The Culture represents the place we might hope to get to after we’ve dealt with all our stupidities: find and isolate/destroy the genes that code for xenophobia, should they exist. Plus we’d have to develop AIs and let them be themselves; another big task.

2018-02-07:

Banks’s conception of the Culture is driven by 3 central ideas. First, there is the thought that, in the future, basic problems of social organization will be given essentially technocratic solutions, and so the competition between cultures will be based upon their viral qualities, not their functional attributes. Second, there is postulation of Contact as essentially the reproduction mechanism of the Culture. And finally, there is the suggestion that the operations of Contact serve not just as an idle distraction, but in fact provides a solution to an existential crisis that is at the core of the Culture. This is what gives the Culture its ultraviral quality: it’s only reason for existence is to reproduce itself.

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