Player Piano is the Novel of Our Moment

This Does Not Mean It’s Especially Good

To sum up Player Piano in as short a span of time as is possible, I would say something like this: “The WASP Mensa guy automation dystopia is bumming me out, but not so much that I can’t bang and infantilize my hot wife and go drinking with Roger from Mad Men. Also the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh is tooling around in a limo with some fat fop from the government and going ‘man, aren’t we all just slaves?’ every once in a while.” It’s pretty good, generally pleasant, intermittently funny, by no means Kurt Jr’s best. But its subject matter gives it a certain edge in our current moment. Player Piano deals with mass industrial automation and with the loss of meaning which results from technology marching onward and onward towards no apparent end beyond more. More efficient. More convenient. More disposable. More automatic. It’s impossible, especially in the early going, to not hear the sneering millenarian prophecy of generative AI dead-enders. Jobless, obsolete multitudes existing by the good grace of postgraduate degree philosopher kings asserting masculinity through softball games on team building retreats. It was in a mindset of doom and gloom about the race to the bottom which seems set to punctuate our era of techno-optimism that I read Kurt Vonnegut’s debut novel Player Piano.

Science Fiction is Not a Game of Horseshoes

A common misconception about speculative fiction is that its quality is directly correlated to how well it “predicts” something. This sort of mindset leads to a boring, self-important tunnel vision on the part of the reader. It drives reading and watching based on some establishment-endorsed canon pre-packed for consumption You see acute cases of this kind of thing among people that think of reading like we think of regular exercise and a healthy diet, a way to assert one’s virtue over the people who don’t partake, regardless of how involved the practitioner is, how much they get out of it. It’s the kind of thoughtless consumption you inevitably arrive at when driven by fear of being sorted into negative categories rather than simple curiosity or even a desire of entertainment. The idea is to just not be a zero, even if you’re only a few decimal places above the zeroes. It’s sad.

Good speculative fiction isn’t good because the author “got something right.” The purpose of speculative fiction (especially science fiction) is not to “predict the future” but to critique, accuse, and reframe the present. The idea of a work being “prescient” is just a marketing strategy from publishing houses with warehouses full of paperbacks to move. To wit: people think they should read William Gibson because he “predicted the internet” and that makes him important. You should actually read William Gibson because he’s really good at making up a weird bar or cafe and then making two weird people have a conversation there.

The Most Interesting Notes on this Piano are the Silent Ones

What makes Player Piano interesting in a modern context isn’t what it “predicts” but what it fails to account for. The present circumstances the novel was seeking to critique upon its original publication in 1952 are distant from our own in every sense of the term. Player Piano urges caution amid the can-do spirit of the Eisenhower years. A fear of misguided paternalism among a self-selecting elite. A minority granted the right to decide what’s best for the majority based on qualifications invented by themselves. The Oligarchy of the Ivy League. IQ test results and advanced degrees destroying the self-worth of the little guy. The human animal being reduced to a receptacle for microwave dinners, reminded all the time that we’ve got it so much better than all the generations who came before because Charlemagne never had a TV. It’s all very mid-20th century and if it feels like the problems it attempts to reckon with still persist today then, well, you fill in the blank and tell me what you think that means.

The most outdated thing about Player Piano’s futurism, and to me, maybe the most interesting, is that it assumes that all of this will come to pass out of a misguided desire to do good. The poor damn fools! They only wanted to help people! How quaint. If there’s an animating force behind the mad rush towards automation and efficiency in our modern economy, it certainly isn’t a desire to do good for the majority. Indeed, it’s just the opposite. A minority is seeking to do well. That’s what Kurt never could have predicted, or maybe just chose not to, for fear of seeming too obvious. The malaise of modern technocracy is not driven by misguided altruism, but by targeted malice. Bitter little nerds high off vengeful, sneering schadenfreude at those who backed the wrong economic horses, hold the wrong opinions, and make mean social media posts about the hairlines, physiques, and drug-induced hyperfixations of billionaires.

The Torment Nexus is Going to Save Our Q4 Earnings Report

It seems fair to me to say that the vast tech conglomerates which have served as protagonists of the global economy since the Great Recession have abandoned any illusion that their products and services will make our lives better. I’ll spare you the speech from atop the soapbox. You know what I mean. You live here too. You see them charging more for less, you see the wild-eyed pursuit of infinite growth within finite systems, you see the decay of social utilities in search of greater value for shareholders (or the simple vanity of private ownership).

Granted, the Silicon Valley aristocracy still have to keep up appearances, even if it’s just for themselves. If there’s one common feature between the engineers and managers of Player Piano and the tech rockstars of our current cultural moment it’s grandiose proclamations of the importance, the sacred quality, of the progress of technology. The certainty in the rightness of the cause which always must be projected outward. Rictus-grinned, unblinking. The imperative of selling the dream takes these people (the real ones) to some pretty hilarious places ideologically speaking. I particularly got a kick out of the extended persona-dissection of current Metropolitan Detention Center (Brooklyn) inmate Sam Bankman-Fried, which accompanied his similarly cathartic fraud trial. SBF was a proponent of “effective altruism,” which, as I understand it, is basically when you do enough methamphetamine to convince yourself and your polycule that doing world-historical amounts of fraud will result in a luxury space utopia. It’s hilarious until you realize how many of these fuckers believe this shit, or something similarly insipid. You gotta laugh or else you’ll cry.

You ever notice how miserable so many of these wealthy tech types are? How their money just enables and strengthens their neuroses? Minecraft man Notch alone in a $36 million dollar mansion full of rotting candy. Twitter guy Jack Dorsey starving himself in a sensory deprivation chamber, looking like John McCain’s roommate at the Hanoi Hilton with a net worth higher than the GDP of some countries. They’ve won, but they’re not free. They can never be free. Technology’s progress for its own sake moves in lock-step with the growth imperatives of market capitalism. Once you’ve grown, all that’s left to do is grow more. The awful reality of the tech economy is that its exemplars are all slaves to stock prices and profit margins. This is why they need to sell the dream. They need you to buy the stock, but they also need to convince themselves that it’s about more than the line going up. This is why they insist on all these bullshit discussions about Roko’s Basilisk, or the Singularity, or AGI or some other Adeptus Mechanicus nonsense. They need to believe that their lives are more than just running on a hamster wheel that generates money.

Player Piano is premised on the notion that automation and alienation will go hand in hand. That we’ll find misery in seeking comfort and that this misery will fester from the ground up, righteous but impotent. What it failed to consider was that the opposite may occur. The alienation, misery, and meaninglessness is most acute among the winners of this economy, and they’ve decided to repackage it, brand it, trademark it, and sell it to everyone else.