Completes Four Futures

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