korrents

korrents · piece

We're stuck in Philip K. Dick's imagined universe

Henry Farrell · 8 Aug 2026 · programmablemutter.com ↗

3 korrents from this piece

Henry Farrell did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

  1. Our reading

    Silicon Valley's actual trajectory increasingly resembles Philip K. Dick's paranoid, hallucinatory fiction rather than the optimistic space-age visions of Asimov and Clarke.

    Their wordsIncreasingly, it is looking much more like the one anticipated by the drugged-up 1960s oeuvre of Philip K Dick, filled with deranged billionaires, machines that claim consciousness, hallucinated worlds and political breakdown.

  2. Our reading

    A writer can be artistically important for revealing new possibilities without being technically skilled at prose.

    Their wordsyou can be a great writer, revealing possibilities that others haven't seen, without always being a good one.

  3. Our reading

    The grand visions promoted by today's tech titans conceal realities that are messier, more sordid, and more contingent than claimed.

    Their wordsAll of these grand visions hide truths that are messier, more sordid and more contingent.