We need to think big. The natural habitat of the left has always been the future, and this terrain must be reclaimed.
Argues the Left needs to go beyonWe need to think big. The natural habitat of the left has always been the future, and this terrain must be reclaimed.
Argues the Left needs to go beyond shortsighted 'folk politics' and start thinking big again. Instead of full employment, the Left needs to start thinking about automation and full unemployment. The author's prescription:
A twenty-first-century left must seek to combat the centrality of work to contemporary life. In the end, our choice is between glorifying work and the working class or abolishing them both.135 The former position finds its expression in the folk-political tendency to place value upon work, concrete labour and craftwork. Yet the latter is the only true postcapitalist position. Work must be refused and reduced, building our synthetic freedom in the process.136 As we have set out in this chapter, achieving this will require the realisation of four minimal demands: 1. Full automation 2. The reduction of the working week 3. The provision of basic income 4. The diminishment of the work ethic
To get there, we need to build a counter-hegemony based on utopian thinking and a return of left wing economics (and expanding popular economic literacy as a whole). The penultimate chapter on technological hegemony and Laclau's populism I found kind of hard to follow – though the bit about Allende's cybernetics stuff was cool.
It was really good at defining some common terms that are sometimes left murky by others. Examples:
Neoliberalism (view spoiler)[Defining neoliberalism as the veneration of free markets is problematic ... because many ostensibly neoliberal states do not adhere to free-market policies. Others have argued that neoliberalism is predicated upon instilling competition wherever possible.4 This makes sense of the drive towards privatisation, but it fails to explain the debates within neoliberalism about whether competition is an ultimate good or not.5 Some take into account these tensions within neoliberalism and recognise it as the political, rather than economic, project of a particular class.6 There is certainly some truth to this claim, but, taken at face value, it cannot explain why neoliberal ideology was rejected for so long by the capitalist classes that purportedly benefit from it.
Our view is that, contrary to its popular presentation, neoliberalism differs from classical liberalism in ascribing a significant role to the state.7 A major task of neoliberalism has therefore been to take control of the state and repurpose it.8 Whereas classical liberalism advocated respect for a naturalised sphere supposedly beyond state control (the natural laws of man and the market), neoliberals understand that markets are not ‘natural’.9 Markets do not spontaneously emerge as the state backs away, but must instead be consciously constructed, sometimes from the ground up.10 For instance, there is no natural market for the commons (water, fresh air, land), or for healthcare, or for education.11 These and other markets must be built through an elaborate array of material, technical and legal constructs. Carbon markets required years to be built;12 volatility markets exist in large part as a function of abstract financial models;13 and even the most basic markets require intricate design.14 Under neoliberalism, the state therefore takes on a significant role in creating ‘natural’ markets. The state also has an important role in sustaining these markets – neoliberalism demands that the state defend property rights, enforce contracts, impose anti-trust laws, repress social dissent and maintain price stability at all costs. This latter demand, in particular, has greatly expanded in the wake of the 2008 crisis into the full-spectrum management of monetary issues through central banks. We therefore make a grave mistake if we think the neoliberal state is intended simply to step back from markets. The unprecedented interventions by central banks into financial markets are symptomatic not of the neoliberal state’s collapse, but of its central function: to create and sustain markets at all costs. (hide spoiler)]
Proletariat: (view spoiler)[This new figure of the proletariat was defined by its lack of access to the means of production or subsistence, and its requirement for wage labour in order to survive.6 This means that the ‘proletariat’ is not just the ‘working class’ nor is it defined by an income level, profession or culture. Rather, the proletariat is simply that group of people who must sell their labour power to live – whether they are employed or not.7 (hide spoiler)]
Hegemony: (view spoiler)[the engineering of consent according to the dictates of one particular group. A hegemonic project builds a ‘common sense’ that installs the particular worldview of one group as the universal horizon of an entire society. By this means, hegemony enables a group to lead and rule over a society primarily through consent (both active and passive) rather than coercion.8 This consent can be achieved in a variety of ways: the formation of explicit political alliances with other social groups, the dissemination of cultural values supporting a particular way of organising society (for example, the work ethic instilled by the media and through education), the alignment of interests between classes (for example, workers are better off when a capitalist economy is growing, even if this means mass inequality and environmental devastation) and through building technologies and infrastructures in such a way that they silently constrain social conflict (for example, by widening streets to prevent the erection of barricades during insurrections). In a broad and diffuse sense, hegemony enables relatively small groups of capitalists to ‘lead’ society as a whole, even when their material interests are at odds with those of the majority. Finally, as well as securing active and passive consent, hegemonic projects also deploy coercive means, such as imprisonment, police violence and intimidation, to neutralise those groups that cannot otherwise be led. (hide spoiler)]
Folk politics: (view spoiler)[a collective and historically constructed political common sense that has become out of joint with the actual mechanisms of power. As our political, economic, social and technological world changes, tactics and strategies which were previously capable of transforming collective power into emancipatory gains have now become drained of their effectiveness. As the common sense of today’s left, folk politics often operates intuitively, uncritically and unconsciously. Yet common sense is also historical and mutable. It is worth recalling that today’s familiar forms of organisation and tactics, far from being natural or pre-given, have instead been developed over time in response to specific political problems. Petitions, occupations, strikes, vanguard parties, affinity groups, trade unions: all arose out of particular historical conditions.12 Yet the fact that certain ways of organising and acting were once useful does not guarantee their continued relevance. (hide spoiler)]
Highlights: The problem: (view spoiler)[Using an idea we call ‘folk politics’, we offer a diagnosis of how and why we lost the capacity to build a better future. Under the sway of folk-political thinking, the most recent cycle of struggles – from anti-globalisation to anti-war to Occupy Wall Street – has involved the fetishisation of local spaces, immediate actions, transient gestures, and particularisms of all kinds. Rather than undertake the difficult labour of expanding and consolidating gains, this form of politics has focused on building bunkers to resist the encroachments of global neoliberalism. In so doing, it has become a politics of defence, incapable of articulating or building a new world. (hide spoiler)]
On progress: (view spoiler)[progress must be understood as hyperstitional: as a kind of fiction, but one that aims to transform itself into a truth. Hyperstitions operate by catalysing dispersed sentiment into a historical force that brings the future into existence. They have the temporal form of ‘will have been’. Such hyperstitions of progress form orienting narratives with which to navigate forward, rather than being an established or necessary property of the world. Progress is a matter of political struggle, following no pre-plotted trajectory or natural tendency, and with no guarantee of success. If the supplanting of capitalism is impossible from the standpoint of one or even many defensive stances, it is because any form of prospective politics must set out to construct the new. (hide spoiler)]
What the future portends: (view spoiler)[With the potential for extensive automation of work – a topic that will be discussed further in the next chapter – it is likely that we will see the following trends in the years to come: 1.The precarity of the developed economies’ working class will intensify due to the surplus global labour supply (resulting from both globalisation and automation). 2.Jobless recoveries will continue to deepen and lengthen, predominantly affecting those whose jobs can be automated at the time. 3.Slum populations will continue to grow due to the automation of low-skilled service work, and will be exacerbated by premature deindustrialisation. 4.Urban marginality in the developed economies will grow in size as low-skilled, low-wage jobs are automated. 5.The transformation of higher education into job training will be hastened in a desperate attempt to increase the supply of high-skilled workers. 6.Growth will remain slow and make the expansion of replacement jobs unlikely. 7.The changes to workfare, immigration controls and mass incarceration will deepen as those without jobs are increasingly subjected to coercive controls and survival economies. Of course, none of these outcomes is inevitable. But this analysis is based on the current tendencies of capitalism, and on the problems that are likely to arise as surplus populations continue to grow.
...
What the next two decades portend is a future in which the global economy is increasingly unable to produce enough jobs (let alone good jobs), yet where we remain dependent upon jobs for our living. Political parties and trade unions appear ignorant of this crisis, struggling to manage its symptoms even as automation promises to toss more and more workers aside. In the face of these tensions, the political project for the twenty-first-century left must be to build an economy in which people are no longer dependent upon wage labour for survival. As we will argue in the next few chapters, this struggle can and should span an array of different approaches: it means creating hegemonic ideas about the obsolescence of drudgery, shifting the goals of trade unions from resisting automation to job-sharing and reduced working weeks,160 government subsidies for automation investment, and raising the cost of labour for capital,161 along with many other options.162 It means opposing the expulsion of surplus populations and attacking the mechanisms of control over them. Mass incarceration and the racialised system of domination associated with it must be abolished,163 and the spatial mechanisms of control – ranging from ghettos to border controls – must be taken apart to ensure the free movement of peoples. And the welfare state must be defended, not as an end in itself, but as a necessary component of a broader post-work society. The future remains open, and which direction the crisis of work takes is precisely the political struggle before us. (hide spoiler)]
Revolution vs reformism: (view spoiler)[Today, revolutionary demands appear naive, while reformist demands appear futile. Too often that is where the debate ends, with each side denouncing the other and the strategic imperative to change our conditions forgotten. The demands we propose are therefore intended as non-reformist reforms. By this we mean three things. First, they have a utopian edge that strains at the limits of what capitalism can concede. This transforms them from polite requests into insistent demands charged with belligerence and antagonism. Such demands combine the futural orientation of utopias with the immediate intervention of the demand, invoking a ‘utopianism without apology’.4 Second, these non-reformist proposals are grounded in real tendencies of the world today, giving them a viability that revolutionary dreams lack. Third, and most importantly, such demands shift the current political equilibrium and construct a platform for further development. They project an open-ended escape from the present, rather than a mechanical transition to the next, predetermined stage of history (hide spoiler)]
Interesting idea of shadow work: (view spoiler)[While waged work remains difficult for many to find, unpaid work is proliferating – an entire sphere of ‘shadow work’ is emerging with automation at the point of sale, with work being delegated to users (think self-checkouts and ATMs).73 Moreover, there is the hidden labour required to retain a job: financial management, job searching if unemployed, constant skills training, commuting time, and the all-important (gendered) sphere of the labour involved in caring for children, family members and other dependents. (hide spoiler)]
A UBI feedback loop (I'm starting to come around to Matt Bruenig's idea for a UBI, with his justification that a basic income already exists for the rich): (view spoiler)[Third, a basic income would necessitate a rethinking of the values attributed to different types of work. Given that workers would no longer be forced to take a job, they could instead simply reject jobs that paid too little, required too much work, offered too few benefits, or were demeaning and undignified. Low-waged work is often crass and disempowering, and under a programme of UBI it is unlikely that many would want to undertake it. The result would be that hazardous, boring and unattractive work would have to be better paid, while more rewarding, invigorating and attractive work would be less well paid. In other words, the nature of work would become a measure of its value, not merely its profitability.114 The outcome of this revaluation would also mean that, as wages for the worst jobs rose, there would be new incentives to automate them. UBI therefore forms a positive-feedback loop with the demand for full automation. On the other hand, a basic income would not only transform the value of the worst jobs, but also go some way towards recognising the unpaid labour of most care work. In the same way that the demand for wages for housework recognised and politicised the domestic labour of women, so too does UBI recognise and politicise the generalised way in which we are all responsible for reproducing society: from informal to formal work, from domestic to public work, from individual to collective work. What is central is not productive labour, defined in either traditional Marxist or neoclassical terms, but rather the more general category of reproductive labour.115 Given that we all contribute to the production and reproduction of capitalism, our activity deserves to be remunerated as well.116 In recognising this, the UBI indicates a shift from remuneration based upon ability to remuneration based upon basic need.117 All the genetic, historical and social variations that make effort a poor measure of a person’s worth are rejected here, and instead people are valued simply for being people. (hide spoiler)] ...more
Capitalist or communist, it all boils down to a pointless distinction between two types of poor, and to a major misconception that we almost managed tCapitalist or communist, it all boils down to a pointless distinction between two types of poor, and to a major misconception that we almost managed to dispel some 40 years ago – the fallacy that a life without poverty is a privilege you have to work for, rather than a right we all deserve.
A breezy read with ideas that are backed up by genuinely interesting statistics and anecdotes.
Argues that we can better society and move towards utopia by implementing three ideas: a 15 hour workweek, a universal basic income (UBI) and open borders.
The problem isn't the programs he's advocating, it's the neoliberal lens he's viewing them from (he grotesquely spends the last chapter blowing Hayek and Friedman).
The 15 hour workweek, for example, sounds fantastic the way he lays it out – more time to play, to dedicate to art, to spend with family and enjoy life – but there's already plenty of people in the retail sector working a 15 hour workweek. Their lives aren't idyllic, they're struggling against poverty. It's called precarity and politicians can't come up with any way to soften its sting. Of course, a genuine labour movement along the lines of the one that brought us the forty hour workweek could go a long way to making the 15 hour week desirable. But the author doesn't even acknowledge it's a problem.
The UBI is the same thing. It's easy to imagine how it would improve my own life, and very tempting to see it as a solves-all for poverty. But if a heartless ghoul like Dick Cheney and his neolizard pal Rumsfeld advocated for it, then it's just not that simple. I don't think a UBI can work unless we have a universal right to education, healthcare and housing. Those are the three things that everyone in our society needs but no one can realistically be expected to pay for them upfront. What good is a UBI if we're all bogged down in student loads, health insurance bills and rent payments? Of course, that's exactly why conservatives are tripping all over their dicks for a ubi, so they can gut and privatize everything else and bring us all back to feudalism.
His case for open borders is so vague I don't know what to make of it. If he just means accepting more immigrants, sure, I'm all for it. My own country, Canada, needs them. Immigrants contribute to society and to the economy in countless ways. Refugees, too. If nothing else there was a boost of civic morale when we started taking in large numbers of Syrian refugees (though I suspect that's going to bite Trudeau in the ass now that's he trying to backpedal away from it all). But what Bregman is advocating seems to go beyond even the current Eurozone, which really does seem like a disaster. I mean, it ended the beggar-thy-neighbour trade policies that used to result in war, but it also created a new caste of democratically unaccountable elites who are uninterested in a proletariat that gets to choose between a life on welfare benefits or immigration away from home just to make a basic living. He points out that in Africa, more money is lost to tax evasion than is received in aid, but I don't see how open, checkpoint-free borders are going to change that. Africa doesn't need any Luxembourgs.
There's nothing wrong with the mechanisms he's proposing. They can all work to make our lives better. It's the "ideology-free" ideology of neoliberalism that's at issue. With the managerial mindset, it's hard to see how life could improve. It'd be a brand new world at implementation and then back to managed decline. On the other hand, if these were road markers of a truly progressive, leftist campaign, backed up by a collective will for a better world – well then maybe they're ideas worth investigating after all.
Highlights:
Like KSR and Sanders he advocates for a tax on socially useless financial speculation to pay for social programs, which I'd be all for: (view spoiler)[The upshot is that we’ve all gotten poorer. For every dollar a bank earns, an estimated equivalent of 60 cents is destroyed elsewhere in the economic chain. Conversely, for every dollar a researcher earns, a value of at least $5 – and often much more – is pumped back into the economy. Higher taxes for top earners would serve, in Harvard science-speak, “to reallocate talented individuals from professions that cause negative externalities to those that cause positive externalities.” (hide spoiler)]
Somehow I actually don't own a cellphone: (view spoiler)[By the year 2013, six billion of the globe’s seven billion inhabitants owned a cell phone. (By way of comparison, just 4.5 billion had a toilet.) And between 1994 and 2014, the number of people with Internet access worldwide leaped from 0.4% to 40.4% (hide spoiler)]
I agree with this 100%, but it's the only time he mentions it and he glosses over what such a politics would look like: (view spoiler)[Lest there be any misunderstanding: It is capitalism that opened the gates to the Land of Plenty, but capitalism alone cannot sustain it. Progress has become synonymous with economic prosperity, but the 21st century will challenge us to find other ways of boosting our quality of life. And while young people in the West have largely come of age in an era of apolitical technocracy, we will have to return to politics again to find a new utopia. (hide spoiler)]
His case for a ubi: (view spoiler)[The great milestones of civilization always have the whiff of utopia about them at first. According to renowned sociologist Albert Hirschman, utopias are initially attacked on three grounds: futility (it’s not possible), danger (the risks are too great), and perversity (it will degenerate into dystopia). But Hirschman also wrote that almost as soon as a utopia becomes a reality, it often comes to be seen as utterly commonplace.
Not so very long ago, democracy still seemed a glorious utopia. Many a great mind, from the philosopher Plato (427–347 B.C.) to the statesman Edmund Burke (1729–1779), warned that democracy was futile (the masses were too foolish to handle it), dangerous (majority rule would be akin to playing with fire), and perverse (the “general interest” would soon be corrupted by the interests of some crafty general or other). Compare this with the arguments against basic income. It’s supposedly futile because we can’t pay for it, dangerous because people would quit working, and perverse because ultimately a minority would end up having to toil harder to support the majority. But… hold on a minute.
Futile? For the first time in history, we are actually rich enough to finance a sizable basic income. We can get rid of the whole bureaucratic rigamarole designed to force assistance recipients into low-productivity jobs at any cost, and we can help finance the new simplified system by chucking the maze of tax credits and deductions, too. Any further necessary funds can be raised by taxing assets, waste, raw materials, and consumption. (hide spoiler)]
On inequality: (view spoiler)[By now, inequality is ballooning in almost every developed country. In the U.S., the gap between rich and poor is already wider than it was in ancient Rome – an economy founded on slave labor.12 In Europe, too, there’s a growing divide between the haves and the have-nots. ... Granted, it all happened very fast. Whereas in 1964 each of the four largest American companies still had an average workforce of about 430,000 people, by 2011 they employed only a quarter that number, despite being worth twice as much.14 Or take the tragic fate of Kodak, inventor of the digital camera and a company that in the late 1980s had 145,000 people on its payroll. In 2012, it filed for bankruptcy, while Instagram – the free online mobile photo service staffed by 13 people at the time – was sold to Face-book for $1 billion.
The reality is that it takes fewer and fewer people to create a successful business, meaning that when a business succeeds, fewer and fewer people benefit. (hide spoiler)]
Obviously we need massive redistribution of wealth, but how is that ever going to happen? Bregman remains mum. (view spoiler)[The scenario of radical inequality that is taking shape in the U.S. is not our only option. The alternative is that at some point during this century, we reject the dogma that you have to work for a living. The richer we as a society become, the less effectively the labor market will be at distributing prosperity. If we want to hold onto the blessings of technology, ultimately there’s only one choice left, and that’s redistribution. Massive redistribution.
Redistribution of money (basic income), time (a shorter working week), taxation (on capital instead of labor), and, of course, of robots. As far back as the 19th century, Oscar Wilde looked forward to the day when everybody would benefit from intelligent machines that were “the property of all.” However, technological progress may make a society more prosperous in aggregate, but there’s no economic law that says everyone will benefit.
Not long ago, the French economist Thomas Piketty had people up in arms with his contention that if we continue down our current path we’ll soon find ourselves back in the rentier society of the Gilded Age. People who owned capital (stocks, houses, machines) enjoyed a much higher standard of living than folks who merely worked hard. For hundreds of years the return on capital was 4–5%, while annual economic growth lagged behind at under 2%. Barring a resurgence of strong, inclusive growth (rather unlikely), high taxation on capital (equally improbable), or World War III (let’s hope not), inequality could develop to frightening proportions once again.
All the standard options – more schooling, regulation, austerity – will be a drop in the bucket. In the end, the only solution is a worldwide, progressive tax on wealth, says Professor Piketty, though he acknowledges this is merely a “useful utopia.” And yet, the future is not carved in stone. All throughout history, the march toward equality has always been steeped in politics. If a law of common progress fails to manifest itself of its own accord, there is nothing to stop us from enacting it ourselves. Indeed, the absence of such a law may well imperil the free market itself. “We have to save capitalism from the capitalists,” Piketty concludes. (hide spoiler)]
(view spoiler)[This paradox is neatly summed up by an anecdote from the 1960s. When Henry Ford’s grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory, he jokingly asked, “Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues?” Without missing a beat, Reuther answered, “Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?” (hide spoiler)]
He doesn't have a solution for what to replace GDP with, but I can't fault him for that. Inevitably you end up in the Tony Blair trap of measuring everything, and getting nothing done, like in that Adam Curtis doc: (view spoiler)[A great idea, admittedly. There’s no denying that GDP came in very handy during wartime, when the enemy was at the gates and a country’s very existence hinged on production, on churning out as many tanks, planes, bombs, and grenades as possible. During wartime, it’s perfectly reasonable to borrow from the future. During wartime, it makes sense to pollute the environment and go into debt. It can even be preferable to neglect your family, put your children to work on a production line, sacrifice your free time, and forget everything that makes life worth living.
Indeed, during wartime, there’s no metric quite as useful as the GDP. ...
The point, of course, is that the war is over. Our standard of progress was conceived for a different era with different problems. Our statistics no longer capture the shape of our economy. And this has consequences. Every era needs its own figures. In the 18th century, they concerned the size of the harvest. In the 19th century, the radius of the rail network, the number of factories, and the volume of coal mining. And in the 20th, industrial mass production within the boundaries of the nation-state. But today it’s no longer possible to express our prosperity in simple dollars, pounds, or euros. From healthcare to education, from journalism to finance, we’re all still fixated on “efficiency” and “gains,” as though society were nothing but one big production line. But it’s precisely in a service-based economy that simple quantitative targets fail. “The gross national product […] measures everything […] except that which makes life worthwhile,” said Robert Kennedy (hide spoiler)]
On how to change people's minds and promote new ideas: (view spoiler)[James Kuklinski, a political scientist at the University of Illinois, discovered that people are most likely to change their opinions if you confront them with new and disagreeable facts as directly as possible. ... If it is true that that ideas don’t change things gradually but in fits and starts – in shocks – then the basic premise of our democracy, our journalism, and our education is all wrong. It would mean, in essence, that the Enlightenment model of how people change their opinions – through information-gathering and reasoned deliberation – is really a buttress for the status quo. It would mean that those who swear by rationality, nuance, and compromise fail to grasp how ideas govern the world. (hide spoiler)]
There's also a great history of Nixon's UBI plan and how the misunderstanding of the Speenhamland case 150 years prior coupled with Ayn Rand to kill it. ...more
Science fiction is to futurism what social theory is to conspiracy theory: an altogether richer, more honest, and more humble enterprise. Or to put itScience fiction is to futurism what social theory is to conspiracy theory: an altogether richer, more honest, and more humble enterprise. Or to put it another way, it is always more interesting to read an account that derives the general from the particular (social theory) or the particular from the general (science fiction), rather than attempting to go from the general to the general (futurism) or the particular to the particular (conspiracism).
With that in mind, Frase uses science fiction and social theory to look at four possible futures. He "posits that we can end up in a world of either scarcity or abundance, alongside either hierarchy or equality. This makes for four possible combinations."
They are:
Communism (equality and abundance): In this scenario he envisions a basic income that grows irrelevant as the tax base shrinks and as automation reduces the need for work. What's left of it, he argues, could be used as a kind of 'whuffie', the reputation-measuring currency in Doctorow's post-scarcity novel, and he looks at dogecoin as a sort of precursor to this (it's an internet currency that's essentially worthless, and so used for tipping people online).
Its chief pitfalls are that we'll never automate everything, and doing away with money might be possible, but we'll still have hierarchies (he cites infighting wikipedia editors).
Sci-fi examples: Star Trek, Corey Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magical Kingdom (view spoiler)[
The long-run trajectory, therefore, is one in which people come to depend less and less on the basic income, because the things they want and need do not have to be purchased for money. Some things can be produced freely and automatically, as 3-D printing and digital copying technologies evolve into something like Star Trek’s replicator. Other things have become the product of voluntary cooperative activity rather than waged work. It therefore comes to pass that the tax base for the basic income is undermined—but rather than creating an insoluble crisis, as in the hands of basic income critics, the withering away of the money economy, and its corresponding tax base, becomes the path to utopia.
...
But I would still argue that the communist society I’ve sketched here, though imperfect, is at least one in which conflict is no longer based on the opposition between wage workers and capitalists or on struggles over scarce resources. It is a world in which not everything ultimately comes down to money. A communist society would surely have hierarchies of status—as do capitalist and all societies. But in capitalism, all status hierarchies tend to be aligned, albeit imperfectly, with the master hierarchy of capital and money. The ideal of a postscarcity society is that various kinds of esteem are independent, so that the esteem in which one is held as a musician is independent of the regard one achieves as a political activist, and one can’t use one kind of status to buy another. In a sense, then, it is a misnomer to refer to this as an “egalitarian” configuration; it is not, in fact, a world that lacks hierarchies but rather one of many hierarchies, no one of which is superior to any other.
Rentism (Hierarchy and abundance): a really great look at how intellectual property rights aren't rights to property but to patterns, and how we're expanding the concept to include more and more patterns that we used to not think of as things that were commodifiable (he talks about fashion designers lobbying to copyright dress patterns, Monsanto copyrighting sees, John Deere arguing that farmers can't use third-party software on its tractors, etc). This, combined with greater automation, creates wealth inequality as the amount things people can buy grows, but "squeezes human labor out of the system". Eventually, all that's left is a dwindling creative class, rentiers who collect payments without contributing to the system, and a class of guards who enforce the rentiers' rights.
For all these reasons, it seems that the main problem confronting the society of anti–Star Trek is the problem of effective demand: that is, how to ensure that people are able to earn enough money to be able to pay the licensing fees on which private profit depends. Of course, this isn’t so different from the problem that confronted industrial capitalism, but it becomes more severe as human labor is increasingly squeezed out of the system, and human beings become superfluous as elements of production, even as they remain necessary as consumers. Ultimately, even capitalist self-interest will require some redistribution of wealth downward in order to support demand. Society reaches a state in which, as the French socialist André Gorz put it in his 1999 book Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-Based Society, “the distribution of means of payment must correspond to the volume of wealth socially produced and not to the volume of work performed.”23 Or, to translate from French Intellectual to English: you deserve a decent standard of living because you’re a human being and we’re a wealthy enough society to provide it, not because of any particular work that you did to deserve it. So in theory, this is one possible long-term trajectory of a world based on intellectual property rents rather than on physical commodity production using human Ultimately, even capitalist self-interest will require some redistribution of wealth downward in order to support demand. Society reaches a state in which, as the French socialist André Gorz put it in his 1999 book Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-Based Society, “the distribution of means of payment must correspond to the volume of wealth socially produced and not to the volume of work performed.”23 Or, to translate from French Intellectual to English: you deserve a decent standard of living because you’re a human being and we’re a wealthy enough society to provide it, not because of any particular work that you did to deserve it. So in theory, this is one possible long-term trajectory of a world based on intellectual property rents rather than on physical commodity production using human labor. What Gorz is talking about is something like the universal basic income, which was discussed in the last chapter. Which means that one long-run trajectory of rentism is to turn into communism.
(view spoiler)[inally, any society like the one I have described, which is predicated on maintaining great inequalities of wealth and power even when they have become economically superfluous, will require a large amount of labor to prevent the poor and powerless from taking a share back from the rich and powerful. The economists Samuel Bowles and Arjun Jayadev call this type of labor “Guard Labor” and define it as “the efforts of the monitors, guards, and military personnel … directed not toward production, but toward the enforcement of claims arising from exchanges and the pursuit or prevention of unilateral transfers of property ownership.”17 It includes private security guards, police officers, the military, prison and court officials, and weapons producers. An estimated 5.2 million guards worked in the United States in 2011.18 These would be the main source of employment in the world of anti–Star Trek: creators, lawyers, marketers, and guards. It seems implausible, however, that this would be sufficient—the society would probably be subject to a persistent trend toward under-employment. Especially if all the sectors except (arguably) the first would be subject to pressures toward labor-saving technological innovation. Even high-level managerial functions can be partly automated: in 2014, a Hong Kong venture capital fund called Deep Knowledge appointed an algorithm, a program called VITAL, to its board, where it receives a vote on all investments.19 And perhaps even “creativity” isn’t such a uniquely human talent (if we reduce that word to the creation of replicator patterns). In a paper presented to a 2014 conference of the Association of Computing Machinery, a group of medical researchers presented a method for automatically generating plausible hypotheses for scientists to test, using data mining techniques.20 Such approaches could eventually be applied to other formulaic, iterative processes like the design of pop songs or smartphone games. What’s more, there is also another way for private companies to avoid employing workers for some of these tasks: turn them into activities that people will find pleasurable and will thus do for free on their own time. The computer scientist Luis von Ahn has specialized in developing such “games with a purpose”: applications that present themselves to end users as enjoyable diversions but which also perform a useful computational task, what von Ahn calls “Human Computation. (hide spoiler)]
Sci-fi examples: Charles Stross' Accelerando, "Anti-Star Trek", Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan
Socialism (equality and scarcity): Similar to communism, but with the realization that we live in a finite world and have to deal with climate change. "In general," Frase writes, "the struggle is over how to recognize and control the waste products of human civilization, rather than imagining that we can ever separate ourselves from nature." He argues we need a "state-driven project that can mobilize resources and labor in a way that's beyond the capabilities of either the free-market or (a) communist free-for-all."
He warns against the obstructive tendencies of modern politics, where the left believes it's too late to take meaningful action, and the right can't be bothered because climate change will only effect the poor.
He makes a case for a centrally-planned economy, and that humans have to take their place as custodians of the planet on a large scale that probably involves geoengineering, but also restructuring our daily lives.
Sci-fi examples: Kim Stanley Robinson's Pacific Edge, Mars Trilogy, 2312. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
Exterminism (hierarchy and scarcity): The scariest of the four, made all the worse because it's basically already happening. With the need for labour diminished by automation the rich no longer have the need for the working classes, who are no longer working, they're just poor. He cites the algorithmic drone targeting in the war on terror, the militarization of America's police and the growing prison industry. It's terrifying.
In a 1983 article, the Nobel Prize–winning economist Wassily Leontief anticipated the problem of mass unemployment that has been contemplated throughout this book. In what he calls, with some understatement, a “somewhat shocking but essentially appropriate analogy,” he compares workers to horses.
One might say that the process by which progressive introduction of new computerized, automated, and robotized equipment can be expected to reduce the role of labor is similar to the process by which the introduction of tractors and other machinery first reduced and then completely eliminated horses and other draft animals in agriculture.5
As he then notes, this led most people to the conclusion that “from the human point of view, keeping all these idle horses … would make little sense.” As a result, the US horse population fell from 21.5 million in 1900 to 3 million in 1960.6 Leontief goes on to express, with the cheery confidence of a mid-century technocrat, his confidence that since people are not horses, we will surely find ways to support all of society’s members. Echoing Gorz and other critics of wage labor, he argues that “sooner or later … it will have to be admitted that the demand for ‘employment’ is in the first instance a demand for ‘livelihood,’ meaning income.”7 However, given the contemptuous and cruel attitudes of today’s ruling class, we can in no way take that for granted.
Fortunately, even the rich have developed norms of morality that make it difficult to reach for this Final Solution as a first resort. Their initial step is simply to hide from the poor, much like the characters in Elysium. But all around us, we can see the gradual drift away from just corralling and controlling “excess” populations, into justifications for permanently eliminating them.
Must redefine utopia. It isn’t the perfect end-product of our wishes, define it so and it deserves the scorn of those who sneer when they hear the worMust redefine utopia. It isn’t the perfect end-product of our wishes, define it so and it deserves the scorn of those who sneer when they hear the word. No. Utopia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever.
Compare it to the present course of history. If you can.
Some brilliant moments that rise above, but still a lot of prosaic parts that characterize his early work (my fault for saving this to near the end). There's a fantastic bit set on a futuristic cargo ship, and you think about a similar one in Aurora and about how he could write a whole book set on one, but it's one chapter that's just disconnected from the rest.
There's too much baseball. The water management stuff and Californian history is boring, and while I think we need to protect wilderness and biodiversity, etc, I can't really get in to this level of deep ecology. I just don't care about them saving the hill from a development. If they'd been fighting it to fight money laundering, sure, I guess. But I suppose that's part of the point: he's setting out to prove there are still underdogs and uphill struggles and chaos in utopia. As a prototype for his future work, it's a fine book.
My only other complaint is how he uses a lot of plain jane names that all run together (Kevin, Tom, Hank, etc). I get that it's a motif in his triptych, but it's a problem in a lot of his novels. Eventually the names just start running together.
I liked the near future elements, of course. And the predictions he gets wrong (the Soviet Union still being a concern, mostly consumer technology stuff like still using VHS tapes) are as interesting as the things he gets right (submarine lifeboats, sort of predicts Skype, solar panel ubiquity, etc). Really weird to think that the first book in the series was written only three years before I was born, and we've already surpassed much of his future stuff in some ways.
In his utopian elements he has an interesting maximum wage law. People top out at a certain point (they're referred to as hundreds, because they're making one hundred percent of what they're allowed, but it's unclear how much wealth they have, and I think the amount a hundred can receive varies regionally). The money they would have been making is (I think) paid to the government as tax, and they can decide how up to 20% of it is spent (one character thinks cynically that a hundred is directing his tax money into the military and biomedical industry, so his related businesses can continue to profit through government contracts). I prefer Jeremy Corbyn's simpler maximum wage proposal: legislate that companies can only pay their highest earning employee X times more than the amount their lowest worker is paid.
Good lines:
Really liked this paragraph on teachers, brought a new perspective: (view spoiler)[ It was clear she was a good teacher, and that was a pleasure to see. It was important for a teacher to have a certain distance, she should be liked and admired but also at a distance, a strong personality presenting a strong and coherent portrait of the world. This is the way the world is! the strong teacher says in every phrase and glance; not to downplay the complexity of the world, but to present a clear and distinct single view of it, which students could then work against in building their own views. It wasn’t so important that the teacher present all sides of a case, or pretend to neutrality in controversial issues. Over the years the multiplicity of teachers that every student got would take care of that. What was more important was that a teacher advocate a vivid, powerful set of ideas, to be a force, to make an impact. Population biology was still a seething mass of theoretical controversy, for instance, but Ramona argued the case for her beliefs as firmly as if speaking to a dissertation committee judging her—outlining other opinions, but then countering them with the ones she believed in. And the students listened. Kevin too. (hide spoiler)] Living life versus telling your story: (view spoiler)[It felt good to tell it, in a way. Because it was his story, his and his alone, nobody else’s. And in telling it he gained a sort of control over it, a control he had never had when it happened. That was the value of telling one’s story, a value exactly the reverse of the value of the experience itself. What was valuable in the experience was that he had been out of control, living moment to moment with no plan, at the mercy of other people. What was valuable in the telling of the story was that he was in control, shaping the experience, deciding what it meant, putting other people in their proper place. The two values were complementary, they added up to something more than each alone could, something that … completed things. So he told them his story, and they listened. (hide spoiler)] On diplomacy: (view spoiler)[He remembered something Tom had said. “Every issue is related to this zoning change issue now, because you’re on a council of seven, and your ability to act is determined by your working relationship with the other six members. Some will be your opponents no matter what, but others are in the middle, undecided. Those are the ones you have to cultivate. You have to back them on the things they care about most. That’s the obvious angle. But then there’s the unobtrusive stuff, following up their remarks with something that reinforces what they said—asking them questions to defer to their areas of expertise—that sort of thing. It has to be subtle—very, very, very subtle. And continuous. You have to think, Kev. Diplomacy is hard work.” (hide spoiler)] On first loves: (view spoiler)[Now he was truly in love. And for the first time. Late bloomer indeed! Most of us first fall in love in our teens, it’s part of the intensity of those years, falling for some schoolmate, not so much because of the qualities of the loved one but because of a powerful unspoken desire to be in love. It is part of the growth of the soul. And though the actual nature of the loved one is not crucially important, it would not be true to say that first love is thereby lessened, or less intensely felt. On the contrary—because of its newness, perhaps, it is often felt with particular strength. Most adults forget this in the flood of events that the rest of life pours over them, or perhaps they’re disinclined to remember those years at all, filled as they were with foolishness, awkwardness, shame. Often enough first love was part of the awkwardness, inappropriately directed, poorly expressed, seldom reciprocated … we prefer not to remember. But remember with courage and you will feel again its biting power; few things since will have made you as joyfully, painfully alive. (hide spoiler)] On near-term AI: (view spoiler)[the computer (ask it odd questions it said “Sorry I fail the Turing test very quickly”), (hide spoiler)]...more
Surreal with a strange logic underlying it all. The geography of the world is fascinating: a thin peninsular continent that runs across the equator ofSurreal with a strange logic underlying it all. The geography of the world is fascinating: a thin peninsular continent that runs across the equator of a water world. It's populated by strange creatures: men with trees growing out of their shoulders and women with faces on their eyes. The infighting crab beach shellcottage people are the best.
(view spoiler)[He said to the swimmer, "were you ever the queen of an ancient kingdom?"
"Yes," she muttered sleepily. "And I still am." But this, he supposed, was another of their misunderstandings. Thel had first noticed this phenomenon when he had seen a windhover, hunting over the meadows inland. "Look," he had said, "a kestrel." But the swimmer had thought him crazy for pointing into the sky, for that to her was the name of a kind of fish. And later he found that when he said loyalty she understood it to mean stubbornness, and when she said arbitrary she meant beautiful, and that when she said melancholy she did not mean the sadness we enjoy feeling, but rather mendacity; and when she said actually she meant currently; and when he said I love you, she thought he was saying I will leave you. They had slowly worked up quite a list of these false cognates, Thel could recite scores and scores of them, and he had come to understand that they did not share a language so much as the illusion of a language; they spoke strong idiolects, and lived in worlds of meaning distinct and isolated from the other. So that she no doubt understood queen of an ancient kingdom to mean something like a swimmer in the deep sea; and the mystery of the ancient alloy coin was never explained, and, he realized, never would be. It gave him a shiver of fear, thinking about it –- it seemed to him that nothing would ever be explained, and that all of a sudden each day was slipping away, that time was flying by and they were getting old and nothing would ever become clear. He sat on the beach watching clouds tumble overhead and letting handfuls of sand run through his fingers, the little clear grains of quartz, flecks of black mica, pieces of coral, shell fragments like small bits of hard ceramic, and he saw that a substantial portion of the sand was made of shells, that living things had labored all their lives to create ceramic shelters, homes, the most permanent parts of themselves; which had been pummeled into shards just big enough to see, millions upon millions of lives ground up and strewn under him, the beach made out of the wreckage of generations. And before long he and the swimmer too would become no more than sand on a beach, and they would never really have understood anything. (hide spoiler)] ...more
A Venetian freelancer scuba dives for artifacts. A man goes for a hike after having his brain repaired following a car accident. The backup crew of thA Venetian freelancer scuba dives for artifacts. A man goes for a hike after having his brain repaired following a car accident. The backup crew of the Enola Gay has the chance to change world history. Slave miners on the Moon make a desperate bid for freedom. A peasant boy joins the Spanish Armada. An archaeologist in Newfoundland confronts a Scandinavian hoax dating back centuries. A blind mathematician falls for an unusual honeytrap. NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab Scientists are forced to cancel a manned Mars mission after the discovery of native bacteria. Yeti is kidnapped in Nepal. A Canadian family flees to a glacier-covered Boston at the dawn of a new ice age. A writer struggles with his history of the twentieth century. It's the best of Kim Stanley Robinson....more
He saw that they were all working together at the first step of the species' break from the home world, and he understood that if the first step were He saw that they were all working together at the first step of the species' break from the home world, and he understood that if the first step were taken successfully, with balance, they could run from star to star all across the night.
A great space opera but a second tier KSR novel.
Holywelkin was a brilliant physicist whose Ten Forms of Change unified relativity and quantum mechanics and allowed humankind to bring sunlight and 1g gravity -- and thus civilization -- to the far reaches of the Solar System. He also invented a strange musical instrument, the Holywelkin Orchestra, a one-man orchestra seen by many as nothing but a gimmick.
Johannes Wright is the ninth master of the Holywelkin Orchestra. He is the musical genius who will create the new paradigm of the age, one that doesn't just explain Holywelkin's new model of reality, but actually suggests there is a connection between our structure of thinking and the structure of reality itself. Because Wright has discovered the Holywelkin's ten equations map a little too neatly to the ten ways a composer can alter a piece of music for it to be a coincidence.
But Johannes Wright has enemies. As he travels downsystem on his great tour, he is attacked by a shadowy troupe of metadramatists, Actors whose theatre is real life. The troupe is composed of a member of the Orchestra's board of directors, a clan of Mercurian Mithraists and a former music school rival. They believe that their metaplay can determine Wright's destiny, and Wright's destiny will determine his music, and his music may very well determine reality...
And then there's Dent Ios, a rustic plutonian tapir farmer who reluctantly accepts his farming cooperative's request that he follow the tour and cover it for their literary music journal, Thistledown. If he'd just shown up for the co-op meeting he could've stayed home.
From anyone else, it would be an instant sci-fi masterpiece. But it's a little bit too neat. There's a bit too much of Arthur C Clarke's-sufficiently-advanced-science-looking-like-magic. I mean, the terras are cool, but they look like cheap Jack Kirby knock-offs when you compare them to KSR's terraformation of Mars, or his asteroid terrariums. The characters aren't much: one's a villain, one's Bilbo Baggins, and one's the next Bach. But then, this was his first novel (second to be published), and his writing about music (and his justification of writing about music) is interesting. The author hasn't quite found his voice, but you can see all of the elements for it are there....more
What a magnificent book. One of the few I know that's genuinely optimistic without being condescending or pollyanna. Robinson's faith in the human speWhat a magnificent book. One of the few I know that's genuinely optimistic without being condescending or pollyanna. Robinson's faith in the human species is remarkable. The fear of utopias is is that they grow boring, but that fear is cast aside because here utopia is always a work in progress.
The idea of the terraria - wildlife sanctuaries inside spaceship asteroids - is the most beautiful science fiction idea I can remember reading about since I was a child....more
Constructing the ideal city in dialogue with your friends or even just in your head is a great pastime and (alongside esoteric recriminations) it's thConstructing the ideal city in dialogue with your friends or even just in your head is a great pastime and (alongside esoteric recriminations) it's the fuel that keeps the Internet Left running. So that's good.
Credit to Glaucon for describing the Internet in his Ring of Gyges story more than two millennia before its widespread adoption.
Also I don't think it's in this (it's been a while since I read it) but fuck Socrates for being against writing. An early indicator that philosophy is dumb and stupid. Really Xenophon's account of tricking Socrates should be the definitive account of Socrates. Another piece of evidence for my belief that Xenophon doesn't get his due respect....more
1. 2312 2. Red Mars 3. Aurora 4. Blue Mars 5. Antarctica 6. New York 2140 7. A Short Sharp Shock 8. Icehenge 9. Green MarKim Stanley Robinson novels, ranked:
1. 2312 2. Red Mars 3. Aurora 4. Blue Mars 5. Antarctica 6. New York 2140 7. A Short Sharp Shock 8. Icehenge 9. Green Mars 10. The Gold Coast 11. Pacific Edge 12. The Memory of Whiteness 13. Galileo's Dream 14. The Wild Shore 15. Escape from Kathmandu 16. Green Earth (Science in the Capital trilogy, collected) 17. Shaman
Definitely not my definitive ranking. Also, I have not yet read The Years of Rice and Salt. And obviously doesn't include his many short story collections....more
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