Into the Future: From Tyler Cowen through Kim Stanley Robinson to Kisangani 2150

I'm bumping this one to the top both on general principle, but more specifically, for it comments on the future of computing. I note that I wrote this before GPT-3 surprised everyone with it's language prowess, but I don't see that as any reason to modify the views I express here. I also call attention to my remarks about fiction.

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Once I’d finished Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation I decided to take a look at his next book:

Tyler Cowen. Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation. Dutton (2013).

As the title indicates, the book looks toward the future, something I’m interested in these days. So I poked around, found things of interest, and made some notes.

I found Cowen’s remarks on Freestyle chess most interesting and have some notes on that in the next section. I skip over several chapters to arrive at his treatment of science in Chapter 11, where I spend an inordinate amount of time quarreling with his guesstimates about the capabilities of artificial intelligence. Then I move to the last chapter, “A New Social Contract?”. That brings us to the heart of this post.

For the world Cowen sketches in that last chapter seems roughly compatible with the one Kim Stanley Robinson created in New York 2140, which, as far as I can tell, takes place somewhat beyond the (unspecified) time horizon Cowen has in Average Is Over. I dig out an unpublished essay of Cowen’s, “Is a Novel a Model?”, and use it to situate the two books in the same ontological register. I argue, in effect, that New York 2140 takes more or less the world Cowen projects in Average, pushes it through climate change, cranks some parameters up to eleven, and concludes with a replay of the 2008 financial crisis, albeit to a rather different conclusion.

Then we arrive where I’m really going, the “Heart of Deepest Africa”, Kisangani, a commercial city in the center of the Congo Basin. What will life be like in Kisangani in 2150, a decade after the institutional upheaval that ends Robinson’s book? I don’t answer the question, I merely pose it.

Pour yourself some scotch, coffee, kombucha, whatever’s your pleasure. This is going to be a long one.

Freestyle chess and beyond

Cowen introduces Freestyle chess in Chapter 5, “Our Freestyle Future”. Freestyle chess is played by teams that include one or more humans and one or more computers (p. 78):

A series of Freestyle tournaments was held staring in 2005. In the first tournament, grandmasters played, but the winning trophy was taken by ZackS. In a final round, ZackS defeated Russian grandmaster Vladimir Dobrov and his very well rated (2,600+) colleague, who of course worked together with the programs. Who was ZackZ? Two guys from New Hampshire, Steven Cramton and Zackary Stephen, then rated at the relatively low levels of 1,685 and 1,395, respectively. Those ratings would not make them formidable local club players, much less regional champions. But they were the best when it came to aggregating the inputs from different computers. In addition to some formidable hardware, they used the chess software engines Fritz, Shredder, Junior, and Chess Tiger.

Cowen later notes (p. 81):

The top games of Freestyle chess probably are the greatest heights chess has reached, though who actually is to judge? The human-machine pair is better than any human – or any machine – can readily evaluate. No search engine will recognize the paired efforts as being the best available, because the paired strategies are deeper than what the machine alone can properly evaluate.

And that was before AlphaZero entered the picture [1].

Cowen then uses Freestyle chess as his model for man-machine collaboration in the future of work. That’s a reasonable thing to do. But I have a caveat.

Most task environments are ill-defined and open-ended in a way that chess is not. From a purely abstract point of view, and given an appropriate rule for converting a stalemate into a draw, chess, like the much simpler tic-tac-toe, is a finite game. That is, there are only a finite number of games possible. So, in point of abstract theory, one could list all possible games in the tree and label each path according to how it ends (win, lose, or draw). Then to play you simply follow only paths that can lead to a win or, if forced, to a draw. However the number of possible games is so large that this is not a feasible way to play the game, not even for the largest and fastest of computers.

However, while computers have been able to beat any human at chess for over two decades they still lag behind six year olds in language understanding, though they can be deceptive in “conversation”. Linguistic behavior isn’t the crisply delimited task world that chess is and so presents quite different challenges to computational mastery. The so-called “common sense” problem is pretty much where it was dropped with the eclipse of symbolic-AI over a quarter of a century ago. Cowen isn’t mindful of this issue, which bleeds into many task domains, and so tends to over-generalize from Freestyle chess. I don’t think that over-generalization does much harm to is overall argument, but it does lead him to overplay his hand when he discusses the future of science.

A new kind of science?

So let’s skip to Chapter 11, “The End of Average Science” (p. 206):

For at least three reasons, a lot of science will become harder to understand:

1. In some (not all) scientific areas, problems are becoming more complex and unsusceptible to simple, intuitive, big breakthroughs.
2. The individual scientific contribution is becoming more specialized, a trend that has been running for centuries and is unlikely to stop.
3. One day soon, intelligent machines will become formidable researchers in their own right.

On the first, it seems to me we made a good start on that early in the 20th century and relativity and even more so with quantum mechanics. Still, Cowen cites mathematical proofs that run on for pages and pages and take years for other mathematicians to verify. Are we in for more of that? Maybe yes, maybe no, who knows? And maybe, as I’ve been suggesting in connection with cognitive ranks theory [2], fundamentally new scientific languages will precipitate out of the chaos and return us to a regime where intuition can lead to breakthroughs. In the past pre-Copernican astronomy had a horrendously complex model of the relations between the earth, sun, moon, and other plants, with epicycles upon cycles. But then Copernicus suggests we center the model on the sun and Kepler abandoned circular orbits for elliptical ones and the model became at once simpler (fewer parts), but also more sophisticated. This more sophisticated model was so sensitive that observed anomalies in the orbit of Uranus led to the discovery of Neptune.

I agree that specialization is here to stay (#2). As for machines becoming formidable researchers (#3), color me bemused and skeptical. Let’s skip ahead (217-218):

Most current scientific research looks like “human directing computer to aid human doing research,” but we will move closer to “human feeding computer to do its own research” and “human interpreting the research of the computer.” The computer will become more central to the actual work, even to the design of the research program, and the human will become the handmaiden rather than the driver of progress.

An intelligent machine might come up with a new theory of cosmology, and perhaps no human will be able to understand or articulate that theory. Maybe it will refer to non-visualizable dimensions of space or nonintuitive understandings of time. The machine will tell us that the theory makes good predictions, and if nothing else we will be able to use one genius machine to check the predictions of the theory from another genius machine. Still, we, as humans, won’t have a good grasp on what the theory means and even the best scientists will grasp only part of what the genius machine has done.

I sorta’ maybe kinda’ agree with the first paragraph, but stop at the point that it implies that second paragraph.

First, I’ve got a philosophical problem. Here we have an expert in cosmology, the best humankind has to offer. She’s examining this impossible-to-understand theory and the verification of predictions offered by a genius machine. How is she to tell whether she’s examining valid work or high-falutin’ nonsense? If she can’t understand what they’re doing, why should she believe the two genius machines? I’m sure this one can be argued, but I don’t want to attempt it here and now. So let’s just set it aside.

Let’s instead consider a weaker claim, simply that we’ll have genius machines whose capacity to propose theories, in cosmology, evolutionary biology, post-quantum mechanics, whatever, is as good as any human. How likely is that? I don’t know, but I want to see an argument, and I can’t see that Cowen has offered one. Nor can I see what he’d offer beyond, “computers are getting smarter and smarter by the day”.

 

In the opening chapter Cowen mentions Ray Kurzweil, one of the prime proponents of the inevitability of computational superintelligence that surpasses human intelligence. He neither endorses nor denies Kurzweil’s claims on that score, but he’s put them on the table. He goes on to assert (p. 6), “It’s becoming increasingly clear the mechanized intelligence can solve a rapidly expanding repertoire of problems.” OK. He mentions Big Blue’s chess victory over Kasparov in 1997 and Watson conquering Jeopardy! in 2010. Exciting stuff, yes.

And then (p. 7):

We’re on the very of having computer systems that understand the entirety of human “natural language,” a problem that was considered a very tough one only a few years ago. Just talk to Siri on your iPhone and she is likely to understand your voice, give you the right answer, and help you make an appointment.

And so on.

On this one I line up with the kids who think that understanding natural language is still a very tough problem, and, yes, I’m aware of the remarkable progress that’s been made since Cowen published this book only six years ago. But understanding natural language (I don’t know why Cowen used scare quotes there when he should have put them around “understanding”) just gets more and more difficult the more we’re able to get our machines to do. Back in 1976 I co-authored an article with David Hays in which we predicted that the time would come when a computer model would be able to “read” a Shakespeare play in a way that would give us insight into what one’s mind does while reading such a text [3]. We didn’t offer just when this might happen, but in my mind I was thinking 20 years.

Well, nothing like that was available in 1996. Not only that, but the framework in which we’d hazarded that prediction had collapsed. Whoops! We still don’t have machines that can read Shakespeare in an interesting way, nor do I see any on the horizon. And yet you can query Siri and get useful answers on a wide range of topics, something that wasn’t possible in 1976, though the Defense Department spent a lot of money trying to make it happen (and I read those tech reports as they were issued).

What’s going on? There’s a lot I could say, but not here. And certainly others know much of the story better than I do, especially the technical details.

Kim Stanley Robinson on just how much money does one person need? [+ drive | motivation]

Ezra Klein interviews Kim Stanley Robinson, NYTimes, July 15, 2022.

KIM STANLEY ROBINSON: Maybe I would say that it’s probably crucially important to focus on the one, that the one needs to be adequacy. And so if the person that is at the entry level, or the lowest amount of compensation, is adequately compensated — And so by that I would say food, water, shelter, clothing, health care, education, electricity — had all of those and knew that they were going to last to the end of their life, no matter what happened, that social security of a safety net, well, that’s a one that you can trust.

And if you had it, you could even say I’m happy, because I’ve got my own personal interest and I’ve got adequacy. And once you’ve got the one as a floor of decency — because it’s such a scandalous situation that we’re in, how many humans are emiserated, and the precariat is indeed precariats. And a whole lot of people are precarious. One job loss, one health crisis and they’re screwed forever.

So if the one is solid, then the top one isn’t as important, because adequacy, if you begin to do it like on my fingers here. One, adequacy, and then let’s go one to 10. Two, adequacy, twice as much as you need. Well, that’s a lot. But then another one, three times as much as you need, four times as much as you need. By the time you get up to 10 times adequacy, your brain begins to explode. You’re like, well, that’s just luxurious. You don’t even need that, because adequacy is adequate.

And yet, we’re in the one to 350, at which point it begins to look obscene. So you have adequacy, and then you just set something above it that seems acceptable, and that should be the new structure of feeling. That would be the utopian goal that we could work to from here.

We talk about the one percent, and there is an amazing amount of wealth at the 1 percent, but if you talk about the top 10 percent getting squeezed from the top down, but you talk about a floor of adequacy for all eight billion of us, you’ve got a decent social order that people might therefore be — how can I say it — patriotic towards. They would believe in it. They would work for it, because they would feel they’re part of the team.

EZRA KLEIN: Well, you’re somebody thinks a lot about technology. We think a lot about innovation for the purposes of social progress, and you think a lot about human motivation because your characters need to be motivated. And I think the first place people go when they hear something like this is that, well, we actually need these remarkable rewards, because they are what incentivize the human race to grow and to reach these new heights. It’s what makes Elon Musk create his car company and a space shuttle company and Steve Jobs and —

when you hear that, what do you think? The people say, look, we may not like it, and I agree that this might be a nicer way of structuring society, but what really matters for long term human living conditions is innovation and great effort from our most productive. And this is simply the cost we have to pay for that.

KIM STANLEY ROBINSON: Yeah, I’d say they’re wrong. They’re wrong, wrong, wrong. People don’t do it for that. They don’t do it for these exceptional riches. Musk would have done what he had done and made his car company if it had made him $200,000 a year. Driven people are driven.

I’ve watched my wife work harder than anybody that I’ve ever seen for a federal scientist salary. And many scientists are working like maniacs on their project because they love their project and they think their project has meaning. And sometimes this is a peculiar thing to follow, a scientist that is trying to decide whether turtles came into being 50 million years ago or 100 million years ago, and they are devoting their whole career to making that determination.

You’re like, whoa, I wonder what the significance of that is in the larger scheme of things. But, and this is history, I mean, this is part of a larger project. When I find out this, then we’ll find out more about everything else. We’ll understand the earth better. We’ll understand reality better.

There’s something about that curiosity and drive to understand more that I often pit science versus capitalism in my novels as being two giant mythic forces, and the scientists are at least as hardworking, and also making the innovations that capitalism then profits off of by exploitation and appropriation and also stealing from future generations as a systemic and legal thing to do.

So I think it’s a right to say that people are driven to innovate for project-based reasons that have nothing to do with wealth. And if they have to do with prestige, which I agree is prominent in many people’s minds, you want to be respected and all that, well, you need a National Academy of Science to get into that. It’s like, oh my gosh. Or you get a little plaque from your coworkers from 30 years and it’s like, oh, that’s great. Or maybe there should be an industrialists’ hall of fame, and then you get your Presidential Medal for doing great work.

That’s all you need. And then a decent amount of money to feel safe and able to do what you want to in life. You don’t need more than that. That’s all there is to it.

There's much more in the interview, doing acid in the High Sierra's in KSR's early 20s, Latour's actor networks (ANT), climate change, pandemic response, backpacks, the Dali Lama, rewilding, and more.

Kim Stanley Robinson Talks about The Ministry for the Future

The Ministry for the Future: Climate Change and Speculative Fiction with Kim Stanley Robinson

1,603 views Apr 3, 2021 Meaningful global action on climate change looks like it may finally be in reach in 2021 – the United States has rejoined the Paris Agreement and the Biden administration has signaled that climate change is a top priority. But what if we fail? In his new novel, 'The Ministry for the Future', legendary science-fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson imagines that very scenario, telling the story of a chaotic, not-so-distant future with runaway climate change, eco-terrorists, petro-billionaires, and a shadowy international organization known as the “Ministry for the Future.”

How can speculative fiction like this new novel help inform smart global policy? Are there real-life equivalents of The Ministry for the Future? And is there hope that the world can avoid the worst-case scenario of climate change?

Kim Stanley Robinson joined us [Perry World House] for this edition of Global Lens, our cultural affairs event program, to discuss his new novel, The Ministry for the Future, and how speculative fiction can inform policy debates.

Kim Stanley Robinson on the game of forms in The Ministry for the Future

The good folks at Crooked Timber recently hosted a symposium on Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future. Nine people each wrote a post about the book. Robinson has now replied to those posts. He begins:

When I attended the Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop in 1975, our first teacher Samuel R. Delany gave us some advice: don’t respond to critics. It never does any good. Don’t even write reviews.

It was good advice, and I’ve followed it ever since. But here I am. Did I make a mistake? Maybe so. [...]

So I’m going to try this: I’ll happily express my appreciation for all the generous giving of time and thought that I see in the responses below; and I’ll do my best to answer any questions they ask. If there are complaints about my book (and there are), I’ll stick to my long-time practice, and hold my tongue.

He then made comments about each post, with links to each. He concludes his response to Belle Waring by commenting on form, which, as you may know, is a hobby horse of mine:

Also, I was playing the game of forms. Even in a novel about such grim stuff, there should be pleasure. For me some of that came from making a game of forms. So the surface novel is Mary’s story, about what we could achieve by legal means; then there’s Badim’s story, obscure enough that the reader has to stay alert for clues as to what’s happening there. This is not unusual, all detective novels operate this way; but this time there aren’t enough clues. The reader has to shift from being a detective to being a co-novelist, concocting their own version of what Badim might have done or authorized. In that process readers have to consider what they themselves might sanction, given the world’s desperate situation.

That Belle Waring saw this structure indicates that it must be there, and legible, which is good to know. That she responded to it so generously (because it could be seen as merely evasive) is something for which I am very grateful.

What I would have commented on, if asked, is the game of forms, the literary game. Lots of modes in this book, in a bricolage, perhaps to imitate the confusion of history and make readers be historians as well as ethicists. Novels always do this.

The riddles came to me from Anglo-Saxon. About a third of remaining Anglo-Saxon literature consists of riddles, and many are structured so that there can be more than one right answer, as in puns. Scholars still argue about whether the answer to one of them is an angel or a grasshopper; that was surely deliberate, a joke. A surface answer and an under answer.

The “IT narrative” was a fad in eighteenth century England, in which a coin or a violin or an atom would tell its story, proceeding through the world, and usually through someone’s digestive tract, with amazement but with little to no agency, which I take it is why the genre died off.

The dialogues between the smooth host and the grumpy guest I got from a book called Orwell at the BBC. Included are some transcripts of Orwell hosting a weekly radio show on books, broadcast during the war. A repeat guest on this show was the literary critic William Empson, whose frequent rudeness always bounced right off Orwell. This struck me funny, and I thought it could be put to use.

Meeting notes: having dramatized quite a few bureaucratic meetings in my career, it seemed to me it would be a relief to all to convey these by notes alone.

Essays, encyclopedia articles, political rants, historical summaries, op-ed pieces: these are all genres with specific norms. They are also forms that fiction can use. Including them in a novel might add to what Barthes called the effect of the real, but even if they don’t, they do create variety, and the chance to play with pastiche and parody.

There is a spine of dramatized scenes, mostly focused on Mary and Frank. Very important, still the basic unit of fiction. Then also the opposite of dramatization, summarization; this was a staple of nineteenth century realist novels, and is still very useful—not to be jettisoned, much less despised, no matter how unfashionable some people now find it.

Lastly, and for me the great discovery for Ministry, is the eyewitness account. This too is a genre, I think under-recognized and theorized as such. Eyewitness accounts are more summarization than dramatization; they are telling not showing, thus reversing one of the Three Stupid Rules of MFA creative writing programs (see The Program Era, by Mark McGurl). Eyewitness accounts are often the result of interviews; the eyewitnesses are usually recalling something that happened many years before, which has since been judged significant. So they make judgments; they tell us what they think the event meant to the world, and what it meant to them in their lives after it happened. They tell their story with urgency and often great propulsive force. Something they saw, and often did, later proved important not just to them, but to the world!

What is Science Fiction? A Quick Note

I stream a lot of science fiction from the web – at the moment I watching Star Trek: Discovery. I find myself asking: What’s this about? I’m not asking about what’s happening in this or that story, or even for interpretations. In some way I’m asking about the genre (broadly speaking): What’s science fiction, as a form of story telling, about, why does it exist?

For one thing, it’s as much about technology as science; the distinction between the two is elided. Moreover, depending on the story (& franchise) the science ranges from plausible to fanciful. It seems to me that the genre couldn’t exist without science itself having become a topic of observation and commentary on the public stage. While there are antecedents going back to who knows when, the genre didn’t really emerge until the twentieth century.

Moreover, it is often, but now always, associated with the future. To be sure, War of the Worlds was not about the future in any interesting sense; it’s set in the present, as are most alien invasion stories. The Star Wars saga is set in “another galaxy, far, far away.” But if you search on something like “science fiction predictions” you’ll come up with a lot of hits. These days the Progress Studies folks are calling for science fiction that is optimistic rather than dystopian. Why? Because they think these stories will affect how people think and act; the influence the world. Of course, Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 is about the future in a way that’s different from the Star Trek franchise, and that’s worth exploring, but not here and now. But still, the future. The future is no longer something that just happens. It’s something we can plan for and change through our thoughts and actions.

Is that what science fiction is about, human agency? But all fiction is about human agency is some way. Perhaps it is that science fiction signals a shift in our sense of the locus and range of human agency, of what we can do and our place in the universe. Surely that’s been explored in the extensive literature on the subject.

If that is so, to the extent that it is, what then do we make of the story of the computer that goes crazy, the computer that surpasses us? That’s a story about human agency coming to displace or negate human agency, no? What kind of story is that? It’s as though we've become our own alien invasion. Does that tell us something about why the idea of a super-intelligent computer is as much an object of fiction as a hope-and-fear of research?

More later.

Critique of disaster films, praise for Kim Stanley Robinson [Media Notes 54]

Peter Baker has an interesting piece in the NYTimes: We Live in Disastrous Times. Why Can’t Disaster Movies Evolve? It opens with a discussion of George Clooney’s The Midnight Sky, moving briskly to:

The story, in the end, uses the same dramatic conceit as just about every other disaster movie: The decimation of Earth becomes a backdrop that lends weight to the choices of a few individuals, which are meant to point to bigger truths about humanity. [...] Most disaster movies aren’t much interested in disasters in and of themselves. The disaster sparks the action and makes its resolution feel momentous, but when it comes to considering where it came from — why it unfolds one way and not another — things tend to get hazy.

These films gloss over the collective nature of the events and ignore the decisions that brought them about. It ends on a note of praise for Kim Stanley Robinson:

By starting with Earth’s fate already settled, “The Midnight Sky” gives itself a pass on this line of inquiry, and an excuse to dwell instead in the pathos of small moments of loss and acceptance. It reminded me, discomfitingly, of figures like Elon Musk, who often seem more interested in triumphant dreams of life in space than in any effort to help address the earthbound problems that would send us there in the first place. [...]

If our planetary crises were the same as conflicts negotiated between small groups of individuals, they would be much more straightforward to resolve. But they’re not. Could we start telling disaster stories that reflect this fact, and grapple with it? The most powerful recent example comes not from film but from literature: Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel “The Ministry for the Future,” which cuts between — to give just a partial list — scenes of climate disaster, government and financial bureaucracy, geoengineering experiments, street protests, refugee camps and eco-terrorism. Each strand takes meaning not just from the experiences of its characters but also from the reader’s awareness of their deep interconnections.

I’ve only begun reading The Ministry for the Future, but I’ve read and thought quite a bit about New York 2140. By that time the planet has already absorbed two global floodings and the sea has risen by 50 feet. Then a massive hurricane floods the east coast of the United States.

Whatever New York 2140 is, it is not an exploration of the psyches of one, two, or three individuals. Yes, there is a core collection of nine people whose lives meet and intertwine during the course of the book, and we do learn a bit about the past of each. But these characters are thinly sketched, at least by the standards of the traditional novel. It’s not about them and their psyches. It’s about the world in which they live. It’s about the collectivity.

Adam Roberts reviews Kim Stanley Robinson's "Ministry of the Future" – Reimagining how we think about the future

He’s ambivalent:

It’s a righteous novel, and I’m a KSR fan of longstanding, so I expected to like Ministry of the Future. And I did, if only up to a point. Beyond that point I ... didn't, really. Nonetheless, I’d suggest, or I would if it didn’t just look perversely contradictory, that the very reason I didn’t much like The Ministry of the Future is actually an index of its success: its ambition, its throughline and above all its—well, it’s ministry.

He goes on, “fat book…thin on plot,” which is hardly surprising. The plot is strung between two poles, one located in the Ministry based in Zurich and the other in a clinic in Northern India. Lots of leaden dialog, lots of information dumps, plenty of future tech, some gee-whiz, some not so much. This is all standard book-review stuff and Roberts handles it very well. Where he shines, though, is in his final two paragraphs:

The negative way of spinning all this would be to say that this novel can be a dry read, sometimes positively drought-dry. There are stretches here which are, baldly stated, an effort for the reader to push through. But the positive way to spin it would be to see it as a novel not just about climate change, but about the kind of stories we tell ourselves about disasters like climate change. Those stories are, clearly, not helping. Take ‘eucatastrophe’, Tolkien’s term for a thrilling story in which disaster impends, becomes more and more inevitable and then is averted at the very last moment. It’s a real workhorse of storytelling nowadays, the eucatastrophe, especially in cinema. There is a threat to the whole world! Let’s imagine that as a singular, external thing: an asteroid on collision course, a huge invading alien spaceship. Then let’s draw out the approaching disaster and make it seem like it could never be overcome. Finally, bam: rabbit from hat, the hero saves the day at the last minute.

The Ministry for the Future is, in effect, saying: that’s a bad story—not bad in entertainment terms but bad in verisimilitude terms. It is saying: we are actually, right now, indeed facing a threat to the whole world, but it’s not a single thing it’s a complex and deeply-embedded function of human interrelation and social praxis. It’s not exterior to us, it is us. And it won’t be solved by a single heroic flourish in the nick of time. It will be solved by a congeries of difficult, drawn-out, collective labour, much of which is so inimical to ‘popular narrative’ that we dismiss it as boring. It’s not boring, though: it’s literally life-and-death. And so one part of our large, human task will be: to reconfigure the kinds of stories we are telling ourselves about disaster and how to avert it.

Notice that word, “verisimilitude”, used about a work of fiction pitched in the future, albeit the near-enough future, a future at least some of the readers of the book will live into.

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Check out KSR’s recent interview in The Jacobin:

I’ve steeped myself in the utopian tradition. It’s not a big body of literature, it’s easy to read the best hits of the utopian tradition. You could make a list, I mean roughly twenty or twenty-five books would be the highlights of the entire four hundred years, which is a little shocking. And maybe there’s more out there that hasn’t stayed in the canon. But if you talk about the utopian canon, it’s quite small — it’s interesting, it has its habits, its problems, its gaps.

Famously, from Thomas More (Utopia) on, there’s been a gap in the history — the utopia is separated by space or time, by a disjunction. They call it the Great Trench. In Utopia, they dug a great trench across the peninsula so that their peninsula became an island. And the Great Trench is endemic in utopian literature. There’s almost always a break that allows the utopian society to be implemented and to run successfully. I’ve never liked that because one connotation of the word “utopian” is unreality, in the sense that it’s “never going to happen.”

So we have to fill in this trench. When Jameson said it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, I think what he was talking about is that missing bridge from here to there. It’s hard to imagine a positive history, but it’s not impossible. And now, yes, it’s easy to imagine the end of the world because we are at the start of a mass extinction event. But he’s talking about hegemony, and a kind of Marxist reading of history, and the kind of Gramscian notion that everybody’s in the mindset that capitalism is reality itself and that there can never be any other way — so it’s hard to imagine the end of capitalism. But I would just flip it and say, it’s hard to imagine how we get to a better system. Imagining the better system isn’t that hard; you just make up some rules about how things should work. You could even say socialism is that kind of utopian imaginary. Let’s just do it this way, a kind of society of mutual aid. And I would agree with anyone who says, “Well, that’s a good system.”

The interesting thing, and also the new stories to tell if you’re a science fiction novelist, if you’re any kind of novelist — almost every story’s been told a few times — but the story of getting to a new and better social system, that’s almost an empty niche in our mental ecology. So I’ve been throwing myself into that attempt. It’s hard, but it’s interesting.

From Progress Studies to Progress [A Ministry of the Future]

Back in July 2019 Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen called for a science of progress in an article in The Atlantic. The article generated a fair response, some in favor, some pushing back – Collison has collected some of the responses here – and people have begun conversing and gathering around the idea of progress studies. The purpose of this post is to take a quick look at what has been going on and a somewhat more considered look at what needs to happen if an interest in progress studies is to yield discernible progress.

A movement begins

Let’s begin with a passage from Collison and Cowen, “We Need a New Science of Progress”:

By “progress,” we mean the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed our lives and raised standards of living over the past couple of centuries. For a number of reasons, there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up. We believe that it deserves a dedicated field of study. We suggest inaugurating the discipline of “Progress Studies.”

Before digging into what Progress Studies would entail, it’s worth noting that we still need a lot of progress. We haven’t yet cured all diseases; we don’t yet know how to solve climate change; we’re still a very long way from enabling most of the world’s population to live as comfortably as the wealthiest people do today; we don’t yet understand how best to predict or mitigate all kinds of natural disasters; we aren’t yet able to travel as cheaply and quickly as we’d like; we could be far better than we are at educating young people. The list of opportunities for improvement is still extremely long.

Note the magnitude of the phenomena they point out: “the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed our lives and raised standards of living over the past couple of centuries.” And so forth. The words are easy to comprehend, and those two paragraphs are relatively short. But they’re talking about human life on earth, all of it, going forward. They go on:

Those are major challenges. A lot of progress can also come from smaller advances: Thousands of lesser improvements that together build upon one another can together represent an enormous advance for society. For example, if our discoveries and inventions improve standards of living by 1 percent a year, children will by adulthood be 35 percent better off than their parents. If they improve livelihoods at 3 percent a year, those same children will grow up to be about 2.5 times better off.

After some discussion of what Progress Studies would be like, they observe:

An important distinction between our proposed Progress Studies and a lot of existing scholarship is that mere comprehension is not the goal. When anthropologists look at scientists, they’re trying to understand the species. But when viewed through the lens of Progress Studies, the implicit question is how scientists (or funders or evaluators of scientists) should be acting. The success of Progress Studies will come from its ability to identify effective progress-increasing interventions and the extent to which they are adopted by universities, funding agencies, philanthropists, entrepreneurs, policy makers, and other institutions. In that sense, Progress Studies is closer to medicine than biology: The goal is to treat, not merely to understand.

Given the scope of phenomena entailed in Progress Studies, just what would treatment entail?

Moreover, treatment is of course oriented toward the future. Thinking about the future is tricky. It is one thing for a physician to devise a treatment plan for an ailment that is well studied. It is quite something else to steer a society into a future that is unknown and unknowable. How do you devise and execute a treatment plan for that? I don’t know, but I’m sure that studying what has already happened, however necessary and useful it may be, is not sufficient. Something else is required, something more like fiction. Imagine a hundred futures, each in detail, pick the ones we like, and figure out how to keep on one of those courses.

How do you play chess with the Devil?

* * * * *

Jason Crawford is one of the people who was energized by the article. He hadsbeen blogging about The Roots of Progress since March 2017, and has been working on Progress Studies full-time, aided in part by a November grant from Cowen’s Emergent Ventures fund. While he’s continued blogging he’s also been organizing, and has put together Progress Studies for Young Scholars, which is an online summer program in the history of technology aimed at high school students. He also hangs out at a Progress Studies Slack, started by Jasmine Wang, who also maintains a database of people interested in Progress Studies.

Crawford recently gave an overview of the current state of the emerging progress studies movement:

I have no intention of summarizing it here as I’ve got other fish to fry, but I will note five things:

• Progress Studies, as called for by Collison and Cowen, is about the organization, creation, and dissemination of scholarly research on progress. It calls on a wide range of investigation in the social and behavioral sciences, history, and the humanities.
• However, Progress Studies also has a practical focus. Thus we need a dedicated journal, a general interest magazine, think tanks, and institutionalized sources of funding (foundations).
• Progress Studies encompasses social and cultural factors as well as technology.
• Progress Studies is a long-term effort, requiring decades.
• Progress Studies is not politically partisan and has participants with a variety of ideological commitments.

Note that last point, that Progress Studies does not seem to be particularly partisan. That’s important. It is quite possible that the long-term possibilities for success in America depends on it as partisan politics seems dangerously deadlocked.

Rekindling will and desire, a political problem

In April of this year venture capitalist Marc Andreessen delivered himself of a St. Crispin’s Day speech in the form of an essay, “It's Time to Build”. He started with America’s confused and anemic response to the coronavirus pandemic and went on to a general condemnation of rot at the core of Western society:

You don’t just see this smug complacency, this satisfaction with the status quo and the unwillingness to build, in the pandemic, or in healthcare generally. You see it throughout Western life, and specifically throughout American life. … The problem is desire. We need to *want* these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things. … And the problem is will. We need to build these things.

Let’s repeat, throughout Western life, and specifically throughout American life, that’s the range of Andreessen’s complaint. And the problem? We’re afflicted with inertia, we’ve lost the desire to build, achieve, improve, we’ve got no will. That’s an indictment as abstract as it is broad. Just who is this “we”, each of us individual by individual, each and every one of us, is Andreessen thinking about institutions and organizations, about a collectivity? Yes, I know that Andreessen is speaking figuratively and thus that these questions are beside the point. I ask them as a way of dwelling on and digging into what he’s saying.

If the goal of Progress Studies is to treat as well as understand, is this what we’re talking about treating? Socio-cultural will and desire?

Science in science fiction 3: New York 2140 [Media Notes 37]

Let’s continue thinking about science in science fiction. I propose we look at Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, to which I’ve devoted a working paper that is, in part, indebted to an online reading group convened by futurist Bryan Alexander. For those not familiar with the book, it is what the title suggests, a look at New York City in the year 2140. That is, it is a look at life in New York City after global warming has reshaped earth geography by rising seas. Much of Manhattan is under water, with boats and sky-bridges replacing automobiles as transportation.

The world Robinson presents is a plausible. In fact it’s so darned plausible that some readers were disappointed that it lacked the gee-whiz razzle-dazzle characteristic of much science fiction – no faster than light travel, no wormholes, no time-travel paradoxes, no super-intelligent AIs (either benevolent or malevolent), no parallel universes, no odd creatures, no tech-mediated brain-to-brain connection. And no space travel. None. It is all so plausible, so normal, so, you know, so real.

But the Sci-Fi fiction really is there. For one thing, there is the foundational premise of that world, that the seas have risen by 50 feet. It hasn’t happened yet, not in our time. We’ve only got models that say the seas will rise (unless we do something, quick), and 50-feet by 2140 is more than most models project. But in 2140 some people are living in villages floating in the sky, and transportation by airship is common. Airships (dirigibles) are hardly new, but they are relatively rare in our current world and used only for limited purposes. They’re common in 2140 and one of the Robinson’s central characters has an airship that’s piloted by a spectacular AI. Its capabilities aren’t those of the computer on the Starship Enterprise, a repository of universal knowledge and every language in the galaxy, but it’s well beyond anything Elon Musk can sell you now or in the foreseeable future. [Bryan Alexander has compiled a useful list of tech in New York 2140.]

And that plausibility is what attracted me to the book. I was looking for an account of a post-apocalyptic world in which life isn’t perpetually shrouded in gloom and doom. Robinson certainly hasn’t given us a utopia, but it’s not a dystopia either. It’s a livable world where one can strive and thrive, even if you’re a river rat rather than an oligarch living in a floating village.

* * * * *

In a recent article about the coronavirus and our response to it, Robinson observed:

... science fiction is the realism of our time. The sense that we are all now stuck in a science-fiction novel that we’re writing together—that’s another sign of the emerging structure of feeling.

Science-fiction writers don’t know anything more about the future than anyone else. Human history is too unpredictable; from this moment, we could descend into a mass-extinction event or rise into an age of general prosperity. Still, if you read science-fiction, you may be a little less surprised by whatever does happen. Often, science-fiction traces the ramifications of a single postulated change; readers cocreate, judging the writers’ plausibility and ingenuity, interrogating their theories of history. Doing this repeatedly is a kind of training. It can help you feel more oriented in the history we’re making now. This radical spread of possibilities, good to bad, which creates such a profound disorientation; this tentative awareness of the emerging next stage—these are also new feelings in our time.

And that’s what New York 2140 is, a way to think about history, a history that recognizably stretches out from what we’re living now.

Yet: Does it make sense to think of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea as a realistic novel of its time (1871)? What of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds (1897)? Recall that when Orson Welles did a radio broadcast of it in 1938 some people panicked, thinking that we really were being invaded by aliens from another planet. On the other hand, I find it difficult to believe that anyone thought of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Princess of Mars (1912) as a realism for any time. What do we make of such films as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1952) or Invaders from Mars (1953) – the latter scared the living-daylights out of me when I watched it on television a few years later? Both had contemporary settings, but realism?

And then we have the Stargate universe, which we examined in the first post in this series. It’s set in the present, but in what sense is it realism? If that’s the question, the most obvious answer is that the world is riven with issues of identity and with a pervading sense of paranoia – we’re under attack, initially by the Goa'uld, then by the Wraith.

What of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the focus of our second post? That’s a very interesting question. Kubrick is positing a revelation, a re-calibration, of our place in the universe that is poised between artificial intelligence (in this case, the confused and hence malevolent HAL) and (planetary) space travel. Has that revelation been received and registered (among some, if not all) in Robinson’s 2140, is it yet to arrive, or has it been forgotten by all?

Kim Stanley Robinson on the corona virus and the future [...into a new structure of feeling]

Kim Stanley Robinson, The Coronavirus is Rewriting Our Imaginations, The New Yorker, May 1, 2020.

I like that phrase,  rewriting our imaginations, for that's what we need, to rewrite and expand our imaginations. That's our best chance of dealing with the challenges ahead. KSR's opening paragraph:

The critic Raymond Williams once wrote that every historical period has its own “structure of feeling.” How everything seemed in the nineteen-sixties, the way the Victorians understood one another, the chivalry of the Middle Ages, the world view of Tang-dynasty China: each period, Williams thought, had a distinct way of organizing basic human emotions into an overarching cultural system. Each had its own way of experiencing being alive.

He goes on to observe: "We seem to be learning our way into a new structure of feeling." Notice what he says: We're learning our way. We're not there yet (not by a long shot).

A bit later:

In many ways, we’ve been overdue for such a shift. In our feelings, we’ve been lagging behind the times in which we live. The Anthropocene, the Great Acceleration, the age of climate change—whatever you want to call it, we’ve been out of synch with the biosphere, wasting our children’s hopes for a normal life, burning our ecological capital as if it were disposable income, wrecking our one and only home in ways that soon will be beyond our descendants’ ability to repair. And yet we’ve been acting as though it were 2000, or 1990—as though the neoliberal arrangements built back then still made sense. We’ve been paralyzed, living in the world without feeling it.

Now, all of a sudden, we’re acting fast as a civilization. We’re trying, despite many obstacles, to flatten the curve—to avoid mass death. Doing this, we know that we’re living in a moment of historic importance. We realize that what we do now, well or badly, will be remembered later on. This sense of enacting history matters. For some of us, it partly compensates for the disruption of our lives.

Actually, we’ve already been living in a historic moment. For the past few decades, we’ve been called upon to act, and have been acting in a way that will be scrutinized by our descendants. Now we feel it. The shift has to do with the concentration and intensity of what’s happening. September 11th was a single day, and everyone felt the shock of it, but our daily habits didn’t shift, except at airports; the President even urged us to keep shopping. This crisis is different. It’s a biological threat, and it’s global. Everyone has to change together to deal with it. That’s really history. [...]

Possibly, in a few months, we’ll return to some version of the old normal. But this spring won’t be forgotten. When later shocks strike global civilization, we’ll remember how we behaved this time, and how it worked. It’s not that the coronavirus is a dress rehearsal—it’s too deadly for that. But it is the first of many calamities that will likely unfold throughout this century. Now, when they come, we’ll be familiar with how they feel.

... science fiction is the realism of our time. The sense that we are all now stuck in a science-fiction novel that we’re writing together—that’s another sign of the emerging structure of feeling.

Yikes! I’ve got a lot goin’ on! – Literature, AI, progress, talent search, Human Swarm, camping trip [Ramble 14]

And that’s a problem, because I only have so much time in a day and I can’t do all these things at once, nor can I really advance on each project each day. But how do I sort things out?

Anyhow.... Here’s what I’m working on, in the order that they occur to me.

Heart of Darkness

I’ve thinking about a post that provisionally ‘solves’ the problem of ring composition in that text. The idea is to have the ring-form be an ‘emergent’ [what a high-class weasel word that is!] of purely local decisions, in this case about narrative strategy. If Conrad wants 1) to keep his readers in the dark about Kurtz for almost half of the tale, and 2) wants them also to know most of his story before they meet him, how does he do this? Aren’t these contradictory aims? He does it by the tricky use of double narration. But why, you ask, would he want to do that? One thing at a time, Grasshopper, one thing at a time.

I’m also thinking to submit a book proposal to the Dead Letter Office at Punctum Books.

Intelligence

What is it? I think about this from time to time. The notion that “intelligence is what intelligence tests say it is” is not as empty as it seems–I’ve been through this before on the five factor personality model. But it doesn’t help us to understand AI, because those machines wouldn’t do very well on such a test. What about playing Go better than the best humans? Or the manual dexterity of OpenAI’s current robotic hand? The informal “know how” seems more useful, for it doesn’t carry the baggage that intelligence carries. Much of that baggage, of course, is coupled to the notion of IQ and all that’s associated with it.

Talent Search

I’ve got a bunch of posts on searching for talent that I want to gather into a working paper. I suppose I’ve got two notions:

ONE: The search process has three phases, 1) identify your a pool of prospects, 2) do a crude search of the pool to narrow the field so that you can 3) conclude with a more careful examination of that narrowed field.

TWO: Just what “talent” is can vary. Perhaps we have a continuum from “self-contained” to “context-sensitive” talent. The most self-contained talent is subject to objective measure, e.g. how fast can you sprint? Context sensitive talent is much more difficult to evaluate because you are trying to estimate how a person’s abilities will interact with and perhaps even change their cultural umwelt.

Progress, painful but real

Here I just want to provide a setting for two papers by David Hays. “On the Painfulness of Progress” is in memory of his friend Raoul Naroll, who argued “that progress causes ... pain during periods of transition but alleviates this and other kinds of pain over the long term.” In “Relativism and Progress” Hays examines worldwide statistics on health, wealth, and social life and includes an appendix with 32 scatter plots depicting the data.

The Human Swarm

I’ve got to keep reading and blogging my way through Mark Moffett’s The Human Swarm, which takes a broad view of the nature of society. The idea is to write a formal review (for 3 Quarks Daily) when I’m done and then package the whole set as a working paper.

Visualizing Form and Evolution in Literary History: A response to Nan Z. Da and to Moretti and Sobchuk

That’s the working title for a longish article I’m working on. It will be of a methodological and theoretical nature. I’ve posted a working paper of draft material for the second part of the article, On the direction of literary history: How should we interpret that 3300 node graph in Macroanalysis, Version 2. I’ve sent that to a few folks and gotten useful feedback I’ve also set up a feedback session at Academia.edu, but I haven’t gotten much feedback. Da dismissed that graph in one long paragraph. I explain why she was wrong to do so, suggesting we view that graph as a trace of the activity of a dynamical system.

The first part of the article will about the cultural analog to phylogeny in biological evolution, which Moretti and Sobchuk touched on. The crucial distinction is between a tree-like structure and a network structure. Tree structures are interesting because: If you have a collection of examples that you know are related, you can infer a phylogeny by careful comparison of your examples. You can’t do that with network structures. What does that tell you about the nature historical process in certain highly structured objects (such as life forms, or cultural artifacts and processes)?

My next task is to draft the first half of the article. When I’ve done that I’ll know whether I want to release it in draft form for comment or just write the whole article.

Kisangani 2150

My ongoing project to write a text depicting Central Africa in 2150. This is conceived as a kind of sequel and reply to [dialectical turn on?] Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140. It would center on Kisangani, which used to be known as Stanleyville and played the role of Central Station in Heart of Darkness. At the moment it's on (deep) back burner.

BAPC Camping Trip

I took well over 600 photos on last weekend’s camping trip with the board of the Bergen Arches Preservation Coalition. I posted two tree photos on Sunday and a handful of fire photos on Monday. I posted a bunch more photos on Tuesday and, for some reason, decided to frame them with a story. And that meant I had to finish the story.

Why? Because that meant that posting the daily photo or photos became a lot more complicated. Now I had to pick them so they fit a story I had to dream up. Why’d I decide to do this? Because it’s fun. Work, but fun.

I intend to compose and post the final episode after I’ve posted this.

* * * * *

I suppose that article with the long title is the really big item on my agenda. It looks like it’s shaping to be a major statement. As such it will supplement and complement my 2006 paper, Literary Morphology: Nine Propositions in a Naturalist Theory of Form, PsyArt: An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, August 2006, Article 060608. 

You will find a downloadable PDF here, https://www.academia.edu/235110/Literary_Morphology_Nine_Propositions_in_a_Naturalist_Theory_of_Form.

More later.

What recent event gets replayed in Kisangani 2150 to a different effect?

“We Are the World”, the 1985 charity song/event orchestrated by (well-off) pop musicians to benefit African famine relief.

Before going any further, however, let’s back up. The idea of Kisangani 2150 is to take the world Kim Stanley Robinson created in New York 2140, run it forward 10 years, and re-center it somewhere else, like Kisangani (in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). KSR wrote NY2140 as a replay of the financial collapse of 2008, but to a different effect. The banks were nationalized and new taxes allowed a fundamental shift if the goals of the federal government. But the book ended there, without providing any sense of how that worked out. OK.

So, I want to replay “We Are the World”. The song itself will be different, and it will be organized out of Kisangani. But why? Who’s to benefit? Good questions. In due course.

I note first of all that this connects organically to NY2140, which ended with our crew dancing to West African pop in a club deep beneath Manhattan. Final words in the novel (613):

“Could you believe that guy on the whatever?”
“I know. Fucking amazing. Best music I ever heard.”
“And now, look at this, here we are right on top of the place, and it’s like they’re not even there!”
“It’s true. And there was hardly anyone there anyway. I never even caught the band’s name.”
“They might not even have a name.”
“Heck, there’s probably fifty bands like them playing tonight in this city. Dances like that going on right now, all over town.”
“It’s true. Fucking New York.”

And that’s it, that’s all. That’s the story I want to tell, about not only those 50 bands, but the million bands all over the world. Without them the story that Robinson told would not have happened. Now that it has happened, now there’s a chance for a real revolution.

And then there’s this, from Tyler Cowen’s Average is Over, which is his guesstimate of our near term future (229):

We will move from a society based on the pretense that everyone is given an okay standard of living to a society in which people are expected to fend for themselves much more than they do now. I imagine a world where, say, 10 to 15 percent of the citizenry is extremely wealthy and has fantastically comfortable and stimulating lives, the equivalent of current-day millionaires, albeit with much better health care.

Much of the rest of the country will have stagnant or maybe even falling wages in dollar terms, but a lot more opportunities for cheap fun and also cheap education. Many of these people will live quite well, and those will be the people who have the discipline to benefit from all the free or near-free services modern technology has made available. Others will fall by the wayside.

Let’s just take that as a reasonable assessment of the near term future. What bothers me is this phrase, “cheap fun and also cheap education.” Why not “inexpensive fun and also affordable education”? Why the use of “cheap” and why the doubling? For that matter, why “fun”, for I doubt that Cowen meant it with the foundational valence it has in the title of Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens. I sense a value judgment lurking in Cowen’s wording. Kisangani 2150 will be working against that value judgment.

Just how to do that, that’s another matter. Just for fun, for example, I imagined exploiting the fact that airships (lighter than air aircraft) are a major form of transportation in NY2140. Not only that, but some people lived in villages in the sky. Why not have a string of airships encircling the globe, nose to tail, with people dancing on them. So I did a quick calculation: assume our airships are 100 yards long (I suppose I should have done this in meters, no?), with a hundred dancers/singers per airship. That’s 440,000,000 dancing at once. Seems like a rather large number. Let’s space the airships out so we only need a tenth as many; that gives us 44,000,000 people. That’s a more manageable number.

Now maybe I don’t want to do that. It’s just an idea. Something to play with.

Why Kisangani? I note that the Congo basin is mineral-rich and some of those deposits are southeast of Kisangani, not nearby, but, when they’re transported may of them would be transported through Kisangani. Maybe Kisangani becomes a center of airship manufacture and maintenance. Who knows?

Coming back to the present, YouTube has a number of collective musical projects. One type involved a song that is sung by performers all over the globe. They recordings are made whenever and however and then edited together into a single clip where we hear one continuous performance and see it handed off from one set of performers to another. That’s the kind of thing that could build to whatever is going to be orchestrated out of Kisangani in 2150 or not too long after.

It’s an idea, a goal, and material to work with.

Social change in New York 2140 [revolution revised and revisited]

I’ve been thinking about New York 2140 and about social change, as that’s what’s at the heart of the book. How’d Kim Stanley Robinson engineer it?

Consider what Robinson had to say about his craft in Nature (20 December 2017):

Here’s how I think science fiction works aesthetically. It’s not prediction. It has, rather, a double action, like the lenses of 3D glasses. Through one lens, we make a serious attempt to portray a possible future. Through the other, we see our present metaphorically, in a kind of heroic simile that says, “It is as if our world is like this.” When these two visions merge, the artificial third dimension that pops into being is simply history. We see ourselves and our society and our planet “like giants plunged into the years”, as Marcel Proust put it. So really it’s the fourth dimension that leaps into view: deep time, and our place in it.

Of course, this is a self conscious and sophisticated version about that old cliché about science fiction, that it’s not about the future, it’s about the present.

In the case of NY2140 the present that interested KSR was the financial collapse of 2008. He wanted to rerun it so that it turned out differently, with the banks getting nationalized. Think about that, he created this whole world (just) so he could get a different outcome for that one event – flooded the world, raised the seas 50 feet, and changed the texture of social life, all the while keeping the basic institutional structure pretty much the same, all that to change that one event. But then that event was a society-wide event, and that’s why he had to do so much engineering, so much revisionist world building in the guise of science fiction, in order to bring about a different outcome.

Let’s first ask, however, why weren’t the banks nationalized in 2008? For one thing, the federal government was in Wall Street’s back pocket, pretty nearly, it seems like. But then that’s the case in NY2140 as well. For another thing there was no way for the outraged populace to turn their anger into political action. People were getting screwed by the banks, but there was nothing they could do but get angry. THAT’s what KSR changed.

One thing he did was change the texture of social life. You have a lot more “mutual aid” in neighborhoods and even buildings, like the Met Tower. They had gardens there and they even ate communally. Social life was more closely knit. That’s one thing.

Here’s a passage from a recent interview in Radical Philosophy conducted by Helen Feder (Feb 2018):

HF New York 2140 is an alternative future history. It tries to imagine, as you’ve said, how we get from a capitalist to a post-capitalist world, but through one building, the MetLife Building, and all the actors (people, human systems, ecosystems) in this network. Is the building also a microcosm of the relation between the money sphere and the biosphere?

KSR It was the way to tell that story, and it was an experiment in form, in the genre of the French apartment novel, used by Zola and others (recently by Thomas Dish, Geoff Ryman and John Lanchester). At the start of the story the characters don’t know each other, but they live in the same apartment building. In my version of it, they eventually get to know each other to make the plot more interesting, rather than just a collection of short stories. It turned out to be quite a long novel, as you saw, because there were eight points of view and a dozen important characters, more than I usually deal with. Well, the Mars trilogy has scores of characters, but this was a single novel.

By the end of the story I try to make what’s going on in lower Manhattan scale up to the national and the global. You can’t have a local solution [to national and global problems]. You hear this focus on local solutions in Naomi Klein, in the work of all kinds of critics: ‘At least there’ll be resistance movements, there’ll be these little pockets.’ In global capitalism those are allowable discharge zones where energy gets dispersed; [they allow] people to think things are changing, while global capitalism continues its destruction. You need a global solution.

There’s our mutual aid, these “little pockets” of local solutions. But then he continues:

At the end of the novel the householder’s union causes a financial crash; the crash causes the federal government to take over the banks. Essentially it’s 2008 again, which indeed will happen again, and the question then will be, do we settle for a little fix or a big one? A big fix would be like what we did when we took over General Motors; we got it back to health and then sold it back to private ownership. When the banks crash again, instead of giving them a hundred cents on the dollar and telling them to go out and do more, we need to nationalise them. When I say nationalise them, there are specific plans as to how this might be done, how they might become fully owned subsidiaries of the American people, how finance might become a tool rather than a master.

What I like about New York 2140 is that it describes something that could happen in the real world. The mechanisms are in place. Congress could make the laws and the president could enact them. It’s not grossly dissimilar to what Bernie Sanders was advocating during his campaign

There’s that householder’s union, that’s the organizational vehicle that allowed these local pockets of discontent to amalgamate into an irresistible political force. The union made it possible to call a nationwide strike and win.

Do we have to wait for climate disaster for this to happen? I don’t know, I don’t know.

ADDENDUM! And KSR raised the oceans by 50 feet. Yes, that’s part of climate change. But he noted in an interview somewhere that none of the models projected 50 foot rise by 2140. Maybe 20 feet, but not 50. So why 50? For cosmetics, makes lower Manhattan look more Venice-like? But this is a novel, not a movie. We don’t actually see anything; we have to imagine it, which isn’t at all the same. But a 50 foot rise is going to cause more stress than a 20 foot rise. That HAS to be why he did it. You keep the institutional structure the same, but move things around inside it. He needed a 50 foot rise to get the appropriate displacements. Not that he had a formula or anything. It’s all intuitive.