The Crown, S6 E8, The Ritz: [Media Notes 101]

I’ve been blogging occasionally about The Crown since it began. The series is now coming to an end. I’ve just watched “The Ritz,” the eighth episode in the sixth and last season. The first four episodes of the season were given over to Princess Diana and her death. This episode focuses on the relationship between Elizabeth and her younger sister, Margaret. They were different in temperament, but quite close.

Margaret was a bit of a wild child. An earlier series of episodes dealt with Margaret’s romance with Peter Townsand. He proposed and she accepted. And then things dragged for this that and the other reason, all tied up in succession to the crown and nobility and status and who knows what. In the end, the marriage did not happen. Margaret was devastated. Her subsequent marriage to photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones ended in divorce. She never remarried.

That’s all in the background for this episode, which covers the last weeks of Margaret’s life. Two motifs are woven together in this episode. In the present we have a series of strokes to Margaret and her subsequent recovery. Each stroke takes a bit more from her, each recovery is weaker. And then there is no recovery.

The other motif is a series of flashbacks to VE Day:

Did the Queen enjoy an illicit kiss with an American GI in the basement of the Ritz? That’s what The Crown (Netflix) wants you to believe, and they’ve based a whole episode around it.

She wasn’t the Queen then, of course, but Princess Elizabeth, sneaking out of Buckingham Palace on VE Day with her sister Margaret. That much is fact, but the rest has been dreamed up by writer Peter Morgan and is teased from the outset. “Our VE Day. It was quite a night. Do you remember?” asks Margaret (Lesley Manville) in the present day. “We almost lost you. And then we very much found you. The real you. The you that you gave up in order to be the other you.”

A black GI invites young Elizabeth to the Pink Sink, a nightclub in the basement where the music is hot jazz and all the crazy kids are dancing the jitterbug. Elizabeth joins in and has a ball.

Even as she is dying, Margaret is reminding Elizabeth how much of herself she has had to give up in order to properly enact the role of Queen. And THAT has been a motif throughout the series. At one point, when Elisabeth is on a trip to America visiting horse stables, she remarks that, if it had been up to her, she’d have devoted her life to horses, breeding them, racing them, and of course riding them herself. Instead, she’s had to live a life whose possibilities and obligations were strongly constrained by law and custom.

In contrast, down in the basement, one of the GIs proclaims: “Down here is the place to be.” “Why,” she asks. “Because down here there’s no rank or background. Just music.” “Well, in that case...” She joins him on the dance floor. He, or course, has no idea who she is. To him she’s just an attractive English girl he met on an evening when everyone is celebrating the end of the war.

And THAT reminded me of a scene near the end of Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, which I’ve written about here and there. As you may recall, it’s set in the future and is a long-complicated book about a financial crisis obviously modeled on the crisis of 2008. But things work out differently this time; the banks get nationalized. We’re at the end of the story, the future’s wide open (perhaps), and some of the good guys are at the Mezzrow club that’s several floors below water level – in a world where the seas have risen 50 feet (pp. 611-612):

Everyone in the room is now grooving to the tightest West African pop any of them have ever heard. The guitar players’ licks are like metal shavings coming off a lathe. The vocalists are wailing, the horns are a freight train. [...] The other horn players instantly get better, the guitar players even more precise and intricate. The vocalists are grinning and shouting duets in harmony. It’s like they’ve all just plugged into an electrical jack through their shoes...Crowd goes crazy, dancing swells the room.

That’s all there is, just this one scene in the whole novel.

Given the way the world works, however, people have been down in Mezz’s the whole time, and other clubs as well. At least that how things are now, and Robinson has given no indication that things have changed in the future he’s imagining. There’s nothing in there about Islamic clerics and dictators and Nazi killjoys taking over and banning black music and dance. No doubt some of our gang of heroes have been down there as well, but the story hadn’t followed them there because it wasn’t relevant to the main line.

Here we have it, two very different narratives: 1) a historical narrative based on the life of Queen Elizabeth II, and 2) a science fiction story set in the future. Both narratives have a scene near the end where African-derived song and dance is placed in counterpoint to the world of hierarchy and repression that has dominated the main narrative.

When is someone going to write a narrative where egalitarian dance and music structure the whole story?

Hedging THE EVENT: Yes, the super-rich are different from you and me, they think they can buy their way out of mortality

I'm bouncing this to the top because it links up with my current interest in AI Doom. Rushkoff has turned this article into a book, reviewed by Cory Doctorow, Survival of the Richest.

 

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Douglas Rushkoff was recently paid "about half my annual professor’s salary " to talk (republished at at The Guardian) with "five super-wealthy guys — yes, all men — from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world."

Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”

The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.

This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers — if that technology could be developed in time.

That’s when it hit me: At least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology.

This, of course, is nuts.

There’s nothing wrong with madly optimistic appraisals of how technology might benefit human society. But the current drive for a post-human utopia is something else. It’s less a vision for the wholesale migration of humanity to a new a state of being than a quest to transcend all that is human: the body, interdependence, compassion, vulnerability, and complexity. As technology philosophers have been pointing out for years, now, the transhumanist vision too easily reduces all of reality to data, concluding that “humans are nothing but information-processing objects.”

How'd we come to this?

Of course, it wasn’t always this way. There was a brief moment, in the early 1990s, when the digital future felt open-ended and up for our invention. Technology was becoming a playground for the counterculture, who saw in it the opportunity to create a more inclusive, distributed, and pro-human future. But established business interests only saw new potentials for the same old extraction, and too many technologists were seduced by unicorn IPOs. Digital futures became understood more like stock futures or cotton futures — something to predict and make bets on. So nearly every speech, article, study, documentary, or white paper was seen as relevant only insofar as it pointed to a ticker symbol. The future became less a thing we create through our present-day choices or hopes for humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at passively.

This freed everyone from the moral implications of their activities. Technology development became less a story of collective flourishing than personal survival. [...] So instead of considering the practical ethics of impoverishing and exploiting the many in the name of the few, most academics, journalists, and science-fiction writers instead considered much more abstract and fanciful conundrums: Is it fair for a stock trader to use smart drugs? Should children get implants for foreign languages? Do we want autonomous vehicles to prioritize the lives of pedestrians over those of its passengers? Should the first Mars colonies be run as democracies? Does changing my DNA undermine my identity? Should robots have rights?

Asking these sorts of questions, while philosophically entertaining, is a poor substitute for wrestling with the real moral quandaries associated with unbridled technological development in the name of corporate capitalism.

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Here's a fictional addendum: It's from Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140. 

By that time the sea had risen 50 feet above where it had been in the 20th century, changing the city in substantial ways. Extreme income inequality still existed. And now a hurricane had hit the city with a 20 foot surge. Major disaster. An angry mob is headed toward some super-luxury residential towers north of Harlem. The private security forces starts firing over their heads. Inspector Gen is with a contingent of police between the mob and the towers. Gen gets the private security to go inside and starts talking with their boss, now under arrest, whom she’d met a week earlier on the water. He’s thinking (p. 506):

And it also looked like he was considering his options, not as this tower’s security head, but as an individual who could get sued or go to jail. Who had perhaps made mistakes, after being ordered to do an illegal and impossible thing, by bosses who did not care about him. Best options for himself, he was now considering.

Hmmm.

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.

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.

What’s the way to progress? Evolution, revolution, or revolution through evolution? [Progress Studies]

I don’t know. But I suspect evolution, if only by default. I think we’re headed toward collapse or revolution, perhaps revolution via evolution (if the latter isn’t merely verbal trickery).

What do those words even mean? A first crack:

• Evolution: The basic structure of the human world is OK and we can achieve progress by tweaking parameters of existing practices and institutions.
• Revolution: The structure of the human revolution is fundamentally flawed and we need to devise new practices and institutions.
• Revolution by evolution: When you tweak enough parameters long enough you end up with fundamental change. By implication, mere revolution implies a quick break (e.g. Russian 1917).

Of course we can look to history to see what has happened in the past and then see which cases best fit the present moment. Of course the present moment isn’t a single monolithic phenomenon, so different cases will fit different phenomena. What of the overall envelope?

Where does the Progress Studies movement stand on this issue? I’d think it varies from person to person, but that it’s mostly up in the air because the question hasn’t been explicitly proposed and thrashed out. It smells to me as though the Progress Studies movement leans toward evolution, if only by default. It’s much easier to think about modifying what we’ve got than creating something new (from the ground up).

How do we increase innovation in scientific research? Do we offer more prizes, award more grants to younger investigators, more long-term grants, reduce the burden of reporting overhead? Those things preserve the current structure, but tweak the parameters. Dismantle the current university research structure and replace it with…whatever…a thousand blooming flowers? That’s rebuilding from the ground up.

Tyler Cowen is a major figure in Progress Studies. The blog he runs with Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution, is subtitled: “Small Steps Toward a Much Better World”. That sounds like parameter tweaking. But how much and for how long (forever)? Is that much better world like the present one, but in color rather than black and white, or is it fundamentally different (3D vs. 2D)? Cowen puts exponential growth at the center of his thinking, as many economists do. And why not? If the pie grows faster than the population, then there’s more for everyone. Back in 1972 the Club of Rome famously proposed that there are limits to growth. Is that a few parameter tweaks away from Cowen’s position or is it a different world?

What about global warming? Collapse of the world order, fundamental change, or can we weather the storm by vigorous parameter tweaking? Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 is set in a world where the seas have risen 50 feet in two major “pulses” (that have taken place before the story begins). There have been technological advances, but no space travel (none depicted in the book), and no human level artificial intelligence. But the basic political and economic structure of the world appears to be the same as our current world, hence Robinson can tell a story that is a replay of the 2008 financial crisis in a different key, with different instruments, and a different ending – spoiler coming! … [the banks get nationalized]. Can we get there from here by parameter tweaking? Though Robinson doesn’t depict it, there seems to be plenty of room in that world for seasteading and charter cities? Assume there is. Could they give rise to a revolutionary restructuring of the world order?

Consider the first quarter of the 20th century. Everything changed. The arts saw abstraction and surrealism begin to displace figurative painting and drawing. Atonality enters classical music while jazz (swing) revolutionizes popular music. The modern novel is born: Ulysses (1922), The Sun Also Rises (1926), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), In Search of Lost Time (1871-1922), and so forth. Then we have the Russian Revolution (1917-1923), and World War I (1914-1918), which reworked the map of Europe. The automobile emerged as a major mode of transportation and motion pictures and radio became major forms of popular entertainment (and news). And so forth.

Can we get from the world of 1900 to that of 1930 by nothing more than tweaking parameter of things that existed in 1900? I don’t think so. Is the current world undergoing changes of a similar magnitude?

At this point we’re far afield from the questions of scientific and technological innovation (fueling entrepreneurial activity) that seem to be driving Progress Studies. Those questions are important ones, but they aren’t the only ones. They’re no more than a beginning.

Some videos that that need to be seen together: From Progress Studies to Progress, OR: Breaking out of the mid-20th century optimism bubble

War Boys contemplating the future.

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I'm gathering these things together in one place because I think they belong together. I'm working on it. I'm thinking.

Last year Patrick Collison and and Tyler Cowen sat down with Mark Zuckerberg to talk about accelerating human progress. Here's a link to the video (where you'll also find a link to a transcript of the conversation). Here's my post about the conversation, which confines itself to an exchange between Tyler and Cowen about the narrowness of the academy.

Collison and Cowen articulate the goal of Progress Studies (from their 2019 article in The Atlantic):

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.

What is required to plan and execute a course of treatment?

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I've been thinking about human progress for decades (the work on cultural evolution I began with David Hays years ago). I'm all for it. But this current push feels to me like it's encapsulated in a bubble of mid-20th century optimism typified in this 1966 video in which Walt Disney presents his vision to an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT) (starting at about 6:30):

From Uncle Walt's pitch:

Everything in E.P.C.O.T will be dedicated to the happiness of the people who live, work, and play here, and those who come here from around the world to visit our living showcase.

We don't presume to know all the answers. In fact, we’re counting on the cooperation of American industry to provide their very best thinking during the planning and the creation of our Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. And most important of all, when E.P.C.O.T has become a reality and we find the need for technologies that don’t even exist today, it’s our hope that E.P.C.O.T will stimulate American industry to develop new solutions that will meet the needs of people expressed right here in this experimental community.

Yes, Disney had his limitations, but count me among those who think he was a great man. The world he lived in is gone and his optimism is not adequate to the world we're living in now. That disparity is visible in two movies from 2015, Brad Bird's Tomorrowland, encased in Disneyesque optimism and George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road, which I read as a mad and carnavalesque dash to escape dystopian visions of the future. I've written about the confrontation of those visions in War Boys in Tomorrowland, or: Mad Max Meets Disney. I'm currently thinking, but have not yet written about, that Kim Stanley Robinson may be pointing a way out of that bubble. In some ways it seems to me that his New York 2140 depicts a future in which the War Boys set out to reclaim Tomorrowland.

But, you may object, Robinson writes fiction. Yes, he does. And he knows it. As he remarked in a recent article in The New Yorker, "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." Disney's EPCOT was a fiction, and it didn't get built. The future he longed for and envisioned was a fiction. Robinson's fiction has been tempered by what has happened since then, the facturing of the American body politic, the OPEC oil embargo of 1973, the disastrous wars in the Middle East, the financial collapse of 2008, and so on.

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Ross Douthat is arguing that the advanced nations are steeped in post 1969 decadence and decline. 1969? The Apollo moon landing. He sees that as a high point. Since then we've just been marking time, going nowhere. He discusses his current book, The Decadent Society, in these two videos:

THAT's what Progress Studies had to contend with: How do we avert the collapse of world civilization?

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Progress Studies to the rescue?

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?

Jonathan Franzen urges us to accept the near inevitability of a climate apocalypse....and the interwebs are not happy.

Jonathan Franzen, What If We Stopped Pretending?, The New Yorker. The deck:

The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it.

And so:

Psychologically, this denial makes sense. Despite the outrageous fact that I’ll soon be dead forever, I live in the present, not the future. Given a choice between an alarming abstraction (death) and the reassuring evidence of my senses (breakfast!), my mind prefers to focus on the latter. [...] Things will get very bad, but maybe not too soon, and maybe not for everyone. Maybe not for me.

Some of the denial, however, is more willful. The evil of the Republican Party’s position on climate science is well known, but denial is entrenched in progressive politics, too, or at least in its rhetoric. The Green New Deal, the blueprint for some of the most substantial proposals put forth on the issue, is still framed as our last chance to avert catastrophe and save the planet, by way of gargantuan renewable-energy projects.

Let's imagine:

As a non-scientist, I do my own kind of modelling. I run various future scenarios through my brain, apply the constraints of human psychology and political reality, take note of the relentless rise in global energy consumption (thus far, the carbon savings provided by renewable energy have been more than offset by consumer demand), and count the scenarios in which collective action averts catastrophe. The scenarios, which I draw from the prescriptions of policy-makers and activists, share certain necessary conditions.

The first condition is that every one of the world’s major polluting countries institute draconian conservation measures, shut down much of its energy and transportation infrastructure, and completely retool its economy. [...]

The actions taken by these countries must also be the right ones. Vast sums of government money must be spent without wasting it and without lining the wrong pockets. Here it’s useful to recall the Kafkaesque joke of the European Union’s biofuel mandate, which served to accelerate the deforestation of Indonesia for palm-oil plantations, and the American subsidy of ethanol fuel, which turned out to benefit no one but corn farmers.

Finally, overwhelming numbers of human beings, including millions of government-hating Americans, need to accept high taxes and severe curtailment of their familiar life styles without revolting. They must accept the reality of climate change and have faith in the extreme measures taken to combat it. They can’t dismiss news they dislike as fake. They have to set aside nationalism and class and racial resentments. They have to make sacrifices for distant threatened nations and distant future generations. They have to be permanently terrified by hotter summers and more frequent natural disasters, rather than just getting used to them. Every day, instead of thinking about breakfast, they have to think about death.

Moreover:

Our resources aren’t infinite. Even if we invest much of them in a longest-shot gamble, reducing carbon emissions in the hope that it will save us, it’s unwise to invest all of them. Every billion dollars spent on high-speed trains, which may or may not be suitable for North America, is a billion not banked for disaster preparedness, reparations to inundated countries, or future humanitarian relief. Every renewable-energy mega-project that destroys a living ecosystem—the “green” energy development now occurring in Kenya’s national parks, the giant hydroelectric projects in Brazil, the construction of solar farms in open spaces, rather than in settled areas—erodes the resilience of a natural world already fighting for its life. [...]

All-out war on climate change made sense only as long as it was winnable. Once you accept that we’ve lost it, other kinds of action take on greater meaning. Preparing for fires and floods and refugees is a directly pertinent example. But the impending catastrophe heightens the urgency of almost any world-improving action.

Still, we must hope:

And then there’s the matter of hope. If your hope for the future depends on a wildly optimistic scenario, what will you do ten years from now, when the scenario becomes unworkable even in theory? Give up on the planet entirely? To borrow from the advice of financial planners, I might suggest a more balanced portfolio of hopes, some of them longer-term, most of them shorter.

Long-term hope? Read Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140. It imagines a world in which the seas have risen 50 feet; lower Manhattan is flooded. There's a financial crisis–a replay of 2008–and this time we-the-people win.

Needless to say, Twitter is all abuzz w/ anti-Franzen sentiment.

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.

Lessons learned at sea: compromise, tolerance, mutual aid [NY2140]

Andrew Revkin had an interesting oped in the NYTimes yesterday (29 Aug 2019), Greta Thunberg and the Lessons of the Sea. He explains: "n 1978, when I was 22, six years older than Greta is now, I serendipitously had the chance to sign on as a crew member on a 55-foot-long, partially home-built sailboat, the Wanderlust, that was circumnavigating the planet." It's the first lesson that caught my attention:

Our first long crossing, from Auckland to Sydney, Australia, was the stormiest. We spent eight out of 11 days on the Tasman Sea pounding into chaotic gale-driven seas. Without GPS or an autopilot, we had taken on extra crew members to handle the night watches. In cramped conditions day after day, everyone aboard felt unfairly overtaxed. But you learn to smooth rough edges, tamp hard feelings and not hoard the Hershey bars. Despite a no-smoking rule, the skipper, Lon Bubeck, even allowed the two chain smoking New Zealanders to light up — in the inflatable dinghy trailing behind.

This gets to my first point. In hashing out climate policy, accommodation is vital among those who have the same goal but differ on how to reach it. I’m thinking here, for instance, of clean energy advocates who disagree about the role of nuclear power in reducing emissions. It’s vital to acknowledge the inevitability, even desirability, of having a diversity of climate solutions.

Why'd that interest me? Perhaps for that last paragraph? Not really, though color me sympathetic. It's the first paragraph. Why?

Because it speaks to Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140 – and here I'm thinking of yesterday's post, "Social change in New York 2140 [revolution revised and revisited]", especially the addendum. Why'd he crank it up to eleven on the sea level, a 50 foot rise when that's not what the models show? Because that would cause more stress, and more living in close quarters, like on an ocean-going yacht. The book is centered on one building, the Met Life Tower. All the central characters live there. Quarters are cramped, for everyone. Some of those characters are making a pretty good living, surely upper middle class whatever that would be in 2140, perhaps even in Tyler Cowen's top 10% to 15% (scan down to the "Society" section of that post; he's not imagining the cramped quarters of a post-climate change world). But they live in one-room apartments and they take their meals in a large communal dining hall.

Stern discipline.

Tough love?

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.

Farhad Manjoo sees revolution on the horizon, around the bend, and at the end of the tunnel

Really?

Here's his NYTimes column, "C.E.O.s Should Fear a Recession. It Could Mean Revolution." He's been reflecting on the recent announcement by the Business Roundtable (CEO's of 200 megacorporations):

that the era of soulless corporatism was over. The Business Roundtable once held that a corporation’s “paramount duty” was to its shareholders. Now, the Roundtable is singing a new, more inclusive tune. A corporation, it says, should balance the interests of its shareholders with those of other “stakeholders,” including customers, employees, suppliers and local communities.

He think's that's empty PR nonsense. I think he's right.

He believes they're scared: "A recession looms". And they may well be scared. But revolution? He points out that, while many people lost their homes and rural areas were devastated in the wake of the 2008 financial implosion,

Corporate profits grew as if there were no tomorrow, but they didn’t trickle down to everyone else. Instead, dividends and stock buybacks got bigger while C.E.O. pay went through the rose-gold roof. The rest of us got smartphones, money-losing conveniences — Uber, WeWork, Netflix and meal delivery apps — and mountains of student debt.

What happens when the next recession hits? Who knows, but we'll find out soon enough. But here's what Manjoo thinks/hopes:

And so, when recession comes, we’ll be right to ask: Was that it? Is this the best it gets? And if so, isn’t it time to go full Elizabeth Warren — to make some fundamental, radical changes to how the American economy works, so that we might prevent decades more of growth that disproportionally benefits the titans among us?

And, so he thinks, we the people will revolt. Just how we'll do that, he doesn't say.

Now, as some of you may know, Kim Stanley Robinson wrote a book about that, New York 2140. As the title indicates, it's set in the future, a very different world where the seas have risen 50 feet. But the institutional structure of that (imagined) world is much like that of our current world. Disaster strikes and millions of people are saddled with housing debt they can't pay. They go on rents strikes and so forth and this time the banks get nationalized as a condition of bailout (p 602): "Finance was now for the most part a privately operated public utility." The revolt worked. Perhaps. Robinson ends the book at that point, so we don't know how things worked out. 

But I don't see that happening now. I don't think the organizational infrastructure is in place to make it happen.

Alas.

But who knows?

Kisangani 2150, some materials for plotting routes to the future

Back on July 10 I announced the (mere) possibility of writing a book that takes Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 as its point of departure. Call it Kisangani 2150 (reconstructing civilization on a new model). I’m still liking the idea. Will I actually write the novel? As I said at the end of the post, probably not. But perhaps I’ll do something, maybe even some kind of collaborative web project. But who knows?

But “Kisangani 2150” is a useful rubric (a word, I believe, that I have from the late Dick Macksey) under which to gather materials about the future – something I think about a lot. By materials I mean both my own thoughts, but also the thoughts of others. The idea, as I indicated in that first post, is to imagine a post climate apocalypse world more or less within the parameters Robinson established in his novel, but nonetheless along somewhat different lines. After all, he set his novel in New York City. Kisangani is in the central Congo, a very different world. What were they likely doing in Kisangani when the events of New York 2140 transpired? And once those events had (quite possibly) altered the course of history, what would have been happening in Kisangani ten years after?

It’s the level of detail that’s important, down to the thoughts of individual people. Since Robinson’s already done such a good job of imaginatively realizing a possible future I can’t see any point in my trying to do it again from scratch. So, take that world as given, and work within and around it, from some other perspective.

Anyhow, I’ve been thinking about the Kisangani 2150 Project, as I’m now calling it. What materials do I have readily to hand?

Let me tell you about Zeal

There’s my friend Zeal. I wrote about him in 3 Quarks Daily: World Island: Zeal means hope [The World’s Got Talent]. He’s had this idea he calls World Island, which I’ve blogged about. You can find some documents at Scribd, PDFs of two PowerPoint presentations and the executive summary of the proposal we’d submitted to the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation (aka GIPEC). He even submitted a proposal to the MacArthur Foundation fairly recently, though I was no longer working on the project at that time. World Island? Think of it as a combination of the best features of the United Nations, Disney World, a kid’s rumpus room, the trading floor at the Chicago Board of Trade, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Japanese exhibit at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago.

I worked closely with Zeal for, say, three, four, five, years and have kept in touch with him. I went with him to many meetings with all kinds of people, people who were interested in the World island project. Many of them are the sorts of folks who’d be working at building the kind of world I’m imagining for Kisangani 2150. And they’ve got friends, children, cousins, nieces, and so forth. So I’m imagining chains of resonance emanating from Zeal in the early 21st century, rippling out over the next century, and then coalescing in Kisangani in the middle of the 22nd century.

How did I meet Zeal? At a meeting at Columbia University. I was introduced to him by Takeshi Utsumi, a Japanese American who has spent three or four decades traveling in the developing world on behalf of what he calls the Global University System. The idea is to funnel Japanese development money two centers in the developing world interested in distance education. Maybe one of those centers is in Kisangani, now. Maybe it persists through 2150. Who knows?

And then there’s Paul Sladkus and his Good News Broadcasting. More connections to conjure with.

Tyler Cowen’s Yonas project

Tyler Cowen is an economist who blogs at Marginal Revolution. He also travels a great deal. Last year he traveled to Ethiopia – in Africa, but a different part of Africa from Kisangani – where he met a man he calls Yonas (not his real name). He decided to donate the royalties of a recent book to Yonas:

So having written Stubborn Attachments, I now wish to live the book, so to speak. I am donating the royalties from the book to a man I met in Ethiopia on a factfinding trip earlier this year, I shall call him Yonas [not his real name].

He is a man of modest means, but he aspires to open his own travel business. He has a young and growing family, and also a mother to support. He is also hoping to buy a larger house to accommodate his growing family. In his life, he faces stresses – financial and otherwise — that I have never had to confront. When I visited his home, his wife had just had a new baby girl, but Yonas’s income depends on the vicissitudes of tourist demand, and by American standards it is in any case low.

I met Yonas when he served as my travel guide around Lalibela. I spent a full day with him, touring the underground, rock-hewn stone churches of that city. He struck me as reliable, conscientious, well-informed, and I was impressed by the quality of his English, which he had acquired on his own. He also took me by his village to meet his family, and they performed a coffee ceremony for me, cooking freshly ground coffee beans (it was delicious, something I had never imagined). Based on my impressions from that day, I believe an investment in Yonas will help his entire family and perhaps his broader community as well. Since then, he and I have kept in touch by email.

As another way of “living the content” of my book, I will be sending the funds via Stripe, Stripe Press being the publisher of this book. Stripe, a payments company, really has made it easy to send money across borders, thereby helping to knit the whole world together. I hope someday Yonas is able to apply for incorporation through Atlas, a Stripe service that helps entrepreneurs incorporate in Delaware, with his travel business, or with whatever else he may do.

What if Yonas succeeds in establishing his travel business? What if it is wildly successful and establishes offices throughout Africa, perhaps even in Kisangani?

* * * * *

You get the idea. On the ground NOW, but one can imagine plausible chains of resonance reaching to Kisangani in 2150.

Kisangani 2150, or Reconstructing Civilization on a New Model

You see what I’m doing, don’t you? Kisangani 2150 is obviously a play on New York 2140; it’s a science fiction novel set ten years after New York 2140. Why ten years? That’s obvious, isn’t it? To give the developments at the end of New York 2140 time to settle down, unfold. As I recall things were a bit up in the air.

But why New York 2140 at all?

Because I’m interested in the future, I want to see how things might work out. Kim Stanley Robinson did such a nice job with New York 2140 that I figured, why not take advantage of his work, why not build on it? He figured that worldwide climate disruption is inevitable. Alas, I’m inclined to agree with him on that. At this point I simply don’t see how we can avoid it. Oh, I suppose I could imagine that we come up with some miracle technological fix, maybe even some form of climate engineering. But I don’t really believe that. Nor do I believe that we’re going to get carbon dioxide under control in time. And even if we did that’s hardly all that needs to be done, is it? No I fear that disaster is inevitable and Robinson has done such a nice job of imagining a post disaster world.

Still, I’d like to imagine a somewhat different world, one not dominated by the Western institutions that still rule the roost in the future that KSR has so richly imagined. Yet he has laid the grounds for that in his book. Here we are at the very end of the novel, in a nightclub deep underground called Mezzrow’s, pp. 611-612:

Everyone in the room is now grooving to the tightest West African pop any of them have ever heard. The guitar players’ licks are like metal shavings coming off a lathe. The vocalists are wailing, the horns are a freight train. [...] The other horn players instantly get better, the guitar players even more precise and intricate. The vocalists are grinning and shouting duets in harmony. It’s like they’ve all just plugged into an electrical jack through their shoes...Crowd goes crazy, dancing swells the room.

That’s the stuff. But it's only one scene, and at the end. Surely that must have been doing on all over the place. The world KSR was imagining couldn't have happened without that kind of party action under-girding everything. Because that's how WE are. So let's bring it to the foreground. Kisangani 2150 is going to concentrate on that, on music, Jes Grew, on the Mystic Jewels for the Propagation of Grace, Right Living, and Saturday Night through Historic Intervention by Any Means Necessary. A counter narrative.

And that’s why I want to center this narrative on Kisangani. I figure that the West is pretty much played out. It’s not going to reconsider, regroup, and renew. It’s just going to pile it higher and deeper, more of the same, hence the world Kim Stanley Robinson imagined, one still ruled by high finance, but with a subversive digital underground to get the dirty done, to flip the switch, open up the can of worms that’ll eat the remains and dissolve them into fertilizer for the new.

Just where’s this NEW going to come from? Why not Africa? That’s where we came from the first time out. Why not give it another spin. Hence Kisangani.

Kisangani? It’s deep inland, in the central Congo. Joseph Conrad used it as the Inner Station for Heart of Darkness, so it’s got THAT particular brand of mythic resonance. New York brings the world order down in 2140 and Kisangani initiates a new one in 2150.

What’s this new world about? Good question. I don’t know. All’s I know that it’s coming from a deep groove. Maybe it’ll cross the world of Jivometrics with that of Luxury Communism. Who knows?

What about Wakanda? Right continent. The movie was cool. But its wealth, after all, is based on mineral wealth, a rare and powerful mineral that just happens to concentrated in one place. That’s the wrong vibe. I want the wealth concentrated in the people. Besides, as far as I can tell, the government is very traditional and fundamentally authoritarian. Perhaps throw in a bit of gross national happiness from Bhutan.

Think of Nollywood too. Oh yeah, think of Nollywood. As of 2013 it is the third largest movie industry in the world (after Hollywood and Bollywood). [Now second?] It’s African, centered in Nigeria. And it’s pretty much native video and digital. The old celluloid-based film industry never really got established. But when cheap electronic technology became available in the 1990s a new home-oriented business took off. A new start.

That’s why Africa. And while Lagos, Nigeria, is on the Atlantic shore, where it’s vulnerable to the ocean rise, Kisangani is inland.

Will I actually write Kisangani 2150? Probably not. Will I think about it? Maybe cough up some fragments or three?

Stay tuned.

I'm collecting posts relevant to this theme under the Kisangani2150 link.

New York 2140, Back to the Future: A working paper

Title above. Links, abstract, contents, and introduction below.

Academia.edu:
https://www.academia.edu/39720382/New_York_2140_Back_to_the_Future
SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3412134
Research Gate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334112757_New_York_2140_Back_to_the_Future

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.24693.01768

Abstract: An extended consideration of Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 (2017). The story is a heist plot engineered by residents of the Met Life Building in the year 2140, when the seas had risen 50 feet. Topics: Fiction and reality, patterns, transportation infrastructure, formal order encompassing narrative chaos, politics, from the micro politics the Met Life Tower, to New York City politics, and beyond that to the nation and the world financial system. Includes photographs of the current New York skyline in which you can see the Met Life Building as it currently exists.

Contents

Patterns: Truth and fiction, cause, agency, and free will – 2
A post-apocalyptic heist: Commentary on a passage from New York 2140 – 5
The New York skyline, two views – 10
New York 2140, Some notes about form and structure – 12
Is the 3D transportation geometry of New York 2140 feasible? – 16
Toward a narrative counterpoint for New York 2140 – 18
The Persistence of political forms and the Emperor’s New Clothes – 20
Through a 3D Glass Starkly, New York 2140 Redux – 22
Postscript: I think I’ve figured out how [to|I] think about space travel – 28
The Met Life Tower, a last view – 30

Patterns: Truth and fiction

When I saw the cover of New York 2140 I was intrigued: Lower Manhattan, but flooded! But then it’s 2140 and the seas have risen. I get it. So I got it. The world hadn’t ended, and those tall buildings in the background, what about them? Someone’s prospering, who?

What if anything could this work of fiction tell me about the future? I know, fiction, made up. But I’d read Robinson’s Mars trilogy, so I knew he made things up with care. What I really wanted to know what’s going to happen, but I knew that that’s not knowable. Oh, astronomers can predict the future movements of the bodies in our solar system with great accuracy. But that’s a strictly mechanical system, a bit complex, perhaps, but only a bit. As these things go, still pretty simple.

The earth’s climate is a mechanical system, too, but much more complex. Predicting the weather a week ahead of time is iffy. Predicting the climate a century hence, very very iffy. But we have to try. Because its heading toward us at a ferocious pace. We can’t avoid it. We’re going to have to live with it. But how?

Truth be told, the climate’s not completely mechanical. For the earth is covered with living creatures, all of whom are acted on by and who act on the climate system. We, of course, are among them. We create climate models so we can plan for the future. And we tell stories, such as the one Robinson tells in New York 2140.

Why tell stories? Entertainment, for sure. Escape, maybe, some of the time. But for truth as well. How can there be truth if it’s made up? Well there are truths and there are truths, and that’s a much larger discussion than I want to entertain here. Let’s be content with the observations that even stories that are made up have patterns within them. And those patterns may well prove true provided, of course, we are able properly to abstract them from the manifold details the author has assembled for us.

So I read the book, looking for patterns. I wrote some of them up in my blog, New Savanna, and at 3 Quarks Daily. That’s what’s in this document, most of those notes.

An online group discussion

I also participated in an online group reading of New York 2140 during July and August of 2018. It was lead by Bryan Alexander who, by his own account, is a “futurist, researcher, writer, speaker, consultant, and teacher, working in the field of how technology transforms education” and is currently a senior scholar at Georgetown University.

Here’s the initial post announcing the reading, giving some background, and laying out the reading schedule:

https://bryanalexander.org/book-club/our-online-book-clubs-next-reading-is-new-york-2140/

All of the posts are collected at this link:

https://bryanalexander.org/tag/newyork2140/

What’s in the rest of this document

A post-apocalyptic heist: Commentary on a passage from New York 2140: A bit of explication de texte, where I take a single passage from the book (two thirds of the way through) and use it as a lens through which to view the book as a whole. One of the characters, Mutt, observes that they’re plotting “a fucking heist movie!” There’s also talk of the Met Life tower as “a kind of actor network that can do thing”, where “actor network” is a term from Bruno Latour.

New York skyline, two views: Two different photographs of the New York skyline, from different points of view. The Met Life Tower is visible in each, though just barely visible in the second photo. I point out other landmark buildings.

New York 2140, Some notes about form and structure: The book is divited into eight parts, each of which is divided into eight (six cases) or nine (two cases) parts. The main parts have thematic names while their component parts are named after the central characters in the book, all of whom live in the Met Life Tower. I outline this structure, which isn’t laid out in the book itself. This rigorous modular structure plays agains the opportunistic chaos that pervades the plot. The book a full of quotations located between the various sections.

Is the 3D transportation geometry of New York 2140 feasible?: The city below 50th street is under 50 feet of water. People move about by small boats and by walkable skybridges. I argue that this isn’t a feasible transportation system.

Toward a narrative counterpoint for New York 2140: But just how DID the residents of the Met Life Tower create such a strong sense of community? Robinson doesn’t really show us, but he does provide a hint in the very last chapter.

The Persistence of political forms and the Emperor’s New Clothes: The politics of New York 2140 mirror those in America after the financial crisis of 2008, but with a different ending in the works. But how do you get all those many scattered pockets of protest to rise up together? Robinson provides a very specific answer to that question.

Through a 3D Glass Starkly, New York 2140 Redux: About Hurricane Sandy, the future, the nature of science fiction (about the present) and just how long is the present? A couple of seconds, a year, a decade, a century? Events unfold in nested waves on various time scales. Can the patterns in fiction nonetheless be true, with their truth in some sense depending on the skillful interweaving of fact and imagination? More metaphysics.

Postscript: I think I’ve figured out how [to/I] think about space travel: No, mostly not about New York 2140, though I mention it. But it’s about the future, one very different from the present. We’ll be in a post-Singularity world, not the fantasy nonsense of superintelligent machines, but a world in which our understanding has gone up a level as, say, Newton’s understanding surpassed.

The Met Life Tower, a last view: Just what it says, a last photograph of the building.