Another Now

by Yanis Varoufakis

  Costa described their Days of Inaction and the successes they had had in securing pay rises for the Amazon workforce, but Thomas remained sceptical.

  ‘Bezos might have thrown them a bone to keep them quiet,’ Thomas said, ‘but I don’t see how a bunch of consumers could ever weaken a megalith like Amazon enough to enable its takeover by the Chris Smalls of this world.’

  ‘Power always rests on the law of large numbers,’ Costa replied. ‘No despot, oligarch or entrepreneur has enough power to rule millions without their tacit consent. The truth about despotic power lies not in the despot’s weapons, bank accounts or computer servers but in the minds of those the despot controls. As long as the many believe they are powerless they remain so. In that sense, Bezos and Akwesi were not as different as you might think.

  ‘The key to assembling immense power,’ Costa went on, ‘is to aggregate the tiny capacities of many, many people. Bezos did this slowly, gradually building up Amazon’s overwhelming appeal as the path of least resistance for countless consumers, vendors and workers. All he needed was for millions to learn instinctively to think of Amazon whenever they wanted to buy a book or a gadget or any household item quickly. And, of course, he needed to keep prices low courtesy of an army of workers with no option but to accept robot-like, soul-destroying, low-paid warehouse jobs. Akwesi’s army, by contrast, followed in the tiny footsteps of the Lilliputians who immobilized Gulliver.’

  It was hard for little people to believe they had power, Costa explained. It took inspirational leadership to persuade them that they did, and then it took serious organization combined with smart strategizing for that belief to have any effect. Akwesi’s strategy was to start small but aim high. His Bladerunners’ Days of Inaction required of consumers only tiny sacrifices, but delivered confidence-boosting rewards. Not visiting a website for a day cost consumers next to nothing but, from the very start, thanks to Akwesi’s global reach, it translated into large costs for corporations like Amazon. Immediately, the Lilliputians saw the effect they could have, and the Days of Inaction became opportunities for feeling part of an effective movement. Whereas previous protest movements took effort and commitment on the part of all involved, Akwesi’s innovation, according to Costa, was to offer disheartened folks the chance to make a difference without personally sacrificing that much at all.

  And in the same way that Bezos shored up Amazon by broadening its power base, from merely selling stuff over the Internet to cornering the market for cloud computing and expanding into artificial intelligence, so Akwesi’s Bladerunners widened their power base by combining the Days of Inaction with the campaigns of Esmeralda’s Crowdshorters and with those of the Solsourcers, the Environs and the rest of the OC rebels.

  ‘Bezos and Akwesi were equally talented at amassing power,’ Costa concluded. ‘The basic difference was that Bezos used people power to milk people while Akwesi used it to empower them.’

  Thomas had been listening intently. Costa inferred from his silence that he didn’t quite know whether to be impressed or dismissive. Sensing his vacillation, Costa chose a different approach.

  ‘Forget the politics and look at it aesthetically,’ he suggested. ‘The force assembled by Akwesi is more beautiful than the blunt and boring power of an ultra-rich man and his sycophantic henchmen. If you were to put the two forces to music, Bezos’s would sound like Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’, Akwesi’s like Beethoven’s Ninth.’

  As Thomas and Costa continued their discussion, Eva reflected on her son’s character and the relationship that was taking shape before her. Costa’s musical references had been lost on the young man, and he had been forced to attempt a different analogy. But had Thomas been familiar with the two musical works, Eva was sure he would have chosen the Valkyries every time. Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ required an optimism of the spirit that her son lacked. She felt keenly that it was the absence of a father figure in his life that made him susceptible to absolutist patriarchal power. A Jeff Bezos, a Rupert Murdoch, a Darth Vader, especially a Mephistopheles, would find it easy to enlist Thomas in their enterprise, their boisterous validation of male power promising him what he had lacked all his life in a way that democratic power, however intellectually intriguing and aesthetically pleasing, could not. So, as she discerned faint signs that Costa was, in some small way, fulfilling Thomas’s yearning for a padre padrone, even while he challenged that desire, she found herself holding back the tears.

  Bleak 20s

  While Eva understood Thomas’s vulnerability to naked power in psychological terms, Costa saw it as an aspect of a wider political malaise that had taken hold in the last five years and shaped the young man’s adolescent mind. Having secured Thomas’s interest, he continued to press the point.

  ‘You won’t remember,’ he said, ‘having been so young at the time, but before 2020 politics in democratic countries was different. It was almost like a game, with the parties resembling teams who had good or bad days on the pitch, scoring or conceding points that propelled them up or down a league table which, at season’s end, determined who got the ultimate prize: the opportunity to form a government – without of course really being in power. But then, all of a sudden, in 2020 the general feeling that politicians were not really in control gave way to the realization that governments everywhere – not just in China and Russia and authoritarian states, but the supposedly liberal ones too – possessed immense powers. With the arrival of the virus came the twenty-four-hour curfew, the closure of the local pub, the ban on walking through the park, the suspension of sport, the emptying of theatres, the silencing of music venues. All notions of a minimal state mindful of its limits and eager to cede power to individuals went out of the window. Many salivated at this show of raw state power. Even free-marketeers like Eva here, who had spent their lives shouting down any suggestion of even the most modest boost in public spending, demanded the sort of state control of the economy not seen since Leonid Brezhnev was running the Kremlin. Across the world, the state funded private firms’ wage bills, renationalized utilities and took shares in airlines, car makers, even banks. From the first week of lockdown, the pandemic stripped away the veneer of politics to reveal the boorish reality underneath: that some people have the power to tell the rest what to do.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ said Thomas. ‘If you don’t control others, they will control you. It’s inescapable.’

  ‘Yes, in that sense you’re right,’ conceded Costa. ‘As Lenin said, politics is about who does what to whom, nothing more. But what 2020 did not do, I’m sorry to say, is what some naïve leftists had hoped it might: revive state power as a power for good.’

  ‘Not all of us were naïve, let me tell you,’ interjected Iris. ‘As I tried to remind those absurdly optimistic fools at the time, the right wing has never really been opposed to state power. Thatcher left the British state larger, more powerful and more concentrated than she found it. It was never about the village baker or the local butcher. Thatcherism grasped that an authoritarian state was needed to support markets controlled by corporations and banks. Why should they hesitate for a moment in 2008 or in 2020 to unleash massive government intervention to preserve that power? Those leftists fantasized about a renaissance of the commons, of public goods, of a new consensus on the common interest. They completely confused state power with people power. And besides, they forgot the essential lesson of the 1930s: economic depression is a breeding ground for political monsters.’

  ‘Maybe you find it hard to imagine,’ Costa continued, addressing Thomas, ‘but the world you know, in which Amazon delivers everyone’s groceries and might means right, did not always seem quite so inevitable. It was our failure to oppose the powerful – first in 2008 and then again in 2020 – that made it so. Believe me, we the people gave Bezos his power just as much as he won it from us. As Iris says, big business has always needed the state to impose and enforce the monopolies – on property,
on resources, on funds, on markets – on which it relies. When we strengthened the state in response to the coronavirus, there was never a serious prospect that it would empower the chronically disempowered. Of course it was the Amazons of this world who benefited. Airlines took a while to return to the skies, true, but money soon resumed its speed-of-light travels across the planet, and all those lethal emissions that had temporarily subsided returned to choke the atmosphere just as they had before as production lines were restored and global trade resumed. Answer me this: who do you think suffered most during the coronavirus pandemic? Do you think it was America or China? Europe or Africa?’

  ‘Wasn’t the data inconclusive in the end? It turned out that none of it was reliable, I thought,’ replied Thomas.

  ‘You of all people should know: in all countries, on all continents, it was the weak who suffered most, as they always must. In 2020, the virus came for the British prime minister, the Prince of Wales, even Hollywood’s nicest star. But they survived. It was the poorer and the browner people that the Grim Reaper actually claimed. Why? Just as Bezos’s power was given to him, so these people’s weakness was bestowed upon them by society. It was disempowerment that created their poverty, and it was poverty that aged them faster and made them more vulnerable to disease. And it was the widening gulf between these two groups of people, between the beneficiaries of lockdown – Amazon, Google, Netflix, Microsoft, their shareholders and financiers – and the billions who struggled and suffered in its aftermath that led to the monsters Iris was warning about who govern us now.’

  Costa described to Thomas how the hellish cycle of mutual reinforcement between inequality and economic stagnation, so familiar in the aftermath of 2008, returned with a vengeance in the early 2020s. Instead of international cooperation, borders went up and the shutters came down. Nationalist leaders offered demoralized citizens a simple trade: authoritarian powers in return for protection from lethal viruses – and scheming dissidents.

  ‘If cathedrals were the Middle Ages’ architectural legacy,’ Costa claimed, ‘our 20s have so far contributed electrified fences and flocks of drones buzzing in their shadow. Finance and nationalism, already on the rise before 2020, have been the clear winners since. The great strength of these new fascists, though, is that unlike their forerunners a century ago, they never had to wear brown shirts or even enter government to gain power. The panicking establishment parties – the liberals and social democrats – have been falling over themselves to do their job for them through the power of big tech. It’s only since we began living our lives in fear of infection that human rights have become an unaffordable luxury. The apps and bracelets with which governments now track our every move began, you may not realize, as a way of stopping new outbreaks. Systems designed to monitor coughs now also monitor laughs. It makes the KGB and Cambridge Analytica seem positively neolithic.’

  Costa realized he had been speaking for some time now, and the good work he’d done by engaging Thomas was in danger of being undone.

  ‘Cambridge who?’ Thomas asked

  By now dinner was finished and eyelids were starting to feel heavy from the champagne they had drunk and the raki that had followed it.

  ‘Never mind, just another reminder that I’m part of ancient history,’ replied Costa gently. He got up and began to tidy away the plates.

  Rising slowly to head for bed, Eva said, ‘It’s true, the virus has held up a mirror to our collective face. At the time I didn’t realize it. But now, I must say, I don’t like what it revealed about us.’

  Thirteen years after chance had brought them together, Iris and Eva were sounding alike for the first time. Impressed, Thomas asked them if encountering the Other Now together had been ‘their moment of truth’, opening the way to a rapprochement.

  ‘Moments of truth are a fiction,’ Iris said, adding, ‘Truth grows organically, Thomas. There was never a particular moment or event that pushed my thinking and your mother’s closer together. Epiphanies are an illusion that our minds conjure up to explain our failure to realize the obvious earlier.’

  Amused, perhaps even a little moved that Iris should acknowledge their convergence, Eva said goodnight and quietly left for bed.

  At the sink, Costa was busy with his elaborate washing-up routine, his mind at work on computations for how to restore the wormhole, but even so he had caught the drift of their conversation. Now he made the point that had been eating at him for years.

  ‘Our moment of truth came in 2008,’ he said. ‘Once we dropped the ball back then, by 2020 it was too late.’

  Yet again, though, Iris had to have the last word before also retiring for the night.

  ‘Like epiphanies, the fork-in-the-road theory of history is a convenient lie,’ she said. ‘Yes, Costa, 2008 was a crisis whose wasting paved the way for the bigots and the financiers to prevail after 2020. But the truth is we face a fork in the road every day of our lives. Every single day we fail to take advantage of opportunities to change the course of history. And do you know how we console ourselves? We look into the past, pick out one “pivotal” moment and try to lessen our guilt by saying that was the moment we missed. No, mate. We miss pivotal moments every day, every hour, every freaking instant.’

  Gently into the good night

  It would be many more hours before either Thomas or Costa was ready to turn in. The night agreed with them, offering a peaceful backdrop for long silences punctuated by the odd exchange. With his mess hall spick and span, Costa sat at the table, transfixed by his laptop screen, which was filled with indecipherable mathematics. Thomas sat nearby, equally immersed in his game.

  ‘There was something you said this morning,’ Thomas said, breaking the silence. ‘I can’t get it out of my head.’ Costa made no reply, so Thomas continued: ‘That exorbitant power ultimately enslaves those who acquire it.’

  ‘A fact that never stops them from doing whatever it takes to acquire it,’ snapped back Costa.

  The silence descended once more.

  A little later, it was Costa’s turn to break it. ‘Perhaps this is a good moment to share something with you,’ he said. ‘My ongoing nightmare, you might call it. No one else knows this, but the corporates are on the verge of hacking HALPEVAM. It’s inevitable now. A matter of days at most.’

  Immediately, Costa wondered why he had opened up to Thomas, possibly putting him in harm’s way. Maybe it was the realization that, for all his attempts to change the teenager’s views, the two of them had something in common: they both knew what it was to crave complete power over others, and that knowledge caused them to dread it. Thomas foolishly wanted it to keep at bay the controlling power of others. Costa, equally foolishly, had sought the power to liberate humanity from the tyranny of manufactured desires. Is that not why he had built HALPEVAM, after all? Was it not a form of megalomania which, despite noble intentions, had given birth to a potential demon should it fall into the hands of big tech?

  Thomas rewarded his trust. Unlike Iris and Eva, who tended to be dismissive of his fears, not to mention bored by them, the eighteen-year-old got it. He knew full well that big tech already held him hostage via the crude games he was addicted to. He could imagine all too easily what would happen if it got hold of HALPEVAM. Of course he would be first in line to join up, but he knew that big tech would extract a terrible price. The beauty of for ever would not be made available to customers. No, they would merely dip him into its multiverse of pleasures for a short while, just enough for him to crave more. Then they would pull him out and demand payment if he wanted to return. And they would do it again. And again. Until they had monetized the new technology to the full, their best customers simply being the last to be shattered by it, after which they would be committed to some asylum.

  The mere thought of this made Thomas angry. And the more he thought about this, the angrier he became. If Costa were close to losing control of it, HALPEVAM would have to be
destroyed. So too with the wormhole: big tech would charge substantial fees for access to one’s self in the Other Now. In no time, the good people there would find themselves bombarded with missives from paying customers in Our Now. Thomas knew very little about the world at the wormhole’s end, but he had picked up enough to worry that such a barrage of messages would poison the Other Now permanently.

  It took only a brief conversation with Thomas to confirm what Costa already knew: HALPEVAM had to be destroyed. He could not risk losing control over it. And, in any case, he was tired of living in fear. The only question was when.

  He and Kosti had agreed to try to restore the wormhole the following Wednesday. Even if they succeeded, it might not be for long. Were a few extra days worth the risk? Should he destroy HALPEVAM here and now? Or wait until after Wednesday?

  Thomas surprised him with his thoughtfulness.

  ‘Is there something you’ve not asked Kosti that you need to? Something important Mum would want to learn from Eve, or Iris from Siris?’

  Costa’s heart filled with regret at how coy he had been in asking after Cleo, Kosti’s daughter in the Other Now. Thomas was right: he needed the wormhole to stay open a little longer. And not just for himself. Thomas had the right to know about Agnes, his sister in the Other Now that Eva had not dared tell him about. A few more days of fear were a small price to pay for proper closure. ‘Possibly,’ he replied to Thomas, adding, ‘I think Wednesday’s experiment should proceed.’ Thomas agreed.

  What had begun, earlier that night, as a theoretical debate on watersheds and moments of truth had yielded a decision that, two days later, on Wednesday 12 November 2025, would produce their indisputable watershed, their moment of truth.

  9

  EXODUS

  Too well