Oldie but goodie. A piece of fiction describing how a computer system can do the job of human managers at fast food restaurants (scarily plausible), how this leads to a dystopia (slowly getting implausible), and how to avoid this scenario and reach utopia (give me a break).
Spoilers...
Was anyone else jarred by the way Burt spoke so cynically about how he and the narrator would never leave their bleak Terrafoam prison because their lives in the 2030's were historically analogous to people living on a dollar a day in 2005, when people rich enough to help others out of third world squalor didn't do anything because they they were distracted by how amazing it was to swim in a pool! Burt argued that they had no more realistic prospects for improvement than people in the slums of Calcutta because no one who owned capital would take the time out to help them.
...and then after the deus ex kicks in at the end to save just them, neither Burt nor the narrator care in the slightest to help anyone they'd just spent months or years living with in the Terrafoam housing projects. Missing any old friends? Nope, not in the slightest! And in their new world no one seems to clearly understand the mechanisms of the new prosperity nor do they seek to use that prosperity to help those with whom they should notionally be able to empathize.
I fear that the author actually believes this stereotyped and non-reflective content is not humorous as propaganda but is somehow actually inspiring and visionary. This hypothesis would suggest that the author is kind of like Ayn Rand, except less skilled.
On the other hand, the author might just be playing out this game with a straight face, like Jonathan Swift where the idea is to aim high and hope some people get it rather aiming low in the fear that someone might not. However the message I get when I interpret the story this way involves breathtaking levels of misanthropy and hopelessness... which is somewhat inconsistent with high artistic aspirations.
Did I miss something obvious?
I think it's a genre convention of utopian fiction -- take an observer from the mundane world (which may be a crapsack, and plant them in the midst of the wonders of Utopia. For me, given the strong resemblance of the Australia Project to the Culture, it's impossible to imagine that they don't have their equivalent of Contact (and Special Circumstances), but that the narrator never was introduced to them. I lean towards the Author Failure explanation, though I don't think it's actually possible to be less skilled than Ayn Rand.