Project Steel Alien
It began back in 2009 with a video game called Spore. Spore guides a species from microorganism through to galaxy-trekking empire, shaping its biology, culture, and technology along the way. The core idea of video games as a creative story-telling medium is this: optionality is created by perceptual ambiguity or by deliberate ‘forking’ of a path into a particular choice, and after dozens of such choices, or increasing ambiguity, the result is what feels like a very personalised story. Not just something the video gamer created and presented to a user, but a story the user constructed in their mind, with the video game as a medium.
RPGs work like this, where the world is largely premade, but you tell the narrative of your character, and what kind of person they are. And you can have very different experiences of a game by pouring more into the lore and motivations of your character.
What was great about Spore is that it was that the role you were playing was species-wide. It was a bit like asking an ecosystemic question:
If you have all of these different possible paths for development, how do they converge, diverge, interact?
And if you ask this question well, you learn something. What we think of as narratives of individuals and their interactions, we can fittingly call a “story”.
When we are telling a narrative on a larger scale, about an entire species interacts, we can think of it as a “history”.
That is largely what the encyclopaedic sprawl of the Steel Alien is. It is an effort to create, not a Story, but a History.
Strategic Survival
Back when I first started writing histories as a form of storytelling, I didn’t have my main character yet. For Spore it was the ‘Novariin’, a sort of tapeworm/stick insect that didn’t have all that much substance behind it - for all that it has branching choices and a wide aesthetic range, Spore’s history is very linear.
I first conceived of The Matrix playing a different game, Galactic Civilizations. The tech tree in Galactic Civilizations is insanely branched, and started making me think about technology as something more than background to a process; ecosystemic inequalities were driven by technological choices.
Microscale differences in resource investment confer a strategic advantage, and the lifeform that gets the biggest strategic advantages is best able to outplay others over the course of long history.
So I had this idea of who the protagonist had to be. They were the species which, at any given point in adopting a culture, technology, or goal, made the best choice, not only for the moment but in the context of longtermism. They were a species of extreme rationalists, built up from a correct epistemological foundation and expressing it instrumentally in a way which converges/degenerates into the ‘only’ future - the future in which they survive purely as an expression of that initial principle of having made the ‘best’ strategic choice. Which sounds sort of circular. Histories, like stories, are often inked from both ends, with the details worked out in the middle.
Straw & Steel
Pretty much anyone who has spent any time arguing with people on the internet is familiar with the concept of the Strawman, an argumentative fallacy whereby instead of interacting with the actual argument presented by an interlocutor, a person interacts with a simpler, dumber argument for the same conclusion.
This is a form of avoiding a valid argument (and often feeling superior) with the aim of ‘winning’. We all do it from time to time, and the result is generally that we make ourselves dumber by not considering the strength of the other person’s position and the ways in which they are right. It also makes us worse as reasoners, because often it is hard problems and puzzles that sharpen our thinking skills - if you only ever face ‘dummy’ arguments, you aren’t actually all that good at adventuring in the realms of truth and knowledge.
The less-known Steelman is an epistemic inversion of the Strawman. It is the idea that once we are aware of our tendency to create Strawmen (what we can think of as a Self-Serving Heuristic), we need to actually make an effort to push in the other direction to avoid over-simplifying people’s arguments. A Steelman takes the opponent’s argument and strengthens it by exercising The Principle of Charity; it assumes good intent, knowledgeability, and careful thinking. It’s sort of like assuming that anyone you meet has the potential to be smarter than you in some way, to have a perspective or technology that you can learn from and use to bolster your own skills. Rather than fighting dummies, this is more like sparring with warriors; sometimes your opponent still isn’t as tough as you thought, but the effort you make to outthink them translates to real training in reasoning skills.
The ALIEN
Steelmanning is now a very popular technique, but it can be pushed a step further with the concept of aliening.
We can imagine others to be as cultured, wise, and sophisticated as ourselves, but it is harder to imagine beings that are more-so. When we imagine aliens a lot of what they do seems magical, technology operating on such an advanced level that it cannot make sense from our current perspective.
H.P Lovecraft, who is a terrible person but a good writer, used this to great effect in telling the history of the Cthulhu Mythos; the idea being centrally that what to a human mind is weird and horrific is, to a technologically-advanced alien, simply a very small detail in a bigger picture. When you can see the bigger picture, the revulsion and confusion are replaced by insight and wonder.
So we can apply this same logic to considerations to the revolting / weird / horror reaction that we have to people’s minds.
Steelmanning makes the assumption that others are like us as reasoning, thoughtful beings.
Aliening goes a step further and says maybe other people can be unlike us in a way which is actually better or superior to us.
This can be a hard perspective to grasp, but is maybe best understood in the way we think of madness and genius. Many things which a ‘genius’ does may seem strange or unusual, but we forgive them, even celebrate them, by understanding it as a product of their privileged perspective.
Aliening is a bit like treating interlocutors like misunderstood geniuses. You sometimes can’t understand a person’s argument from your own perspective, so you have to not only have to apply rules in a fair and unbiased way, you have to assume that parts of your perspective are limited in a way that shapes your understanding of the world.
Bringing it Back
The Steel Alien, then, is a combination of these two ideas, Steelmanning and Aliening:
Assume that others are as rational, capable, and intelligent as you are.
Assume that others have differences in perspective and see part of the picture that you cannot see.
By doing this, you create an attitude of openness to experience that falls outside of self-centered narratives. You acknowledge that what is more important is drawing a link, finding the perspective that creates the ‘Oho!’ of understanding when you finally understand something you didn’t.
The only real winners of an argument are those who, at the end of the day, change their mind by understanding more.
It didn’t start this way. I didn’t even know about the term ‘Steel Alien’ until I was several years into the project. When I did, I had a good chuckle, because of course that is what the project has been about the entire time.
Humans don’t appear in this history. The Cephlariin, who take up a sizeable chunk of it, are decidedly ‘not’ human in either appearance or outlook; a bit like Vulcans they represent a radicalisation of virtues in the form of a species. Their history is about where those virtues lead.
It is impossible to tell any history without conflict; the idea that, while collectively there is an averaged or shared identity, individually it is made up of millions of expressions of contrary ideas, goals, and decisions. These differences are what make individuals individual. Without them, story and history would be the same thing.
So there is, at its basis, a central conundrum to The Matrix:
If, as a species descriptor, Matrixians always make the most correct, strategic, rational choice, why are there individuals with conflicting ideas throughout their history?
Why are there materialists fighting with spiritualists? Why don’t the spiritualists just give up?
Why are their militarists at odds with diplomats? Why don’t the militarists simply put down their weapons?
Why are there environmentalists fighting industrialists? Why don’t they just find mutualistic middle-ground?
And the answer is recursively Steel-Alieny:
The species descriptor is the Steelman. The difference in its expression is due to individuation of perspective.
So what I am attempting to do is to dress the history of an entire species in metal.
Xenophobes? They have perfectly good and rational explanations for their policy. The only difference is their context.
Imperialism? A totally intelligent, well-reasoned position. It is just an optimal strategy within a very specific niche.
Spiritualists? Surprisingly, they get closer to the truth than anyone. They are just looking at a bigger picture than them.
The Steel Alien Project is about exercising The Principle of Charity to understand historical context.
THEN IT GOT A LITTLE OUT OF HAND
Whenever I was playing video games, I found myself trying to recreate The Matrix, and adjusting its timeline to include new detail.
A bit like running dozens of simulations and aggregating their outcomes, when I played 4K games I would add technologies, events, and lore to absorb and incorporate fixed and random occurences from those games.
I asked, “What year/point in time best fits this technology? How does this event fit with this other event that happened in the previous run? How can both versions be true?”
I found myself thinking, “What is the Matrix-equivalent of this?” Particularly games like Stellaris and Endless Space fuelled multiple runs and shaped the Matrixian space-age. But then even games like FTL, Star Traders, and Civilization were used to think out details for specific events and historical eras.
Sci-fi, I found myself thinking, has stories in distinct technological stages. Some express early space exploration, others multicultural spacefaring civilisations, others a post-apocalyptian civilisational collapse. And if The Matrix is a lense through which to steelman everything, then its timeline must incorporate and aggregate all sci-fi narratives.
I sort of didn’t realise what I had gotten myself into until I was deep, deep into the lore.
Meanwhile a narrative ‘arc’ was emerging. I’ve heard some people refer to Stellaris as a ‘genocide simulator’ because total dominion is pretty much the end-state of all 4K games. If you win, you take over the galaxy.
That was one way of looking at The Matrix, and it was fascinating to expore the idea of the people I saw as ‘the good guys’ being, to everyone else, an AI singularity. The Cephlariin virtually cease to exist by uploading their minds into machines. Their culture is overturned when computing power becomes a central economic unit, and again when they develop species-wide mind-meshing. Seeing the suffering inflicted by technologically-inferior aliens, they crusade across the galaxy destroying all other cultures by sharing their technological powers.
The end, or at least the point at which I stop spreading out as much and start filling in more, is very similar to that of Sheri S. Teper’s Arbai Trilogy.
Steel is the only thing that survives history. The face of the technology constantly changes, from organic to cybernetic to digital. Every story plays out every which way, ends, and has its outcome aggregated to a larger trend. History becomes a story not of a species, but of a principle:
The strategy lets you survive, but in the end, it is the strategy that survives.
THE STRATEGY
Try to figure out what really exists to be interacted with out there in the world.
Communicate what you find with others. Be open to learning as much from them.
Work with others toward shared goals.
Fight when you have to, and hide when you must.