No Exit?

One of the people who blurbed Walkaway enthusiastically is William Gibson, whose own most recent book, The Peripheral covers many of the same themes that Walkaway does. The rise of extreme inequality described by Piketty and others, as the super-rich become so different from everyone else as nearly to be a distinct species. Accelerating technological change so that there are no jobs, or only very bad ones, for most people. A post-industrial landscape, in which the wreckage of the industrial era provides valuable resources for those in the new era.

Yet the two books draw radically different conclusions from roughly similar premises. Gibson’s book is a dystopia, in which the rich are so powerful as to be, effectively, beyond challenge. The only possibilities for agency on the part of anyone else are in the interstices, the implied spaces within the structures of the internecine conflicts of the elites. Walkaway, in contrast, is a book about the beginnings of a utopia. The characters frequently quote variants of Alasdair Gray’s dictum that one should “work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation.” Above is a detail from a print by Gray, based on his frontispiece for Book Four of Lanark. It displays the forces through which the state, “foremost of the beasts of earth for pride,” maintains its domination, with the machineries of war to the left, and those of law and thought to the right. At the end of Walkaway, Doctorow’s characters live in a society which appear to have mostly escaped from both kinds of domination.

So why the different outcomes? Of course, neither Gibson nor Doctorow is setting out to predict the future, and each of their proposed worlds is an extrapolation of tendencies that exist in the present. Yet these extrapolations are disciplined – the surface matter of the story is supported by a vast, submerged and semi-visible mass of arguments about how society might change.

Gibson gives us two futures, one relatively close, the other several decades away. The first is a version of small-town America, where the economy has gotten much, much worse, so that the economy is based around illegal drug manufacture and homeland security. Fabbing has become cheap and easy, but its main disruptive impact is to make it hard for ordinary people to find work. The second is several decades on – most of the world’s population has died in a concatenation of environmental, epidemiological and political catastrophes called the “Jackpot,” leaving only the very rich, and those people who are useful to them. Nearly all the visible characters in the near future are ordinary people, trying to patch together a livelihood. Nearly all the people we see in the further future are the very rich and powerful and their immediate servants. The two futures are connected through a device that is never properly explained (the near future may be a very detailed simulation created in the far; it may be something else entirely) so that only information can pass backwards and forwards. The distance between the hyper-rich and everyone else which Gibson has been concerned with since the Tessier-Ashpools of the Sprawl trilogy has now become an ontological separation – the rich literally exist on a different order of being.

This is a world in which ordinary people have next to no agency of their own. Wilf Netherton – the viewpoint character in the further future – exists, as does more or less everyone else, on the sufferance of the rich. His status is somewhere between a higher servant and a member of a Hollywood entourage – able to enjoy relationships with the very rich, but valued primarily for his usefulness, and ultimately disposable. When his patron tells him that he has a drinking problem, and suggests he undergo treatment to fix it, he is terrified, since he has little choice but to do what pleases his better. The London that Netherton lives in is a fantastication of its current status – a tourist trap and playground for rich oligarchs and ‘klepts’ (members of kleptocratic clans), where the institutions of the City serve to make disorderly capitalism very slightly more ordinary, but are terrifying in their own right.

Doctorow’s future is not particularly pleasant for ordinary people either, but it offers many more possibilities. Again, there is a separation between the very rich (‘zottas’, since mere billions or trillions no longer serve to distinguish the truly rich from the merely affluent) and ordinary people. The former create their own secure and private enclaves, while the latter have to cope with the radical decline of regular employment, omnipresent surveillance, and a state that is increasingly willing to show the iron fist beneath the velvet glove. Yet it’s also possible to get away. The polluted world that the industrial age has left behind provides a lot of space for people who want simply to walk away from traditional society.

The toxic industrial spaces, which are exploited by the rich and their lackeys in The Peripheral (the plastic reef of the Sargasso sea is exploited by a scam masquerading as a radical body-alteration cult) provide openings, that Walkaway culture can flourish in. Fabbing allows people to turn the detritus of the industrial era into a new way of life, based around norms of solidarity and the pleasure that people get from contributing. Property is far less important in a world where people can more or less make what they need, and it’s easier to avoid conflict. If you don’t like what others are doing, you can just pick up and move elsewhere. The zottas don’t ever take really effective action against this emerging society, in part because they disagree among themselves, since some benefit from the innovations that emerge from the walkaways.

I think that the key difference between the worlds depicted in the two books is the possibility of exit. In Gibson’s book, there isn’t any exit – there is no way that one can get away from the rich and powerful. People who aren’t rich have no threat of exit because they are readily replaceable, either by other human beings or by robots (which are nearly ubiquitous). The best one can reasonably hope for is protection from a relatively benign member of the kleptocracy such as Netherton’s patron (and even then, one has to worry that he will change his mind, or grow bored, or suddenly decide that you need to radically reshape your life or ideas based on whatever new idea he’s just had). Doctorow’s book is all about exit, in the Albert Hirschman sense of the word (I don’t know whether he’s read Hirschman, but Exit, Voice and Loyalty is very relevant indeed. Doctorow’s book depicts a world in which two things are possible that are not possible in Gibson’s. First – one can create an attractive alternative society in a radically unequal world without being either squashed or suborned by the rich. Second, once this world has been created, one can move easily from regular society to the alternative.

If the two are possible, then everything else follows. If you are at the shitty end of the distribution in a radically unequal society, and your only possibilities are dead end jobs or unemployment, why not try something different, if that something different is available, and the people who have already tried it seem to be enjoying it? And if enough people try this, then it becomes impossible to maintain the machineries of oppression that Gray’s illustration depicts, since your hired coercers and indoctrinators are probably heading to the exit doors too.

Again, Doctorow’s book isn’t an exercise in predictive science – he’s not saying that things will be so. But he is saying, I think, that things could and should be so, or sort-of so. Walkaway is quite unashamedly a didactic book in the way that earlier books such as Homeland were didactic – he has a very clear message to get across. In conversations with Steve Berlin Johnson years ago, I came up with the term BoingBoing Socialism to refer to a specific set of ideas associated with Doctorow and the people around him – that free exchange of ideas unimpeded by intellectual property law and the like, together with transformative technologies of manufacture, could open up a path towards a radically egalitarian future. Unless I’m seriously mistaken (in which case I’m sure that Doctorow will tell me), Walkaway wants to do two things – to argue for why such a future might be attractive, and to suggest that something like this future could be feasible. Doctorow is very clearly picking up on a tradition of socialism present in Fourier, and (despite his animadversions against Fourier), Marx. The motivating notions of “maker culture” – that people find a profound satisfaction making things, and solving problems for their own sake, are not all that far from the young Marx’s arguments about labour and alienation. This passage explicating the Critique of the Gotha Program in Peter Frase’s Four Futures (which cites Doctorow’s books extensively) is as close to Doctorow as makes no difference.

Most of us are so accustomed to capitalist relations of production that it is hard to even imagine individuals who are not subordinated to the “division of labor.” We’re used to having bosses who devise plans and then instruct us to carry themn out; what Marx is suggesting is that it is possible to erase the barriers between thsoe who make plans for their own benefit and those who carry them out – which would of course mean erasing the distinction between those who manage the business and those who make it run.

But it also means something even more radical: erasing the distinction between what counts as a business and what counts as a collective leisure activity. Only in that situation might we find that “labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want.” In that case, work wouldn’t actually be work at all any more, it would be what we choose to do with our free time. … Marx’s critics have often turned this passage against him, portraying it as a hopelessly improbable utopia. What possible society could be so productive that humans are entirely liberated from having to perform some kind of involuntary and unpleasant kinds of labor? … widespread automation … could enact such a liberation or at least approach it – if, that is, we find a way to deal with the need to secure resources and energy without causing catastrophic ecological damage.

As Frase notes, the demise of wage labor “was once the dream of the Left.” Doctorow is reviving that dream.

The hard questions involve the possibility conditions for that dream. First, it may very well be that one can’t build an attractive alternative: that the utopia would crash, as others have in the past. Perhaps human beings aren’t cut out to behave in the appropriate ways enough of the time, or at scale. Indeed, one of the themes of Walkaway is that utopia is persistent and unavoidable hard work. Even drudgery can be made fun (as long as one is perpetually looking to improve and optimizing it), but cultivating the necessary habits of keeping stuff going without self-aggrandizement requires a lot of thought and introspection. Perhaps the informational demands are too high for a non-cash economy. One of the implications of a world of fabbing is that economic coordination may be less important than in the past, since large level exchange is less necessary. People can build a whole lot of what they need for themselves. Still, some mechanisms of coordination beyond distributed volunteering may be essential. Finally, it might be that abundance results in radically increased rather than decreased hierarchy (call this the A for Anything equilibrium).

It also may be that exit is far harder than it is in Walkaway. Doctorow depicts a world in which extreme inequality is coupled with high exit opportunities. The zottas take piecemeal action, but they never properly coordinate against Walkaway society until it’s too late. Yet as Gibson’s future suggests, it may be that the correlation goes the other way, so that the attractiveness and availability of exit are negatively correlated. The more unequal a world is, the more (putatively well informed) people at the bottom of the distribution would prefer another alternative, yet the less likely it is that such alternatives will be available, since the people at the top of the distribution will have forestalled or suborned most of the people who might otherwise have come up with one. None of the people in Gibson’s twinned futures are particularly happy, yet none can see any other possibilities.

Yet an exclusive focus on the plausible reasons why it Surely Could Never Work may obscure the value of Doctorow’s utopia. As per Erik Olin Wright, we don’t really know what the possibility conditions are in advance.

there is no map, and no existing social theory is sufficiently powerful to even begin to construct such a comprehensive representation of possible social destinations … Instead of the metaphor of a road map guiding us to a known destination, perhaps the best we can do is to think of the project of emancipatory social change as a voyage of exploration. We leave the well-known world with a compass that shows us the direction we want to go, and an odometer which tells us how far from the point of departure we have traveled, but without a map which lays out the entire route from the point of departure to the final destination.

and, as per Francis Spufford in a previous Crooked Timber seminar, we need a picture of what’s at the destination if we are to start even searching for it.

Finally, a point about rhetoric. If we’re deciding instead that, like all panaceas, wildly overpraised at first and then shrinking to the size of their true usefulness, Kantorovich’s insight has a future as something more modest, a tool of human emancipation good for some situations but not others – and aiming too for a more modest (and safer) politics that gains the more human world of our desires in pragmatic stages, which is what Cosma ends up with, and George Scialabba has found in the Nove-Albert-Schweikart nexus – then we have a presentational problem. It’s a lot easier to build a radical movement on a story of tranformation, on the idea of the plan that makes another world possible, than it is on a story of finding out the partial good and building upon it. The legitimacy of the Soviet experiment, and of the ecosystem of less barbarous ideas that turned out to tacitly depend upon it, lay in the perception of a big, bright, adjacent, obtainable, obvious, morally-compelling other way of doing things. Will people march if society inscribes upon its banners, ‘Watch out for the convexity constraints’? Will we gather in crowds if a speaker offers us all the utopia that isn’t NP-complete? Good luck with that. Good luck to all of us.

Good luck indeed. We’re all going to need it.