I have another new (open access) piece just out, considering the intersection of surveillance and Science Fiction, this time in the context of the the ideologies of tech oligarchs, in a special section of Science as Culture, edited by Kean Birch and Les Levidow…
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09505431.2026.2646894#d1e124
The interpretative and polemical essay is written in the spirit and legacy of Barbrook and Cameron account of the ‘Californian Ideology’. Since Barbrook and Cameron wrote their text in the 1990s, a new and an increasingly coherent ideological constellation has emerged in Silicon Valley which Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres called TESCREAL (Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism). Unlike the preceding Californian Ideology of Barbrook and Cameron, I argue that this new ideological constellation is more strongly religious in its orientation, and that this is connected both to the broad cultural influence of science fiction (SF) and to the particularly limited way in which the ideology’s advocates understand SF. Based on a critical reading of the work of influential TESCREAL philosopher, Nick Bostrom, contextualized within a brief cultural history of the tech industry and its relationship to surveillance and SF, I argue that this increasingly religious ideological bundle serves to act as both an apologia for the already enormous infiltration of surveillance into everyday lives and frames total surveillance as a necessary stage in the path towards a transhuman, extraplanetary civilization.
ubisurv 