In his introduction to the book, The Best of Cordwainer Smith, J J Pierce recounts a story about Linebarger:
"While in Korea, Linebarger masterminded the surrender of thousands of Chinese troops who considered it shameful to give up their arms. He drafted leaflets explaining how the soldiers could surrender by shouting the Chinese words for ‘love’, ‘duty’, ‘humanity’ and ‘virtue’ – words that happened, when pronounced in that order, to sound like “I surrender” in English. He considered this act the single most worthwhile thing he had done in his life."
Young men with guns might have been more willing to go down fighting if they'd felt their surrender was dishonorable. Linebarger's tactic "sweetened the deal", and very likely saved a lot of lives.
the CIA and army works like the OG fortune 500 mega corp.
most of those anecdotes were likely detrimental to the good overall outcome, but they work as great promotion and effectiveness signal for some expensive team.
like some google PM boasting how they sold more pixels because of some dumb feature that actually annoyed all users, and everyone just bought pixels because the competition for even worse... but saying it was because that feature gets him and his director and their vp a promotion.
Linebarger is also the source of my anecdote about making it easier for german soldiers to surrender by giving them a "Surrender Form" to fill out and hand to Allied troops, with all the standard bureaucratic fields they were accustomed to in civilian life.
(His Psychological Warfare is well worth reading; not only does he warn the reader up front that PSYWAR operators are not always to be taken at face value, but I believe both 1948 and 1954 versions can be easily be read between the lines as promoting racial integration in the DoD; compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_9981 )
I was intrigued and looked that up. Found this which was very interesting: Paul M.A. Linebarger mentions the theory in Psychological Warfare, Infantry Journal Press, Washington D.C., 1948. He says:
"Germans liked things done in an official and formal manner, even in the midst of chaos, catastrophe and defeat. The Allied obliged, and gave the Germans various forms of very official looking ‘surrender passes.’ One is printed in red and has banknote-type engraving which makes it resemble a soap-premium coupon."
Looks like I'd misremembered and "General Eisenhower's personal signature" was the ticket, not having a form to fill out. Sorry!
> British expert Lee Richards told me that the picture itself is propaganda. By 1943 the M unit only sent "black propaganda" into Germany and the picture is probably meant to disguise that fact and imply that they just ballooned harmless white leaflets. In fact, he adds "Looking closely at a higher resolution version of the photo you can see that just the top leaflet is the Safe Conduct, beneath it are the forged Skorpion newspapers."
"White" propaganda is when you say stuff you wrote is yours; "black" when you claim it comes from the other guys.
Linebarger goes at length into the problem of "source attribution", which, however difficult it was in the 1940s, can only be even more so nowadays.
The whole concept of bureaucracy itself is propaganda to convince you to that you have no choice but to submit to the bureaucracy's whims. "Computer says 'no'."
> ...to persuade his fellow-countrymen that their customs and traditions were not the universal laws of reason, but only the peculiarly fine development of one civilization
Our current day is so dominated by nationalist rhetoric that I can't imagine what this would even look like on an international stage. It sometimes seems like there's always a convenient excuse to put state politics ahead of humanity itself....
Companies use to be the same complete with executions and slavery. We now have a clumsy but workable set of rules for that. The only thing that gets in the way of making the same for government is apathy and nihilism. We don't believe we each have an important role to play. If we ever do it will be much like nationalism.
While there are certainly many other forms of slavery than the sort of chattel slavery that we've supposedly collectively moved beyond, I don't think it's a very controversial statement to point out that capital would happily resume buying and selling labor as assets directly if governments didn't stop them.
I'm not sure I buy this progressive narrative, but i for damn sure don't expect anything from my employer that isn't legally obligated.
Anyway, corporations still engage in slavery with open endorsement from major powers including the US: they just launder it through supply chains that are broadly outside the reach of states with leverage over them. See eg the supreme court's repeated endorsement of slave labor outside the US (thank you Nestle & Neal Katyal).
More known as "public realations". In 30's Edward Barneys thought it would be more convincing to use this term after "propaganda" become linked to Nazis.
Myth and folklore has always been used as an instrument for defining culture and reinforcing it. Nothing is a better example of this than the myriad of Bibles produced during Charlemagne's rein, and these manuscripts are the progenitors of the English bible. A source for the curious, https://www.purecambridgetext.com/post/charlemagne-and-the-e...
So what does this author consider “psyops”, exactly? I assume anything that subverts the culture being maintained by the ruling class in the current time for a given place.
> So what does this author consider “psyops”, exactly?
Linebarger was employed by the US Army during WWII with a Psychological Warfare MOS and wrote a textbook (with the obvious name, available in the obvious places) on the subject; after that, having been among the group that "lost China", he updated his textbook with lessons learned.
(but yes, subverting the culture* which the other guys' ruling class maintains to keep their subjects fighting on their behalf is an obvious part of the job; Linebarger gives biblical examples demonstrating this line of work, and the Cyrus Cylinder fits in his model. He was himself part of the class depicted in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPPpjU1UeAo and, at least by the 1954 version of his book, was aware how this may have damaged his side's credibility in the eyes of the modal chinese peasant)
* culture explains the stasis hypothesised in 1984: because all three geopowers have superficially-different but structurally-identical socioeconomics, they have a shared interest in not attempting to subvert each other deeply, only competing superficially.
>This guy who wrote about subversive cat women and robot cities and weapons made from angry psychic weasels and mind control sex between people who are literally floating naked inside a chamber of flames – he had also codified the U.S. military’s approach to psyops at the dawn of the Cold War? Really??
That part is not super surprising. There was a ton of para-psychological, New Age woo-woo happening within military circles of the 60s, 70s, 80s. Men who stare at Goats is a fun book that delves into some of the really bizarre psychological experiments the US military ran and a lot of pop culture draws from that intersection, Metal Gear Solid for example. There was a thing called the "Human Potential Movement" that originated in 60s hippie circles that somehow made it's way to the military as well and influenced some apparent programs trying to create superior soldiers.
It's pretty hilarious and a little bit concerning that these ideas were sometimes as popular within these institutions as they were in the conspiracy theories about them.
These institutions always appear ultra-serious from the outside, but in the inside they are just an anthill of idiots running around in absurd bureaucracy.
Heh, the ultimate Spanish slapstick comic book called "Mortadelo y Filemón", which first began parodying Sherlock Holmes and, next, James Bond, it's a more proper depiction about who idiotic state agencies where in Spain in the 70s-80's, if not worldwide. Imagine a more idiotic duo than Don Quixote and Sancho Panza but in a modernish set, a la Supeagent 86, where the Spanish CIA-like agency it's filled with dumb, incompetent agents and superiors everywhere fighting outdated technology and with an 'IT'/scientic lab with a mad doctor proposing crazy inventions to fight the crime...
And the IRL depiction wasn't that far fetched...
In the Arpanet days, a lot of people walked 'inside' the net as if your aunt Gertrude walked inside an official secret bulding carelessly without too much effort...
Close, but MyF began in the 50's. Later, with the first James Bond films, the UFO craze, mad/futuristic technology an such, MyF stepped up from being private detectives to become full members of an parodic agency.
And, as Alan Ford, the critizised the Spanish society/politics as well.
And maybe the OGs Metal Gear 1 and 2 under MSX, which now have proper English translations to be played anywhere. OpenMSX it's a good emulator.
For Spanish speakers/readers, there's a short,half hilarious scifi/fantasy/triller/comedy novel called 'Más fría que la guerra' (colder than [the] war), which begins with Woodstock hippies summoning dark entities from who knows where, a la Lovecraft. You'll get these military/agency tropes and lots more. BTW, for Latin Americans, CESID = basically old CIA-like state agency from Spain.
Indeed; the novel it's set in an alternate 80's with a cold war still going on. The books begins
with a Francoist Spain which never got into democracy because of the paranormal events of the 60's in the USA, and then the world opens up making the main characters roam between different places around the globe.
Including the psychological torture research the proto-CIA conducted at Harvard on a teenage boy named Ted Kaczynski, which made him into the "Unabomber"
> and a lot of pop culture draws from that intersection, Metal Gear Solid for example
metal gear solid and later are best thought of as ninja stories that put on a tom clancy veneer. that a bunch of psy-ops and other initiatives kind of line up with that genre all the better, but when they didn't kojima just sort of handwaved them away. like there was a vampire guy in MGS2, and sexy robot ladies in MGS4.
I have a different take. People are suprisingly capable of doublethink. Much fun is made of the prevalence of furries among IT administrators, but consider that many of these people also work at the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon, the Pentagon, and the NSA. People convince themselves of whatever they feel they need to believe.
Another example of doublethinking would be anticommunists and grant recipients in one person. Or democrat supporting censorship/desinformation regulations.
I agree with your latter example, but not the former. It is perfectly reasonably be against some government policy while at the same time choosing to benefit from that policy. To claim otherwise is to be Mister Gotcha: <https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/>
Then you support centrally planed economics that ruin a free market.
Benefit from system that you are against sounds like hypocrisy. Also, could be morally unacceptable to benefit from money of involuntary collected money - taxes.
Let me get this straight. You say that just because I believe someone can be against a government policy while at the same time benefiting from that policy, that I therefore ”support centrally planed economics that ruin a free market”? That’s quite the leap.
I benefit from society all the time. I buy cheap food from the store, and the low prices are a benefit I get from societal policies which I do not agree with. To avoid hypocrisy, would I have to grow my own food?
Having cheap food at the store and being eligble for grants, or tax breaks, are all benefits which result from policies with which the beneficiary might not agree.
nsa today is full of furies. pretty much all the staff out of Hawaii (analysts) and Langley (liaisons) is all furies and anime girls avatars on the employee chat thing i can't name.
My expectation is that this has to do with there being a critical mass of autistic or otherwise neurodivergent persons who work in these spaces.
There are many interests more common to people on the autistic spectrum. Gender and identity is experienced as much more performative and arbitrary by many on the spectrum.
> It's pretty hilarious and a little bit concerning that these ideas were sometimes as popular within these institutions as they were in the conspiracy theories about them.
Can you expand on what you have in mind here? This seems like the polar opposite of my take on it.
Yeah, imagine if they didn't check and it turned out to work somehow. Various biological stuff would have probably been a better bet, I think they took the psy stuff too far in some places.
I once played an indie JRPG that took inspiration from Cordwainer Smith and some other authors. It's untranslated but the Santaclara drug is a usable item that acts like a Phoenix Down.
Canada for the most part is ultra exposed to hostile foreign nation state propaganda. Whereas USA's cyber army is protecting against this.
the problem with unfiltered internet is that bad actors across the world can simply post upon social media and cause problems. You need some sort of defense against this, but Canada is too broke to afford a legitimate cyber army unlike the rest of the world.
One of the interesting things that happened when I was writing this book.
When this happened, I made the early prediction this guy was going to be Canadian. In fact, I could have predicted he would be from BC but I didn't. There was absolutely nothing early on to suggest this and people called me crazy.
But this is exactly what's happening. Foreign nation states unopposed by cyber armies are convincing people online to do attacks like this.
> Canada for the most part is ultra exposed to hostile foreign nation state propaganda. Whereas USA's cyber army is protecting against this.
Can you explain what this might consist of? On the face of it, the US is a pretty difficult place to simply remove posts, and has a massive domestic propaganda industry.
>In both the House and Senate the bill was included in the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2017.
So this is a department of defense effort; cyber command obviously. Which is quite interesting because in the twitter files, they never mention DoD at all. Most focus was on the FBI. Obviously a factor of national security you might consider?
>and has a massive domestic propaganda industry.
You have to be careful with this though. What's the attribution here? Snowden never revealed this right, surveillance is obviously true but not necessarily propaganda.
There is perhaps the CIA mockingbird program which is still operating, but much smaller then during the cold war; so it's difficult to suggest this is massive.
A big one though started under Obama isn't so public to be able to make those conclusions. We are simply seeing the consequences and collapse of the USA journalism because of this.
It's important to note, this is fully bipartisan supported. Seeing from a Canadian point of view where this isn't happening, it's a much worse situation.
>You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.
Welp, got shadow banned on HN again for this post. I also see I'm censored and quite negative on the parent comment... i wonder who it was lol... none of my other posts have gone negative votes.
I always find it funny when I get shadowbanned on HN and I'm obviously not posting too fast.
Re: "massive domestic propaganda industry", this is mostly loosely affiliated groups trying to take control of the government by lying about things in the media rather than any kind of "deep state" per se. People like Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones.
I design a good test for one to discover how brainwashed we really are.
You take some clips of movie footage with lots of gore and carnage, ideally films we've seen. Then you mix it with some real world footage showing the exact same things.
If the picture is the same, how can one be enjoyable and the other horrific? "It's not real" we tell ourselves as if it matters. You can think of plenty of visuals that wouldn't be acceptable. If you stitch someones head onto some porn it's not real either?
> Canada for the most part is ultra exposed to hostile foreign nation state propaganda.
I read /r/Canada regularly, and I have formed a strong belief that domestic government propaganda (or to be more epistemically cautious, misinformative messaging, intentional or not) is a much bigger problem.
Do you believe I have formed a necessarily incorrect belief?
several offshoot Canadian subreddits, like r/onguardforthee, were created several years ago when a number of users felt that the existing r/Canada subreddit discussion was being manipulated.
I don’t recall the deeper substance of the disagreement anymore unfortunately.
I am now shadow banned on HN because of this post; so we'll see if I get to ever reply to you.
>I read /r/Canada regularly,
This subreddit was subject to a number of studies in relation to echo chambers. The mods chose to ban all conservatives. At least this was true many years ago. It's possible they have since stopped doing this, but I don't know because I was perm banned.
>I have formed a strong belief that domestic government propaganda (or to be more epistemically cautious, misinformative messaging, intentional or not) is a much bigger problem.
My take was that the mods for r/canada are liberal party affiliated and curate content against the conservatives and to a lesser degree the ndp.
So yes while the liberals are in power, it doesn't quite logically follow for me that this is equivalent to 'government propaganda'
Now outside the context of r/canada. The CBC can be seen as domestic government propaganda. Obviously defunding the CBC is #1 most popular position the Conservatives hold.
It's unclear to me why the CBC decided to give up on their political neutrality but in the end conservatives are never going to be able to fix this situation. Defunding is the only option. It's only a matter of time until this is the case now.
>Do you believe I have formed a necessarily incorrect belief?
Going back to my comment above that it's possible they stopped banning conservatives. It's also possible they got even worse. I really don't know. It's completely reasonable that you know more then me as I havent been on that subreddit in many years.
I know way back in the day there were often sticky threads saying they'd stop censoring conservatives but then just get caught again and again doing it.
I was thinking more about formal governmental news releases being propaganda, these get posted to Reddit (as just one example), and people believe them to be true despite how "obviously" "illegitimate" (in various ways) they are.
This is generally true of how almost the entire world runs (only to the degree that it is though, of course).
"what Stories Are Weapons is about: how psyops designed for use against national adversaries became weapons in a culture war between people who live in the United States."
Question: are you drawing on oral accounts of the 'meme magic wars' of 2016? I find it a fascinating piece of history and very relevant to the subject you're writing about.
If American propaganda owes so much to Scifi, I wonder why optimistic visions of the future have gone out of vogue to such a great degree. Endemic conservatism in the military arm of the deep state?
Optimistic visions pretty much ended with the 1971 oil crisis, in much the same way as all those graphs showing wage divergence starting then. It became apparent that progress was not linear and only upwards, and there would be significant downsides for at least some groups. You don't have to presume that it's all propaganda.
TOS was literally the Cold War and Vietnam in space. TNG brought us a world-consuming machine hivemind, a military bureaucracy in which admirals being corrupt or incompetent was so common it's become a meme, and the Maquis. DS9 obviously had the Dominion War. Enterprise had the Xindi/temporal cold war nonsense. And I'm pretty sure Janeway is guilty of war crimes all across the Delta Quadrant. Star Trek was always space opera, and has always involved war. Not because of "the deep state" or propaganda, but because pew pew lasers make for compelling television.
Its an interesting paradox, why yould piew piew make compelling television? It was always part of the scope of genres but some serious money and equipment was made available to portray the military favorably. It doesnt have to go towards this production to have an effect on expectations.
The series definetly portrayed an interesting future be it slightly simplistic. Is there anything else that isnt dystopia?
What harm is there if we turn the only non dystopian sf series into more piew piew? I dunno, but it seems it could turn out very expensive.
>Its an interesting paradox, why yould piew piew make compelling television?
It isn't a paradox. Star Trek is entertainment, first and foremost, and conflict is entertaining. Gene Roddenberry may have wanted to portray a post-human utopia of luxury space communism, as it were, where humans all evolved beyond their base desires and vices and everyone was a paragon of superior intellect and virtue, but no one wants to watch that all the time. His ideal of the perfect Federation human was Wesley Crusher, the most hated character in Star Trek history (long before the identity politics around hating the new Star Trek series came about.) People want dogfights in space and snarling Klingons and scheming Romulans. Drama and violence. Sturm und Drang.
>Is there anything else that isnt dystopia?
There is no utopia or dystopia. Star Trek was never very utopian, except maybe on paper. Idealistic and hopeful, sure, but the struggle for liberation from an oppressive order is by definition idealistic and hopeful. Star Trek doesn't become dystopian when it bothers to examine its own ideals, or acknowledge the flaws in human nature, nor is it utopian when it pretends they don't exist. I think that looking at science fiction in terms of utopia and dystopia is missing the forest for the trees. These are two opposing and impossible ideals, while most stories (excepting purposely grimdark stuff like 40K) take place in the middle.
And that's fine. Humans can't aspire to perfection, but we can be inspired by the struggle to be better than we are.
Of course it has to be entertaining, we wouldnt watch it if it wasn't.
> Gene Roddenberry may have wanted to portray a post-human utopia of luxury space communism
He went a bit further than wanting. If the goal was communist propaganda he couldn't have done a better job.
From a reddit post:
> There are a lot of mentions throughout multiple series about how the Federation civilization is post scarcity and doesn't internally use currency. It is stated that they work for personal fulfillment, almost as volunteers in a fashion.
> The series also has a number of time travel related episodes that venture back to near the end of the capitalism system and describes in detail an America that's suffering from massive income inequality and collapsing. Generally that period isn't painted in a favourable light by any of the characters often being referred to as a period of unchecked greed and ignorance
I think it makes a fair amount of sense - the Ferengi have elevated capitalism to a functional religion, and although the only thing that's scarce is latinum (which is useless and unexceptional except for the fact that it can't be replicated) their religion still works when that's the only target of acquisition.
Kind of a neat example of a religion outgrowing the pressures that created it but still being a source of meaning to the believers.
While I find communists the most annoying ideologues I've ever met, I'm fine with communist propaganda if it assumes postscarcity as a necessary precursor for communism. It's people's tendency to handwave the getting to postscarcity that makes my eyelid twitch.
Gene Roddenberry's proclivities aside, Star Trek is still a capitalist enterprise (pun intended, come at me petaQs) written and produced by capitalists to entertain a capitalist society. To that end, I would see most of the series' criticisms are from the perspective of liberal progressive, even neoliberal, but not necessarily communist (in the sense of anti-capitalist), ideology. More often than not, Trek's "communism" is undermined and turned into window dressing, because of course it has to play to the God fearing Commie hating mainstream.
Earth didn't reach post scarcity by seizing the means of production through class warfare, but scientific and technological advancement and culture shock from first contact with the Vulcans. The Bell Riots you're talking about in the time travel episodes are probably the strongest explicitly socialist part of recent canon, but within that canon they still didn't result in an anti-capitalist revolution since the themes the writers wanted to touch on were homelessness and sociopolitics from the 1960s and 1970s (Attica, Kent State, etc.) The Federation doesn't require its member worlds to be communist nor does it foment revolution in potential member worlds. As portrayed, most Federation worlds appear capitalist in some form.
People have jobs with clear non-collectivist hierarchies (see Sisko's restaurant.) We're just supposed to accept that this is entirely voluntarist, but the whole issue of how labor in this post-scarcity society actually works is swept under the rug because no one writing the show actually cares. The pacifist Federation flagship whose only purpose is exploration and diplomacy carries enough firepower to glass a planet, and it uses that firepower often. "God" is an alien and a jackass but also somehow working in humanity's benefit, and as often as Trek espouses atheism, it does a wink and a nod to theism. Even the relatively low bar of gender and sexual equality was often undermined by producer Rick Berman's homophobia.
The Ferengi (ignoring the first few appearances) are explicit parodies of American capitalism, but they are also portrayed sympathetically and heroically, and often used to criticize the Federation's own ideals and human nature (see Quark and Garak's famous "root beer" scene in DS9[0].) This is obviously a criticism of American cultural propaganda but is also slyly pro-American imperialism, since of course the (deeply America-coded) Federation will sweep in, guns blazing, kill the (asexual and trans-coded) evildoers and save everyone.
So I have to disagree. If the goal was communist propaganda, they could have done a lot better.
Do we have the same DoD and State Department? Whiggist progressive ideals are the reigning ideology of the executive bureaucracy, and the idea of a benevolent, democratic US empire enforcing prosperity and freedom on tyrannical despotic regimes rules the roost in the halls of the Pentagon. By contrast, American conservatism has been isolationist for far longer than anyone currently alive has been around. The Reagan and Bush neoconservative (read: Whiggist) years were a blip in a very consistent longer trend.
Or am I reading too much history to be taken seriously in this myopic place?
I'm not sure how much you can learn from history when you take claims of "democratic US empire enforcing prosperity and freedom on tyrannical despotic regimes" on face value.
The justifications to project power changed greatly over time and vary between the set of political ideologies in charge at any given time, but US and western foreign policy was always rooted in unspoken, consistent motivations.
That's why the transition between pre- and post- cold war foreign policy was so seamless. The covert action, coups, interventions, military support, economic warfare didn't change at all. Afganistan 1 was about the "red scare", 2 was about "international terrorism". Iraq, Syria and Libya was about "tyrannical despotic regimes". etc.
Those are nominal justifications. They reflect persuasive arguments (aka propaganda), not true beliefs and actions. The true beliefs and actions of the military and state bureaucracy for many decades has had an imperial focus that is crystal clear through the prism of action and belief.
I could cite the revealed preferences of many prominent figures in the military and state policy world: Rice, Power, Rumsfeld, Kissinger, Bolton, Nuland, etc. And those are just the people at the top; the hierarchy is stocked with true believers.
Yes, the belief in the empire, it was always about (neo)colonialism/imperialism, I think even neoliberalism and LIO is just justification rather than a true belief of the people that drive foreign policy of western nations.
> They reflect persuasive arguments (aka propaganda), not true beliefs and actions.
People have been so infantilized by this propaganda, its really frustrating to talk with most people about it.
I don't think you understand. Some of these people genuinely believe that US imperialism will spread progress and prosperity. Yes, some are Machiavellian and understand the geopolitical game, and are simply playing for keeps (resources, dominance, US hegemony, self-enrichment, etc). Others actually believe in the forceful spread of the Enlightenment project worldwide to accelerate the upward curve of history.
Never underestimate how stupid an aristocracy can become. Some portion will always be true believers. The idea that it is all Machiavellians is a probabilistic impossibility, and revealed preferences (interviews, slips of the mic, secret conversations, whistleblowers, etc.) have shone sunlight on them in the past. There are genuine ideologues in the US military and state department. Calling them "conservative" or "neoliberal" is a useless simplification that does not adequately describe how deranged their beliefs are.
By that line of analysis, we'd expect a Whiggist regime to have optimistic propaganda with contemporary scifi being pessimistic because the Whiggist faction is ineffectual?
There is nothing that says that a ruling Whiggist regime can't be coupled with naively optimistic contemporary sci-fi which essentially shares the views of the regime and only critiques a shadow of an enemy long-vanquished from power. Precisely because there is no rule that requires sci-fi to always critique the current regime. If the beliefs are shared, we shouldn't expect that. I think that's exactly the scenario we're in right now.
I also think it's why most contemporary sci-fi isn't resonating, but that's just my own opinion based on speculation. I have a suspicion that contemporary sci-fi doesn't sell well. They all present societies which have solved social and material problems through progress, or which are still solving them, critiquing an image of the Western world in the 20th century. None of them nab at any kind of biting truth relevant to young readers today.
Short story "Best Of" omnibuses are especially depressing for me personally. This is where I found some of the most mindblowing stories and concepts I had encountered when I was younger, and now they're essentially no better than tinder for firestarting. The people running the Nebula or other awards have astoundingly safe and poor taste.
>They all present societies which have solved social and material problems through progress, or which are still solving them, critiquing an image of the Western world in the 20th century. None of them nab at any kind of biting truth relevant to young readers today.
What are some examples of scifi you're referring to there? Because the noteworthy scifi stories I can think of, ones which drew enough attention to be televised at least, are stories like the hunger games (dystopian), divergent (dystopian), the new star trek series (which I haven't seen but I understand shoehorned scarcity back into the startrekverse), Foundation (fall of a golden age), The Expanse (dystopian) etc. I think the only optimistic scifi I've read in the last twenty years or so was Anathem, and there's no way that's getting a miniseries.
Maybe it's a function of the authors I follow, but I just don't see this optimistic contemporary scifi you speak of, naive or otherwise.
What is this surface skim literary analysis? I'm getting the sense that you have a Whiggist interpretation of history and reality yourself and you are not aware of it. You assume that the society depicted in a work constitutes its tone and philosophy, while the characters apply universal values to save the day. Re-calibrate a bit. The society depicted within inculcated Whiggist "dystopian" sci-fi works represents the previous, backwards, regressive kraken to be slain, while the methods the characters use to correct that society are the manifestation of the author's progressive values applied.
The maximally unequal society of Hunger Games is resolved via a violent revolution in favor of more egalitarian values. Same with Divergent. Star Trek Discovery is about a sexually and ethnically diverse crew somehow (in a future that was supposed to have solved these things) facing bigotry and solving it by simply applying or arguing for the "morally correct" values they already have. In Foundation, enlightened technocrats shorten a regressive civilizational collapse and return to "upward" progress by literally tricking the surrounding cultures into the Foundation's value judgment of the "correct" path (very VERY State Department of them). The Expanse is a TTRPG novelization and subsequent TV adaptation where a near-literal paladin (Holden) applies enlightened egalitarianism, diplomacy, and pacifism to stop an interplanetary faction war.
ALL of the specific stories you mention feature extremely strong Whiggist storytelling, and further than that, Isaac Asiimov (author of Foundation) was a famously outspoken activist for enlightened, Whiggist, progressive, technocratic ideals. Many peoples' first introduction to these ideas was Star Trek, though modern Trek handles its themes with all the subtlety of a mace.
Since we're criticizing reading comprehension, you seem to be shoehorning whiggist interpretations of history into every story that needs a villain, so do be careful not to stare into that abyss too long. My question was about a surface skim literary analysis, 'Golden Age' scifi have many utopias, modern scifi prefer distopias, why is? Since Asimov wrote plenty of utopian scifi, and that's not the portion of his work getting film adaptations today, I don't think your whiggist bogeyman theory really works for the question I was actually asking. And I'm well aware of my whiggist beliefs, though I despise the term. If you want to be polite, you can call me an evolutionary humanist.
I suppose I might have been imprecise in my speech by conflating optimism with utopianism, but 'depiction of future I'd like to live in' and 'optimistic scifi' are close enough concepts to those of us untouched by modern English departments that those of you who are could just disambiguate and move on when you encounter it.
I'd ask what you disagree with, but you're calling an open-ended question an argument so I doubt it would be a productive discussion. I doubt you'd have had the same initial response if I'd said 'decision makers in the security and intelligence branches of the civil service'.
Incidentally, I think a lot of insights can be gotten into psychological warfare if one likens it to cellular biology and the games viruses and engineers play to get a cell to accept foreign code. What we're seeing here is an excellent example of an immune response that looks for 'tells' of hostile activity causing an allergic reaction.
> I doubt you'd have had the same initial response if I'd said 'decision makers in the security and intelligence branches of the civil service'.
I doubt I'd have had the same response if you'd used any kind of phrasing that demonstrated the most basic level of competence in the subject matter. Talking about "the military arm of the deep state" is like claiming to understand aerospace engineering and then talking unironically with a straight face about "the spinny thing on the front of the plane."
You missed an oppotunity to decry Scammers Live in Vain ;)
Seriously though, it was a decent read with material on Linebarger I hadn't seen before, the various photos and his life in China were new to me despite having skimmed other bio's in the past and having real life book copies of his work under several of his names.
"While in Korea, Linebarger masterminded the surrender of thousands of Chinese troops who considered it shameful to give up their arms. He drafted leaflets explaining how the soldiers could surrender by shouting the Chinese words for ‘love’, ‘duty’, ‘humanity’ and ‘virtue’ – words that happened, when pronounced in that order, to sound like “I surrender” in English. He considered this act the single most worthwhile thing he had done in his life."
Further analysis here: https://languagehat.com/chinese-endangered/