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diff --git a/books/scifi/four-futures.mdwn b/books/scifi/four-futures.mdwn index 8bb8473..0338220 100644 --- a/books/scifi/four-futures.mdwn +++ b/books/scifi/four-futures.mdwn @@ -18,13 +18,13 @@ (science fiction), rather than attempting to go from the general to the general (futurism) or the particular to the particular (conspiracism). - + -- 16 - + Abundance Scarcity Equality communism socialism Hierarchy rentism exterminism - + Exercises like this aren’t unprecedented. A similar typology can be found in a 1999 article by Robert Costanza in The Futurist. 26 There are four scenarios: Star Trek, Big Government, Ecotopia, @@ -38,7 +38,7 @@ capitalism and politics. [...] - + So for me, sketching out multiple futures is an attempt to leave a place for the political and the contingent. My intention is not to claim that one future will automatically @@ -70,3 +70,113 @@ and despair. -- 19 + + The French sociologist Bruno Latour has made the same observation through his + reading of Mary Shelley’s seminal science fiction tale, Frankenstein. This + story is not, he observes, the warning against technology and humanity’s hubris + that it is so often made out to be. 13 The real sin of Frankenstein (which is + the name of the scientist and not the monster) was not in making his creation + but in abandoning it to the wilderness rather than loving and caring for it. + This, for Latour, is a parable about our relationship to technology and + ecology. When the technologies that we have created end up having unforeseen + and terrifying consequences—global warming, pollution, extinctions—we recoil in + horror from them. Yet we cannot, nor should we, abandon nature now. We have no + choice but to become ever more involved in consciously changing nature. We have + no choice but to love the monster we have made, lest it turn on us and destroy + us. This, says Latour, “demands more of us than simply embracing technology and + innovation”; it requires a perspective that “sees the process of human + development as neither liberation from Nature nor as a fall from it, but rather + as a process of becoming ever-more attached to, and intimate with, a panoply of + nonhuman natures.” 14 + + -- 43-44 + + But short of that, there are ways to turn some of the predatory “sharing + economy” businesses into something a bit more egalitarian. Economics writer + Mike Konczal, for instance, has suggested a plan to “socialize Uber.” 26 He + notes that since the company’s workers already own most of the capital—their + cars—it would be relatively easy for a worker cooperative to set up an online + platform that works like the Uber app but is controlled by the workers + themselves rather than a handful of Silicon Valley capitalists. + + -- 48 + + The sociologist Bryan Turner has argued that we live in an “enclave society.” 8 + Despite the myth of increasing mobility under globalization, we in fact inhabit + an order in which “governments and other agencies seek to regulate spaces and, + where necessary, to immobilize flows of people, goods and services” by means of + “enclosure, bureaucratic barriers, legal exclusions and registrations.” 9 Of + course, it is the movements of the masses whose movements are restricted, while + the elite remains cosmopolitan and mobile. Some of the examples Turner adduces + are relatively trivial, like frequent-flyer lounges and private rooms in public + hospitals. Others are more serious, like gated communities (or, in the more + extreme case, private islands) for the rich, and ghettos for the poor—where + police are responsible for keeping poor people out of the “wrong” + neighborhoods. Biological quarantines and immigration restrictions take the + enclave concept to the level of the nation-state. In all cases, the prison + looms as the ultimate dystopian enclave for those who do not comply, whether it + is the federal penitentiary or the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay. Gated + communities, private islands, ghettos, prisons, terrorism paranoia, biological + quarantines—these amount to an inverted global gulag, where the rich live in + tiny islands of wealth strewn around an ocean of misery. + + [...] + + Silicon Valley is a hotbed of such sentiments, plutocrats talking openly about + “secession.” In one widely disseminated speech, Balaji Srinivasan, the + cofounder of a San Francisco genetics company, told an audience of start-up + entrepreneurs that “we need to build opt-in society, outside the US, run by + technology.” 12 For now, that reflects hubris and ignorance of the myriad ways + someone like him is supported by the workers who make his life possible. + + -- 53 + + Remember exterminism’s central problematic: abundance and freedom from work are + possible for a minority, but material limits make it impossible to extend that + same way of life to everyone. At the same time, automation has rendered masses + of workers superfluous. The result is a society of surveillance, repression, + and incarceration, always threatening to tip over into one of outright + genocide. + + But suppose we stare into that abyss? What’s left when the “excess” bodies have + been disposed of repression, and incarceration, always threatening to tip over + into one of outright genocide. But suppose we stare into that abyss? What’s + left when the “excess” bodies have been disposed of and the rich are finally + left alone with their robots and their walled compounds? The combat drones and + robot executioners could be decommissioned, the apparatus of surveillance + gradually dismantled, and the remaining population could evolve past its brutal + and dehumanizing war morality and settle into a life of equality and + abundance—in other words, into communism. + + As a descendant of Europeans in the United States, I have an idea of what that + might be like. After all, I’m the beneficiary of a genocide. + + My society was founded on the systematic extermination of the North American + continent’s original inhabitants. Today, the surviving descendants of those + earliest Americans are sufficiently impoverished, small in number, and + geographically isolated that most Americans can easily ignore them as they go + about their lives. Occasionally the survivors force themselves onto our + attention. But mostly, while we may lament the brutality of our ancestors, we + don’t contemplate giving up our prosperous lives or our land. Just as Marcuse + said, nobody ever gave a damn about the victims of history. Zooming out a bit + farther, then, the point is that we don’t necessarily pick one of the four + futures: we could get them all, and there are paths that lead from each one to + all of the others. + + We have seen how exterminism becomes communism. Communism, in turn, is always + subject to counterrevolution, if someone can find a way to reintroduce + artificial scarcity and create a new rentist elite. Socialism is subject to + this pressure even more severely, since the greater level of shared material + hardship increases the impetus for some group to set itself up as the + privileged elite and turn the system into an exterminist one. + + But short of a civilizational collapse so complete that it cuts us off from our + accumulated knowledge and plunges us into a new dark ages, it’s hard to see a + road that leads back to industrial capitalism as we have known it. That is the + other important point of this book. We can’t go back to the past, and we can’t + even hold on to what we have now. Something new is coming—and indeed, in some + way, all four futures are already here, “unevenly distributed,” in William + Gibson’s phrase. It’s up to us to build the collective power to fight for the + futures we want. + + -- 63-64 |