Discworld Rules

And LOTR is brain-rot for technologists

The Contraptions Book club March pick is Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition by Frances Yates. Chat thread here. We will discuss this the week of March 24th.

The Lord of the Rings is a great story, but I have to say, I’ve never understood the strange hold it seems to have on the imagination of a particular breed of technologists.

As a story it’s great. It is pure fantasy of course (in the Chiang’s Law sense of being about special people rather than strange rules), full of Chosen Ones doing Great Man (or Great Hobbit) things. As an extended allegory for society and technology it absolutely sucks and is also ludicrously wrong-headed. Humorless Chosen people presiding grimly over a world in terminal decline, fighting Dark Lords, playing out decline-and-fall scripts to which there is no alternative, no Plan B.

This is no way for a high-agency technological species to live, and thankfully it doesn’t have to be.

I mean, I get why politicians and economists might identify with the story. They enjoy little to no direct technological agency, harbor ridiculous Chosen One conceits, and operate in domains — political narratives and the dismal pseudoscience of economics — that are natural intellectual monopolies or oligopolies. Domains that allow fantasies to be memed into existence (the technical term is hyperstitional theory-fictions) for a while before they come crashing down to earth in flames, demonstrating yet again that no, you do not in fact get to create your own reality; that “reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away.”

There is a contrarian reading of The Lord of the Rings that argues that Sauron and Mordor are in fact the good guys, and represent technological progress, etc. But this is throwing good money narrativium after bad. Flipping the valence of a Chosen One story doesn’t make it any better. It’s still a Chosen One story with reversed roles.

No, you have to tell different sorts of stories altogether.

Such stories have, in fact, been told. They are Terry Pratchett’s Discworld stories. This post is an extended argument that as a lens for thinking about the world, The Lord of the Rings, is a work that you should “not set aside lightly, but throw across the room with great force,” and that in place of Middle Earth, you should install Terry Pratchett’s Discworld.

I won’t get into whether Discworld is better or worse as a fictional universe than Middle Earth. That is a matter of taste and which elements of craft you admire. But as an allegory for technology and society, Discworld is so radically, vastly superior, and LOTR is so terminally bad, it is not even a contest.

If you’re an actual, serious technologist, Discworld is where you should look for clues about how the world works, how it evolves in response to technological forces, and how humans should engage with those forces. It is catnip for actual technological curiosity, as opposed to validation of incuriously instrumental approaches to technology. If on the other hand, you’re really just a fantasist larping Chosen One stories bolstered by specious Straussian conceits, trying to meme your hyperstitional theory fictions into existence for a while, looting the commons with private-equity extraction engines until you get your Girardian comeuppance — by all means go for it. Though Margaret Thatcher and Neoliberalism are both dead, There Is No Alternative (TINA) — for you.

The rest of humanity, thankfully, has more imaginative and generative models of reality to draw on.

Roundworld and Discworld

Now, for those of you who haven’t read the Discworld series, it is basically the anti-LOTR. For starters, even though it is set in a pseudo-historical time rather than the future, and features all the common tropes of fantasy, all that is in purely ironic mode. Discworld is in fact the hardest of hard science fiction universes you can find. Entirely about strange rules rather than special people.

You just have to learn to look past the wizards, dragons, elves, and such. There is even a “Science of Discworld” meta-series to help with that.

The irony is not subtle. It’s in-your-face. For instance, the core world-building premise is that of a literal “flat earth” disc-shaped planet, resting on the back of four elephants that stand on the back of a giant turtle swimming through space. But this parody of the cosmologies of antiquity is put through its paces with deadpan faux-scientific earnestness. There’s an entire novel about how there was once a fifth elephant, whose fossilized remains are the basis of the fossil fuel industry of Discworld.

And it only gets sillier from there.

And the sillier it gets, the better it seems to model our own world (known as Roundworld in the Discworld cosmogony, a place Discworlders can and do travel to, generally causing mayhem). The wilder a Discworld plot, the more you learn about how technology, society, and progress in Roundworld actually work.

I have a rule-of-thumb: The more seriously you take Discworld, the smarter you get about Roundworld.

The silliness is a feature, not a bug. Our universe is a vast, crazy place, and we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of the endless weirdness it harbors. As Douglas Adams noted, “If life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.”

Discworld is about curing yourself of the allure of a “sense of proportion.” There is no surer of way of becoming detached from reality and addicted to some notion of manufactured normalcy.

It is notable that one of the favorite rhetorical tricks of self-styled Special People is to point to something in incredulity and pretend to be aghast at how weird it is; how against “common sense” and “reasonable” and “first principles” understandings of the world. Those words and phrases are always suspicious, and extra suspicious — suspicious-squared as Pratchett might have said — when used by Chosen One types.

The Lord of the Rings on the other hand — the more seriously you take Middle Earth, the dumber you get about Roundworld.

Revealingly, Roundworld isn’t even modeled in the Middle Earth cosmology, except via vaguely racist and lazy allusions (In Middle Earth, I’m presumably one of those turbaned men-from-the-east riding an Oliphaunt and uncritically allied with Sauron).

If you double down on the LOTR brainrot, and add things like Ayn Rand and Rene Girard to the soup, you get a profoundly stupid vision of the world that it takes real genius to buy into. Which is what, as it happens, a lot of real geniuses (and I don’t mean this snarkily — Peter Thiel is a legit genius who happens to have bought into a really stupid vision of the world) have in fact done as of 2025, as they try to meme a revanchist Great Power world back into existence.

I’ve thought about this a lot in the last few months, and I’ve concluded the whole program is in fact exactly as stupid as it sounds, and will fail in profoundly stupid ways, doing a lot of irreversible damage (Brexit was a small scale model of what’s in store for us here in the US).

But to some extent I’ve made my peace with what’s coming, and have no desire to convince you that this is where things are headed. If you’ve bought into that, have fun being miserable in Middle Earth.

Instead, I want to sketch out for you how you can truly learn to think in pluralist there-are-many-alternatives ways.

The place to start is with the rules of Discworld.

The Rules of Discworld

If you haven’t read any Discworld novels, here is a map with a suggested reading order. I got it from Wikipedia, and literally checked off the books as I read them all a few years ago (except the Tiffany Aching ones). I recommend you do that too.

I read one Pratchett novel (Thief of Time I think) in college, but I’m glad I didn’t properly get into it till my mid-forties. These are books you cannot really appreciate if you’re too young. I read through the lot around 2017-19, during the first Trump admin, when I was in my early forties.

Pratchett believed you should start with Sourcery, and he is right, not just because it is early in the in-world chronology of one of the main sequences, but because it forcefully establishes what is perhaps the central dogma of Discworld:

People who think they are Special and Chosen are dangerous and bad for the world.

The story revolves around Discworld’s satirical version of the Chosen One plot arc. Here is the premise according to the Wikipedia entry:

On the Discworld, "sourcerers"—wizards who are sources of magic, and thus immensely more powerful than normal wizards—were the main cause of the Great Mage Wars that left areas of the Disc uninhabitable. As eight is a powerful magical number on Discworld, men born as the eighth son of an eighth son are commonly wizards. Since sourcerers are born the eighth son of an eighth son of an eighth son, they are "wizards squared". To prevent the creation of sourcerers, therefore, wizards are not allowed to marry or have children.

These “sourcerers” are one species of annoying Chosen Ones in Discworld. In the novel, the prevention mechanisms fail, and a sourcerer is born, and wreaks havoc for a while trying to do dumb Chosen One things until one of the main protagonists of the world, Rincewind, a hapless, mediocre wizard, manages to contain him. With a lot of help of course — the mediocre protagonists of Discworld rarely act alone and never in hero-mode. Most Discworld stories are, to a first approximation, carrier-bag stories.

Discworld is essentially a kind place though, so the antagonists are usually just contained and neutralized, and sometimes even redeemed. They’re not vengefully made an example of by protagonists. That’s a Chosen One move. Discworlders are kinder, even if it costs them. That’s a point we’ll say more about.

The Rincewind stories are one of four major sequences in the Discworld universe. These are:

• Unseen University: Revolving around events at Unseen University in Ankh-Morpork, the setting for most stories, where Rincewind is a professor of geography. It is a den of complacent, mediocre, academic wizards who mostly don’t do anything. They rarely actually use magic for anything practical, not because of any lofty ideas of great power requiring great responsibility, but because they are lazy and magic is messy and causes more problems than it solves. The other residents of Ankh-Morpork agree, and rarely call on them to do anything.

• The City Watch novels, featuring a stubbornly everyman chief of police, Sam Vimes (based on the historic Robert Peel who founded London’s police force) who in the universe stands for regicidal skepticisms of power and a plodding, quiet integrity that cannot be bought off or stopped. His ancestor killed the last despotic king of Ankh-Morpork, the city-state in which much of the action unfolds. One of Vimes’ lieutenants, the nice but ordinary Carrot, is in fact the True King, but harbors no ambitions of ascending to a throne in a restored monarchy.

• The Witches novels, featuring a milieu of witches in the countryside, with Granny Weatherwax as the no-nonsense elder. Like the wizards of Unseen University, they too don’t really make much actual use of magic, preferring to solve problems through wisdom and skeptical common sense, frequently battling Chosen One ambitions in their own ranks. The hold the wizards of Unseen University in affectionate contempt, as wild theorists doing weird experiments.

• The Death novels, featuring the regular scythe-wielding figure of Death, who is really the steward of life itself on Discworld. He works tirelessly to keep life generative, messy, rich, and varied with his curatorial efforts. His primary antagonist is a bureaucracy, the Auditors of Reality, who hate life because it is messy, and would rather have a lifeless universe following predictable and well-behaved laws.

The Auditors of Reality are particularly interesting. They are the Discworld edition of what I’ve called the Great Bureaucrat archetype elsewhere. Their ideology is something like the Wokism of Discworld, a deadening, stifling, faceless force of intersectional lifelessness. But as Discworld historigraphy correctly theorizes, the antidote to the dangers of Auditors of Reality is not individual Chosen Ones like sourcerers, over-ambitious witches, or kings claiming divine rights, but Death itself, understood as a personification of the process of renewal, regeneration, and stewardship of the organic messiness of life.

I like this as acerbic commentary on the longevity fetish and Eternalism of the Tech Right.

I have no issues with individuals simply making an extreme sport of literally trying to live as long as possible. Bryan Johnson is a friend and occasional client of mine, and Vitalik Buterin, whom I have interactions with through my protocols work, is also a longevity maven. At more regular-people level, friends of this newsletter like Sarah Constantin are into longevity.

I don’t object to any of this, though personally I want no part of it. I think thar be ossified Asimovian spacer worlds. But if people want that kind of life and arrange their own affairs to try and get there, I have no quarrel with them.

What I have a problem with is people trying to live forever as part of a Chosen One script which involves them trying to carve up all of the world into the dead empires of a dystopian Great Game world run according to a totalizing script.

I prefer a world run by ordinary mortals who have embraced both their ordinariness and mortality.

Vetinari and the Guilds

While most core Discworld characters are either mediocre anti-heroes or parodied Chosen One antagonists, there is a big supporting cast of colorful characters who are neither, but not NPCs either.

The most important of these is the wise (but ordinary and mortal) despot who rules the city of Ankh-Morpork, Vetinari (an allusion to the Medicis). Vetinari’s style of governance is a cross between Daoist and LBJ in Master of the Senate mode.

He operates with an acute and finely tuned sense of the nature of power and how to wield it in the subtlest ways possible. As much as possible, he limits himself to the tiniest possible nudges, conducting the balance-of-power constituent forces of Ankh-Morpork like an orchestra, almost always working through others. His main job is keeping all the guilds of Ankh-Morpork, and its relations with foreign powers, in a stable balance of power (he himself is an alumnus of the Assassin’s Guild). He does this with pragmatism and compromise, nudging the arc of the moral universe to slouch towards utopia, but not at a pace it cannot handle. He is nearly always on the right side of history and social evolution, though sometimes he has to be convinced by more idealistic characters that the time is ripe for a particular change now, rather than later. He is no broad-based accelerationist, but he surreptitiously, selectively, and surgically helps accelerate currents of positive change that he must publicly appear to oppose.

The guilds are the load-bearing elements of Ankh-Morpork’s society. Not NPCs, but usually running as background processes, with Vetinari as system administrator, albeit one who is very wary of sudo-ing anything.

Vetinari is something like an anti-Chosen One. In the most Chosen One story, Sourcery, the sourcerer turns him into a lizard and puts him in a cage, and he remains out of the picture for the whole novel. That’s one reason things get so out of hand in that story: The main adult in the room is locked away from the action while the Chosen One tries to bull-doge a new reality into being. But in most stories, he adds a decisive nudge or two that allows the world to smoothly and elegantly switch tracks to better futures.

Within the rules of Discworld, you could say Vetinari only acts to the extent the system is underdetermined. While he is sovereign in the Schmittian sense — the one with the power to make exceptions — he only has this power to the extent he uses it to nudge the system towards doing what it most wants to do anyway. He counteracts destabilizing noise in the signal but does not impose his opinions on what Discworld wants to do.

Before I get to that, a word on what Discworld does not want.

Gods and Monks

The main thing Discworld does not want is to be at the mercy of the gods (and Chosen Ones with god-delusions).

There are gods on Discworld, but fortunately they are for the most part living in peaceful retirement in Dunmanifestin (“done manifesting”), making it a de facto atheist universe.

Unlike most of the supporting cast of Discworld, the gods are NPCs. They don’t do anything, and don’t want to. Ontologically, they are creatures of pure belief, being stronger or weaker, or altogether non-existent, depending on the extent to which mortals believe in them. The only story revolving consequentially around gods is Small Gods, about a meme-stock god named GameStop, whose power crashes, and who ambitiously plans to pump himself back up to a new high. A parody Chosen One story crossed with Greek mythology tropes.

So the story of Discworld is explicitly not the story of what the gods have planned for it. They got it going and retired, leaving it to its own potentialities. Discworld is free in a theological sense. There is no Discworld eschatology.

Discworld is also not a story scripted by priestly intercessors. There is a class of time monks (who come across as vaguely Daoist/Buddhist and keep the machinery of time itself going). They are allies of Death, stewards of the messiness of life like him, helping keep the Auditors of Reality at bay. Their job is to keep history free and evolving through a timescape of many alternatives (not “free” in some narrative-captured sense).

There is also an array of occasional antagonists who periodically show up with grand Thielean “determinate optimism” type plans, convinced they know better than average shmucks, and threatening the freedom of Discworld for its own good.

These include monsters and dragons from the dungeon dimensions, and elves.

These last named are perhaps the closest thing Discworld has to unredeemed and unredeemable villains.

Elves and Narrativium

In Discworld, elves are evil in an insidious, feckless sort of way, being an invasive parasitic species with no imagination but a lot of superficial charm. Here is the essence of their nature, from the Discworld wiki:

[Elves] are not native to the Disc, but come from a "parasite universe", sometimes called Fairyland. This pocket dimension can latch onto different universes at certain times…

…Elves have no proper imagination or real emotions, and therefore such things fascinate them. Because they cannot create they steal musicians and artists. Because they cannot have children (although they are capable of breeding with humans, resulting in offspring with superficially elvish characteristics - skinny, pointy ears, a tendency to giggle and burn easily in the sun - but fundamentally human traits i.e. empathy) they steal children from the Disc to be their toys. Because they cannot feel empathy they enjoy the suffering of others. Even if an elf is, for reasons of its own, trying to be nice, its lack of understanding of humans mean there's always something "off" about it.

Mostly they get away with this, due to the illusion-creating glamour they cast. While elves are, as mentioned above, not musical, elfsong is perceived as beautiful by humans, and is highly hypnotic. Elves are generally seen as innately beautiful and stylish, but this is just another aspect of the glamour. Some of them are only vaguely humanoid.

At one point, the elves migrate to Roundworld and cause havoc there, by killing the narrative vigor of history with their empty and superficial illusions, until Discworlders save the day. I like to pretend this actually happened.

The elves are among the most sophisticated bits of world-building by Pratchett, because they are the personification of anti-narrative forces in the cosmology. They commonly pose a threat by obscuring the rich potentialities of reality with illusory, degenerative bullshit.

The ontological antithesis of the elves is narrativium, the most common element on Discworld. It is a kind of meta-fictional conceit on Pratchett’s part, allowing his universe to be metamodern without being tedious about it.

Everything satirized and parodied in Discworld, all the ironically deployed tropes of fantasy, are accounted for as the workings of narrativium. That means in-world, all the effects of narrativium are made fun of, but not treated as existential threats. Within the meta-story of Discworld, narrativium adds some of the coherence and discipline that the Auditors of Reality yearn for, but not in a deadening, joyless way. Narrativium is life-affirming narrative irony embodied and embraced.

Narrativium allows Discworld to escape the tyranny of hegemonic TINA stories that insist on destroying all alternative stories. It allows Discworld to have a history, but not be bound by history. It allows Discworld to constantly entertain and choose among many futures, as an entire entangled reality. It allows Discworld to forcefully reject (and sometimes eject from reality) the efforts of Chosen Ones to capture reality.

Narrativium is also what allows Discworld to escape the tyranny of the idea that there are, or should be, no stories (or what is the same thing, the idea that all stories are equally valid and good). This is the fatal flaw in the worldview of the Auditors of Reality who, like their Roundworld counterparts, want to arrive at an always-already bureaucratic perfection and forget anything imperfect ever happened, erasing not just history, but time itself. Death and the Time Monks might do the work necessary to keep them at bay, but Narrativium is what makes Discworld unauditable in the first place.

Narrativium is the elan vital that allows Discworld to pursue what it wants as opposed to merely avoiding what it does not want.

What Discworld Wants

The essential property of Narrativium is that it ensures that the history of Discworld will unfold in satisfying ways that make it a good story. This property is most on display in the fifth major sequence of novels in the map: the Industrial Revolution sequence, which feature one of the most interesting characters, Moist Von Lipwig, who is Vetinari’s fixer, nudging technological progress along.

Through these books, Discworld in general, and Ankh-Morpork in particular, repeatedly breaks free of its own past with the help of technological innovations. There is an industrial revolution driven by steam, a postal system emerges, a film industry is born. A great deal more of this sort of thing happens. Discworld evolves a lot between the earliest and latest books by in-world chronology. That’s what makes the stories a “literature of change” in Ted Chiang terms. These are not stories of heroes restoring changeless sacred realities after profane excursions.

The details of these developments usually feature absurd (and absurdly entertaining) twists on the corresponding Roundworld historical events, while largely staying true to the logic of Roundworld history. For example, film technology on Discworld relies on some faux-science built around small goblins who sit in the cameras painting really fast (magical, but in an inconsequential way).

And it’s all very satisfying, in ways the corresponding histories on Roundworld are not. The story also feels a lot more forcefully inevitable and necessary, but not in a restrictive or totalizing way. It is intensified rather than revisionist Roundworld history.

That’s what makes narrativium good to have around.

This process is one of generative discovery and continuously improvised contingency. The rule that governs this evolutionary process on Discworld, in Pratchett’s own words, is “Our minds make stories, and stories make our minds.”

This is the Pratchett version of “hyperstitional theory fiction” which applies with much greater force in Discworld, such that far more consequential things can be memed into existence.

In the most extreme case, as we’ve seen, the gods of Discworld themselves are memed into existence by belief, like over-powered versions of the subjects of Roundworld cults of personality. Roundworld religions, thankfully, don’t have this kind of power to create Roundworld gods of equal substance, since unlike the retiring and lazy Discworld gods, we tend to imagine very interventionist and opinionated gods for ourselves.

In the case of more real things that exist by themselves, rather than as incarnated memes, narrativium undergirds a sort of theory of relativity. I actually independently rediscovered Pratchett’s theory of narrativium in 2019, just before encountering his version, by transposing J. A. Wheeler’s description of General Relativity to narratives. I wrote up my theory as part of an extended series on Worlding co-authored with Ian Cheng (that’s Ian’s term for world-building):

A bit of fun synchronicity. A few weeks ago, I came up with a snowcloned line inspired by a famous tldr of general relativity: narratives tell archetypes how to evolve, archetypes tell narratives how to curve. ¹ Right after, I found a Terry Pratchett quote that says almost the same thing, but less ponderously: “Our minds make stories, and stories make our minds.” I prefer my version though, since I like the synaptic link to physics it creates.

Roundworld, sadly, does not have more than trace quantities of narrativium, which is why Roundworld histories are often so unsatisfying and so easily fall prey to Discworld elves, or humans possessed by them.

The presence of narrativium, and the dynamic of stories and minds creating each other, lends to Discworld history a legitimate telos. On Roundworld all historicism (except perhaps Fukuyama’s) are simply bad thinking. But on Discworld, it is actually meaningful to ask, what does Discworld want?

The answer is that Discworld wants to evolve in a way that could be interpreted as progress in the most neutral, non-ideological sense possible — that of an infinite game, where the goal is not for some to win at the expense of others, but for all to continue to play, and gradually learn to play ever more nicely and kindly as abundance and meaning increase in the world.

The sentiment behind the aspiration is perhaps a mark of British culture at its best. The high conceit of Discworld is that the infinite game always prevails and cannot truly be derailed by even by the most powerful forces. The mediocre efforts of ordinary characters powered by narrativium is enough to keep the infinite game going.

This is why the denizens of Discworld can often act with a generosity of spirit even towards their worst villains. A generosity that we on Roundworld can find hard to conjure up. They know they are good guys and necessarily on the winning side, while we can only hope.

One of my favorite lines from Doctor Who captures the spirit of the Discworld’s narrativium-powered infinite game perfectly: always try to be nice, but never fail to be kind.

That’s a line from the regeneration speech of the twelfth Doctor (Peter Capaldi). Like Pratchett’s universe, the Doctor Who universe too tries to be about keeping the infinite game going, albeit not as elegantly (since the Doctor is a Special Person, making it a fantasy universe).

The plot device of regeneration that is limited to the Doctor in Doctor Who applies to all of Discworld. The whole world periodically regenerates into a new, richer, more complex form, through a process that looks very much like technological progress.

A Special World

Discworld is almost perfect science fiction by Chiang’s Law; a world of strange rules rather than special people. Almost, but not quite. There is one big way in which Discworld is in fact fantasy: the world itself is a special world. A Chosen World.

The telos of Discworld that Roundworld lacks — it wants to evolve in open-ended ways that make it preternaturally resistant to capture by totalizing narratives — makes it special.

The history of Roundworld in recent centuries has, at least empirically, exhibited such tendencies, but unlike the denizens of Discworld, we cannot trust in that being the intrinsic nature of our world. Certainly those currently in power are trying to prove it isn’t.

Not so on Discworld. On Discworld, the arc of the moral universe does in fact have a particular disposition; not towards justice or liberalism or any other such tawdry Roundworld ideological conceit, but towards greater generativity and complexity and more alternatives. On Discworld, the show actually must go on, due to the laws of narrativium.

Or to put it another way, Discworld has an astounding, unbreakable resistance to Chosen Ones at any scale except the scale of the world itself. Discworld is powered by the anthropic principle on steroids. It keeps discovering new ways in which its entire reality is special.

This is one reason Discworld can afford to be such a kind world. As a world that is intrinsically pre-disposed to reject totalizing narratives and protect multiple possibilities in an ever-expanding garden of forking paths, reality is on the side of pluralism and against totalizing conceits.

This is why, on Discworld, even the weakest, most mediocre protagonists, when going up against a powerful Chosen One who wants to capture and enslave reality, can afford to be gracious. Even when they are at the lowest, and cowering before a Chosen One who thinks he has won. Because thanks to the narrativium levels in the environment, the protagonists know they will win, and need never despair.

The Discworld protagonist seems to know that though they must always scramble comically and improvise energetically to save it from the monstrous Chosen One of the Week, the arc of their moral universe bends in their favor.

Discworld is a world that knows what it wants, and how to get it. With some nudging along by Vetinari, Death, and Time Monks, and a lot of reluctant anti-heroic adventuring by the likes of Rincewind, Vimes, Granny Weatherwax, and Moist von Lipwig. Narrativium helps those who help themselves.

I wish this were true of Roundworld.

Unlike Discworld, our own Roundworld has no such specific disposition. The ideas that the arc of moral history on Roundworld bends towards justice, or that “reality” has a well-known liberal bias (a comforting premise of the late-lamented hyperstitional theory fiction of traditional American politics known as “normalcy”) that are popular with us are no more than thin, wishful fictions. Probably planted in our heads by the Discworld elves.

Roundworld does not want anything in particular, and no future is necessary. As Discworld scientists have discovered on their trips here, life and civilization have evolved and been destroyed multiple times on Roundworld, in a meaningless process of fragile evolution.

Unlike on Discworld, totalizing narratives of bleak “determinate optimism” can capture and destroy Roundworld. They can actually end history as surely as our Sun going nova. All it takes is a couple of idiots with their fingers on nuclear triggers, surrounding by admiring Yes Men reassuring them of their greatness.

But kindness is perhaps one bit of hyperstitial theory fiction that is worth believing in, even if it does not have any of the force of Discworld’s sympathetic magic to it. Kindness is a feature of our moral universe we can pretend we can meme it into bending towards.

Because kindness is worth it for its own sake, even if Roundworld lacks the narrativium leverage to turn it into a world-protecting force.

There Are Many Alternatives

The idea that there are many alternatives is the second most politically loaded one I’ve ever put out, after the idea that with the right technological scaffolding, a proper reckoning with history is in fact possible and desirable, and not necessarily an exercise in bad-faith book-keeping of resentments and grievances.

Both these ideas currently only exist as talks. I haven’t written them up as essays. The reckoning-with-history idea is my Bloodcoin talk from 2018, and the TAMA idea is in my Civilizational Hypercomplexity talk from 2021. Not surprisingly, both talks rely on blockchain-based models of reality. Blockchains are the closest thing to narrativium we Roundworlders have invented. They may be infested with scams and memes, but they cannot be easily captured by Chosen Ones peddling stupid TINAs.

The funny thing is, I was never against the original TINA story, neoliberalism. I rather liked it philosophically, liked living in it, and owe basically everything good in my life to it. Now that it is basically over, I do regret its passing, since every TINA hyperstitional theory fiction jockeying to replace it is much worse.

But at least we’re exploring many alternatives for the moment and not locking into one. And at least the value of real attempts to reckon with history, of the sort I gesture at in the Bloodcoin talk, is becoming crystal clear, given the barrage of wild and transparently motivated confabulations we are now enduring.

This thought inspired a note yesterday:

If you want peace, prepare for war. If you want war, prepare for peace.

If you want the benefits of war without the costs of peace, lie through your teeth about everything

Vetinari, incidentally, did not believe the popular first epigram; he thought the truth was more banal — If you want peace, prepare for peace, if you want war, prepare for war. But I think he would agree with my second thought. Whatever the causal pattern linking war and peace, it is clear that those possessed by elves (or Auditors of Reality) lie through their teeth about everything to justify doing whatever they please, as Chosen Ones.

All that said, there is still the question of kindness — should you be kind, especially to those you disagree with, and especially especially when they are strong and threatening to destroy all you hold dear, while you are weak and unable to protect any of it?

Should you live by Discworld rules of kindness and grace, when all that might get you is contempt and destruction?

Or should you tell yourself stories that make your mind of sterner stuff?

Discworld Rules vs. Culture Rules

The thought I began with, that The Lord of the Rings, whatever its merits as a fantasy tale, is brain-rot for the technological mind, is one that I find so obvious it feels barely worth stating. I only started there because I think that’s where our world’s collective head is at. We not only lack the narrativium protections of Discworld, most humans seem to actively prefer totalizing single narratives and surrendering to Chosen Ones. Fantasy — in the regular, LOTR sense — is vastly more popular than science fiction.

But a comparison that is not so obvious is between Discworld and Iain M. Banks very similar Culture novels. Though the milieus couldn’t be more different (space opera vs. steampunk absurdist ironic fantasy), both are science fiction in the Chiang sense — literatures of change set in worlds governed by strange rules.

The Culture is a galactic-scale post-scarcity anarcho-capitalist mongrel utopia under the benevolent protection of superintelligent spaceships. The closest fully realized fictional universe to that meme about fully automated luxury gay space communism.

The Culture though is neither communism nor capitalism, but a post-capitalist anarchist milieu with few technological peers. It is a superpower on a galactic scale that behaves like a superpower — imposing its values on less developed civilizations with opinionated, unilateralist prejudice. That the values happen to be ones I agree with doesn’t make the Cultures actions more palatable. They are often very troubling (and meant to be).

If Discworld has the laws of narrativium going for it, so that mediocrities can serve as stewards, the Culture has a powerful and unapologetically interventionist secret service called Special Circumstances, which operates by the opposite of Star Trek’s Prime Directive. It cheerfully and heavily interferes all over the place, where it judges that history is headed in the wrong directions. It appoints itself as the Schmittian sovereign making exceptions wherever it likes.

The Culture’s AIs and drones have no compunctions about killing and destruction — this is no gentle Three Laws of Robotics Asimovian universe. In fact, the series opens in the aftermath of a bloody war between the Culture and a peer civilization.

In the Culture, what is a natural property of reality in Discworld is enforced with extreme prejudice and violence. The entirety of the Culture is like an Assassin’s Guild, with the agents and minds of Special Circumstances acting collectively like a much more forceful Vetinari.

While life inside the Culture is something like a high-abundance version of an Ursula Le Guin style peaceful anarchy, its actions in foreign space resemble those of the CIA and KGB at the height of the Cold War, rolled into one. Fomenting revolutions, deposing leaders, assassinations — the whole shebang.

To bring it back our core question, that of kindness, the Culture is often kind, though rarely tender, and acts to make sure it’s never in a weak position. It only ever needs to consider the question of kindness from a position of overwhelming strength. The question is never if it can prevail, but whether it can do so in keeping with its values.

Should we play by Discworld Rules or Culture Rules in the coming years? Should we try to become strong before choosing to be kind, or should we choose kindness whether or not we happen to be strong or weak at any given time?

I don’t know, but I like that I have at least two good alternatives to ponder. That is the power of not being tied to one narrative with no alternatives being admissible.

I may never end up choosing, but I think either set of rules would be better than LOTR rules.