"reform all the tawdry inefficiencies"
March 31, 2022 5:57 AM Subscribe
"Running Walden Three is not a feel-good exercise. It is a job, and it is a difficult one. We can make an executive love Walden Three, but we can’t make a fool into an executive." "Tomorrow’s Dictator" is a short, dark scifi story by Rahul Kanakia, published in 2012, in which it's hard to hire good brainwashers, er, community managers.
Gonna keep this story in mind next time I start complaining about my antidepressants being only vaguely helpful — never thought about the trade offs that might be involved if they were too specifically helpful…
Brainwane I don’t know how you keep finding these gems, but you’re single-handedly reviving my interest in a genre I’d largely given up on. I’m grateful.
posted by ook at 8:49 AM on March 31, 2022 [9 favorites]
Brainwane I don’t know how you keep finding these gems, but you’re single-handedly reviving my interest in a genre I’d largely given up on. I’m grateful.
posted by ook at 8:49 AM on March 31, 2022 [9 favorites]
Ooh, curious to read this one. Especially so with the clear nod to B. F. Skinner's Walden Two, which I only just became aware of in its own right because Jenny Odell discusses it a bit in her execellent How To Do Nothing.
posted by cortex at 8:56 AM on March 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by cortex at 8:56 AM on March 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
And, yeah. Good, and gut-punchy and dark. I like how effectively it plays with the false contrast between the cultishness of adjustments as an explicit and loathed practice of inducement vs. all the implicit and inescapable pressures of inducement that exist in "normal" society. Roger's knowing manipulation of Sasha in their lunch meeting—starting with that intentional ordering of a drink for a reformed alcoholic and the concomitant feigned ignorance—manages to paint just as ugly a picture of functional, normative executive behavior as the notion of brainwashing adjustments does of Sasha's work.
And the unsettling effectiveness Roger has in drawing Sasha into a mercenary tactical proposal for making potential factory workers miserable enough to manufacture consent, in contrast with the seeming driving ethics behind her work at Walden Three: is it really then an ethical core, or just a maquette of one she has built for herself to justify the self-acknowledged misery of her situation?
The premise made me think of P. K. Dick's mood organ from "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep"; this feels intentionally resonant of that, and as in that novel I think the idea works well here partly because it's embedded in the concept of people getting by in a hard ugly world, not just people getting fantastically high as some sort of pleasure fantasy.
posted by cortex at 10:26 AM on March 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
And the unsettling effectiveness Roger has in drawing Sasha into a mercenary tactical proposal for making potential factory workers miserable enough to manufacture consent, in contrast with the seeming driving ethics behind her work at Walden Three: is it really then an ethical core, or just a maquette of one she has built for herself to justify the self-acknowledged misery of her situation?
The premise made me think of P. K. Dick's mood organ from "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep"; this feels intentionally resonant of that, and as in that novel I think the idea works well here partly because it's embedded in the concept of people getting by in a hard ugly world, not just people getting fantastically high as some sort of pleasure fantasy.
posted by cortex at 10:26 AM on March 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
That was a brilliant story - and incisive and sharp enough that I said a little 'ouch!' by the end. Seconding being someone who hadn't read sci fi in a while but always enjoys these hand picked recs.
posted by MarianHalcombe at 3:06 PM on March 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by MarianHalcombe at 3:06 PM on March 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
FWIW, writer's name is Naomi Kanakia. I went out seeking her fiction after an essay of hers, "The myth of the classically educated elite," was previously featured in a FPP.
posted by handle in the wind at 9:15 PM on March 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by handle in the wind at 9:15 PM on March 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
This was excellent.
posted by brilliantine at 8:34 AM on April 1, 2022
posted by brilliantine at 8:34 AM on April 1, 2022
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posted by Faint of Butt at 8:41 AM on March 31, 2022