The Future is a Trap: Venture Capital on Arrakis (Part 1)

Happy New Year.

We have moved into the future, past a line of numerical and astronomical demarcation that means very little to the animals and rocks. Yet we who created it embrace it as a milestone towards liberation, with even more despairing need than usual. All the days are dark, but if we mark a ‘new’ day, then certainly – our feeble brains insist – what comes next must be brighter.

Of course, no conjunction of rotating stars can guarantee a brighter future. Neither can meticulous planning, a passionate political base, or wildly advanced technology. That’s why, at the risk of jinxing it on its first day, 2021 might wind up being the perfect year to release Denis Villeneuve’s Dune.

This might be opaque if you have a passing familiarity with Dune, at this point a roughly Star Wars-like franchise with multiple film and television adaptations and an ‘expanded universe’ of books and games. The first book of the series, and David Lynch’s flawed but enthralling 1984 film, appear to tell the story of a prophetic superhuman, Paul Atreides, who liberates his subjects from a galactic empire.

But for Dune author Frank Herbert, this was just an opening feint. In the subsequent core works of the Dune series, it becomes clear that Paul’s ambitions – or more properly, his fate – lead only to chaos and death. The hero becomes the villain, quite explicitly. The same, later in the series, happens to other characters.

At the crux of all of their failures is the central component of the Dune universe, the spice melange, a drug that grants the ability to see the future. The banning of artificial intelligence has made human prophecy the backbone of galactic society, predominantly through the grotesquely mutated Guild Navigators who use spice-fueled insight to guide starships through hyperspace.

But for Paul Atreides and others who seek to use prophecy for political or military power, the point of the Dune series is clear: Seeing through time only increases the risk of being surprised and destroyed by its flow. Foreknowledge, we are shown over centuries, creates blind spots that lead to spectacular failures. The overriding message of the books is that extreme political, economic, or social control, even if they are seized in the name of hopeful ends, create stresses and blind spots that lead only to periods of even greater rupture, strife, and suffering.

The tragedy of Paul Atreides is that he knows perfectly well from very early in his journey to godhood that he can’t control what is coming. To the inattentive reader, the first Dune is a hero’s journey, but in fact it is the beginning of a jihad that will wreak destruction across the universe in Paul’s name, and destroy from within the very people he sets out to save. Paul knows all of this – but any action he takes to derail the jihad would only, he also sees, make things worse.

I read Dune as a teenager, but I have to confess it hasn’t been as much an object of obsession for me as other sci-fi projects. This point about the trap of prescience has been driven home to me through an amazing podcast, DunePod, which I discovered about a month ago. The show is a sort of prep course for Velleneuve’s Dune, with most episodes focusing on a film or other work related to the stars and creators of the new Dune, such as Villeneuve’s prior films or projects like Rogue One, which was shot by Dune’s cinematographer.

The meditation on time and prophecy is particularly interesting because of what appear to be DunePod’s close ties to Silicon Valley. One of the hosts is based in San Francisco; Slack CTO Cal Henderson appeared on an amazing episode about 2011’s Drive; and the New York Times tech reporter Mike Isaac appeared on an even better ep about 1974’s Zardoz.

This is, primarily, a great index of the high level of discourse and insight on the pod – these are sharp, sharp people. You’ll want to watch every movie discussed (or as I had to do in the case of Drive, pause the episode and watch the film before the spoilers get too heavy).

But (and here finally is my real point) there is also considerable irony to the SV presence. For who is closer to Paul Atreides, in our world, than a tech startup founder or a Silicon Valley venture capitalist? The job of a VC is to both predict and create the future – to identify the collapsing of the waveform, and occupy the strategic space at which a probability becomes a reality.

This is true of all financial realms, of course, but the technology class has a particular enthusiasm for Dune. Just as The Lord of the Rings became a touchstone for hippies, Dune became a kind of manual for revolution for the techies who followed in their footsteps. It fits almost too neatly into the ideaspace of futurist Stuart Brand, for instance, creator of both the back-to-the-land Whole Earth Catalog and the early bulletin board the WELL.

Yet the entire point of Dune is that the effort to shape the future is not just mostly fruitless, but often dangerous. Have its adherents in Silicon Valley, a veritable army of futurists, completely missed – or completely repressed – this message?

The fate of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook are uncanny in their parallels to the fate of Paul. Zuckerberg was, unquestionably, a singularly gifted and driven young person. He seems to have truly believed that he could ‘bring the world together,’ just as Paul aimed to bring the universe together. And, just like Paul, the forces he unleashed in the name of revolutionary good have turned into an uncontrollable, deadly catastrophe – not a single great jihad, but many small ones, from Indonesia to the United States. He is, like Paul, a tragic figure. (And Zuckerberg’s perpetual look of stunned confusion in recent years suggests this is beginning to become clear to him.)

The difference, of course, is that Zuckerberg isn’t the ultimate source of his own power or position. He was installed, effectively, by the likes of Peter Thiel, who in 2004 became Facebook’s first outside investor. Thiel’s investing philosophy is practically a caricature of rationalist overconfidence in prophecy, particularly his famous statement that “competition is for losers.” The way to succeed in 21st century capitalism, Thiel believes, is not to outcompete the alternatives, but to make sure there aren’t any alternatives.

In other words, Thiel – famously if superficially ‘libertarian’ – believes in the power of a smart enough business to create the conditions of its own success. To, in effect, predict the future, and in turn control it.

But Dune, published in 1965, is a meditation on the foolishness of this outlook. On the one hand, Thiel and the other tech gods are inheritors of Joseph Schumpeter’s ethos of creative destruction – the idea that freewheeling innovation leads to improvements in human life, even if it destroys some individual lives and institutions along the way. On the other hand, though, Thiel and other venture capitalists believe in their own power to predict and shape the future amidst this free-market chaos. Both of those things cannot simultaneously be true, even for truly gifted individuals.

I’ll pause here, because there is much, much more to say – particularly about Efficient Markets Hypothesis, the ideology that underpins the stock market success of future bets like Tesla, yet is manifestly and inevitably wrong as Paul Atreides’ quest for control. That conjunction will be the focus of Part 2 of this essay, coming soon.

Other Pandemic Notes

MF DOOM is Dead: I listened to Operation: Doomsday and cried for about an hour last night when I found out. Apparently Daniel Dumile passed in October, but his family didn’t disclose until yesterday. In a way, I appreciate that – get the news out with the rest of 2020’s awfulness. I’ll have a lot more to say about DOOM’s genius and why it hit me so hard (for a start, he was only 7 years older than me). He’s in my book under the same heading as William Burroughs, Chester Himes, Ishmael Reed, and William Faulkner: a guy who effortlessly bridged the street and the conceptual heights, writing surrealist poems with a baseball bat while sipping from a vial of unrecognizable sludge. One of the all-time real ones.

The Void (2016): One of the great contemporary Lovecraftian/weird films, nearly up there with The Endless (2017) and Annihilation (2018). Though its gore-and-adventure vibe is more akin to Event Horizon or Mandy (2019) than those abstract thinkers, there are still some great breaking-open-the-head moments when the Great Beyond rushes in to an inexplicable outbreak of demonic energy in a remote hospital. The hopelessness and insanity of the situation is incredibly visceral. A must-watch.

Underwater (2019):Absolute dogshit. I heard this talked up as a decent, even somewhat artsy monster movie, and it’s structurally roughly comparable to The Thing or Alien. It even cops the Moebius style for its diving suits. But scratch the surface, and it’s one of the most insultingly conceived and lazily written things I’ve ever seen.

There are major, intractable issues with the setup. Above all, the movie doesn’t remotely reckon with what it would really be like to operate at three or four or more miles under the ocean. The station where the movie is based springs leaks that just … leak, instead of mercilessly crushing everything inside. The characters have (essentially) guns that can shoot at more than 100 atmospheres, which by any logic whatsoever, is absurd. (Yes, I know this is a sci-fi movie. But it’s very pointedly a gritty near future sci-fi movie, while the things being accomplished would seem to require far-future tech indistinguishable from magic.)

But, as fun as the bad science is to talk about, the real problem is that this movie is nothing but a gaping hole draped in leftover Alien designs. The creatures at the heart of the film are unexplained – which is often a good thing for a horror movie. But this movie exemplifies Hemingway’s Hills like White Elephants principle: A writer doesn’t have to tell the audience everything that’s going on. But the writer themselves has to know. And Underwater doesn’t have a clue.

The movie explains its (also lazily designed) monsters with one incomplete idea: “We drilled too deep.” It’s a line uttered by a character about a third of the way through, and that’s that. There are similarly vague allusions to the company that runs the deep-sea drilling rig: nothing works, pointing to corporate greed and inhumanity, but that idea is never developed or tied to any other part of the story. No threads, for instance, suggesting than anyone was aware of the danger and ignored or suppressed it, etc. This gives the characters no contextual motivation aside from survival, making the movie nothing but a dressed-up story about five people you can’t be bothered to care about running from the Boogeyman in a setting that blows through your suspension of disbelief just about every five minutes.