The basic idea, Eva gathered, was that each gComms divided its land between social zones and commercial zones, collecting rents from the commercial zones to finance social housing and space for social enterprises in its social zones. There were two types of commercial zone. One was land for housing, to be occupied by those able and willing to pay market prices. The other was commercial space for business. The key to the system was the Permanent Auction Subletting Scheme (PASS), a mechanism the OC rebels designed to ensure that communities could extract maximum rents from their commercial zones.
The essence of PASS was worryingly simple. Hosted within each gComms’ website, PASS was a comprehensive listing of every building in its commercial zones. At the beginning of each year, anyone who occupied a building in a commercial zone, as a business or a resident, had to visit the PASS web page and next to the listing of the building they occupied put in what they believed to be the market value of the premises. PASS would then compute their monthly rent as a fixed portion of that self-declared market value. No audits. No red tape. No haggling with gComms regarding the level of the rent or of the ‘true’ market value of the space.
What stopped those using land in a commercial zone from undervaluing their premises? The answer lay in another feature of PASS: a virtual bidding room where any visitor to the website could bid for any building – any office or shop, any house or flat – within a commercial zone. Anyone offering to pay a higher annual rent for a property than its existing occupier had the right to take it over – after an appropriate transition period, which varied in length according to the type of building and the circumstances of the occupants. This permanent auction kept occupants honest. Set the value of the land or building you occupy too high and you pay too much rent. Set it too low and you risk eviction.
In PASS Eva recognized what academic economists refer to as a self-revelation mechanism design – arrangements that motivate people to act honestly, as in the famous method of dividing a pie between two people, whereby one cuts the pie and the other chooses which piece they want. When, later, Eva told Costa about PASS, he recognized it too, but from a somewhat different context.
‘Sounds like a reverse antidosis,’ he muttered.
Eva had to look the term up online. In ancient Athens, she discovered, the demos had decreed that rich citizens had a duty to pay for particular public services, the liturgies. The justification was the prevailing view that, since the city made private wealth possible, the demos that governed the city had the right to make such demands of the wealthy. Individuals that the assembly decreed should pay for, say, a play to be staged, had a choice: pay up or, if they believed they had been unfairly selected, file for antidosis.
Antidosis was a legal suit. When the assembly picked, say, Crito to pay for a play or a religious ceremony, he had the right to argue that, say, Phaedo should have been picked instead because in Crito’s estimation Phaedo was better off. If Phaedo disagreed, he had the right to refuse but only if he was willing to accept that his whole estate would be given to Crito and that he would receive Crito’s in return. Thus Crito was given pause before claiming Phaedo was richer, and Phaedo thought twice before he disagreed.
PASS was designed similarly, but in reverse: instead of acting as a safeguard for those who were unfairly declared wealthier than they were, it prevented an occupant of real estate from under-declaring its value and short-changing the community.
Eva’s qualms and questions were legion. How were houses and land distributed in the social zones? Who got the nicer of the council-owned homes there? How did one move house? Above all, who ran the gComms? And yet, despite her concern that the whole system left too much room for authoritarian collectivism, Eva could not help but admire PASS: an automated, fully fledged market mechanism that, in the absence of private ownership, nonetheless revealed land’s true value and contributed maximally to public projects under conditions of full transparency. A refreshing lack of bureaucracy, not to mention estate agents – all exciting features that she found hard to scoff at.
The next batch of dispatches answered some of Eva’s questions, though not all of them to her satisfaction. A county-wide citizens’ assembly, the County Association, oversaw the division of land between commercial and social zones, and then the division of commercial zones between business and residential uses, and the distribution of properties within the social zones. Once again, its members were selected randomly with the help of an algorithm that guaranteed fair representation of the various groups and communities living in the county.
Setting aside too much land for social zones meant less money to invest in them. On the other hand, expanding the commercial zones too much would leave too little room for social housing. Similarly, prioritizing business within the commercial zones at the expense of residential housing would limit the availability of property for wealthier residents whose higher spending capacities might draw successful corporations into the area and generally fuel the local economy. One of the hardest decisions the County Association faced was how much room to leave for newcomers: too much might antagonize the locals, too little would prevent new blood from enriching the local community.
As Eva had surmised, the most delicate of the County Association’s tasks was the allocation of social housing in the absence of a price mechanism. Who qualified? And of those who qualified, who got the more desirable properties?
To create peace of mind in the community, Eve explained, tenure was guaranteed once you had been allocated a property within a social zone. But when someone chose to move out, or died, or a new property was built, the available property was allocated using a randomized digital raffle. Anyone wishing to move into the county and who put themselves forward was guaranteed a minimum probability of securing a property. This ensured that everyone had a decent chance. However, the odds of winning were set higher for applicants that interviewed well and rose in inverse proportion to the deposits in the candidate’s PerCap Accumulation account – penalizing, in other words, those who could afford to bid for land or homes in the commercial zones.
The spectre of so much social control terrified Eva. She loved markets for one important reason: the freedom they granted from social obligations and power dynamics. To get something you just paid for it, anonymously, without having to befriend or negotiate, and certainly without having to convince some panel of strangers that you were sufficiently deserving. Nonetheless, Eva recognized that, when it came to land, capitalism denied most people that freedom.
What good is the freedom to buy a penthouse apartment in Kensington, she thought, if you’re broke and house prices are guaranteed to rise faster than your income, no matter how hard you work?
If anything, the Other Now’s use of permanent auctions in commercial zones and lotteries in social zones seemed to her far more liberal than the capitalist real estate markets she loved and despised in equal measure, for they provided a far better defence against monopoly.
‘Could I be turning into a convert?’ Eva scribbled in the margin of one of Eve’s dispatches.
Borders
Over the last ten years, as other liberals were yielding to the ‘pragmatism’ of increasingly tougher immigration controls, Eva’s spiritual loneliness had grown. Instinctively she opposed fences patrolled by armed guards, funded and empowered by some ethnocentric nation state. From 2016 onwards, she had been appalled by the surge in what she considered xenophobia among her political kin. So when she learned that Ebo, Eve’s partner and Agnes’s dad, led something called the Human Movement Project, she was eager to know more.
Under capitalism, globalization relied on the freedom of money and commodities to cross borders. Trillions of dollars circled the planet incessantly and at the speed of light. Countless container loads of goods crossed the great oceans and every boundary humanity had erected. And yet in so many places people were fenced in, enjoying none of the freedom afforded to toxic money, plastic toys or seasona
l fruit. Scores of Mexicans gathered in the shadow of the US–Mexican border wall, weighing up the risk of scaling the barbed wire, while trucks laden with car parts, computers and beer passed freely onto US soil. Africans drowned in their thousands in the Mediterranean as they attempted to follow the vegetables their continent exported to Europe. In the name of refashioning the world as a borderless global village, globalization was building new fences and reinforcing older ones everywhere.
The Human Movement Project, Eve explained, had a simple remit: to facilitate freedom of movement for humans without inflaming further discontent within communities receiving newcomers. In his inaugural speech as HMP coordinator, her partner had pointed out that immigrants have always contributed net wealth to their destination countries – even under capitalism – but because the gains have been reaped disproportionately by the rich, the vast majority of the native population have enjoyed none of the benefits. All they see is greater competition for increasingly scarce social housing, amenities, health services and schools. For those in southern Europe, for example, forced to wave goodbye to their children as they set off in search of decent wages and dignity elsewhere, the arrival of migrants only intensifies their bitterness and their desire to claim something for themselves.
‘You are right to want your country back,’ Ebo had said in his speech. ‘You are right to want to take back control. But first you must first take control of your community.’
Ebo and many other OC rebels were convinced that empowering people and giving them a greater sense of social status and agency was key to unlocking their readiness to appreciate the benefits of immigration. The gComms and the County Associations were the primary means by which they achieved this at the regional level. The Citizens’ Juries that held corporations to account were another substantial source of grass-roots authority. The demise of shareholding, meanwhile, dramatically reduced inequality, while Dividend and Legacy accounts wiped the worry lines from people’s faces. These were the foundation, Ebo had argued, for widespread support for a liberal migration policy.
But immigration policy itself needed radical change too. One such change was to devolve the power to grant visas to the regional gComms. Instead of the state deciding how many visas to issue and to whom, it was now down to the County Associations to consider visa requests directly from potential migrants. Additional funds for new homes and amenities would be allocated by the Human Movement Project and the International Monetary Project’s IRDD to those counties who chose to grant migrant visas. If they did, the potential migrants would simply be entered into the same lottery for space in the social zones as any incomer, with their odds adjusted according to their performance in remote interviews conducted by a panel of randomly chosen residents.
‘Global solidarity manifesting itself at local level,’ was how Eve described it.
‘Is it any wonder they never had to deal with Brexit or Trump?’ wrote Iris in her diary.
Digital renaissance
In 2020, when Covid-19 hit and unemployment abruptly swelled, Eva had noticed a puzzling piece of graffiti on a wall near their local pub in Brighton: IF YOU HAVE NO JOB YOU HAVE NO LEISURE. At the time she took it to mean simply that without decently paid work, every waking minute becomes a struggle and it is impossible ever to rest; leisure and work become indistinguishable. Five years later, she found herself reminded of this graffiti as she read Eve’s account of the Other Now’s digital economy and began to see the assertion in a rather different light.
Initially, Eva had considered the harvesting of data by Facebook, Google and others for the purposes of advertising a pretty innocuous way for consenting adults to trade a little bit of privacy for some rather desirable free leisure services. But as Costa would point out whenever given half a chance, Facebook and Google, Twitter and Instagram, Amazon and the rest were not mere service providers. Nor were their profits rewards for services rendered. No, they were gigantic behaviour modification machines, addicting and provoking, teasing and enraging their users in order to maximize engagement and the profiling data – and profits – that came with it.
‘Big tech only enables two people to communicate if it can manipulate their behaviour,’ Costa would insist on the rare occasions that he and Eva had argued the matter.
This was what he meant when he said that social media was proletarianizing us all. Facebook’s users provided both the labour that went into the machine and the product that was sold by it.
‘Even Walmart, a company renowned for its capacity to squeeze every drop of value out of its workers, pays out 40 per cent of its total revenue in wages,’ Costa would complain. ‘But Facebook pays only 1 per cent of its revenues to its employees and precisely nothing to its users!’
That was back in 2019. By 2025, Eva had become convinced that no self-respecting liberal could condone big tech’s mass manipulation techniques nor defend its gains as a fair reward for entrepreneurship. Its returns were only made possible by a species of techno-feudalism that made billions of people work for it for free.
And so, when she read Eve’s detailed description of the digital economy forged by the OC rebellion, Eva caught herself cheering. The tipping point was the double strike action against Facebook that took place on 5 November 2012. Like the earlier Day of Inaction against Amazon, the Face the Music strike involved a boycott by Facebook’s users, but this time they struck not as customers but as unpaid data labourers, striking in solidarity with Facebook’s actual employees, by simply not visiting their Facebook pages. In conjunction with the new corpo-syndicalist legislation which shrank and eventually eliminated the share markets – doing away with those perpetually loss-making powerhouses, like Netflix and Uber, that grew on the back of speculation rather than profit – the wave of tech strikes left the major data-harvesting businesses in turmoil. The killer blow, however, came from the various Digital Rights Acts, which granted full property rights to every person on earth over their personal data.
This transformed the Internet economy overnight, driving the behaviour manipulation machines to extinction and fostering in their place a diverse ecosystem of countless digital businesses with many of the characteristics of consumer associations. Starved of their targeted advertising revenues and access to stock exchanges, the new shareholders of Google, Facebook and their ilk – employees owning one share each – were forced to seek the financial support of their community of users. In a surprisingly short time, what used to be the world’s greatest and greediest private monopolies had mutated into vast digital communes.
The key to the Digital Renaissance, as Eve called it, was the micropay platform that the OC rebels cheekily named Penny For Your Thought. In operational terms, it combined Netflix’s subscription model with the British National Health Service’s principle of universal provision.
App developers needing people’s data had to pay to get it from consenting users, who could choose which parts of their data to sell and to whom. At the same time, anyone using an app had to pay the developer for access to it. The sums involved were extremely small for the individual, but for an app with vast pools of users they could add up to large amounts. More importantly, the amount any individual received in micropayments went a long way towards covering the cost of their Internet usage. But if any user or developer was unable to pay the stream of micropayments demanded by Penny For Your Thought, they could apply for their PerCap Legacy account to be charged directly. No one was denied access to anonymized data or desirable apps, even while no digital service or data was provided for free.
Free now from the predation of the tech giants, millions of small tech corporations emerged, and a rowdy digital marketplace was born that could never have flourished under Our Now’s techno-feudalism.
‘Penny For Your Thought made the era of targeted advertising, based on “free” digital services look like a digital Middle Ages,’ Eve commented.
The only potential drawback of this vibra
nt new ecology was that it lacked the sheer scale of the tech giants which had made their data so potent. Without access to a pool of data on an equivalent scale, many technologies – including life-saving diagnostic tools, for example – would remain out of reach. In Our Now in 2019, for example, Google had collaborated with Britain’s National Health Service. In return for access to the NHS’s vast pool of patient data, it had been able to develop a machine-learning app capable of diagnosing a dangerous eye malady as effectively as the best ophthalmologists. But the contract stipulated that, after a few years, the NHS would have to buy the app from Google like any other commercial user. Google was eating its cake and having it too. Keen to press machine learning into public service on terms that reflected the actual value of people’s data, the OC rebels created a glorious new institution: the Sovereign Data Fund, an ingenious means of extracting value from that data before returning it to the community.
Eve explained that all data, both public and private, was stored anonymously on the Sovereign Data Fund’s cloud computer network. Companies wishing to use it as Google had used the NHS data had to pay a royalty into that country’s fund in return for a licence to use it. The more successful the technology, the more royalties the fund accrued, thus funding further technological breakthroughs.
Another Now Page 13