I love how their comments section censor any mention of him to D**k.<p>Big PKD fan myself, some of his stories seem impossibly fanciful and he does bang on about drugs an AWFUL lot but the stories can have a lot of insight in them all the same.<p>In one of his books, the characters take drugs so powerful reality itself changes. Bit rum even for PKD, I had thought. Until I read the account of a depression sufferer when asked how he knew his medication was kicking in. He said he felt no internal changes whatsoever, but knew it was working when other people starting being nicer to him. And I realised PKD had got to the truth of something, how we take drugs maybe not to change ourselves but our perceptions of the world, and if your perception of the world changes is that not the world changing?
On a light note, I live down the street from PKD's old house in Point Reyes. I drove by yesterday and took this pic. The current owner has setup a Starlink above his old study where he wrote many of his books.<p><a href="https://imgur.com/a/DojT97L" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/DojT97L</a><p>I wonder what he would have thought if someone told him that 50 years later, just a few feet above his head, that there would be an antenna talking to a swarm of low earth orbit satellites in space, that could access all information known to man. But, at least 20% of the data flow would be used to share images of people having sex with each other.<p>He actually might have been one of the few people from that era who would NOT have been surprised this was the future.
P.K. churned out much of his work in an amphetamine haze driven by then need to make money as writing was his sole means of support. I think a lot of California dystopian writings can be attributed to the overuse of amphetamines. The Summer of Love was destroyed by it as the phrase that emerged at the time was "Speed Kills." Joan Didion wrote about it "Slouching Towards Bethlehem.'<p>On the other hand I'm a optimistic utopian, so I may be inclined to minimize and disregard dystopian writing.<p>Where P.K. Dick really got me is in "How to Build a..." [1] in which he's very interested in the nature of reality and open to the idea that it is far more fungible than we think and in fact there may be a greater intelligence at work in the Universe that arranges reality in such a way as to communicate to the participant who is paying close attention. It doesn't scare and depress me to think that I don't have the control I thought I did and am mostly along for the ride. It's also exciting to think "more will be revealed"<p>[1] "How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later" Philip K. Dick, 1978<p><a href="https://urbigenous.net/library/how_to_build.html" rel="nofollow">https://urbigenous.net/library/how_to_build.html</a>
Interesting writeup, and the modern surveillance state certainly has a lot of parallels to Philip K. Dick's world, although the personal flavor of the latter - i.e. the extensive use of undercover STASI-type operatives in A Scanner Darkly, characterized by the betrayal of trust in personal and intimate relationships, is not as much of an obvious general feature of Facebook-type data collection and NSA archival data tracking of both American citizens and non-citizens.<p>At least our current system is not (yet) a true panopticon, which is a system where the prison guards can see all the prisoners, all the time, but the prisoners cannot see or communicate with one another. People can still communicate with one another, but the expectation of privacy is almost entirely gone. Certainly the power structure can see who is communicating with who via metadata monitoring, even if strong encryption can hide the content of the communication in many cases.<p>The extent to which general knowledge of this constant monitoring changes mass social behavior isn't really known, but one imagines it's the kind of thing the research anthropologists in CIA Behavioral Studies programs - characters that populate many PKD works - are obsessed with.<p>Incidentally, PKD's drug-psychosis-theme in many of his works is most likely linked to amphetamine psychosis, a fairly well-studied and well-understood side effect of constant use of amphetamines and their derivatives or analogues (i.e amphetamine, (Adderall), methamphetamine, MDMA (Ecstacy), methylphenidate (Ritalin)). These widely prescribed, used and abused substances should be regarded with more caution, I think - particularly when it comes to ADHD diagnoses in children. Certainly the for-profit drug manufacturers shouldn't be trusted on this, nor the mass social behavior manipulation types.<p>Also, it's likely that Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, another vision of a drug-addled dystopian future (1932), was a major influence on PKD's dystopian works.
>"<i>Technology was and is perhaps the most Californian aspect of the American mythos. The idea that the universal constants of human nature were at war with the mutilating demands of technology-driven systems was a very Sixties Californian conceit, to which Dick’s fellow anti-utopians each adhered in their own way: In Kesey’s showdown between man and the castrating nanny-state; in Didion’s emphasis on the vanishing virtue of self-reliance; in Pynchon’s degenerate Ivy League Puritanism; in Thompson’s drug-addled primitivism; and in Stone’s Catholic idea of devotion to a God that might somehow salve the wounds of the survivors once the great American adventure goes bust.</i>"<p>What an interesting quote!<p>I will have to check out some of the works of those other authors in the future, to examine the idea sets they propose, and then (after having read them thoroughly!) possibly add some of the better/more interesting ideas they propose -- to my "<i>chock-full-o'-everything philosophical idea corpus in my mind</i>" <g> (For lack of a better term!)<p>Anyway, a very interesting quote -- worthy of future study!
Read most of Phil's books - not more than once - enjoyed them for what they were ... paranoid, dark, imaginative, disorganized, groping ... but wouldn't include him with the great writers (showing what it can mean to be human in its great variety ... and how that can be denied us ... revealing more as we age).<p><i>Bladerunner</i> (the director's cut anyway) was a great film, still among my top favorites. It added much-needed clarity to some of Phil's best cud-chewings. Without the film, I think he'd have remained relatively unknown. Other authors, before and since him, I may turn back to for another read - because they offer me more than more confusion.
> a surveillance society run by engineers would feel like to its inhabitants with a nauseating accuracy that did not become fully apparent until the rise of the modern tech surveillance complex.<p>Dick used to write letters to the FBI in the 1970s urging them to investigate fellow science fiction writers like Thomas Disch or professors like Fredrick Jameson. He was a participant in (delusionaly?) ratting people out to the secret police. I'll leave it to others to forecast a dystopia, he seems to forecast a dystopia he is trying to build.
This piece shows little awareness of Philip K. Dick's work or the circumstances of his life. PKD wasn't on the typical agenda of a sci-fi author, so it won't really work to analyze his work that way. PKD's fiction doesn't have any clear goal of futurology, deeply analyzing technology (like, say, Arthur C. Clarke) or presenting dystopias (like, say, George Orwell). A Scanner Darkly was written at a tough time in his life and was autobiographical in some fragmentary way. Tessa Dick made a sci-fi novel out of it, but the veneer over 1960s California is paper-thin.<p>It would be more adequate to say that PKD focused on spiritual and religious subjects, particularly the nature of reality and how the "little creatures" suffer and struggle to survive. This isn't a mode of futurology. PKD struggled with the symptoms of diagnosed schizophrenia and his work powerfully reflects that personal struggle. "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" is about a spiritual dystopia that doesn't center the replicants at all - that theme of "our idea of the human" comes rather from Ridley Scott.<p>Then comes the political pivot near the end of this blog post. PKD didn't predict COVID-19 or even try. It's spectacularly unclear that he was trying to warn us about the "danger" of qualified scientists telling us that it would be helpful to get vaccinated and wear masks to reduce the death and disability caused by a lethal pandemic. COVID-19 has killed over a million people in the US alone - hundreds of 9/11s worth. This isn't a conspiracy to control you with technology. To quote a certain wise wizard, "I am not trying to rob you. I'm trying to help you."
I'm all for criticizing hypocrisy, especially in government, but the COVID example strikes me as perhaps the <i>worst</i> possible for demonstrating the point. Some level of "draconian" action <i>would</i> have helped slow, or even stop, the spread of COVID-19; at least in the US, none was taken.<p>A far better example, which actually involves surveillance rather than unrelated masking and distancing measures, would be politicians and wealthy businesspeople pushing invasive CSAM detection systems into consumer devices "for the good of the children" while schmoozing with Jeffrey Epstein.<p>Typical faff from Unherd; a long article full of information better explained elsewhere followed by a poorly veiled gesture towards their existing agenda.
PKD didn’t consider encryption and the many tools we can use to thwart spying and surveillance. I’m tired of these articles that suggest we’re helpless fools sleepwalking into a dystopia. Encryption is all we have now to fight Orwellian dystopias and it’s worth having good opsec (depending on your threat model). I feel very safe and cozy on the web and with technology in general because it’s all locked down. MFA. Password managers, AD blockers, secure operating systems, compartmentalized identities etc