"the mass of people are dissolute or self-absorbed to the point of naivete"
In a few of the Culture novels Banks makes a point of the fact that the Culture annoys a lot of other civilizations (or more accurately, the leaders of other civilizations) by being the nice guys who appear to always finish first - which as we all know, is not supposed to be how the real world works.
The idea of a society that goes to extreme lengths to ensure that all of it's citizens are happy and lead long and fulfilling lives, doing pretty much whatever they want to do (extreme sports, building stuff, designing worlds, playing games, helping other civilizations...) seems to annoy a lot of people - for reasons I've never quite understood.
Of course, outside of Special Circumstances, an individual human isn't going to contribute much to a society that includes billions of hyper-intelligent AIs and trillions of lesser AIs - but the Culture has accepted that the humans role in their society (also shared by a lot of the drone AIs) is basically to have fun. Personally, I could live with that.
"seems to annoy a lot of people - for reasons I've never quite understood."
Because it's a cheat. In novels, you can build up whatever society you like, no matter how implausible, but it doesn't mean anything in the real world. Sure, the Culture world is among my #1 fictional places I'd like to live, but it probably can't exist because there's no path from here to there that looks anything like the books. It's a fun place to put stories, but as an argument, it's disingenuous, which is what bothers people.
Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek TNG run was another example of a cheat... the idea that humans would grow, get to space, build a star-system-spanning Federation, and that the crew of its flagship starship wouldn't so much as slightly disagree about anything, ever, let alone squabble, is just an absurd cheat of an argument, as arguments go. Things got more realistic, if not necessarily "better", when at least small amounts of internal conflict were let in.
To which my solution is to simply stop allowing works of fiction to make normative arguments in my head. It's too easy to cheat. Arguably it's impossible not to cheat.
Even Banks thought that humans weren't really nice enough to form something like the Culture. On the other hand, he also makes it clear the organic inhabitants are as engineered as the drones and Minds - everything from the way their bodies work through the language they speak has been had thousands of years of engineering.
Of course, all SF "cheats" in some respects - and clearly a lot of aspects of the Culture technology are effectively unexplained magic - but that doesn't bother me. Having always been fascinated by strong artificial intelligence (real artificial minds) and I think the Culture novels do a very entertaining and optimistic job of raising questions about what a society made up of artificial intelligences and organic inhabitants might be like.
As he said to an interview about the Minds:
Is this what gods would actually be like?” Banks answered, “If we’re lucky.”
The idea of the society doesn't bother me in the least - I'd love to live there and you can bet I would indulge myself. What I meant was that when Banks depicts individuals outside the small pool of slightly-rogue-elite-who-know-what's-really-going-on, he has a strong authorial tendency to infantilize them in some way. Not in every case, eg the pregnant ex-spaceship captain who's a major character in Excession - although she's a wholly passive actor as far as the plot is concerned, in which she functions more as a moral problem for her host to deal with; but more often than not they're characterized as either flippant or dysfunctional.
Of course to some extent this is a problem of the space opera genre, i which the secondary characters wind up being pretty two-dimensional because they are in thrall to the plot. Banks recycled a lot of narrative techniques, to the point where if you encounter a deftly sketched character who never appears for more than 3 pages or changes their environment in any significant way, it's usually a safe guess that the character is like a 'Red Shirt' in Star Trek, created for a villain to callously do away with around the end of act II.
As far as the Culture itself works (run by mostly benign mega-intelligent spaceships and their robotic underlings, any of whom could take out a small army), I don't have any big problem with that. Excession, mentioned above, is perhaps the best look into the Minds' society, rather than the usual Chaplinesque human-scale story where the Minds' machinations are glimpsed only as outsize gear wheels or are the framing device for some sadistic non-Culture villain.
BTW I'm not that big a fan of Banks' non-SF work, but The Wasp Factory is absolutely essential reading if you find his SF at all interesting - it's like the conceptual template for a great many other of his stories and sets out basic themes that he returns to over and over.
I skipped that one for some reason - think I went from Espadair Street to The Crow Road and didn't like the latter, so I took a break from his 'contemporary' fiction for several years. I'll go back and check it out!
In a few of the Culture novels Banks makes a point of the fact that the Culture annoys a lot of other civilizations (or more accurately, the leaders of other civilizations) by being the nice guys who appear to always finish first - which as we all know, is not supposed to be how the real world works.
The idea of a society that goes to extreme lengths to ensure that all of it's citizens are happy and lead long and fulfilling lives, doing pretty much whatever they want to do (extreme sports, building stuff, designing worlds, playing games, helping other civilizations...) seems to annoy a lot of people - for reasons I've never quite understood.
Of course, outside of Special Circumstances, an individual human isn't going to contribute much to a society that includes billions of hyper-intelligent AIs and trillions of lesser AIs - but the Culture has accepted that the humans role in their society (also shared by a lot of the drone AIs) is basically to have fun. Personally, I could live with that.