Once more, it seemed to Eva, leisure and work were becoming hard to distinguish. Only in the Other Now the sense of alienation that lay behind that Brighton graffiti had been replaced with something different, something more like its opposite: empowerment.
Grossly demoted GDP
It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them…It counts napalm and nuclear warheads and armoured cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities…Yet [it] does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry…It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.
Bobby Kennedy’s famous condemnation of GDP, the dollar metric of a nation’s total income, had always irritated Eva despite its obvious poetic quality – or perhaps because of it. During her time as a postgrad in economics at the end of the noughties, GDP-bashing had become something of a cottage industry, although Eva had thought it was akin to lambasting a maritime navigation device for failing to appreciate the beauty of the ocean and its impact on the human psyche.
‘Of course GDP rises when a terrible earthquake kills thousands,’ she would assert to the students in her seminars. ‘That’s what it’s meant to do: count the monetary expense of the rescue efforts at first and the cost of rebuilding later. And of course its needle does not move when a lover’s gesture uplifts one’s soul or a bush fire consumes a forest. The point of GDP is not to condone the earthquake or to make us indifferent to intangible beauty or environmental disaster. It is to measure that which it was designed to measure: money expenditures by some that add, equivalently, to the incomes of others.’
Monetary profit drives capitalism. Under capitalism, like it or not, society’s resources are attracted by the anticipation of higher profit and repelled by anything that reduces the bottom line. Eva’s view was that GDP is a snapshot of these forces at work – a highly effective one that does not purport to be anything more or less. ‘It seeks to capture capitalism’s dynamic and to map out the types of endeavour that generate money – “the alienated essence of our life”, as I believe your beloved Karl Marx once put it. To dump GDP and replace it with an arbitrary measure of something…nicer would be to take our finger off capitalism’s pulse – to ditch our only means of gauging the beast’s behaviour.’
Every time an environmentalist demanded a new, cuddlier metric with which to replace GDP, Eva despaired. ‘If we want to protect trees or lakes that have no market price,’ she argued, ‘we should just do it: slap preservation orders on them! What’s the point of concocting an arbitrary price substitute by which to measure their intangible value?’
The irony is, Eva had thought to herself, these hip anti-capitalists are their own worst enemy. Under capitalism, the only way a tree or a lake can be assigned a quantifiable value is by putting it up for sale to see what price it fetches. In the absence of any alternative to capitalism, Eva used to tell her students, we need to stop criticizing GDP and instead invest in immeasurable public goods like the health of our children or the beauty of their poetry.
At least, that was Eva’s view when, like almost everyone else, she believed there really was no alternative to capitalism. In the light of Eve’s latest dispatches, she was starting to wonder.
On the one hand, markets in the Other Now appeared to be in rude health despite, or maybe because of, capitalism’s demise; a great deal of economic activity in Kosti and Eve’s society could still be measured in terms of monetary incomes. On the other hand, a lot of private-sector activity was driven neither by net revenue maximization nor by market forces but by instruments such as the Socialworthiness Index, which played a large role in diverting resources to various activities. Compiled by customers, neighbours, artists and the community at large, the index assigned a number to an economic activity that reflected neither price nor the quantity supplied. Or take the Citizens’ Juries’ power to dissolve enterprises for failing the public interest. These both created strong incentives for corporations to diverge from business plans that maximized profits. Freed from the tyranny of their share prices and the fear of hostile takeovers, corporations were more alive to society’s needs. So too with the County Associations, whose members allocated land for the benefit of local communities. While they exploited market forces to generate funding for social purposes, their decisions were uninfluenced by the prices generated by capitalist real estate markets.
Once capitalism had died, and markets were freed from private ownership, a different kind of value took over. Instead of judging something’s worth by its exchange value – what it would fetch in return for something else – the Other Now judged worth according to experiential value – the benefit the thing brought to the person who used it. Prices, quantities and monetary profits were no longer the sole masters of society. And the more experiential value liberated itself from the hegemony of exchange value, the less meaningful or relevant GDP would be. And so it was in the Other Now, Eve confirmed. Although it continued to play a role in measuring monetary incomes, GDP was simply one of many metrics used to monitor the economy – a demotion that would have made no sense before capitalism died.
To the market’s rescue?
Markets fail all the time. Eva knew this as well as the next woman. But until very recently her faith in markets had never failed. She would not allow it to fail because she could not conceive of an alternative way of allocating scarce resources that worked consistently better and, more importantly, did not empower some central authority to make decisions about who gets what.
In the 1920s and 1930s, her liberal forebears had assailed socialists who aspired to replace markets with some centrally designed system for allocating raw materials, jobs and goods with a powerful critique: no human mind or organization, however smart and well meaning, can ever know what society wants, what capacities it has or how it should use its resources. It was not, the free-market liberals maintained, a question of insufficient computing capacity. In the same way that squaring the circle is not just immensely hard but absolutely impossible, working out what we all want, and how we should get it, is downright undoable. Only by groping around in the marketplace as individual consumers and producers can we hope to find out what each of us wants and what each is capable of. At least, that was their story.
Eva believed it. But then, one day in 2019, her faith was tested. Browsing the Amazon website, scrolling through the list of books it was recommending to her, she realized that its algorithm was spookily accurate at guessing her preferences. Experimenting, she turned her attention to music. The big tech companies had all sussed her out. Amazon, Spotify and Apple Music all picked songs she liked and some she was interested in trying out. She needed only to type a character or two into Google Search, and it completed her words. Netflix, meanwhile, inundated her with movie suggestions that only a friend who knew her film tastes inside out would have made. Though it might not be perfect, it was no longer true, she suddenly realized, that a centrally designed system could never know what we want.
With liberal arguments against communism’s inherent inefficiency disproved by capitalism’s technologies, Eva’s faith in capitalism now hung by a single thread: her belief that a centrally planned system, even if potentially efficient, posed a grave threat to human rights and personal freedom. But was this enough? Capitalism triumphed in 1991 not so much because the citizens of the USSR or East Germany lacked freedom but because of the queues they had to endure to get hold of anything, whether a loaf of bread or a TV set. Had it been solely a question of freedom, Eva feared, the red flag would still be flying over the Kremlin – perhaps over the White House too.
Once big tech had given the lie to the liberals’ insistence that individual preferences could never be centrally served, Eva concluded that Silicon Valley’s greatest, and perhaps only, beneficiary was the Chinese Communist Party. She saw no reason why Beijing could not, in
time and with development, adopt the very same technologies that allow Alibaba – China’s equivalent of Amazon – to predict accurately what its customers will want next in order to manage the country’s entire economy. It already had the authority to do so; all it needed was the means. And once artificial intelligence advanced a little more, what would there be to stop Chinese-style communism from overrunning markets completely?
Such concerns were already troubling Eva by the time she found herself in Costa’s San Francisco lab in 2025. Indeed, they were responsible for her openness to the Other Now dispatches, which surprised even her. Normally, she would have railed against the society they described. The OC rebels had banned share markets, abolished labour markets and banished banking. They had taken land into public ownership and denied big tech the very oxygen it breathed. So why did Eva, the archetypal liberal, see in the Other Now, which was in so many respects a liberal’s nightmare, a glorious opportunity for markets?
The reason was that the Other Now was brimming with features that any liberal would find hard to resist: an absence of income and sales taxes; the freedom of workers to move from company to company while taking their personal capital with them; the curtailment of large companies’ market power; universal freedom from poverty, but also from a welfare state demanding that benefit-recipients surrender their dignity at the door of some social security office; a payments system that was free, efficient and which did not empower the few to print money at the expense of the many; a permanent auction for commercial land that exploited market forces to the full in the interests of social housing; an international monetary system that stabilized trade and the flow of money across borders; a welcoming attitude to migrants based on empowering local communities and helping them absorb newcomers.
Yes, almost everything Eve told her made her uneasy, but it also pointed to a world in which markets at last fulfilled their proper purpose. With private property, corporate empires and turbocharged finance all gone, the OC rebels had found it possible, and desirable, to construct markets that were genuinely competitive – the kind of markets that a true liberal could only dream of under capitalism.
Eva went over Eve’s dispatches, scouring the Other Now for evidence to the contrary, but by the time she had combed them for a third time, the absurd idea was firmly planted in her mind: a proper market revival requires the end of capitalism.
* * *
—
By now Eva and Iris had been staying with Costa for two months. Eva had applied for study leave from Sussex University to prolong her stay beyond the end of the summer break. While her official excuse was that Thomas had promised to join her in November, Costa and Iris knew that her actual main reason was fascination with the Other Now. Both she and Iris had long since abandoned any doubt that it was real.
But while Eva’s interest in the alternative present only grew, Costa’s had been moving in the opposite direction. Kosti’s dispatches to him had for a long while been generating diminishing returns. By the end of September, his communications with Kosti were confined to technical exchanges for the maintenance of the wormhole. In fact, as Eva and Iris had been corresponding with their alternative selves, Costa and Kosti had been struggling to keep the wormhole stable. Strict rationing of the data that passed through it was now vital if they were to avoid its collapse. According to Costa’s records, Eva had proved by far the keener correspondent, with Iris taking time to reflect between messages. By the end of October, Eva had used up almost all her entire quota of data, while Iris was not even halfway through hers.
Eva had just received a dispatch from Eve that referred tantalizingly to the ‘deep monetary Crunch of 2022’, when Costa told her that her time was up. Eva was torn. On the one hand, she was angry and frustrated that Eve had not mentioned this event before; on the other, she was strangely relieved at the revelation that the Other Now was not immune to crisis. She pleaded with Costa for additional kilobytes, but he was adamant: ‘You have the equivalent of a short paragraph,’ he told her. So Eva turned to Iris and tried to impress upon her the importance of using some of her quota to find out about the Crunch that Eve had referred to. For Eva wanted to use her last missive to Eve to ask something else.
‘How is Agnes dealing with adolescence?’ she enquired.
‘She finds me fairly intolerable,’ Eve replied. ‘Ebo less so. But overall, she seems pretty happy and fulfilled.’
Eva was oddly comforted. Anxious about her reunion with Thomas after a difficult few years, she allowed herself to think that maybe his uphill struggle in life was neither inevitable nor, on a self-centred note, down to her DNA.
7
TROUBLE IN PARADISE
A hard-to-kill cockroach
By the time Eva began badgering Iris to find out about the Crunch of 2022, Iris’s exchanges with Siris had taken her in a completely different direction – one in which markets, prices and incomes seemed distant, immaterial, tedious.
They had not got off to a good start. Heeding Costa’s advice, as Eva had also done, Iris introduced herself to her counterpart with an autobiographical detail that no one else could have known: an incident that had taken place in 1974 during a raucous forty-eight-hour party at the country home of the sweet aristocrat who was later to secure her financial independence with a surprising bequest.
For half a century Iris had wanted to believe that the bequest was unconnected to that incident, rather than a silent apology for leaving her unprotected. To avoid reliving the violence and excruciating panic she had endured that weekend, she had suppressed the memory. Why had she retrieved it now? Convincing Siris of her identity was not the whole reason. Writing that first message, Iris was finally addressing an old, pent-up need. But Siris’s angry response made her feel foolish and confirmed the depth of a pain that endured even more in the Other Now.
Gradually, however, the awkwardness dissipated as they discovered that, despite their eighteen-year separation and wildly different experiences, they were equally weighed down by the permanent spectre of male violence. To Iris’s disappointment, though not surprise, Siris confirmed that the OC revolution had not made much of a difference in this particular regard. Corporations had been democratized, citizens’ assemblies had sprung up, bankers and estate agents no longer existed, but structurally and psychologically – even in the most progressive circles – the relationship between women and men remained a zero-sum game, one that its historic winners continued to dominate.
‘Mountains move, banking becomes extinct, even capitalism dies,’ Siris wrote, ‘but patriarchy lives on like a hard-to-kill cockroach. The difference is that it is now disguised beneath an even thicker veneer of political correctness.’
Siris’s heated dispatches left Iris troubled. On the one hand, had she been told that the OC rebellion had killed off patriarchy, she would have dismissed the Other Now as an unsophisticated hoax. It was completely implausible to her that patriarchy would wither as a result of some political revolution, however transformative it might be in every other respect. Nonetheless, the intensity of Siris’s fury at the Other Now’s combination of political correctness and unyielding patriarchy took her aback – even while it put a smile on her face: for the first time in her life, she found herself on the receiving end of what her friends had been enduring for years.
The correspondence with Siris reaffirmed Iris’s conviction that any utopia imagined by minds formed in a patriarchal world – however well meaning and progressive those minds might be – was bound to be a bleak place for women. It was a conviction she had held since she was fourteen years old, when her paternal grandmother, Anna, a brave figure who had agitated for women’s lib when it was unfashionable and stigmatizing to do so, had urged Iris to imagine herself a suffragette too.
‘Imagine, Iris,’ she had said, ‘that there was no state, no laws, no institutions of authority like the BBC or the Bank of England, no Royal Opera House or Football Association.�
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The young Iris had tried in vain to comply.
‘Now imagine also,’ Anna continued, ‘that we could all, women as well as men, have the chance to sit nicely around a large table, as equals, to discuss over many cups of tea the rules we want to work and play by, the institutions we need, the best form of governing our country, our community, our family affairs. Finally, imagine that this grand assembly succeeded in agreeing unanimously on what laws and institutions to put in place. Would that not be the good society? Isn’t it fascinating to try to imagine what that society might be like?’
It was the disarming glow of excitement on her grandmother’s sweet face that caused Iris to restrain herself. But Anna sensed Iris’s intense scepticism and insisted she explain its source. Eventually, Iris came clean.
‘Women would not be sitting at the table, Gran,’ she asserted with her usual terrifying confidence. ‘They would be standing, fretting, fetching drinks and food for the pontificating males, who would of course decide everything.’
In truth, it was not just the likelihood of men and women debating matters of state and power as equals that Iris doubted, but it was not until she was a first-year undergraduate that she was able to articulate precisely why she had rejected Anna’s thought experiment so vehemently. As a student, she learned of Marx’s contempt for the idea that the bourgeoisie would ever deliberate as equals with factory workers. Lesser minds would have seen Marx’s objection as equivalent to her own: simply replace the working men with women. Not Iris. Despite their obvious similarity, she was adamant the hypotheses were not equivalent.
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