Once a few million Joyces had signed up, DCCS and others owned the right to shift vast amounts of money to whomever they chose. They then approached the gComms – the ground commons authorities who oversaw the distribution of each county’s land – that they knew were eager to invest in developing new commercial sites (with a view to funding social housing in their social zones) and offered them immediate and plentiful financing in exchange for a cut of the gComms’ future earnings. Once these contracts were signed, granting them the right to collect on future monetary gains, DCCS had secured access to two kinds of other people’s money: existing savings belonging to Joyce and others, and future, public land rents to be collected by the gComms.
Eva knew from her experience at Lehman that if you give financiers access to two different income streams, they quickly find a way to make money by combining them. Which was exactly what they did. DCCS wrote a contract that afforded its bearer the right to draw parts of Joyce’s money and, at the same time, to trade in part of a gComms’ future earnings. These contracts, called mixed credit rights (MCRs), were then put up for sale on an improvised digital trading platform of their design. While it had no legal standing, this trading platform was not banned by law either, possibly because no lawmaker had thought of it. When, later, some of its instigators were brought to justice, their dubious defence was ‘That which is not illegal is ethical.’ Eva smiled when she read that, reminiscent as it was of the heady days of 2008.
Access to Joyce’s real money had now been boosted in value by the expectation of the gComms’ future earnings, and so it sold for more than was required to pay Joyce the interest DCCS had promised her. Soon, MCRs were selling like hot cakes and companies like DCCS had an idea. Why just sell the damn things? Why not also buy them to resell later once their price goes up even further? As long as the MCRs could be sold tomorrow for more money, it made sense.
Within a year, a large percentage of people’s PerCap savings had been shifted onto the improvised and unregulated trading platforms that DCCS and others had created. As money flooded into the local authorities via their gComms, the value of their local digital currencies went up. Demand for land in the areas doing particularly well increased, further boosting prices and inflaming the trade in MCRs. As land was developed faster, both in the commercial and social zones, the purchasing power of the community as a whole increased, and all sorts of local companies flourished. Everyone was a winner – just as long as land prices kept rising.
Reading Siris’s dispatch, Eva experienced a painful sense of déjà vu and knew what was coming next. It was a random event – a flood somewhere, according to Siris – that pushed land prices down in south-east England. Several MCRs that had factored in large increases in those land values tanked overnight on the informal trading platform. A cascade of MCR failures took less than a day to crash the purchasing power of one community currency after another. Companies whose business was conducted primarily in those currencies went bust. To address their own liquidity problems, the shadowy credit brokers, DCCS included, immediately exercised their right to transfer monies from Joyce’s and others’ PerCap accounts, leaving many of them empty.
For Eva, the whole calamity was depressingly familiar. But what happened next was not. As soon as the authorities woke up to what was unfolding, they acted fast. Thankfully, the tools they needed to reverse the ruinous cascade were already in place. Central banks replenished the PerCap accounts of Joyce and anyone else who had been badly hit, restoring their purchasing power. They also added a little more to all accounts for good measure. By adjusting the overall quantity of money upwards in this way, they were able to lift the gloom and boost society’s animal spirits.
Companies that had lost significant sales as a result of devaluations in their local currency received one-off cash injections too. And at an emergency conference the International Monetary Project decided to provide support to national currencies that had suffered disproportionately. Once the dust had settled, legislation was introduced that beefed up the citizens’ monetary assemblies which regulated currencies, dismantled all informal credit trading platforms and banned contracts between savers and credit brokers of the sort that had created the bubble and put Joyce’s savings in jeopardy.
By early 2022, the Crunch had been overcome. Human nature’s capacity for mischief had proved itself to be irrepressible once more, but the Other Now’s defences had held. The authorities’ swift reaction had stopped the crisis in its tracks, and the new regulations would prevent anyone from trying again to profit from other people’s future earnings. Eva was impressed.
‘What a contrast to the comedy of errors that took place in the aftermath of 2020,’ she remarked.
Iris, meanwhile, sank a little deeper into her melancholy.
Shaking the superflux is not enough
In the old days of our activist youth, few plays upset Iris like King Lear. I remember sitting next to her during a performance at the Old Vic theatre in London and, as the stage thundered with Lear’s famous words of regret, noticing a single tear running down her cheek.
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp.
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.
When I asked her afterwards why the fallen king’s epiphany had touched her so, she got annoyed.
‘What, that old fool?’ she said. ‘Who went all social democratic on us when it was too late?’
‘Well, if that’s how you feel, yes, why the tear over a fool’s lament?’ I asked.
Iris replied that it was the play, not the character, that had got to her. It reminded her how the forces of evil never fail to acknowledge and support each other, how effortlessly and consciously they cooperate. Whereas the forces of good know only how to betray and abandon each other when it matters most. Hers was a tear of frustration – or so she claimed.
That Iris had no sympathy for Lear himself made sense, for she had a deep aversion to the kind of paternalist redistribution of excessive wealth – superflux – that he calls for. She was of course all for reducing inequality, but she feared that the kind of income redistribution practised by Labour governments in the UK and various social democrats in continental Europe in the 1970s would be short-lived and, ultimately, counterproductive, simply providing capitalism with the cover it needed to appropriate even more superflux on behalf of an ever-decreasing circle of shareholders.
‘Shaking the superflux,’ I remember her saying that night over post-show drinks, ‘temporarily showed the heavens more just – only to make them less so soon after.’
Never missing an opportunity to say, ‘I told you so’, Iris began her reply to Siris’s latest dispatch with a reminder of their prescient opposition to such romantic notions and by pointing out that in disempowering one set of spivs – the bankers – the OC rebellion had simple given cover to another.
Yes, she found the handling of the 2022 crisis by the Other Now’s authorities laudable. Yes, it was impressive that they had done away with the absurdity of corporations owned by people who didn’t work in them and not owned by those who did. And, yes, of course she approved of the end of abject poverty brought about by Legacy and Dividend. Nevertheless, none of this was sufficient to overcome her deep scepticism of Siris, Eve and Kosti’s world. She remained profoundly suspicious of the Other Now’s institutions, she said – of their capacity to prevent the environmental destruction that came with economic growth, for example, or of their ability to curb profiteering, as the Crunch of 2022 confirmed.
&nb
sp; ‘Yes, bringing corporations and land and money under democratic control sounds splendid, but I just don’t buy it: ending capitalism, and that alone, doesn’t bring about a truly just society. Tell me, Siris, can you in all honesty say that it has?’
Siris’s reply did little to persuade her. If anything, it did the opposite. The citizens’ assemblies, she admitted, were imperfect. The OC rebels had aspired but failed to establish isegoria – the ancient Athenian ideal that every opinion in an assembly should be judged on its merits alone, rather than according to who spoke the words. Siris was also caustic about the rebels’ claim that international solidarity had prevailed. ‘The imperialist psyche, which rationalizes the suffering of its victims by treating them as “other”, absolutely lives on,’ she reported.
That the ‘imperialist psyche’ was as hard to kill as that other cockroach, patriarchy, was unsurprising. It was baked into our essence at least since the slave ship, on which the psyche of white trash sailors, along with their upper-class superiors, learned to fear and loathe the black man. Sure enough, in the United States the Dividend liberated blacks from wholesale dependence on bullshit jobs and the daily long commutes to get to them. Similarly in Britain and elsewhere ethnic minorities, refugees and assorted migrants, suddenly found the power to say ‘No’ to exploitative work. Their kids came to the world with a Legacy that offered additional freedom. But eradicating racism from the fabric of racist society, from the police to the schoolyard, was a bridge too far for the OC-Rebellion.
And even though Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and all the other surveillance capitalists were gone, technology was so ubiquitous and advanced that people still lived in constant fear of being watched, their behaviour monitored and policed if not by the NSA then by their own feminist comrades. ‘The panopticon does not need capitalism to exist,’ she wrote.
The one positive note in Siris’s response was that meaningless work – the countless shitty, soul-destroying jobs people were forced to endure mainly so that governments could boast of their low unemployment rates – had been largely eradicated. ‘The availability of a basic income for everyone and the democratization of corporations has forced us to invest in the automation of most chores, so the more dispiriting jobs simply don’t exist any more.’
If Iris took heart from this news, she didn’t let on. ‘It’s good to know that bad jobs are on the wane over there,’ she said, ‘but I bet their eradication did nothing to eliminate loneliness.’
What hid behind her stubborn negativity? Why could she not acknowledge the Other Now’s successes, its proof that capitalism could be transcended, and that it could be done efficiently? Her dogged rejectionism surprised even her until, eventually, through her correspondence with Siris she realized what lay at its heart: an insurmountable belief that patriarchy and the market would continue to poison society even after capitalism is dust.
Freedom from the market
This was new to Iris. For decades she had raged against capitalism’s total dependence on granting private property rights over land, buildings and machines to a minority who, as a result, had immense extractive power over the majority. As an anthropologist, she would tell her students that all societies featured markets, but they remained on the periphery of people’s lives until the onset of capitalism. Before the eighteenth century there had been no such thing as a market for labour or a market for land. You were either a landowner or a peasant, and that was that. In the wake of capitalism, however, everything was for sale – not just labour and land but eventually even wombs, genes and minerals in outer space. Societies with markets became market societies, and every aspect of human endeavour was eventually channelled through one all-encompassing global marketplace. That’s what made capitalism different – and a danger to our planet, to our souls, to our humanity.
When as an activist she was asked what needed to change, she would answer forcefully, ‘Ban private ownership of land, buildings, machines – all the means by which we produce our material and spiritual goods.’ She could now see that this was not enough. She had seen in the Other Now how the means of production could be ingeniously socialized and realized that she had been remiss: the problem was not just who owned what before entering into market exchanges. The problem was the market itself. It was the very principle of conditional rather than unconditional exchange: ‘I shall give you an apple – but only if you give me an orange.’ In the end, it was thanks to Esmeralda’s Soho Address, her beautiful call for non-market reciprocity, that it finally dawned on Iris: she was more radical than she had realized!
After years spent cooped up in her Brighton sanctuary, effectively a market-free zone, exposure to the Other Now had radicalized her against the market society in all its forms, even the Other Now’s post-capitalist one. Iris had come to feel that society’s only saving grace was the rare and virtuous rebels who used their independence to embrace unconditional collaboration. The Other Now’s reliance on markets jarred with her aspiration to live in a world where the good was sovereign, rather than the by-product of a smart market design. All of its achievements now seemed tainted and unappetizing.
The news of the Crunch of 2022 had been the catalyst. Siris’s account of the scam devised by DCCS was the trigger.
‘I bet,’ Iris wrote, ‘that the DCCS managers were men with no real unmet needs, except a hunger for power over the little people.’
Even with capitalism gone, as long as society privileges markets, Iris’s virtuous rebels would be eaten alive by cunning operators always on the lookout for the next bargain. It gave her precisely the same sinking feeling she got from King Lear.
Iris did not dispute that the Other Now had shaken the superflux magnificently. But at what cost? At the cost of freeing markets from the shackles of the mega-firms’ and mega-banks’ monopoly. And why was this too high a price to pay? Because in her estimation, free markets, which may indeed require the end of capitalism to be fully realized, are not the solution. Markets, capitalist or otherwise, create the habitat in which patriarchy and oppressive power survive.
Her opposition to the Other Now, Iris concluded, was not dissimilar to her contempt for Lear. Just as a slight reduction of inequality in the name of social democracy only paved the way for a revival of inequality later on, so the Other Now had merely prolonged the reign of markets over societies – which is, of course, why Eva had warmed to it in the end.
As her exchanges with Siris drew to a close, Iris saw it all clearly. Her dream was freedom from, not of, the market – a dream that the Other Now dashed perhaps even more decisively than capitalism ever had. Was the Other Now’s corpo-syndicalism not better than capitalism? Sure it was. But was it worth the candle if its outcome was a society in which Esmeralda, along with her Soho Address, could be snuffed out so easily?
8
THE RECKONING RESUMES
Digital toxoplasmosis
Thomas showed up at Costa’s lab on Monday 3 November 2025. By then, Iris and Eva were exhausted, not only by their discoveries but by composing their own dispatches, describing Our Now since 2008, how capitalism in this period worked and how it had failed. After four months of this arduous back and forth, they had decided it was time to take stock and had agreed to dedicate a week to studying the dispatches separately during the day, before getting together in the evening to exchange notes. It was on the first day of their study week, as they called it, that Thomas joined them.
Though he had texted Eva a week earlier to confirm that he was coming, she had not been counting on it. Partly this was a way of managing her own expectations, so she was quietly overjoyed when he arrived, while also terrified that something might go wrong again between them. Painfully aware of his aversion to her shows of affection, she tried to not overwhelm him with questions and gave him plenty of space during the days that followed. The study week offered mother and son a nice buffer, providing the excuse they both needed. During the day, while Eva and Iris st
udied their dispatches, Thomas was free to do as he pleased, the four of them getting together at precisely seven o’clock every evening over dinners meticulously prepared by Costa.
Thomas chose to spend his days with Costa, intrigued by the weird Cretan’s demeanour and fascinated by what his mother had implied about the lab next door – a place in which, as Eva had tantalizingly put it, ‘all sorts of technological wonders lurk’. And Costa, it turned out, was the ideal companion for the troubled young man. After returning home to San Francisco, following his Brighton trip, a calm rage had gradually displaced hope in his soul, his initial excitement at discovering the Other Now being replaced with an obsession with keeping his equipment safe from Our Now’s corporate raiders. Thomas felt comfortable around the broody, fragile and fierce middle-aged engineer. He appreciated that Costa never asked personal questions but instead would occasionally engage him in charmingly off-the-wall and unexpected conversations, alternately quirky and macabre. Thomas even managed to discover an interest in the preparation of Cretan food.
During one of their first mornings together, Thomas was playing a game on his tablet while Costa was preparing some lentils for the evening meal. Leaving them to soak in a mixture of water and balsamic vinegar, Costa turned to Thomas and out of the blue asked, ‘Have you heard of toxoplasmosis?’
Thomas said he had not.
‘Toxoplasmosis is a parasitic disease that rewires rodent brains in such a way that it reduces their fear of cats,’ Costa explained. ‘When the reckless mice are devoured, the parasite reproduces in the cats’ intestines and then spreads through their faeces to infect more mice who in turn become vulnerable to cats. And so on.’
This guy is a complete weirdo, thought Thomas. I like him.
‘I’ve been watching you,’ continued Costa, ‘playing that game on your tablet. You have the symptoms of digital toxoplasmosis painted all over your face.’
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