Thomas was more curious than offended.
‘If I am the rodent,’ he asked, playing along, ‘then what’s the parasite? And where are the cats?’
‘I didn’t mean that you are the rodent,’ replied Costa. ‘No, your attention is. Big tech gobbles it up through these games you play, while the invisible parasite breeds through their search engines and apps, making it harder and harder for you to hold on to your autonomy, to your capacity to direct your attention where you choose. Freed of fear of slavery, you surrender more and more to them.’
Thomas did not mind the insinuation that he was a mug, a plaything of big tech. In his conversations with his mother and with Iris there was always tension caused by the need on both sides to settle the matter and be proved right. Costa and Thomas got on because neither sought closure, let alone victory. Questions were posed for their own sake, claims were left unchallenged, differences were allowed to stay unresolved. For the first time, Thomas felt he could relax in the company of another soul, a genius even.
Costa felt comforted too. He basked in the long pauses during their strange conversations. He appreciated that he was not expected to fill them with insightful chatter. Eva had asked him to help ease her son’s melancholy and loneliness by forging a connection with him, but soon it was Costa who was soothed by their time together. The freedom to punctuate silences with random thoughts messily articulated was oddly satisfying. It also gave glimpses of Thomas’s mindset that would otherwise have remained hidden.
‘I sometimes wonder,’ Thomas ventured at one point, ‘whether all of life is really just a fight for control, and because others are out to get the better of me, the only thing to do is to try to get the better of them first. Does that make me a freak?’
‘Not as much of a freak as I am,’ replied Costa. ‘I sometimes worry that the whole thing is an illusion – that selfhood itself doesn’t exist and that there is no “I” in my head that is me. But let’s say for the sake of argument that you’re right. That in this world it is impossible to prevent others from controlling you except by controlling them first. If I have learned anything,’ he said solemnly, ‘it is that to control others you must first acquire exorbitant power, and that, before you know it, such power takes you over and makes you its trophy.’
Thomas remained silent, processing Costa’s observations.
‘Suppose I could make your dreams come true,’ Costa went on. ‘Suppose you could press a button and be transported into a world where you control absolutely everyone and everything. A place where no one can put ideas or desires into your mind, but your desires determine literally everything about the world. A multiverse where you can not only do anything you want but you can do everything you want all at once. Would you press the button?’
Thomas had some questions of course, but having clarified the exact terms of Costa’s thought experiment – which were of course the design features of HALPEVAM as originally conceived – his answer was unambiguous: ‘Of course I would press it!’
Costa’s moment of truth had arrived.
‘Would you still press the button if there was no turning back?’ he asked. ‘If, once you are ensconced in that digital realm of unbounded pleasure, you could never come back?’
‘Seriously, dude? I would be mad not to,’ Thomas replied incredulously and without a second’s thought.
Costa half-smiled and went back to soaking the rusks for that evening’s dakos salad in olive oil and lemon juice. ‘So much for the liberating power of for ever,’ he murmured to himself.
Corona versus Crunch
On the Sunday evening at the end of their study week, the four of them met as planned for dinner in the mess hall, as Costa referred to his combined kitchen and dining space. Eva brought with her a chilled bottle of champagne, ‘To celebrate the end of a fascinating week,’ she said. Costa sensed that her celebratory mood had as much to do with her reunion with Thomas as with the insights they had shared from the Other Now. It was clear she was happy to be in his company again and to see fewer worry lines on his face, evidence that the week spent with Costa had had its desired effect.
Once they had moved from the bubbly to his trahana soup, accompanied by the obligatory glass of raki, Costa broached some unfortunate news. The wormhole had buckled, allowing for only tiny amounts of information to pass through. Communication with Kosti had been reduced to the occasional burst of Morse code, learned from their father, who had himself been taught it by a Kiwi soldier the family were hiding during the Nazi occupation of Crete.
‘Is there no way to re-establish the wormhole?’ asked Thomas, who looked up to Costa as to a genius capable of almost anything.
Costa explained that it had been a struggle to keep it open for as long as they had. To reopen it, he and Kosti were working on a drastic technique.
‘By Wednesday we shall know if it works, though to tell you the truth it doesn’t look good,’ he admitted.
Iris reminded him that she was due to catch a flight back to England on the Thursday. ‘I don’t know about you folks,’ she said, ‘but I for one think it’s time to head back home. I’ve been cooped up here all summer. Enough is enough!’
It was at this point that the conversation turned to the world-changing events five years earlier. Eva had been much preoccupied with the Other Now’s Crunch of 2022 and how it compared to the 2020 lockdown crisis – and the economic depression that had followed in its wake. Those thoughts provided the tinder; Iris’s final remark provided the spark. Naturally enough, the conversation began with a quarrel between the two of them, but once the topic of the lockdown took hold, it dominated the rest of their evening’s dinner, with Costa and at times even Thomas taking the lead too.
‘It’s not the first time we’ve been cooped up together,’ said Eva.
‘Don’t remind me, please!’ retorted Iris.
‘Remember, Iris,’ Eva went on light-heartedly, ‘how guilty I felt about coming next door for a glass of wine, while you were so blasé? And how anxious I was about doing so for months afterwards?’
‘Yes,’ Iris replied. ‘In all honesty, I thought it pathetic.’
‘Typical, isn’t it?’ said Eva. ‘Whereas I was eager to comply with a sensible practice that the state should never have the right to impose, you supported the government’s overreach while violating the very same ban whenever you felt like it.’
‘Inconvenient laws are meant to be broken,’ said Thomas. ‘You weren’t caught, so you did the right thing.’
Thomas’s disturbing comment took both of them aback. Not wishing to cause a confrontation with her son, Eva steered the conversation in a different direction.
‘Loath as I am to admit it, compared to the shambles our authorities made of the coronavirus, the Other Now’s handling of their own economic crisis was outstanding. Admittedly, the Crunch of 2022 was a completely different kind of calamity, much closer to our crash of 2008. Nonetheless, I’m certain the Other Now’s institutions would have handled a pandemic much better than ours did.’
It was the first time Iris and Costa had been made aware of Eva’s extraordinary conversion. Shocked, they struggled at first to find the words.
‘I…beg your pardon?’ said Iris. ‘What makes you say that?’
Eva gave a typical economist’s reply.
‘First off, consider their central banks,’ she began. ‘As every person and company has an account at their country’s central bank, the bank can hand over a sum of money to everyone directly. No intermediaries, no laborious means testing, no questions asked, no forms to fill; some functionary just has to push a few buttons and every person suddenly has extra money to spend. In our situation, only the commercial banks have accounts at the central bank, so the only way it can refloat a collapsed economy is by giving money to them, hoping they will pass it on in the form of loans. But what do you always say the prime directive of a commercial bank
is, Iris?’
‘Never lend to anyone who actually needs the money,’ Iris replied, reeling somewhat from being agreed with.
‘Precisely. The moment you put a commercial bank between the central bank’s money and the people out there, two things happen: much of it never gets to the people, and what does goes largely to those who don’t need it. If we’d had the same central bank facility in 2020 as the Other Now had in 2022, we could have replaced all lost incomes and prevented most, if not all, bankruptcies immediately.’
The second depression-busting feature of the Other Now, Eva went on, was the absence of share markets. To Iris and Costa, who had witnessed Eva’s initial outrage at that notion when she first encountered it in Brighton, this was a mind-boggling concession.
‘Like a lot of people from my world,’ Eva explained, ‘to me 2008 was a wake-up call. From that point on, I grew increasingly concerned at the swelling disconnect between the real economy and the financial markets. But I remember how in 2020 that disconnect became a chasm. Even with half the world’s population locked up, businesses failing everywhere, unemployment engulfing the planet, the stock markets were nonetheless doing nicely, thank you very much. Why? Because those loans made possible thanks to the largesse of central banks and governments went not to the people, as you say, but to the directors of big business, who promptly used them to buy back their own shares. That’s why share prices shot up just as the real economies collapsed, and no doubt their bonuses shot up too as a result. They just couldn’t lose. While everyone else suffered – including those big businesses – company directors and their bankers flourished.’
‘You’re telling me you’ve only just realized this?’ asked Costa. ‘Could you not see all these years, after the bailouts of 2008, how the Fed’s printed dollars combined with Amazon and Facebook-like digital platforms to create global fiefdoms that turned us into techno-peasants. How, well before the pandemic, capitalism was already morphing into Technofeudalism?’
Eva confessed that before the wormhole afforded her a glimpse of alternative possibilities, she was simply unable to imagine a market society without banks or share markets. But now she could and it had made at least a few things very clear to her.
‘The Other Now got this much right,’ she said emphatically. ‘In times of economic crisis, commercial banks and share markets wreck the central bank’s capacity to help society mend itself and are nothing but a drag on a market economy.’
The third great advantage of the Other Now that Eva believed would have helped Our Now, had it had it, was the International Monetary Project, which could also have done for different countries and regions what the Other Now’s central banks would have done for its residents. All the IMP had to do at a time of global crisis, she explained, was credit national accounts held at the IMP with different amounts of Kosmos reflecting the extent of the damage done to each country’s economy.
‘And if some weaker countries suffered permanent losses of factories, agriculture or tourist income,’ she concluded, ‘the trade-imbalance and surge-funding levies flowing into the International Redistribution and Development Depository would have compensated with the necessary long-term investment.’
‘I tell you what else we could have done with in 2020,’ Costa interjected. ‘Their Sovereign Data Fund. The single most important advantage we humans have over any virus is that we can – in theory – mount a coordinated global effort against it, provided we have the means and the desire. When it spreads globally, the virus in China can never share information with its counterparts in America or Africa. But we can! So, if we’d had the Other Now’s open-source global data depository, think how much more quickly we could have tracked its course and developed a vaccine. We could have strangled the pandemic in its cradle.’
Jeff versus Akwesi
As Eva and Costa analysed the technical possibilities, Iris grew impatient. For her, things were simple.
‘In Our Now, billions of humans were and still are one payday away from ruin. When the virus hit in 2020, it was simply exposed for all to see. Waiters, farmhands, caterers, cleaners, office workers, nurses, drivers and countless others lived hand to mouth, with barely anything in the bank to fall back on. The same went for small businesses operating on wafer-thin margins. One or two days without customers was enough for them to go under. All this talk of refloating the economy ignores the essential underlying problem. Do you remember, Eva, that article by Arundhati Roy you sent me from the Financial Times of all places?’
The lines Iris had in mind were transcribed in her diary:
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world.
‘Remember, Eva,’ she went on, ‘how back in 2020 you were one of those who refused to imagine another world, continuing instead to drag along the carcasses of dead ideas?’
‘Maybe you and people like you,’ replied Eva, smiling, ‘were the reason I refused to imagine that other world. Your collectivist fantasies and authoritarianism were what made them seem so dangerous. What irks you now – admit it, Iris – is that I have turned out to be more open, deep down, than you ever were to another world that actually answers your concerns while respecting the basic human liberties that I’ve always defended.’
From a young age Thomas had learned how to shut out the squabbling pair, as he called Iris and Eva. As far as he was concerned, society was a nasty, brutish place that only caused him heartache, and the pointlessness of their obsessive battling over the whys and wherefores of it only irked him. He had therefore remained silent, more interested in Costa’s food than in Eva and Iris’s debate. But to Costa, Thomas’s absence from the conversation seemed unhealthy. He knew Thomas was generally more interested in the technicalities of the wormhole than in what lay at its other end, but in a bid to involve him in the conversation, Costa hit upon the one angle that he thought likely to capture the young man’s imagination.
Before Iris had a chance to respond to Eva’s challenge, Costa turned to Thomas and said, ‘If you ask me, the most interesting difference between Our Now and theirs during our respective crises was to do with power.’
To Costa’s satisfaction, Thomas’s ears immediately pricked up.
‘And if you want to understand what makes some people powerful and others pushovers,’ he went on, ‘then you need only compare the stories of Chris and Akwesi.’
Sensing that Costa had her son’s attention, Eva signalled to Iris to keep quiet.
Costa began with the story of Chris Smalls, an Amazon employee who had dared organize a walkout from the company’s Staten Island facility in protest at working conditions during the pandemic. He shot momentarily to fame when it was revealed that, having fired him, Amazon’s ultra-rich and uber-powerful directors strategised on a teleconference how to direct the media’s gaze upon Smalls in a manner that diminished him and his cause. But even though a considerable number of public figures spoke out in Chris’s defence and decried Amazon’s tactics, Costa explained, the furore had no effect. Amazon emerged from the 2020 lockdown richer, stronger and more influential than ever. As for Chris, once his five minutes of fame faded, he remained fired and vilified.
‘It wasn’t the first time a corporation had emerged from a global catastrophe stronger and with a splendid reputation among an appreciative public,’ Costa said. ‘At the end of the Second World War, Ford and General Motors were enshrined in American mythology as patriotic corporations that had helped defeat the Axis. For decades afterwards, if you claimed as some did that “What’s good for General is good for America” you’d find plenty of Americans nodding
in agreement. Could any corporation best this, you might wonder? Well, Amazon did in 2020.’
During the pandemic, Costa explained, while most companies were shedding jobs, putting thirty million Americans on the dole in a single month, Amazon bucked the trend and appeared to a swathe of Americans like a cross between the Red Cross, delivering essential parcels to confined citizens, and Roosevelt’s New Deal, hiring one hundred thousand extra staff and paying them a couple of extra dollars an hour to boot. Of course, behind the façade, the reality that Chris Smalls protested against was grim: in its warehouses Amazon treated its human workers as fungible, expendable units reducible to their physical capacity to pick and pack. Good luck to anyone who protested at unhygienic facilities or a lack of protective equipment or low sick pay. That was the ugly reality behind Amazon’s elevation from a near-monopoly to something closer to a state within a state.
‘All power to Bezos!’ said Thomas. ‘If this Smalls guy couldn’t hack it at Amazon, he should have left anyway. No one asked him to work there. If you can’t take care of yourself, that’s your lookout.’
Costa had expected – even hoped for – this reaction. He anticipated that Thomas would see Chris as a weakling whose sacrifice was an unavoidable corollary of Jeff Bezos’s mesmerizing will to power. In fact, he sympathized with Thomas’s inability to care about Amazon’s ethics. How could it be otherwise for a young man overflowing so conspicuously with sadness and who felt as powerless as he did? The boy’s yearning for power compelled him to admire and submit to it wherever he encountered it.
‘Maybe so,’ said Costa. ‘But there’s another kind of power – entirely different but equally overwhelming. More powerful than Amazon and Bezos, it turns out. And we can see it in the story of Akwesi and his Bladerunners.’
Another Now Page 17