The Contraptions Book club March pick is Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition by Frances Yates. Chat thread here. We will discuss this the week of March 24th.

I’ll be co-hosting an online salon Silicon Archipelago: A Salon On Open Distributed Southeast Asian Tech Futures on Friday, March 14 (Southeast Asia time). This is a prequel for an in-person workshop on the same themes in Bangkok in late April (apply here if interested — free but limited capacity, with some regional travel support available). I would appreciate any forwards to interesting techies, tech policy people, and tech culture people from the region.

The Lord of the Rings is a great story, but I have to say, I’ve never understood the strange hold it seems to have on the imagination of a particular breed of technologists.

As a story it’s great. It is pure fantasy of course (in the Chiang’s Law sense of being about special people rather than strange rules), full of Chosen Ones doing Great Man (or Great Hobbit) things. As an extended allegory for society and technology it absolutely sucks and is also ludicrously wrong-headed. Humorless Chosen people presiding grimly over a world in terminal decline, fighting Dark Lords, playing out decline-and-fall scripts to which there is no alternative, no Plan B.

This is no way for a high-agency technological species to live, and thankfully it doesn’t have to be.

I mean, I get why politicians and economists might identify with the story. They enjoy little to no direct technological agency, harbor ridiculous Chosen One conceits, and operate in domains — political narratives and the dismal pseudoscience of economics — that are natural intellectual monopolies or oligopolies. Domains that allow fantasies to be memed into existence (the technical term is hyperstitional theory-fictions) for a while before they come crashing down to earth in flames, demonstrating yet again that no, you do not in fact get to create your own reality; that “reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away.”

There is a contrarian reading of The Lord of the Rings that argues that Sauron and Mordor are in fact the good guys, and represent technological progress, etc. But this is throwing good money narrativium after bad. Flipping the valence of a Chosen One story doesn’t make it any better. It’s still a Chosen One story with reversed roles.

No, you have to tell different sorts of stories altogether.

Such stories have, in fact, been told. They are Terry Pratchett’s Discworld stories. This post is an extended argument that as a lens for thinking about the world, The Lord of the Rings, is a work that you should “not set aside lightly, but throw across the room with great force,” and that in place of Middle Earth, you should install Terry Pratchett’s Discworld.

I won’t get into whether Discworld is better or worse as a fictional universe than Middle Earth. That is a matter of taste and which elements of craft you admire. But as an allegory for technology and society, Discworld is so radically, vastly superior, and LOTR is so terminally bad, it is not even a contest.

If you’re an actual, serious technologist, Discworld is where you should look for clues about how the world works, how it evolves in response to technological forces, and how humans should engage with those forces. It is catnip for actual technological curiosity, as opposed to validation of incuriously instrumental approaches to technology. If on the other hand, you’re really just a fantasist larping Chosen One stories bolstered by specious Straussian conceits, trying to meme your hyperstitional theory fictions into existence for a while, looting the commons with private-equity extraction engines until you get your Girardian comeuppance — by all means go for it. Though Margaret Thatcher and Neoliberalism are both dead, There Is No Alternative (TINA) — for you.

The rest of humanity, thankfully, has more imaginative and generative models of reality to draw on.

Now, for those of you who haven’t read the Discworld series, it is basically the anti-LOTR. For starters, even though it is set in a pseudo-historical time rather than the future, and features all the common tropes of fantasy, all that is in purely ironic mode. Discworld is in fact the hardest of hard science fiction universes you can find. Entirely about strange rules rather than special people.

You just have to learn to look past the wizards, dragons, elves, and such. There is even a “Science of Discworld” meta-series to help with that.

The irony is not subtle. It’s in-your-face. For instance, the core world-building premise is that of a literal “flat earth” disc-shaped planet, resting on the back of four elephants that stand on the back of a giant turtle swimming through space. But this parody of the cosmologies of antiquity is put through its paces with deadpan faux-scientific earnestness. There’s an entire novel about how there was once a fifth elephant, whose fossilized remains are the basis of the fossil fuel industry of Discworld.

And it only gets sillier from there.

And the sillier it gets, the better it seems to model our own world (known as Roundworld in the Discworld cosmogony, a place Discworlders can and do travel to, generally causing mayhem). The wilder a Discworld plot, the more you learn about how technology, society, and progress in Roundworld actually work.

I have a rule-of-thumb: The more seriously you take Discworld, the smarter you get about Roundworld.

The silliness is a feature, not a bug. Our universe is a vast, crazy place, and we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of the endless weirdness it harbors. As Douglas Adams noted, “If life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.”

Discworld is about curing yourself of the allure of a “sense of proportion.” There is no surer of way of becoming detached from reality and addicted to some notion of manufactured normalcy.

It is notable that one of the favorite rhetorical tricks of self-styled Special People is to point to something in incredulity and pretend to be aghast at how weird it is; how against “common sense” and “reasonable” and “first principles” understandings of the world. Those words and phrases are always suspicious, and extra suspicious — suspicious-squared as Pratchett might have said — when used by Chosen One types.

The Lord of the Rings on the other hand — the more seriously you take Middle Earth, the dumber you get about Roundworld.

Revealingly, Roundworld isn’t even modeled in the Middle Earth cosmology, except via vaguely racist and lazy allusions (In Middle Earth, I’m presumably one of those turbaned men-from-the-east riding an Oliphaunt and uncritically allied with Sauron).

If you double down on the LOTR brainrot, and add things like Ayn Rand and Rene Girard to the soup, you get a profoundly stupid vision of the world that it takes real genius to buy into. Which is what, as it happens, a lot of real geniuses (and I don’t mean this snarkily — Peter Thiel is a legit genius who happens to have bought into a really stupid vision of the world) have in fact done as of 2025, as they try to meme a revanchist Great Power world back into existence.

I’ve thought about this a lot in the last few months, and I’ve concluded the whole program is in fact exactly as stupid as it sounds, and will fail in profoundly stupid ways, doing a lot of irreversible damage (Brexit was a small scale model of what’s in store for us here in the US).

But to some extent I’ve made my peace with what’s coming, and have no desire to convince you that this is where things are headed. If you’ve bought into that, have fun being miserable in Middle Earth.

Instead, I want to sketch out for you how you can truly learn to think in pluralist there-are-many-alternatives ways.

The place to start is with the rules of Discworld.

If you haven’t read any Discworld novels, here is a map with a suggested reading order. I got it from Wikipedia, and literally checked off the books as I read them all a few years ago (except the Tiffany Aching ones). I recommend you do that too.

I read one Pratchett novel (Thief of Time I think) in college, but I’m glad I didn’t properly get into it till my mid-forties. These are books you cannot really appreciate if you’re too young. I read through the lot around 2017-19, during the first Trump admin, when I was in my early forties.

Pratchett believed you should start with Sourcery, and he is right, not just because it is early in the in-world chronology of one of the main sequences, but because it forcefully establishes what is perhaps the central dogma of Discworld:

People who think they are Special and Chosen are dangerous and bad for the world.

The story revolves around Discworld’s satirical version of the Chosen One plot arc. Here is the premise according to the Wikipedia entry:

On the Discworld, “sourcerers”—wizards who are sources of magic, and thus immensely more powerful than normal wizards—were the main cause of the Great Mage Wars that left areas of the Disc uninhabitable. As eight is a powerful magical number on Discworld, men born as the eighth son of an eighth son are commonly wizards. Since sourcerers are born the eighth son of an eighth son of an eighth son, they are “wizards squared”. To prevent the creation of sourcerers, therefore, wizards are not allowed to marry or have children.

These “sourcerers” are one species of annoying Chosen Ones in Discworld. In the novel, the prevention mechanisms fail, and a sourcerer is born, and wreaks havoc for a while trying to do dumb Chosen One things until one of the main protagonists of the world, Rincewind, a hapless, mediocre wizard, manages to contain him. With a lot of help of course — the mediocre protagonists of Discworld rarely act alone and never in hero-mode. Most Discworld stories are, to a first approximation, carrier-bag stories.

Discworld is essentially a kind place though, so the antagonists are usually just contained and neutralized, and sometimes even redeemed. They’re not vengefully made an example of by protagonists. That’s a Chosen One move. Discworlders are kinder, even if it costs them. That’s a point we’ll say more about.

The Rincewind stories are one of four major sequences in the Discworld universe. These are:

• Unseen University: Revolving around events at Unseen University in Ankh-Morpork, the setting for most stories, where Rincewind is a professor of geography. It is a den of complacent, mediocre, academic wizards who mostly don’t do anything. They rarely actually use magic for anything practical, not because of any lofty ideas of great power requiring great responsibility, but because they are lazy and magic is messy and causes more problems than it solves. The other residents of Ankh-Morpork agree, and rarely call on them to do anything.

• The City Watch novels, featuring a stubbornly everyman chief of police, Sam Vimes (based on the historic Robert Peel who founded London’s police force) who in the universe stands for regicidal skepticisms of power and a plodding, quiet integrity that cannot be bought off or stopped. His ancestor killed the last despotic king of Ankh-Morpork, the city-state in which much of the action unfolds. One of Vimes’ lieutenants, the nice but ordinary Carrot, is in fact the True King, but harbors n