Another Now

by Yanis Varoufakis

  The Wikiblowers were a key rebel group. These anarchistic geeks proved crucial in preventing the established order from regrouping in order to strangle the OC rebellion. Their vital insight was that the most important advantage that governments and corporations held over the general population and the rebels was their access to and control over surveillance information. The only way to stop Big Brother was to level the playing field: to create a digital eye and train it upon him so that everyone could see what he was up to.

  Their main weapon was a piece of software they called the Panopticon Code. Created collaboratively using open-source tools, it was a remarkably infectious computer virus that lay dormant and wholly undetectable, allowing it silently to infect every computer network on the planet. Once it had penetrated all networked devices on earth, the Wikiblowers activated it. The result was immediate and total informational transparency. Everyone could see everything. Citizens had access to every state secret. Workers could read the files their bosses had on them. Anyone could tune into any CCTV camera installed anywhere in the world, from one on a lamp post to a military drone. For the first time, the poor and the weak had the same access to information as the rich and the powerful, even the NSA itself. Within minutes the world changed. Governments and corporations were paralysed by the billions of eyes trained on them. Many families were divided, as relatives discovered awful secrets about one another. Lifelong friendships were tested. But with the tumult came also tranquillity. An eerie calm descended as the world became glued to its screens not knowing where or what to look at next.

  The OC rebels made sure to guide the world’s attention towards the activity of those clinging to power at their expense. The unveiling of a plot by several governments to intervene militarily against the OC in several countries at once caused a global uproar. But gradually outrage at what was being revealed gave way to calls for reform: for democratization of the workplace, for an end to surveillance by the few, for demilitarization. The Wikiblowers had not merely prevented a coordinated and most likely lethal multi-state attack on techno-syndicalism’s activists. No, they had accomplished something much grander: they had let the genie of people power out of the bottle. Once it had been set free, there was nothing the establishment could do to force it back in.

  The final group Costa was able to learn anything about were the Infiltrators, whose task seemed to him the least fun. They began their campaigns by infiltrating existing political parties of every sort and in every country with a view to infecting them with the OC spirit. Wherever entryism did not work, the Infiltrators helped OC activists form new parties, movements and unions. Their overriding goal was the institution of participatory forms of democracy, such as those that ruled within Kosti’s corporation and which could not have been sustained, Costa surmised, without a similar spirit energizing democracy regionally, nationally and transnationally.

  Naturally, the OC rebellion manifested itself differently in different countries. Setbacks punctuated its progress, and in many cases the rebels had to compromise. Nevertheless, no country proved immune to the rebellion’s transformative wave, just as the 1848 and 1991 revolutions had touched everyone, in one way or another, around the globe. Political institutions changed everywhere, even while they maintained many apparent features of the pre-existing ones. In the United States, for instance, radical transformation was portrayed as a natural evolution of the Founding Fathers’ original intentions. Congress was forced to accommodate citizens’ assemblies, as were the Houses of Parliament in the United Kingdom. In China, changes to corporate law were presented as the logical extension to Deng Xiaoping’s break with Maoism in the 1990s. In continental Europe, they were introduced in new treaties helping to shore up the crumbling European Union. Ironically, it was in the countries that had emerged from the former Soviet Union, most notably Russia, that oligarchic capitalism proved most resilient.

  ‘The strangest thing,’ wrote Kosti, ‘is that the traditional Left had very little to do with bringing down capitalism and instituting the economic democracy that we leftists dreamed of before anyone else dared to.’ This is the type of message Iris could warm to, thought Costa.

  Back to the fold

  And so Costa now stood on Iris’s doorstep, preparing to share this sensational story with the only people he could trust. Normally, the part of any get-together that he craved and feared in equal measure was the obligatory preliminaries: the hugs, the ‘how have you beens’, the cups of tea, the mandatory small talk. This time, it was their conclusion that he feared and craved most. Sure enough, after he had been ushered into Iris’s kitchen, and Eva had joined them, and the greetings had been made, Iris’s liberating question did not take long to come: ‘So, what brings you here? Is it too much to hope that Tatiana is a girlfriend rather than an obsession?’

  5

  THE RECKONING BEGINS

  Suspending disbelief

  Iris would have none of it. For almost two hours she mocked, teased and toyed with Costa, frustrating his efforts to describe what Kosti had revealed to him. And when he mentioned that he and Kosti shared identical pasts up until the autumn of 2008, her scorn got the better of her.

  ‘How do we know that the timeline did not also split back in 1929?’ she asked sarcastically. ‘Or at the height of the Second World War? Or at the moment Hiroshima was obliterated? Or during the Vietnam War? Or on that day in 2020 when a mindless virus placed us all in lockdown for months on end? Or, indeed, every time Wolverhampton Wanderers score?’

  ‘Maybe it did!’ he replied. ‘Maybe there are countless alternative realities to our own branching out every moment. It’s the only plausible explanation. But so what? For whatever reason, I happen to have stumbled across this one. Maybe HALPEVAM led me to it, knowing it was closest to my heart. At any rate, the existence somewhere out there of other forks in the road, leading to an infinitude of different realities, is irrelevant – as irrelevant as all the other what-ifs you can think of but can never be tested. Kosti’s dispatches are a golden opportunity. Surely we should grab it with both hands!’

  Help came from an unexpected quarter. While Eva harboured the Panglossian belief that, however dissatisfied or unhappy we may be, we live in the best of all possible worlds, she was ready to engage in thought experiments with the impossible. And besides, despite her own incredulity, she was not going to miss out on an opportunity to show up Iris as stubborn and closed-minded.

  ‘I don’t mind assuming that your Kosti is alive, well and lives in a mythical Other Now,’ she told Costa, visibly enjoying Iris’s irritation. ‘Accepting incredible assumptions can be a gateway to enlightenment. You may remember, Iris, how Descartes invented a non-existent and impossible number – the square root of minus one – in order to lampoon those prepared to accept any old rubbish as plausible, just as disrespectful atheists ridicule believers for keeping an imaginary bearded friend up in the sky. And yet, a century or so later, those mathematical geniuses Euler and Gauss showed how many crucial problems can be solved if we are prepared to suspend disbelief and assume that this imaginary number exists. Indeed, modern technology would be impossible without that little imaginary number. Come on, Iris, be a sport. Let’s see where we end up if we assume that Kosti’s world exists. Let’s throw ourselves down Costa’s rabbit hole.’

  Iris was taken aback by Eva’s open-mindedness.

  ‘Delusions of scientific grandeur make you economists refreshingly open to mad assumptions,’ she said. ‘But never ones that put capitalism in question.’ But grudgingly impressed by Eva’s unexpected willingness to countenance Kosti’s post-capitalist Other Now, she dropped her opposition to discussing the dispatches Costa had brought with him from San Francisco. Suddenly it was game on.

  For six straight hours they pored over every paragraph that had made it through the wormhole. Months later, Iris would acknowledge that on that day – Thursday 12 June 2025 –the process of reading, debating and questioning Kos
ti’s account brought the three of them closer to one another than they ever had been before. The process drew them into a shared mindset that it was impossible ever to leave or for anyone else to join. Piecing together and understanding the Other Now became an obsession well before Iris and Eva actually believed in its existence.

  Why was this? What was it about the Other Now that brought them together in this way? A shared history of disillusionment, is my hypothesis: Eva’s faith in benign, liberal capitalism, Iris’s faith in revolutions to yield emancipation rather than horrors, Costa’s faith that technology could democratize society – all had been shattered. In the face of their shared melancholy, Kosti’s dispatches left open the possibility that their faith might not have been misplaced – that the world could be otherwise. The year 2008 was a poignant one for each of them. Studying Kosti’s dispatches thus turned into a shared attempt to mend their broken dreams.

  Eva approached the dispatches as she would an academic paper, treating Kosti’s description of corporate life in the Other Now as Euler and Gauss had treated Descartes’ imaginary number. Iris quickly became emotionally invested in the possibility of the radical alternatives that she had once lived for finally being realized. Costa, meanwhile, basked in the respite from his solitude.

  Varieties of oppression

  Iris did not buy it: having no boss sounded peachy but in reality she was sure it hid a multitude of sins, despite what Kosti claimed.

  ‘Flat management does not automatically mean the end of oppressive hierarchies,’ she said. ‘Kosti’s company could easily be a despotic workplace despite its lack of a formal power pyramid. After all, humans created ruthless patterns of oppression well before any law, civic or corporate, was written down.’

  It was a lesson she had learned the hard way, she explained. As a young lecturer entering the self-proclaimed ‘community of scholars’ in the 1970s, male colleagues took it for granted that she would take the minutes or make the tea. It wasn’t the law. It was something worse: a shared expectation that inhabited the common room just as patriarchy did the wider world.

  It was a common mistake to think that laws and written rules create networks of power. No, power networks emerge first. They do so organically and only then crystallize into codes, rules, regulations and, finally, law. Removing the rules that enshrine hierarchy in law will not end hierarchy any more than the retreat of organized religion has eliminated superstition. Iris was not questioning that in Kosti’s company everyone enjoyed formal self-management. ‘But I bet some people are more self-managed than others.’

  Her objection went deeper than doubting the flatness of the management system Kosti described. Experience with male-dominated power networks had led Iris to the conclusion that human nature hates a hierarchy vacuum and will find myriad ways to fill it with subtle forms of oppression and control. After all, it is in the egalitarian schoolyard that bullies are at liberty to build their sick little empires. Hierarchies protect the weak even while they oppress them; that is their quid pro quo. She had witnessed too many comrades commandeer democratic institutions, from trade unions and town hall meetings to cooperatives and neighbourhood action groups. It was the reason that she, a consummate syndicalist, had retreated into her tiny private sphere in Brighton – and the same reason led her to be instinctively suspicious of boss-less corporations.

  ‘Given the choice between a formal oppressive hierarchy and an informal one,’ she said, ‘I think I probably prefer formalized oppression to hidden coercion presented as collegiality in action.’

  Eva’s objection to flat management was more prosaic.

  ‘It sounds great’ – she chuckled – ‘until you try to get anything done without anybody telling anyone else what to do.’

  Democratic partnerships, she argued, may work reasonably well for a while within a circle of well-mannered architects or solicitors – as long as the partners are not asked to accept the absurd idea that menial staff should be handed equal voting rights. But even then, Eva was adamant that such relationships never survive success or time: as partnerships grow, management by consensus becomes cumbersome. The inevitable inefficiency begets discontent. Retirements and new recruits constantly throw spanners in the works. Sooner or later the whining leads to breakdown. If flat management was a reliable model, Eva was convinced, it would have evolved in Our Now.

  It was at this point that Costa, who until then had been relishing his silent role, spoke up. He reminded Eva that in Our Now, in the UK alone, at least twenty million people were working in the voluntary sector under managers with no right to fire them, force them to do things or even discipline them. And the outfits these volunteers staffed, which included lifeboat, firefighting and other essential social services, were remarkably efficient. Without such voluntary organizations, the 2020 epidemic would have claimed many more lives than it did. The question, as far as Costa was concerned, was whether the whole economy could emulate the voluntary sector.

  Iris was shaking her head, not at Costa but at Eva, who was intentionally missing her point.

  ‘It’s not that democratic partnerships are inherently inefficient,’ Iris said. ‘As Costa points out, order can be generated spontaneously even if no boss is formally anointed. No, it’s that democratic partnerships are too efficient at empowering the entitled while sneakily disempowering the rest of us.’ A formal right to having no boss, when in reality you are being bossed around, may be worse than being subject to a boss whose powers are formally prescribed and thus contestable, she argued.

  ‘As a liberal’ – Iris addressed Eva directly – ‘you must surely agree that the real question to be answered here is: how can power over persons be contained? How can bullies be kept in check in the workplace and beyond? Is flat management a good start in the fight against patriarchy?’

  The evidence is mixed, Iris went on. On the one hand, the worst abuses take place in formally egalitarian spaces, the home being the most striking. On the other hand, as Costa had reminded them, millions of people demonstrate daily that it is perfectly possible for organizations to function well under consensual management.

  ‘Don’t you think you might be straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel?’ Eva replied. For Eva, a far greater cause for concern – the camel in the room – was not the lack of hierarchy but the ban on trading company shares. Worrying about a bossy colleague having a little too much power, as Iris did, was a luxury compared to the gross threat to reason and liberty represented by the prohibition of selling shares in a business that one was trying to build up or get started. ‘Stopping people from buying into a business is bad enough,’ she said, ‘but doing it in the name of democratizing power is to add insult to injury.’

  Eva didn’t know where Costa’s dispatches actually came from but assumed that one way or another they were an expression of his own utopian fantasies. As such, she found it heartening that Costa did not envisage replacing free markets – which she had spent years defending to her lefty friends – with the usual collectivist nightmare. She was delighted, in fact, that Costa’s utopia contained corporations in which staff were free to move about unimpeded by a nanny state. It was a marked improvement that Costa had graduated from total opposition to free-market capitalism to idealization of markets without capitalism. And yet, the more she thought about it the more she realized that Costa’s rehashed socialism was perhaps even more of a threat to liberty and rationality than the old Stalinist project. Embracing markets but banning the market for shares was a brilliant move that Eva felt she had to counter with all her strength.

  ‘The notion of stopping people from selling part of their business is the first step along the road to serfdom,’ she said heatedly. ‘It challenges the inalienable right of consenting adults to transact with each other. If Jill wants to sell an apple to Jack, or some portion of her business, and Jack agrees to buy it, what right has anyone to stop them?’

  It was as if Eva had contri
ved to turn Iris from a sceptic into the Other Now’s champion.

  Liquid ownership

  Is trading shares as simple and benign as Jill selling an apple to Jack? Is the ban on trading shares legislated, according to Kosti, in the Other Now, a violation of liberty and an act of folly? Or is it an excellent idea, the equivalent of a ban on selling votes in a democracy? That was the question, Iris and Eva agreed. What they disagreed on, naturally, was the answer.

  Eva’s answer required no complicated philosophical arguments or historical analysis. A share is simply a contract that entitles the purchaser to a slice of a company’s future profits, she said. If there is nothing wrong with Jill selling Jack a number of apples, how can it possibly be wrong to sell him a share in the future harvest of her orchard? The only difference was that, in buying a portion of an apple harvest not yet produced, Jack was accepting a degree of risk. If, for example, a hail storm destroyed some of the apples before they were picked, he would end up with fewer of them. But if Jack is happy to pay his money despite the risk, who are we to stop him?