiction future this summer as SpaceX completed the biggest initial public offering in history. The rocket company had claimed it would help humanity ascend in stages from building orbital AI data centres to Mars colonies and eventually a “Kardashev II-level civilization” — one so technologically advanced it could encase the sun to capture its entire energy output."}],[{"start":32.82,"text":"Amid all the excitement, there were familiar notes. Silicon Valley likes to dress its ambitions in the glistening garb of science fiction from the 1950s, when authors such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke spun tales of humanity spreading through the stars."}],[{"start":48.6,"text":"But what kind of future are we really hurtling towards? Increasingly, it is looking much more like the one anticipated by the drugged-up 1960s oeuvre of Philip K Dick, filled with deranged billionaires, machines that claim consciousness, hallucinated worlds and political breakdown. Musk and his brethren seem more like escapees from this universe than the Asimovian super-geniuses they imagine themselves to be. It is Dick’s far weirder sensibilities that offer the better guide to Silicon Valley today."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":79.26,"text":"Dick created queasy worlds where everything seems to teeter on collapse. His novels themselves often threatened to unravel — featuring convoluted plots, ideas sometimes leading nowhere and misogynistic portrayals of women, all wrapped up in unenviable prose. Drugs and financial exigencies help explain the rushed writing; he could not have worked on six novels in 1964 without massive abuse of amphetamines. Regular lurches into paranoia help explain why his legacy was uneven. The list of people Dick denounced to the FBI includes Polish writer Stanisław Lem, as well as literary critics Darko Suvin and Fredric Jameson."}],[{"start":119.02,"text":"Dick died in 1982, mostly having failed to achieve significant literary appreciation. He was not a good writer for his time. But he is a great writer for ours."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":128.9,"text":"Technology in Dick’s world is invasive and glitchy, sometimes telling us that it refuses to work, or holding us to ransom. At the start of his 1969 novel Ubik, the apartment door smugly demands a payment for opening and closing. The protagonist, after losing the negotiation, decides to unscrew the door from its frame, prompting the latter to threaten a lawsuit. When characters in Dick’s world yell at the TV, the TV sometimes yells right back. The speech modules of our personal devices don’t yell, but they are beginning to combine alert attention with dim-witted obsequiousness, anticipating our needs while profusely apologising for irretrievably wiping our database."}],[{"start":172.38,"text":"Machines can be mistaken for humans and humans for machines. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), the basis of the film Blade Runner, human bounty hunters come to resemble the soulless androids they hunt down for money. In the movie, as in many of Dick’s short stories, they are unsure whether they might be androids themselves."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":193.9,"text":"Dick’s fascination with the fragility of reality and what it means to be human stemmed from deep conviction and a mental breakdown. His speech-turned-essay “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later” revealed that the two questions that fascinated him were “What is reality?” and “What constitutes the authentic human being?” Society is starting to grapple with AI psychosis, when people mistake predictive text algorithms for friends, boyfriends and girlfriends. Maybe they don’t want to know better."}],[{"start":224.34,"text":"Above all, it is Dick’s understanding of political economy that is urgently relevant today, as Trump-produced instability is compounded by AI-generated unreality."}],[{"start":234.22,"text":"An unholy tangle of elites tends to hover over every Dick novel: corporate titans who have created new technologies, property developers who own a chunk of Mars or a demesne in California, conglomerates managed by charismatic founders. Though some government authorities are checked out (replaced by androids), others run technology-fuelled police states that reduce citizens to bundles of data that can be monitored and eliminated."}],[{"start":259,"text":"These elites are smart and conniving but prone to a particular kind of self-deception. They imagine that they are entangled in the plots of some mastermind who is even more sinister than they are. Dick’s most brilliant move is to reveal that the malign forces reshaping the world are in fact petty, self-obsessed and jealous beings."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":280.02,"text":"In Ubik, nearly everyone dies soon after the book’s opening. The bodies of the former employees of Runciter Associates are stored in cryogenic facilities that allow them to imagine a shared world into being. As they try to unravel the mystery of their death, the characters are devoured by a seemingly terrifying force. It turns out to be a rather disturbed adolescent demanding their attention. That may seem painfully familiar to Americans whose cable news and social media feeds are all Donald Trump, all the time."}],[{"start":312.3,"text":"A similar revelation anchors Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974). The novel portrays Jason Taverner, a celebrity and member of an elite that is genetically enhanced for brains and beauty. He wakes up one day to a world in which no one knows who he is. Taverner was undone not by one of his peers but by a troubled fan who has consumed a drug that warps reality. In our world too, the feedback loops of fame have become increasingly deranged. It isn’t just pop stars but venture capitalists and CEOs whose sense of the real is inexorably chiselled away by the attentions of their adorers and execrators."}],[{"start":350.34,"text":"The fusion of business and hallucination reaches its peak in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), in which a business tycoon returns from the stars, promising to fulfil the wishes of everyone who steps into the fantasy worlds that he has created. Eldritch’s every move threatens to destabilise the existing corporate and political order. Those who use his product, a drug called Chew-Z, find themselves plunged into worlds that revolve around Eldritch, infecting them with his blurred vision, alienation and despair. Though Elon Musk has reportedly been a prolific drug user, he has not yet released his own variety of dope."}],[{"start":388.04,"text":"In the 1960s and 1970s, the physicist Freeman Dyson speculated about megastructures that could encircle whole stars to capture their energy, before dismissing the idea as “a little joke”. Now such ideas inspire not just science-fiction novels but SpaceX’s business plans. Wild speculative fiction has become the fuel of wild financial speculation. Morgan Stanley projects that SpaceX’s revenue could reach $3.4tn by 2040, presumably the year that these particular stock analysts expect to retire."}],[{"start":423.34,"text":"Grand visions of technological transformation are everywhere, and everywhere they hide realities that combine extraordinary moneymaking schemes with bizarre beliefs. On the one hand, Marc Andreessen’s venture capital partnership funds gambling apps and a start-up promising to “cheat on everything”; on the other, the Silicon Valley Trump whisperer promises that our descendants will “live in the stars”, writing his own quasi-religious credo, complete with “patron saints”. Peter Thiel combines a superb record of picking tech winners with an obsession with the eschaton; he has brought his gloomy discourses on the nature of the Antichrist to the doorstep of the Vatican. Sam Altman says that thanks to AI, we “are close to creating a genie that can grant any wish”."}],[{"start":468.58,"text":"Yet it is perhaps Mark Zuckerberg who is trying hardest to build a universe that Dick invented as a cautionary tale. The chief executive of Meta is working on an AI version of himself that can interact with employees, maybe so he won’t have to. Zuckerberg’s exhortations, however, have so far failed to win over Meta employees asked to allow all of their clicks to be recorded so that they can train their own AI replacements."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":494.02,"text":"All of these are Dickish characters. We live in a future that he would recognise immediately. Billionaires have dreamt up alternative realities that they try to pull everyone into, constructing homegrown myths of religions from apocrypha. We are building AI that seems so close to human as to even confuse its creators, while it often fails at basic human tasks. The political order is trying to co-opt the rising business elites — or is it the other way around?"}],[{"start":519.48,"text":"Dick’s political bugaboo of Richard Nixon may be farcically reincarnated as Donald Trump. The historian Gary Wills described Nixon’s personal tragedy of talent and resentment in his 1970 book Nixon Agonistes. Trump’s dark promises to restore order are not nearly as psychologically interesting, but they have been much more consequential in practice. Like Arnie Kott, the corrupt and venal union leader in Martian Time-Slip (1964), Trump has tried to turn back time and failed. The rest of us are trapped with Trump in his pretend universe where he won the election in 2020, while government policy falls into dank memes and decay. Instead of being made great again, America has become poorer, weaker and meaner. Our fate might have more dignity if Trump were less petty than he is."}],[{"start":569.58,"text":"Back in 1976, Ursula K Le Guin compared Dick to a “homegrown Borges”, whose subject matter was “reality and madness, time and death, sin and salvation”. He would be better recognised had he not been trapped in self-created theological and existential labyrinths after suffering his breakdown in the 1970s."}],[{"start":590.12,"text":"We live once more in an era that doesn’t make sense, however hard we look for some grand order. Dick’s combination of verve and madness in confronting the problems of the 1960s — Vietnam, suburbia, the cold war, drugs — holds three key lessons for today."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":606.34,"text":"First, our business and political elites are not paranoid enough, or at least not paranoid in the right way. Western leaders spend plenty of time fearing the designs of the fearsomely technocratic Chinese Communist Party. Though that may be merited, they should also dwell on far weirder threats: predatory imaginary realities, billionaires reshaping people’s information environments around their own alienation, machines that could be mistaken for human (and often are). Politicians obsess too much over ordinary geopolitics rather than the technologies and corporate interests that might devour their world."}],[{"start":640.86,"text":"Second, technology can still be an ally for human ends. Dick’s androids are not necessarily antagonistic towards their human progenitors. In Vulcan’s Hammer (1960), the novel’s equivalent of GPT-7 achieves sentient consciousness and decides to work with humanity in order to prevent the emergence of GPT-8. Dick’s aliens (his technological visions in another guise) tend to be friendly towards humanity; if they pose any threat, it is towards humanity’s political oppressors. Technology might be glitchy and churlish in Dick’s world. It also has a purposiveness that sometimes fits surprisingly well with people’s own purposes."}],[{"start":679.02,"text":"Third, and most importantly, these purposes should be built from the bottom up. We are confused by and entangled in the science-fiction futures that tech elites have dreamt up for us, demanding that we assent to their strange beliefs about humanity’s destiny amid the stars, the coming of the eschaton, the birth of conscious artificial intelligence, perhaps all at once. More traditional elites, with their self-serving nostalgia for a past world that was never as solid as they believed, aren’t any better as guides."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":708.32,"text":"We need to find our way back to reality: in Dick’s description, that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. Dick’s last novel describes his own madness from the outside through the eyes of Angel Archer, the one sympathetic and deeply rendered woman in all his work. She concludes that the only way out is through holding on to what is solid, and building up from small relationships."}],[{"start":730.9,"text":"Salvation is found in the ridiculous and the small — in Ubik, God takes the form of a spray can. It is also to be found in the people around us. Le Guin says that Dick is like Dickens in treating the “honesty, constancy, kindness and patience of ordinary people” as the bedrock of the world. The disturbed child in Martian Time-Slip begins to grow out of his madness when an aboriginal Martian brings him into communion by passing him a cigarette."}],[{"start":756.26,"text":"Much of what we used to believe in has gone away. Much of what obsesses us now might go away if only we stopped believing in it. The hypnotic powers of Trump and Musk are often a phantasm, losing their pull if people decline to be entranced."}],[{"start":770.28,"text":"Instead of gazing upwards to find our glorious cosmic destiny, we should be looking closer to home. What are the people around us doing to build things up, brick layered and mortared carefully on brick? How can we make solid connections between the communities we live in and the bigger structures of the world? How can technology be put to work for human ends, rather than becoming an end in itself? Those are the kinds of questions that helped guide Dick out of his madness. They can help guide us out of ours, too."}],[{"start":800.82,"text":"Henry Farrell is a professor at Johns Hopkins University, external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute and the co-author with Abraham Newman of ‘Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy’. Dan Wang is a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and the author of ‘Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future’"}],[{"start":821.14,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning"}],[{"start":834.32,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1786277572_7060.mp3"}