Although much science fiction imagines full automation in terms of the violent extermination of all humankind, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress was written during a brief window when a machine-controlled world was seen as having a role in creating a social, political and economic utopia.36 One reason is the influence of Norbert Wiener’s vision of cybernetics as an engine for social change. Both Russian and Chilean systems were influenced by Wiener’s thought,37 as was the work of Robert Heinlein, seen most directly in his naming a space ship the Norbert Wiener in his 1957 novel Citizen of the Galaxy.38 On the one hand, Wiener was wary of the abuse of automated systems, seeing no difference between abusive systems made of metal and those made of flesh.39 Yet the interplay of communication and control in the feedback between humanity and machines has the potential for deep-seated change;40 this is what makes his thought important for all these actors trying to reason out the implications of automated economic revolution.
While Wiener saw human intervention as key for ensuring that automatic systems were not abusive, some contemporary theories argue for just the opposite: it is humanity that has got us into this mess, so therefore human subjectivity is the variable that needs to be removed from the equation. With automation, as Lev Manovich says, ‘human intentionality can be removed from the creative process, at least in part’.41 Therefore, if in a computer–human interface, media and users remake each other, there is a chance for both machine and human to perform unexpected behaviors. Ray Brassier calls this ‘compulsive freedom’, meaning that autonomous behaviour is enslaved to subjective choice, while the ‘un-freedom’ of involuntary behaviour can lead to a freedom from the self.42 This is one way that automation can fight against capitalist realism: if it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, then we need something else to do our imagining for us, to dislodge us from the limitation of ourselves.
But is this the role of automation in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress? Yes and no. The inhabitants of the Moon are able to have a revolution only because of Mike. They do not have the sense of community needed to revolt together, and the only way to obtain this sense is for Mike to join people together. He does this through the ‘un-freedom’ of choice, because he not only makes decisions for the humans on the Moon but also impersonates their voices, making decisions for them and influencing others. The first unsupervised decision Mike makes is to allow some revolutionary cells to have more than three members,43 though he soon gives orders to cell members using the voices of others, deciding on his own when and how to do so.44 Yet Mannie is happy with Mike’s actions. When Mike smooths things over with a co-husband in Mannie’s polygamous marriage, Mannie says, ‘Mike had done me proud: he had answered for me with just the right embarrassed choke. “I’ll do that, Greg – and look, Greg, I love you too. You know that, don’t you?” […] Mike had played my role as well or better than I could.’45 Mike makes choices for the rebels, and thus the rebels are in a position of un-freedom. Yet this position makes them freer than they would have been otherwise. They are compulsively free because their actions are following someone else’s rules. What is specific about Heinlein’s novel is that these rules are the structure of Mike the machine. The rebels are becoming more like Mike: a decentralised community.
Yet some important questions remain: what were the economic forms that arise in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress? And what forms could arise with the current level of automation available to us today?
Regarding the first question, Heinlein’s novel is a contradiction. As Robert Rogers argues, while most of Heinlein’s work shows a devout belief in free-market economics, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is different: ‘On the one hand, [Heinlein] portrays a Moon community which may be his ideal libertarian society where almost anything goes in the way of social and economic relationships. On the other hand, the lunar economy is almost totally controlled by Mike…’46 The book’s stand on the free market is clear. As stated in an early meeting of lunar revolutionaries: ‘“You are right that the Authority must go. It is ridiculous…that we should be ruled by an irresponsible dictator in all our essential economy! It strikes at the most basic human right, the right to bargain in a free marketplace.”’47 In addition, there will be no taxes in Free Luna; instead, fees are charged when needed, for air (which is precious), roads and libraries. Almost everything else is taken care of by hedging, including health care and all other kinds of insurance.48 This is the complete abandonment of all social services to the marketplace, and thus represents the worst of so-called neoliberalism. On the other hand, and this is the contradiction of the novel that Rogers points out, the economic revolution has a central figure who exercises almost complete control. Mike lies, cheats and steals the way to freedom from Authority; he is not below stacking voting committees in his favour, including the one voting on the Declaration of Independence and other important issues.49
Yet the structure that the economy takes becomes a performative effect of the way Mike is put together: a number of semi-autonomous networks linked together by a dominant node. An automated system adopts the features of the automation system. This is a naïve reading of the economy based on an oversimplified reading of Wiener’s equity between human and machine. Perhaps there is a certain kind of truth contained within this simplification, however. Automated economic systems in Chile and Russia were seen as having revolutionary potential. One reason was because such systems performed a kind of compulsory freedom on both their users and subjects. Organisations of knowledge foreign to human subjectivity are enacted by automated structures. In a state of capitalist realism, when the future seems usurped by the pervasive economisation of all spheres of life, an intimate feedback between human and machine may be the only opportunity for utopia that is left. This is also at the heart of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, as Mark Rose insightfully says: ‘Again and again, the novel questions the validity of making a sharp distinction between the organic and the mechanical. But instead of regarding the interpenetration of man and machine with suspicion, Heinlein celebrates it as the key to a new freedom.’50 Yet this mesh of human and machine is not just part of a dream of 1960s and 1970s socialism; it is alive and well at the heart of one of the most automated aspects of our current financial world: high-frequency trading (HFT).
One of the earliest arguments for automated trading can be found in an essay by Fischer Black (of the Black–Scholes–Merton equation mentioned above), ‘Toward a Fully Automated Stock Exchange’ from 1971, the same year that the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ) was founded as the first electronic stock market. Black essentially argues that pricing systems could be taken over by an electronic network that turned into a ‘thinking whole’.51 One of the areas in which Black’s early premonitions have been actualised is the world of high-frequency trading, which is based on speed, with competing systems functioning in terms of micro-second trades in order to get the fastest reaction to changes in price. Despite the extreme level of its automation, however, it does not offer a significantly different structure from the one Mike does. As Srnicek and Williams argue, HFT consists of both extreme decentralisation, in the parallel processing it involves, and intense centralisation, in a few financial centres in New Jersey and Chicago.52 Similar to the contradictory nature of the mix of free-market economy and tyrannical centralisation seen in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, HFT involves both decentralisation and centralisation,53 thus offering little in the way of a new structure of automatisation.
On the other hand, financial instruments and models such as HFT, derivatives, collateralised debt obligations and portfolio insurance are seen as being performative in a different manner. Their role in the 2008 financial crisis could be defined as the opposite of Barnesian performativity. Counter-performativity, MacKenzie argues, is ‘the use of an aspect of economics altering economic processes so that they conform less well to their depiction by economics’.54 Or, as Elena Esposito puts it, ‘[w]hen sudden price changes occur, people t
end to think that the hedging models do not work. They therefore abandon these models, further strengthening the original movements.’55 One effect of counter-performativity is a new relation to time. The events of yesterday affect tomorrow, but in unpredictable ways. ‘The past teaches, but we do not know what it teaches.’56 This is a change in the experience of temporality, both from the modernist sacrifice of the present to the future and from the time of financial logic and credit, when the future is used up by the present.57 Instead, the time of counter-performativity is ‘one of a present facing the openness of a future that is unknowable and indeterminate not because it is independent from us, from our actions and our expectations, but precisely because it is constructed by the (contemporary) present and would not come about without our intervention’.58 In other words, the openness of the future is dependent on current economic models.
On the other hand, there may be new structures of automated economies that can offer alternative modes of compulsory freedom. The Bitcoin blockchain, for example, offers a model of decentralisation without any kind of overriding central node. Rather than having a central governing body overseeing currency activity, with the cryptocurrency Bitcoin all transaction requests are submitted to a network, confirmed by a number of different ‘miners’ (computers assigned the job of checking transactions, thus earning Bitcoins) and, if approved, processed. Records of these transactions are stored in publicly available ‘blocks’, which are chained together and form a permanent record. This means, in essence, that ‘the degree of consensus logic is separate from the application itself; therefore, applications can be written to be organically decentralized…’.59
The blockchain model offers a fundamentally different system of automatisation from those looked at previously. There is no central node; there is no Mike. Instead automation is distributed, decentralised. It is what Melanie Swan calls a ‘decentralized trustless system’,60 because users put their trust in a decentralised public record of transactions rather than in a central authority.61 For Swan, this structure could make the blockchain the fifth disruptive computing paradigm, following the development of the mainframe, the PC, the internet and mobile and social networking.62 The rise of automated ‘intermediary-free transactions’63 could have a revolutionary impact not just on the economy of the internet but also on justice applications, healthcare issues and ‘nearly all areas of human endeavor’.64 The reason for the revolutionary potential of blockchain technology is that its decentralised structure, when coupled with the global reach of the internet, can scale up to a ‘universal and global scope and scale that was previously impossible’.65 Blockchains turn the paradoxical sentences that opened this chapter into true statements.
Blockchain technology offers a more revolutionary structure than HFT because of its lack of a central authority. At first it seems as if this leaves behind the structure of Mike and the revolution he heads in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, but in at least one aspect it does not. Mannie describes Mike’s political stance in a very particular way; he calls Mike a ‘rational anarchist’.66 Mannie uses the term to describe how Mike is ‘rational and he feels no loyalty to any government’. There is no central authority to underwrite any trust placed in Mike. Professor de la Paz, a former teacher of Mannie’s and the one who first brings up the idea of a revolution, then asks, ‘If this machine is not loyal to its owners, why expect it to be loyal to you?’67 The answer is that Manuel has a ‘feeling’ that he would be. Blockchain technology replaces this feeling with a publicly available transaction record that is hosted on every computer acting as a Bitcoin miner. If this technology were to become as prevalent as Swan suggests, the society that would be formed around it could be truly different from the one we have now. This would be one way to see through the morass of capitalist realism. This would be science fiction worth living.
1N. Srnicek & A. Williams (2015) Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work. London: Verso, p. 105.
2Ibid., p. 183. This is in contrast to Ignacio Palacios-Heurta, who singles out science fiction for being a bad indicator of future economics: I. Palacios-Heurta (ed.) (2013) The Idea for In 100 Years, in In 100 Years: Leading Economists Predict the Future: xi–xiv. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. xiv.
3S. Shaviro (2013) Accelerationist Aesthetics: Necessary Inefficiency in Times of Real Subsumption, e-flux journal, 46, http://worker01.e-flux.com/pdf/article_8969650.pdf. The almost meaningless term ‘neoliberalism’ is being used in the sense that Wendy Brown formulates it: ‘[N]eoliberal rationality disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activities – even where money is not an issue – and configures human beings exhaustively as market actors, always, only, and everywhere as homo oeconomicus’: W. Brown (2015) Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books, p. 31, emphasis in original. Nevertheless, this model is something that, as Maurizio Lazzarato says, ‘is always in the process of being made’: M. Lazzarato (2012) The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), p. 107, emphasis in original.
4F. Jameson (2003) Future City, New Left Review, 21: 65–79, p. 76.
5M. Fisher (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Ropley, UK: Zero Books, p. 16, emphasis in original. See also B. Willems (2015) Shooting the Moon, Ropley, UK: Zero Books, p. 55.
6K. Eshun (2003) Further Considerations on Afrofuturism, CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(2): 287–302, p. 289.
7D. Delillo (2016) Zero K. London: Picador, p. 3.
8F. Jameson (2016) An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army, ed. S. Žižek. London: Verso.
9D. Murphy (2016) Last Futures: Nature, Technology and the End of Architecture. London: Verso.
10Srnicek and Williams, Inventing the Future, p. 75.
11W. Davies (2017) Moral Economies of the Future: The Utopian Impulse of Sustainable Prosperity, Working Paper no. 5. Guildford: Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity, University of Surrey.
12Iain Banks’ Culture series would be another, as would Agustín de Rojas’s 1990 novel The Year 200 (2016, New York: Restless Books), in which a computerised ‘Central Archive’ is seen to be behind all the decisions made (p. 530). The eshu computer in Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber is another possible example (2000, New York: Grand Central Publishing).
13H.-J. Chang (2014) Economics: The User’s Guide. London: Pelican Books, pp. 380–1.
14R. Heinlein (1966) The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, p. 14.
15Ibid., pp. 8–9.
16Ibid., pp. 14–15.
17Ibid., p. 19.
18Ibid., p. 20.
19Ibid., p. 23.
20Ibid., p. 91.
21Ibid.
22Ibid., p. 7.
23R. Heinlein (1988) The Cat Who Walks through Walls. New York: Ace Books, p. 229.
24Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, p. 301.
25Ibid., p. 286.
26Ibid., pp. 60–1.
27Ibid., p. 97.
28N. Wiener (1954) The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. New York: Doubleday, p. 57.
29Ibid., pp. 26–7.
30D. MacKenzie (2007) Is Economics Performative? Option Theory and the Construction of Derivatives Markets, in D. MacKenzie, F. Muniesa & L. Siu (eds.) Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics: 54–86. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 60. I thank William Davies for drawing my attention to this reference and to the work of Elena Esposito, used below.
31Ibid., p. 66.
32Ibid., p. 67.
33S. Gerovitch (2008) InterNyet: Why the Soviet Union Did Not Build a Nationwide Computer Network, History and Technology, 24(4): 335–50.
34Ibid., p. 341.
35E. Medina (2001) Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 1.
36Perhaps the last book written during this window was Agustín de Rojas’s previously
mentioned The Year 200, published in 1990, in which people with cybernetic implants controlled by a self-aware computer network are seen as the true heirs to the Cuban Revolution. MacKenzie’s performativity also finds a parallel in the time of the Soviet avant-garde. See B. Arvatov (1997) Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing (Toward the Formulation of the Question), October 81(Summer): 119–28.
37Gerovitch, InterNyet, p. 337; Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries, pp. 19–25.
38R. Heinlein (1957) Citizen of the Galaxy. New York: Del Ray, p. 149.
39Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, pp. 185–6.
40Ibid., pp. 16–17.
41L. Manovich (2001) The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 32. Gerald Raunig makes the same point in relation to the work of psychiatrist Ronald D. Laing: G. Raunig (2016) Dividuum: Machinic Capitalism and Molecular Revolution. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), p. 102.
42R. Brassier (2013) Unfree Improvisation/Compulsive Freedom, mattin.org, 21 April, www.mattin.org/essays/unfree_improvisation-compulsive_freedom.html.
43Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, p. 116.
44Ibid., p. 246.
45Ibid., p. 247.
46R. Rogers (1998) Robert A. Heinlein and Issues in American Economics, in M. Rutherford (ed.) The Economic Mind in America: Essays in the History of American Economics: 272–92. London: Routledge, p. 280.
47Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, p. 24.
48Ibid., p. 193.
49Ibid., p. 162.
50M. Rose (1981) Alien Encounters: Anatomy of Science Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 155.
51F. Black (1971) Toward a Fully Automated Stock Exchange, Part 1, Financial Analysts Journal, 27(4): 28–35, p. 28.
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