ReadMultiplex.com: You Have 5000 Days: Navigating the End of Work as We Know It. Part 35: Use of Weapons By Iain M. Banks.

Imagine a man who can win almost any war he is handed, and still cannot win the war inside his own name. Imagine a civilization so abundant it no longer needs soldiers of its own, so it borrows other people’s genius for violence and calls the arrangement morality. Imagine a chair that is not furniture. This is the cold thunder Iain M. Banks unleashes in Use of Weapons (https://amzn.to/4wmKNvq), the novel that asks the question The Player of Games only circled: after scarcity is solved, who gets used, and what does the using do to the user?

In Part 7 I walked with Bora Horza Gobuchul through the Idiran war and showed the Culture from the outside, a machine civilization that looked to an old warrior like the end of meaning. In Part 33 I stood with Jernau Morat Gurgeh on Chiark Orbital and watched paradise curdle into boredom until a game became a weapon and a weapon became a soul. Now Banks turns the lens on the hidden hand itself. Special Circumstances. Contact’s shadow. The department that does not play Azad on a public board. It plays people.

Picture the Abundance Interregnum not as a gentle dawn and not even as Gurgeh’s tournament. Picture it as a weapons locker whose door has just come unlocked. AI agents are no longer toys. Humanoid bodies are no longer demos. Local models in garages can already plan, persuade, fabricate, and coordinate. The question is no longer whether we will have power. The question is whether we will become the Culture’s Minds, or whether we will become Zakalwe: brilliant, useful, and secretly broken, running other people’s missions because we cannot face our own.

Elon Musk has said the Culture books are a pretty good prediction of the future he is building. SpaceX drone ships carry Banks names. That future is not only Orbitals and matter printers. It is also Special Circumstances. It is the temptation to treat a person, or an agent, or a swarm, as a tool that happens to talk. Use of Weapons is the book that refuses to let that temptation stay pretty.

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