As long as this racket continues, the trade in shares roars and their price soars. If the companies do happen to make a profit, share prices soar even higher. As share prices rise, the money men ratchet up immense paper profits, leaving bankers with a juicy cut. And when the bubble bursts, and the overdrafts turn into black holes in the banks’ books, the bankers dial the number of their favourite politician, whose campaign they featherbedded, and, before anyone notices, their losses are transferred to the taxpayers – many of whom the banks evict from their homes after foreclosing on their mortgages. No wonder our financiers think of themselves as masters of the universe, thought Costa. Almost totally disconnected from actual profits, capitalism is powered by fictitious capital flowing from convoluted trades in profits that have not yet materialized – and may never do so!
‘Who needs mythology when reality is so unreal?’ Costa had once wondered, when discussing this with Iris.
‘We all do. Never underestimate the human need for soothing lies,’ had been her reply.
He could hardly disagree, and yet it bewildered him that people truly believed capitalism to be about making things or providing services at a profit. He found it extraordinary how most people disliked speculators but thought of them as peripheral, as harmless bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise.
‘They fail to recognize that the very opposite is true!’ he had said to Iris. ‘That enterprise long ago became a bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. That, in reality, workers, inventors and managers resemble driftwood buffeted hither and thither on a manic torrent of runaway finance. No one I know gets it: real power stems not from making real things but from this bizarre flux.’
As he came through passport control at Gatwick, the full significance of the abolition of tradable shares in the Other Now was making his head spin. It was, figuratively, the equivalent of damming the whirlpool of financial speculation until its torrent is reduced to a tepid stream – but a stream of real, not fictional, economic energy. In the wonderfully boring financial world of the Other Now, a Lehman Brothers, a JP Morgan or a Goldman Sachs could not exist.
As his taxi pulled over outside Iris’s Brighton terrace, the butterflies in Costa’s stomach were in a frenzy. Where does one start telling friends famous for their scepticism that another world, where capitalism had died, was not only possible but in fact already in existence? That TATIANA lived in the form of a society humming along without stock markets, bosses, means-tested benefits or banks? That, even though people were equally flawed and technologies were nowhere near as advanced as they appear on Star Trek, such a world was for real?
‘They’ll laugh in my face,’ he said aloud without realizing it.
‘Is everything OK, sir?’ the taxi driver asked.
‘Yes, yes. I’m fine,’ he said irritably. ‘For now.’
As soon as he alighted from the taxi, Eva emerged onto the street to greet him. And before he had a chance to knock on Iris’s front door, she popped her head out of an upstairs window and said, ‘Ah, you’re here. Good.’
It would not be long before he would have to deliver the hardest presentation of his life to the toughest of audiences.
OC rebels
Even if Kosti’s dispatches helped him convince Iris and Eva of the Other Now’s plausibility, the main problem would be explaining how it had come about. One reason was Kosti’s greater eagerness to describe how things worked in the present than to tell stories from the ‘Three Years That Changed the World’, as he referred to the period from 2008 to 2011. It left Costa with relatively little to go on. The best he could do with the fragments that Kosti had sent over was begin at the beginning: with the Occupy Movement that they all knew well.
In the Other Now, the Ossify Wall Street movement, as it was known, sprang up in New York City just as Occupy Wall Street had in Our Now. However, over there it went global under the name Ossify Capitalism, or OC for short. At the time Costa had been excited by Occupy Wall Street and its various equivalents worldwide: the Indignados in Spain, who in their tens of thousands took over the plazas of the main Spanish cities; the Greek Aganaktismenoi, who made Syntagma Square their own for three joyous months in the spring of 2011; the Nuit debout gatherings a few years later in Paris. Alas, that early promise fizzled out as fast as it materialized – especially after the surrender of the Obama administration to Wall Street in early 2009 and of the Greek leftist government to the oligarchy-without-frontiers in the summer of 2015. The great difference between the two movements was that the OC rebels recognized the futility of occupying spaces – squares, streets or buildings.
‘Capitalism does not live in space but in time and in the ebb and flow of financial transactions,’ was how Esmeralda, one of its impromptu leaders, put it.
The team she led was known as the Crowdshorters. According to Kosti, it was the first group to demonstrate the vulnerability of financialized capitalism and the power of a well targeted digital rebellion. Its first success came when it took direct aim at the financial instruments of mass destruction that played such an important role in causing the 2008 global crash: collateralized debt obligations.
These CDOs were a form of synthetic debt with which Eva would have been intimately familiar, having played a part in their manufacture while at Lehman. They can be imagined as boxes in which their creator places many tiny chunks of debt: a few pounds of the mortgage owed by Jill to her local bank, a few yen owed by Toyota to a Japanese pension fund, a few euros owed by a Greek bank to a German one, a few dollars owed by the US Federal Government to JP Morgan, and so on. Each CDO was filled with countless chunks of different types of debt, each with its own risk of default and interest rate.
The great selling point of CDOs was the fiction that they were a safe bet. Since they contained so many different pieces of debt owed by such a diversity of people and organizations, buyers were told that there was no chance that more than a few of those chunks would turn sour at once. Moreover, each CDO was so complex it was impossible for any human, even its creator, to estimate its value, so there was no real limit to what it could sell for: those who created, sold and traded in CDOs simply let the market decide, and no one in the market could argue that they knew any better. They were an invention worthy of a Bond villain, the ideal snake oil: pieces of paper that were, at once, completely opaque and yet apparently safe and lucrative. The false sense of security they offered led to far higher demand – and far higher prices – than CDO creators expected. Observing bankers’ surprise at the high prices, others flocked in to place their orders, boosting prices ever higher.
With so much money being made, the bankers who had created the CDOs soon forgot their original purpose: to offload bad debt onto gullible victims. Unable to stand by as others profited from their creations, bankers like Lehman lost their faculties and began to buy back their CDOs. The more they bought, the higher the already stratospheric prices went, the greater the paper value of their stacks of CDOs, and the larger their bonuses. Delirious with their profits, the bankers borrowed mountains of money from each other to buy even more CDOs.
In short, the bankers fell headlong into their own trap. And when all of the bad debts inside those CDOs turned sour and the bottom fell out of the market in 2008, the financiers fell into a bottomless pit of their own making. As they sank, the politicians and the major central banks – the Fed, the Bank of England, the ECB and all the rest – rushed in to re-float them. That’s when Esmeralda’s Crowdshorters struck.
Techno-rebels
Esmeralda, like Eva, had worked for one of the large financial houses until just before the crash, and thus understood their inner workings well. Using her expertise, her Crowdshorters undermined the central banks’ efforts surgically and stylishly. They realized what few understood: by privatizing everything, capitalism had made itself supremely vulnerable to financial guerrilla attacks. Specifically, Esmeralda recognized that the creation of CDOs out of plain debt
– a process known hubristically and ironically as securitization – afforded the perfect opportunity for a peaceful grassroots revolution.
The consequence of having privatized all the utility companies was that every telephone, water or electricity bill incurred by residents in Croydon or small businesses in Preston was owed to some private corporation. However, the corporation had pre-sold these payments ages before to some financier. What exactly had the financier bought? The right to collect the future revenue streams from the little people. And what did the financier do with that right? Sliced it up into tiny chunks and placed them in different CDOs, which in turn were sold on to other financiers – globally!
Esmeralda and her comrades had the technical skills to unpick the contents of every CDO. Painstakingly, they wrote software that could identify precisely which chunk of debt within each CDO was owed by which household, when each chunk of a bill or a debt repayment was due, to whom it was owed, and who owned the specific CDO at every point in time. Using this vast database of information, they were then able to contact households – most of which were outraged by the bankers’ behaviour and the bailouts they were set to receive – and invite them to participate in low-cost, targeted, short-term payment strikes – or crowdshorting as Esmeralda called these campaigns.
The Crowdshorters’ pitch to residents was simple. In fact, one of the first of them – a circular sent by Esmeralda to Yorkshire residents – is now commemorated in the Other Now on a plaque that adorns the Houses of Parliament in London:
HELP US BRING DOWN THOSE PROFITING FROM YOUR EXORBITANT WATER BILL WHILE YOU ARE STRUGGLING TO PUT FOOD ON THE TABLE. JUST DELAY PAYING YOUR WATER BILL FOR TWO MONTHS, AND DON’T WORRY ABOUT THE LATE PAYMENT FEE. WE ARE CROWDSOURCING FUNDS TO COMPENSATE YOU. UNITED WE STAND, DIVIDED WE FALL!
Similar plaques are on display in the entrance to the Capitol building in Washington DC, even the Greek parliament on Syntagma Square.
The uptake was breathtaking. People all over the UK, soon the world, began to take great pleasure in tracking, and heeding, the Crowdshorters’ calls. Their meticulously coordinated payment strikes caused cascades of crashes in the CDO market which spilled over into the major stock exchanges. Within three weeks, the central banks realized it would be impossible to re-float the bankers’ trillions of dollars’ worth of securitized debt while, at the same time, the privatized utilities were going bust and demanding bailouts too.
Unable to convince Congress to pump the missing trillions into Wall Street for a second and then a third time in the space of a few months, the US Federal Government had to allow Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and the other behemoths to be wound down. The repercussions were immense. Europe’s banks, which were in a far worse state than America’s, shut up shop too. The City of London was in meltdown. Governments were forced to nationalize the failing utilities. The Fed, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, even the People’s Bank of China, had no alternative but to step into the void and provide citizens with bank accounts – the first stirrings of PerCap.
While they played a central role in sinking global finance, Esmeralda and her Crowdshorters could not have sparked the OC revolution on their own. Wrecking an already collapsing Wall Street was one thing; ossifying capitalism was quite another. This is where other techno-rebels came into the picture.
Recognizing pension funds as the largest shareholders in the great corporations, a band of radicalized traders working out of Mumbai’s financial centre and calling themselves Solidarity Sourcing Proxies – Solsourcers for short – decided it was time to target globalization’s most ludicrous racket. Drawing inspiration from the Crowdshorters, the Solsourcers invited people to nominate companies with the worst record of zero-hours contracts, low pay, carbon footprints, working conditions and the tendency to ‘downsize’ in order to boost their share prices. Millions of people from all over the world pitched in to name the worst offenders. Then the Solsourcers organized the mass withholding of pension contributions to the pension funds that owned shares in those companies. The mere rumour that the Solsourcers had targeted a particular pension fund turned out to be enough to send its shares crashing and to cause an exodus of worried investors from equity funds related to it. The Solsourcers eventually needed only to send to a pension fund a list of the companies it wanted it to divest from, and the fund would do so immediately, lest its incoming pension contributions dried up.
Realizing their power, the Solsourcers spread their wings globally and began to make more ambitious and highly sophisticated demands, not merely for divestment from unscrupulous employers and environment-destroying corporations, but for reforms to corporate law. Inspired by a flat management structure pioneered by a corporation based near Seattle, they managed to take the first steps towards prescribing by law the corporate model one person one share one vote.
By early 2010, the Solsourcers had been joined by another group of techno-rebels. Calling themselves Bladerunners in homage to Rick Deckard, the fictional character whose job in a famous 1982 sci-fi movie was to hunt down and kill androids, they thought of themselves as neo-Luddites, even choosing as their patron figure Lord Byron, the poet laureate of the original Luddite movement. The Bladerunners did not fear technology, though. They celebrated the Luddites as history’s most misunderstood figures, whose vandalism of machines was a protest not against automation but against social arrangements that used technological innovation to deprive the majority of their dignity and life prospects. Indeed, the Bladerunners embraced digital platforms, even the rise of AI, but were adamant that such machines should be utilized in the cause of shared prosperity, not as instruments of neo-feudalism or of a class war by the few against the many.
The Bladerunners’ first target was big tech: mega-corporations with monopoly power that rendered them so rich they required neither Wall Street nor pension funds for their capital. Akwesi, one of their early leaders, had worked for Microsoft in the 1990s. In early 2009 Akwesi proclaimed that Google had inadvertently invented a new human right: the right to freely available and instantly accessible information.
‘The problem with inventing a human right,’ Akwesi explained playfully to a director at Google, ‘is that you lose the right to monopolize its provision and, most certainly, to profit from supplying it.’
The Bladerunners organized mass consumer strikes, targeting one big tech company at a time. Their first successful mobilization was aimed at Amazon. Akwesi issued a global call to boycott Amazon for a day in support of doubling hourly pay in its warehouses around the world. That Day of Inaction, as the Bladerunners called it, caused less than a 10 per cent drop in Amazon’s usual revenues. But that was enough for Amazon immediately to concede a 50 per cent pay rise. Encouraged by their success, the Bladerunners embarked on many more campaigns of widening scope.
Rallying support via social media, the Bladerunners’ Days of Inaction became worldwide events, enjoying mass participation, especially by the young, until they needed only to announce their next target for its share price to fall precipitously and for there to be relentless scrutiny of its directors and their practices online. When in early 2012 they brought down Facebook and gained legal recognition for an individual’s property rights over their private data, the Bladerunners knew they had grown sufficiently powerful to make history and effect serious societal change.
At around the same time the Bladerunners teamed up with the Environs in order to hasten the demise of the fossil fuel industry. Together, they forced panicking governments to introduce stringent limits to pollutants, to reduce net-carbon targets to zero by 2025 and even to limit land-clearing and cement production. Some influential corporations recognized that these constraints presented them with opportunities to profit from clean energy, but the OC rebels made it a condition for not targeting them too that they would drop out of the stock markets and give a single, non-tradable share to each member of their staff, thus laying the found
ations for the corporations’ conversion to an anarcho-syndicalist model.
Within three years, the Crowdshorters, the Solsourcers, the Bladerunners and the Environs had formed a highly effective network of targeted activism that the oligarchy-without-frontiers could not withstand.
Kosti had referred to this network as techno-syndicalism – adapting a term coined in the mid-1960s by John Kenneth Galbraith, an eminent twentieth-century American economist who referred to capitalism’s network of power, its agglomeration of mega-firms and mega-banks, as the Technostructure. At first this had surprised Costa. He had never met anyone else familiar with that term. And then he remembered that until 2008 he and Kosti had been the same person.
This proved to be a curse as well as a blessing. Costa wished he could converse directly with Esmeralda, Akwesi and the other key players of the OC movement, the pioneers who had miraculously pushed capitalism beyond breaking point while sketching out and implementing fabulously novel social and economic arrangements. How he would have loved to cross-examine them on all aspects of this tremendous transition! But of course Cerberus prevented him from communicating with anyone in the Other Now who did not share his DNA. Total reliance on Kosti limited not just the range of information available to him but also the quantity. After a while, Kosti had grown impatient at Costa’s ‘tiresome historical questions’.
‘Tiresome?’ Costa exclaimed. ‘I’d say these people deserve great tomes to be written about them!’
But to Costa’s great frustration, Kosti refused thereafter to answer his queries about the past with anything more than a few snippets, bombarding him instead with minutiae reflecting his own preoccupations. And yet, so far as Costa could tell from the little Kosti would write about them, these bands of technologically savvy rebels boasted a rare blend of genius, courage and moderation – virtues hitherto absent from any successful revolutionaries. Another group, the Flying Pickets, embodied an international solidarity not seen since the International Brigades flocked to Spain in 1936 in an ill-fated attempt to defend democracy from Franco’s fascist hordes. They set themselves the noble task of stopping multinationals from shifting exploitative practices from countries where the OC movement was flourishing to countries and jurisdictions where it was weaker. So if a multinational corporation tried to squeeze its Nigerian workforce to compensate for some compromise it had made with the OC movement in the United States, the Flying Pickets would orchestrate industrial action in the United States against the same company, while also liaising with the Solsourcers and the Bladerunners to act against its stocks, bonds and sales.
Another Now Page 7