The Soft Predicament

Aldiss, Brian. "The Soft Predicament." F&SF Oct. 1969. Coll. The Book of Brian Aldiss (q.v. under Anthologies).

Western civilization ("Westciv") has become regimented, bureaucratic, technocratic—and all White; arguably, Westciv is composed of "slaves to consumer goods and machines," and is unambiguously at war with "Blackyland": the nations of the Third World. One Westciv project is CUFL, the Free-Living Collective Unconscious program, where human dreamers are connected to a machine that "is intended to be to the psyche what the computer is to knowledge" (Book of BA 151, 137).

RDE, Title, 7Aug19