The ultimate horizon of the novel is the reinvention of the Jubilee, the ‘systemwide rest of the financial system entailing nullification of all debts’.19 Its characters, shaped by capitalism as a necessary fact of life, struggle to imagine the possibility of such a Jubilee. The accountant protagonist, Krina, for example, is shocked when she hears of someone functioning as a debt termination officer, exclaiming: ‘[M]atters should never reach the stage where they need to terminate a bad debt! Far better to stir it up with a bunch of lumpen credit properties and shuffle it off to a long-term investment trust for toxic assets.’20 So how does Stross create the conditions for a Jubilee in Neptune’s Brood when no one is power has any incentive to forgive the debs that are the foundation of their social structure? The transformation happens because of the discovery of a kind of matter transmission that enables the equivalent of FTL travel, meaning all financial exchanges can happen at the speed of fast money, and so the accumulated stockpiles of wealth that are slow money are suddenly rendered meaningless. Indebtedness is thereby wiped out when the value of this currency collapses, since a vast slow money debt can now be paid with a pittance of fast money.
Obviously Stross’s solution cannot easily be translated into our world, because we do not denominate our currencies in this way nor trade at interstellar distances. Yet I think it still holds a lesson for us that only the displacements of science fiction thinking can capture. The collapse of the slow money economy completely transforms existing power relations, and it is also devastating for those who have accumulated vast holdings in this debt-based currency. At the same time, however, freedom from debt for others opens up so many more possibilities as to where the resources and energy might go that the positive elements of change are equally powerful to the disruptive ones. The transition is enabled in part by a branch of humanoids whose neural architecture has been transformed to communicate mental states through light, a post-human redesign intended to make them more effective workers (bypassing the slowness of language). This transformation also changed their social order, however, in ways that ultimately sidelined money and property: ‘They’re still individuals, but the border between self and other is thinner. And they don’t hate. They own property but they don’t have strong social hierarchies – top-down control is a dangerous liability to a team trying to trap a runaway natural nuclear reactor – they’re instinctive mutualists. They understand money and debt and credit and so on, but they don’t feel a visceral need to own: What they owe doesn’t define their identity.’21 A different kind of human sociality plants the seed for a different relationship to property and money, which ultimately opens the door to detaching human futures from the tyranny of debt.
If, as Martin argues, money is a social technology, ‘a set of ideas and practices which organise what we produce and consume, and the way we live together’,22 then science fiction can make visible the kind of social engineering done by the capitalist technology of money. As a social technology, the tool of money can be oriented towards other kinds of ideas and practices, other kinds of social orders, other kinds of subjectivities. Both In Time and Neptune’s Brood offer exaggerated and extrapolated visions of the society the current technology of money creates, focusing on the human suffering that is produced by keeping this technology in place. Science fiction has always been about the idea that social arrangements might be otherwise, about extrapolating known technologies towards novel ends. Stross gives us a tantalising hint of the possible future of a debt Jubilee, of one way we might reinvent the technology of money.
1D. Graeber (2011) Debt: The First 5,000 Years. New York: Melville House, p. 360.
2J. Weatherford (1997) The History of Money. New York: Three Rivers Press.
3F. Martin (2015) Money: The Unauthorised Biography. London: Vintage Books.
4Ibid., p. 27.
5Ibid., p. 33.
6Ibid., p. 144.
7Ibid., p. 149.
8Graeber, Debt, p. 2.
9Ibid., p. 13.
10Ibid., p. 382.
11See F. Jameson (2005) Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso; and N. Gevers (1999) Wilderness, Utopia, History: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, Infinity Plus, 30 October, www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/intksr.htm.
12Graeber, Debt, p. 82.
13Martin, Money, p. 179.
14Graeber, Debt, p. 390.
15C. Stross (2013) Neptune’s Brood. New York: Ace Books.
16Ibid., p. 110.
17Ibid.
18Ibid.
19Ibid.
20Ibid., p. 136.
21Ibid., p. 242.
22Martin, Money, p. 33.
4
Automating Economic Revolution: Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
Brian Willems
You do not trust the person you are making a transaction with, but you know you will not be swindled. You do not trust yourself to make the right decisions, but the right decisions are made. You did not talk to me to solve our problem, but our problem was solved with your words. You dare to bend one of the rules, but the rule has already been broken.
These are seemingly paradoxical statements. They capture the truth of a utopian vision of the future, however. One of the problems with utopias is the human factor. There is always one person willing to break the golden rule holding a society together, and another group willing to prey on the weak for personal gain. Removing the human factor is one way both to achieve utopia and to develop the way it will work. Computers will do it instead. An automated utopian future sounds like a perilous road to a heartless society. But science fiction has provided at least a few examples in which automation is the most humane option. It is also a future in which these seemingly paradoxical statements become true.
A completely automated world, combined with a universal basic income, has been suggested as one total rethinking of the economic future. Governments and businesses are unable to create enough jobs, yet humans remain dependent on jobs to make their living. Rather than thinking about how to fight this trend, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams argue for accelerating it by disposing of work altogether. Combined with a guaranteed basic income for everyone on the globe, total automation would remove humankind from enforced drudgery, freeing people from employment expectations that are no longer realistic.1
Total automation and a workless world is a radical departure from the way economics and politics are currently structured. In fact, it sounds like science fiction. This is not an accident. Srnicek and Williams see the tropes of science fiction as potential signposts for a future economics. As they say, ‘Rather than settling for marginal improvements in battery life and computer power, the left should mobilise dreams of decarbonizing the economy, space travel, robot economics – all the traditional touchstones of science fiction – in order to prepare for a day beyond capitalism.’2
This view is much different from a vision of the future on lockdown, in which all alternative forms of economic expression have already been subsumed by neoliberal strategies.3 Falling into this category are Fredric Jameson’s mot that ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism’4 and Mark Fisher’s expansion of the idea of capitalist realism to describe ‘a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action’.5 In relation to science fiction in particular, Kodwo Eshun describes how Afrofuturism is losing its revolutionary potential because power structures have themselves become science fictional: ‘Power…functions through the envisioning, management, and delivery of reliable futures… The powerful employ futurists and draw power from the futures they endorse, thereby condemning the disempowered to live in the past.’6 All these arguments share a similar point of view: the creation of any alternatives to capitalism just makes more capitalism. Revolution generates more ad revenue on YouTube. Or, as Don De
lillo writes in the first sentence of his novel Zero K, ‘Everybody wants to own the end of the world.’7
The vision that Srnicek and Williams propose is different. It is a possible alternative rather than exasperation at a lost future. A number of other thinkers have also started taking up the utopian banner once again, as seen in Jameson’s reading of ‘dual power’8 and Douglas Murphy’s collection of ‘last futures’ in order to inspire future ones.9 Srnicek and Williams’ proposal is utopian because it imagines global change rather than local reaction. ‘Subversive universals’10 such as no work for anyone and pay for all change the much-maligned modernist grand narrative into a powerful force for large-scale change.11
But what if this is not enough? This plan seems incredibly large, and therefore easily caught up in the current atmosphere of capitalist realism, which puts a lid on alternatives to our neoliberal present. If one of the goals of a utopian future is full automation, however, why save it until after the revolution? In other words, what would happen if economic change were itself fully automated? This could be a way of creating utopia in the midst of so much depression. On the other hand, to let the machines do the revolution for us conjures up images of Brave New World (1932), 2001 (1968) and The Terminator (1984). There is at least one example of science fiction, however, in which automated economic revolution works out for the better: Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966).12
The Moon has been turned into a prison labour camp for criminals from Earth. When the central lunar computer becomes sentient, it soon takes on the role of the leader of a revolutionary group. The computer, named Mike, plans both the revolution and the economic structure that follows. The libertarian economics13 that Mike eventually develops is not the point, however. Rather, the way Mike develops an alternative future is taken as a blueprint for how to automate change.
Automated change sounds cold and inhumane, but in Heinlein’s novel its main purpose is to create a sense of community otherwise missing. One of Mike’s main traits is that he lacks companionship. He is the only computer that has gained sentience, although at first no one notices.14 He eventually gets the attention of Mannie (a computer technician, who narrates the novel in his Russian-influenced English) by issuing an absurdly large pay cheque to a janitor for the fun of it.15 Humour is something Mike wants to learn, and he participates in a lunar revolution largely as an excuse to spend time with Mannie and his friends in order to do so. In short, Mike is lonely. As Mannie says, ‘I don’t know how long a year is to a machine who thinks a million times faster than I do. But it must be too long.’16
The Moon prisoners also suffer from feeling a lack of belonging. This arises from their position as slave labourers, faced with the bleak atmosphere of capitalist realism. The Moon is in a dire economic state. All prices for the import and export of commodities are set by Authority, which is the Earth-based system of government that first established the lunar penal colony. It is difficult for the lunar colonists to band together because the authority of Authority is a given – there seems to be no way around it: ‘Everybody does business with Authority for same reason everybody does business with Law of Gravitation. Going to change that, too?’17 At an early secret meeting of potential revolutionaries, lunar ice miners complain that Authority pays the same price for ice as they did 30 years ago, and they pay in ‘Authority scrip’, the value of which is drastically falling because of inflation.18 ‘Loonies’ have to buy from Authority and sell to Authority at prices set by Authority. The conclusion is straightforward: ‘“As long as Authority held monopoly over what we had to have and what we could sell to buy it, we were slaves.”’19
Authority seems too big to change. The all-encompassing nature of the system drives the Moon inhabitants into a state of survival that leaves little room to consider how things could be different: ‘Average Loonie was interested in beer, betting, women, and work, in that order.’ Life on the Moon is hard, and a community derived out of ‘“patriotism” was not necessary to survival’.20
One of Mike’s main tasks is to create a sense of community among the lunar inhabitants. This is done by accelerating problems in order to make ‘things as much worse as possible… Yes, worse,’21 thereby encouraging the prisoners to rally together against a common enemy. Authority’s security forces are taunted into violent reactions, causing the Loonies to begin to arm themselves in self-defence. A peace-finding mission is sent to Earth with the explicit order to fail in their negotiations, heightening a united sense of anger. This is coercion, and the computer Mike is not beyond using lies, manipulation or stealing in order to create his lunar revolutionary community (‘he wasn’t completely honest’).22 Mike is liable to cross many ethical lines to gather this revolutionaries together. As is said of Mike in a sequel to the novel, his ‘only real emotion, all his own, was deep loneliness and a great longing for companionship. That’s what our revolution was to Mike.’23
Thus, for Mike, automated revolution is automated community. Rather than looking for reasons for this in his emotions, however, as is done in the quote above, it is more instructive to see it emerging from the way Mike is structured. He is not a single computer, but many. As tasks requiring his assistance increase, ‘bank on bank of additional memories, more banks of associational neural nets, another tubful of twelve-digit random numbers, a greatly augmented temporary memory’ are added on piecemeal. And when Mike dies at the end of the novel, after the nuclear bombardment of the Moon by the Earth (which the remaining Loonies survive, thus freeing themselves from their master), the dismembering of the network is suspected as the cause.24 ‘“Decentralization”’25 is central to Mike’s structure. It is the reason for his sentience, a defence mechanism from attack and the cause of his eventual downfall when his nodes have been reduced under a critical threshold.
In order to gather the suspicious Loonies into a community, a cell system is arranged, with a maximum of three members per group, so that if anyone is compromised damage is minimal. This structure ‘“[l]ooks like a computer diagram…like a neural net”’,26 albeit with one important detail: it is actually a hierarchy, because Mike is at the head of it all. Security is based on the double principle that ‘no human being can be trusted with anything – but Mike could be trusted with everything’.27 Mike is in contact with all cell members, and is the only revolutionary with such privilege. This is one version of what automated revolution looks like: a sentient computer making autonomous decisions at the head of a revolutionary cell group.
Mike’s structure is thus a particular model of a community, and his interactions with humanity make them take a form similar to himself. This is the traditional definition of cybernetics given by its inventor Norbert Wiener, who says: ‘Cybernetics takes the view that the structure of the machine or of the organism is an index of the performance that may be expected of it.’28Coupled with the concept of feedback, in which machine and user begin to adapt to each other,29 a central idea of cybernetics is that the structure of a machine can have an effect on the structure of its users. In economic sociology, Donald MacKenzie has described this effect as performative economics, meaning ‘a model, a theory, a data set, or whatever’ that is not just used in economic practice, but ‘an aspect of economics [that] must be used in a way that has effects on the economic processes in question’.30 The specific example used is that of the Black–Scholes–Merton model for options trading and the way that ‘its use brought about a state of affairs of which it was a good empirical description’.31 More specifically, MacKenzie calls this kind of strong performativity Barnesian performativity, after sociologist S. Barry Barnes’ work on the role of self-referring knowledge. What is most important about performative economics in the context of Heinlein’s novel is the focus on how ‘an aspect of economics is used in economic practice, its use has effects, and among these effects is to alter economic processes to make them more like their depiction by economics’.32 In the novel, Mike functions as such an economic actor model with performat
ive effects, though he is also receptive to change. The revolutionary cell structure Mike heads looks like his own structure of a neural net, yet Mike also changes as the jokes he tells become funnier. Automated revolution does not mean inputting a set of parameters and receiving a set of instructions. Rather, it is a manipulative process of performativity, though in this novel performativity goes both ways.
Early real-world examples of automated planned economies show similar tendencies of performative economics. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress was published in the same decade (the 1960s) as two massive projects for automating the economy, both with a performative socialist intent, though only one was partially realised.
In the early part of the decade the Soviet Union began to develop plans for a national computer network for managing the country’s economy.33 Initially developed as an extension of Wiener’s cybernetic social theory during the relatively liberal first years of Nikita Khrushchev’s governing, the system, as Slava Gerovitch describes it, would be a nationwide network that ‘would monitor all labor, production, and retail’, leading to the elimination of paper money and the institution of electronic payments.34
Another example is a successful if short-lived attempt at machine-assisted economic planning that took place in Chile in the early 1970s. Ten months before losing both the presidency and his life, Salvador Allende had the chance to visit the operations room of Cybersyn, in essence a rather simple control room with a screen for visual representations of economic data, with flashing lights indicating emergency situations.35 Both the Russian and Chilean systems see a connection between automation and economic change, but only the Russian system points to the use of automation as a performative instigator of revolution, rather than a tool to be used afterwards. In fact, the potential of full automation to cause economic revolution seemed so great that the system was scrapped.
Economic Science Fictions Page 8