Chatter chatter bang bang

by Andrew Brown on April 27, 2017

This is a novel of ideas which proceeds through pages of earnest conversation interrupted by cataclysmic explosions or scarcely less cataclysmic fucks after which another set of characters take up another earnest conversation until the next explosion. Chatter chatter bang bang – and this time the magic car is taking us back to the late Sixties. The counterculture in Walkaway is a very recognisable enlargement of the world according to the Whole Earth Catalog, in which technology and computers and spontaneous co-operation will combine to deliver us from evil. You reach the better world by separating from the Evil Big Daddy world through a tunnel of music, sex and drugs and when you have made this journey of rebirth you build the new Jerusalem, a shining Shoreditch on a hill.

Since I am going to be rude about the ideas, it’s worth saying right now that the novel, is much more interesting than the world that it is set in, because the novel has a couple of complex and well realised characters, among them the heroine’s evil father. And the consideration of how you deal with the existential dread of a computer program which realises it’s a human being is science fiction at its best.

But the world in which this utopia is worked out has fatal problems.

Getting back to the Whole Earth Catalog is a necessary journey for today’s optimists. The big ideas of late Sixties northern California were the culmination of all the good big ideas of the preceding century, and they still provide our most powerful pictures of what a better world ought to look like. Right now, when we’re living in the first days of some much worse nations, we need to understand what went wrong with the old dreams that wound up with us here.

It was generally true back then that material scarcity was not a huge problem for young white North Americans and still less for Western Europeans. Even without inherited class privilege there was work if you wanted it, and adequate social security if you did not. There seemed to be more than enough of everything people really needed to go round. It turned out, with the oil shock and afterwards, that this was not true. But in the world of Walkaway, the problem of abundance has been definitively solved. There is nothing that cannot be made with the machinery which has somehow escaped the control of the square world – and, logically, once you have a device that can fabricate anything, given the blueprints, it can obviously fabricate copies of itself, which suggests that the end of scarcity must come almost all at once if it ever comes at all.

The model for this abundance is the digital world, where copying is almost friction free, unless friction is added by legal impediments. The consequences of that have not, however, been utopian, unless you regard iTunes and Facebook as part of utopia. Quite apart from the effects on the producers of art and artefacts of no longer getting paid, a world where no one need pay for software could not on its own satisfy everyone’s wants. What’s more, it turns out that software that isn’t paid for is only really good when it is used by the people who make it.

The web would not function for a second without free software; but the stuff which works well is produced by programmers for programmers. When it comes to interacting with people who have no interest in programming, money provides by far the most direct and accurate way of communicating the users’ preferences. To see the proof of this, you need only look at the general quality of IoS (where the writers expect to be paid by their users) against Android software – which makes far less money. For what it’s worth, I use android stuff very happily, but most of the bits that work well are funded by advertising, which brings its own problems. If all you’re doing is scratching your own itch, it is unlikely that this will relieve my discomfort.

This has implications for the Doctorow utopia. Universal fabbing devices would not in themselves solve all the problems of scarcity any more than the ubiquitous availability of computers and high quality free software mean that the normal user can make software that does what they want. The skills of design and engineering will remain choke points even when manufacturing is a mere detail of implementation. The history of the computer industry teaches us that there is a constant battle to commodify whatever is profitable, but that as soon as one thing is commodified, something else begins to yield vast profits to its controllers.

Walkaway is very self-consciously tied to an ideal of the hacker/maker culture which again has its roots in early seventies northern California. All of these ideas – the use of technology for individual freedom and empowerment – the power of the gift economy – the brilliance of lone hackers building things for love – the half-secret networks of those who truly understand and thus become the unacknowledged legislators of the world – can be found in Steven Levy’s Hackers, (published in 1984) and again, ten years later, in the early editions of Wired magazine. Yet look at Wired magazine today. Something huge went wrong and we still don’t entirely understand what. The great failing of this book is that it doesn’t much help us understand what went wrong, nor how to stop it happening again.

The liberal and optimistic idea which triumphed in the Sixties utopia is simple: if people are free to choose for themselves they will make good choices. The simple conservative reply is that in such cases people will choose badly. To quote Grace Slick, they will be “obscene lawless hideous dangerous dirty violent … and we are!”. One problem turned out to be that all these words were not merely satisfyingly frightening to parents. They have real and unpleasant meanings which no one should celebrate. So the conservative concludes that people can’t be trusted with freedom and need wise guardians and to protect them from themselves.

Ah but, the liberal returns: we can learn from our mistakes. We can even learn from our parents’ mistakes. And, in any case, who is going to guard the wise guardians? Human beings may be unfitted for freedom, but they are still more unfitted to exercise power. This is the fundamental argument for democracy and is at least strong enough to ensure that neither side can ever triumph in the long run, however strong their evidence appears to be at any given moment.

But there is another argument against the liberty of desire. This isn’t about the direction of our appetites but about their force. Suppose the problem is not so much that our appetites are disordered because we want the wrong things as that they are too strong and too little inhibited however they are directed. Greed is not good, ever. Insatiable wants cannot be satisfied by any amount of abundance, so the idea that we should satisfy them all is inherently flawed.

One aspect of this is that some of the things I want are positional goods. My possession of them requires you to be dispossessed. The traditional line on that, which I think Doctorow follows, is that everyone should excel at something and then all will have prizes – but this rather misses the satisfaction offered by positional goods, which is precisely that other people think they are enviable. The attention of strangers is perhaps the most obvious positional good, since its supply will always be rationed, and it is satisfying only to the degree that others can’t have it. Being Kim Kardashian must be almost entirely pointless (apart from the money) but try to imagine the still greater futility of being the Kardashian whom nobody knows – Trevor, perhaps, or Beatrice.

I know a man who realised in early adulthood that he was never going to be best in the world at any of the things he was good at, but for a while soothed the demands of his ego by thinking that he was best in the world at the combined event of solving Times Crosswords and playing chess (he was actually a GM at that time) . But even here success requires others to fail, although in a competition they have no idea they’ve entered. And many of the positional goods that people lust after gain in desirability by being more widely desired. So most of those appetites are never going to be satisfied.

Doctorow understands this very well but he confines the problem to the old, square world: the bad guys, the “zotta rich”, are far more vivid and interesting in their insatiable appetites than the heroes are. But the bad guys are all confined to the world outside the walkaway, and this is the central flaw of the book’s optimism, because in our own timeline the zottas emerged from the counterculture rather than the square world it thought it was rejecting. Steve Jobs and Jann Wenner were world class assholes empowered by the idealism around them. The libertarian hacker culture gave rise to Uber, to Facebook, and to Peter Thiel. 1

The important point is that any better culture we try to build will need defences against the rise of such people from among the good guys. This may not be possible. That was certainly the view of John Milton, who knew a thing or two about paradise.

For though it were granted us by divine indulgence to be exempt from all that can be harmfull to us from without, yet the perversnesse of our folly is so bent, that we should never lin hammering out of our owne hearts, as it were out of a flint, the seeds and sparkles of new misery to our selves, till all were in a blaze againe. And no marvell if out of our own hearts, for they are evill but ev’n out of those things which God meant us, either for a principall good, or a pure contentment, we are still hatching and contriving upon our selves matter of continuall sorrow and perplexitie.

But in the spirit of the Whole Earth Catalog, let’s maintain we can do better than that, and we can learn and improve our social institutions. This is a moral and political task, not a technological one, and it looks even larger in Walkaway’s world where all the big technological problems have been solved.

1 Bill Gates is an interesting counterexample, both because he started off rich and because he seems genuinely to have humanised and grown in sympathy as he has aged.

{ 15 comments }

1

Matt 04.27.17 at 6:19 pm

Even in the Space Opera Magic, Unobtainium-Grade utopian post-scarcity of Iain M. Banks’ Culture series there remain positional goods. Only some people are famous. Only some people can attend a live concert by a famous composer. But deeply fretting that you’re not famous for anything after all other frets are pre-empted seems like a First World Problem dialed up to 11. What fraction of humans would actually feel that way? I’d love to live in a world good enough that we can resolve the question empirically.

Is mortality optional in Walkaway, like in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom or in the Culture? I can’t quite tell from blurbs I’ve read about it so far and I haven’t had a chance to read the book itself. Mortality seems like the last great monster after the monsters of scarcity and rivalry are gone or at least diminished to pocket-size.

I don’t know how Walkaway handles it but my main worries about a fabbers-everywhere post-scarcity world revolve around violence rather than positional goods, shoddy software, or ennui after most people realize they have to make a purpose rather than getting assigned one. Sometimes a man shoots his soon-to-be-ex wife and her family, then turns the gun on himself. In a world with fabbers everywhere, the rage-killer’s handgun could be a cruise missile. The Culture solved violent crime by having machines that are much smarter, faster, and more reliable than biologicals surveil everything and intervene within microseconds when necessary. Humanoids weren’t really in charge any more. Some people find that creepy; my objection is more that it doesn’t seem possible with real-world physics.

2

Paul Davis 04.27.17 at 8:31 pm

Getting back to the Whole Earth Catalog is a necessary journey for today’s optimists. The big ideas of late Sixties northern California were the culmination of all the good big ideas of the preceding century, and they still provide our most powerful pictures of what a better world ought to look like. Right now, when we’re living in the first days of some much worse nations, we need to understand what went wrong with the old dreams that wound up with us here.

This is insightful, but I missed the part where this analysis took place. Well, it seemed that to me.

3

Andrew Brown 04.28.17 at 5:51 am

The nearest this comes to analysis is Milton; well, him and the idea that the problem is intemperance of desire. I think a better and more human world would have to start from the recognition that self-realisation can be a bad thing; some of the selves thus realised should not be brought into the world.

Matt’s point about violence is a good one, which the book dodges. There is force backed up by the credible threat of greater violence in the Walkaway world, but all the real killing comes from the bad guys. And (spoiler alert) the heroes conquer death by uploading themselves into the cloud. This raises a problem that I haven’t seen tackled elsewhere — if you have become a set of programs in the cloud, why shouldn’t there be multiple instances of you running simultaneously? and what would that mean?

It’s worth noting that among all the terrible weapons available to the evil squares of “Default”, there is none that can knock out the power supply to the walkaway’s cloud. That knowledge has apparently been lost since the wars of the early 21st century.

4

MFB 04.28.17 at 9:02 am

Hmmm, so Doctorow is essentially plagiarising the end of Mona Lisa Overdrive? Well, that’s interesting, but if I were uploaded as software and someone didn’t like me, they would probably not find it difficult to install malware into the system, or simply delete me. It’s not a solution which can really be attractive to anyone except people who take the Singularity seriously, and I wouldn’t want to spend eternity with people like that.

5

Maria 04.28.17 at 10:33 am

It is not plagiarising to write about the same topic as another writer (indeed, as many other writers – google ‘rapture of the nerds’) has.

Doctorow asks a couple of your questions, MFB, in Walkaway, and comes up with answers to them I’ve not seen elsewhere, and some other questions, too. So, far from plagiarising (and it is really not ok to throw that accusation around so lightly), I think he’s written something you might enjoy reading, if you are interested in this stuff.

6

NickS 04.28.17 at 3:35 pm

I haven’t read Walkaway, but I’ve been thinking about this paragraph since you posted it:

All of these ideas – the use of technology for individual freedom and empowerment – the power of the gift economy – the brilliance of lone hackers building things for love – the half-secret networks of those who truly understand and thus become the unacknowledged legislators of the world – can be found in Steven Levy’s Hackers, (published in 1984) and again, ten years later, in the early editions of Wired magazine. Yet look at Wired magazine today. Something huge went wrong and we still don’t entirely understand what.

I read Wired magazine back in the early 90’s, so the question feels relevant to me. I’d be inclined to say, following on the themes of your post, that the Wired ethos both paralleled earlier California utopianism and killed parts of those ideals.

On one level I think early Wired can be read as equivalent to Hillary Clinton’s line about, “searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living.” It was an overreach based on genuinely meaningful and exciting changes that were happening. I think 60s radicalism did have a permanent cultural impact*

But, at the same time, I recently happened to read this interview from 1971 with a Pulitizer Prize winning poet in which he tells the following story:

There is another Irish tradition I’d like to mention. It is based on sheer arrogance, the determination to live. Poetry can keep life itself alive. You can endure almost anything as long as you can sing about it. Do you know Raftery? Anthony Raftery, from the eighteenth century, blind and illiterate, who carried a hand harp. He was standing in a bar and someone asked, who is that poor, frail old man leaning there in the corner with a harp in his hand? Raftery turned around and said: “I am Raftery, the poet, full of hope and love, with no light in my eyes, and with gentleness that has no misery, going west upon my pilgrimage by the light of my heart, though feeble and tired to the end of my road, and behold me now, with my back to the wall, playing music unto empty pockets.”

I feel like the techno-utopian tradition has almost no interest in the idea of misery, and that’s a weakness. That the idea of, “why not imagine a world of complete abundance” while invigorating erases some aspect genuine heroism from the human condition — of facing difficulty or discomfort with calm and grace.

I am also inclined to think that the 90s Silicon Valley did a lot to erase the idea of “selling out” — that there was a tension between living one’s communal ideals and becoming rich.

But perhaps Walkway will have interesting things to say on those question.

* To pick one example.

7

Andrew Brown 04.29.17 at 8:15 am

I feel like the techno-utopian tradition has almost no interest in the idea of misery, and that’s a weakness.

No shit, comrade.

Doctorow, on the other hand, does do misery rather well, though it is the misery of heartbreak and of loss, which one of the book’s genuine characters, a middle-aged woman, feels. Of course, in the end the computers make everything right.

8

Malys 04.29.17 at 6:29 pm

That the idea of, “why not imagine a world of complete abundance” while invigorating erases some aspect genuine heroism from the human condition — of facing difficulty or discomfort with calm and grace.

There’s a grand tradition of finding meaning and ennoblement in misery and suffering, particularly other people’s. But I shouldn’t worry – the stuff’s remarkably persistent. I don’t think pain is likely to be an endangered resource anytime soon.

… I’m being a jerk, I admit it. (Hence my cheap nom-de-troll.) But I’m itchy about anything that smacks of the “virtue of suffering”. It can lead to some troubling attitudes and rhetoric. (For example I’ve seen assisted-dying advocates accused of “consumerist attitudes”, as if they were hankering after the newest line of trainers.) I think Ursula LeGuin is wiser on this:

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

“You can endure anything as long as you can sing about it.” Maybe so, but you shouldn’t have to endure it. And not everybody can sing – misery can be a great spirit-stealer.

9

Matt 04.29.17 at 9:19 pm

I was going to just write “Donner Party humanism!” and leave it, but that was too sharp and short. I basically agree with Malys. I am close with three chronically ill people, two of them also frequently in significant pain. It’s not enriching. Fuck fate or other people deciding whether you must die (or live), fuck cancer, fuck rape, famine, war, plague, and pain. If you think that the world needs suffering, I’m sure that even in the Culture you’re still allowed to slam your own fingers in a door[1].

Imagining the diminution of scarcity has a funny way of turning ordinarily reasonable people into social reactionaries. “How are people going to feel purpose if they don’t have employer-set schedules to adhere to and bosses to tell them what to do in those hours?? Don’t people need jobs to ensure that they don’t live meaningless lives? Or to ensure that their lives don’t look meaningless to me, which surely amounts to the same thing?”

My father found more joy in hiking and gardening after retirement than he did in his last 30 years of paid employment. His mother hadn’t worked for money since WW II, died in 2012, and was the happiest person I knew. The vast majority of human beings lived and died before the age of capital. I have it on good authority that they occasionally felt their lives meaningful despite a shocking absence of time clocks. People might eventually invent new paths to meaning that don’t necessitate servants and served, should we actually factor human labor out of most goods and services.

[1] I am not a Kurzweil-type optimist who thinks that all disease and even death can be cured in a few decades. I think that’s extraordinarily unlikely. But I also think it would be extraordinarily good, should it happen somehow.

10

NickS 04.29.17 at 9:27 pm

There’s a grand tradition of finding meaning and ennoblement in misery and suffering, particularly other people’s. But I shouldn’t worry – the stuff’s remarkably persistent. I don’t think pain is likely to be an endangered resource anytime soon.

I think you miss my point (or, rather, we’re making points that are divergent but not completely opposed to each other). I don’t think that whatever suffering would be erased by a world of complete abundance is a loss. I think that the utopia imagined by Wired magazine of the early 90’s represents a limited imagination.

In part because so many of the people involved in it were young — and I was young (and, incidentally, not in CA and not a computer person) when I was reading it. I’d be happy to argue the other side as well — that there was real value in the things that it was celebrating and that I have some nostalgia for that era.

But, in this case, I was responding to Andrew Brown’s that ” Something huge went wrong and we still don’t entirely understand what.” which I think is largely accurate and an interesting starting point for conversation (incidentally, the other major thread that I could have mention about “what went wrong” would be the ideas touched on in Bruce Schneier’s post — that in the early days it was easy to think that computer technology as inherently inclined to benefit small, agile, or decentralized organizations* but that was a specific historical moment, rather than an intrinsic property**.

* For example, Bruce Sterling’s snarky comment, in 1994 (emphasis mine), “I’ve been asked to explain why I don’t worry much about the topics of privacy threat raised by this panel. And I don’t. One reason is that these scenarios seem to assume that there will be large, monolithic bureaucracies (of whatever character, political or economic) that are capable of harnessing computers for one-way surveillance of an unsuspecting populace. I’ve come to feel that computation just doesn’t work that way. Being afraid of monolithic organizations especially when they have computers, is like being afraid of really big gorillas especially when they are on fire.”

** That said, at this point I would still argue that computers have done more to increase the power and reach of small, decentralized, or hobbyist organizations but, obviously, Sterling’s comment hasn’t worn well (and Bruce Sterling’s a smart guy who was often ahead of the curve in seeing the effects of technology).

11

Matt 04.29.17 at 9:40 pm

What if we nearly built Omelas but it was incomplete because we forgot to abuse a child locked in a basement! That would be truly heartless. Walking away from Omelas would be no more significant than walking away from Des Moines. Poetry would suffer for it.

12

NickS 04.29.17 at 10:31 pm

Okay, fine, apparently, my comment didn’t make sense to people — which is somewhat understandable, since it was a partially completely thought. But, just to be clear.

I don’t think suffering is a virtue; I think responding to suffering with grace is a virtue and, much more importantly for this conversation, the ability to recognize and respond to suffering in others is a virtue and not on that techno-utopians, by and large, place a priority on.

That said, as Andrew Brown’s response might suggest it is a bit of a cliche to suggest that young idealists may have insufficient appreciation for the tragic element of life. But, part of what I was trying to say was that, it is a familiar thing and part of what went wrong was the same thing that goes wrong with every idealistic utopian movement.

But then the question becomes, looking back a generation later, what elements of that utopian thought are worth continuing to engage with and what elements look misguided in retrospect — and, at that point, I’m hindered by not having read Walkaway because I would be interested in Cory Doctorow’s perspective.

13

Marc 04.30.17 at 6:27 am

The noble truths of Buddhism still apply at end of life, even with unlimited material abundance. And creating a clone is no more immortality than having a child is.

So the entire discussion of pain at end of life seems to me to be a detour. The concern, instead, is perhaps closer to the idea that this Utopia would be more convincing thirty years ago than it is today. Because this particular set of Gods has already failed us.

14

Andrew Brown 04.30.17 at 7:11 am

Marc gets what I was trying to say in my criticism. I obviously derailed the discussion.

Is it worth trying to distinguish between the frustration of desire, which causes suffering, as any toddler will explain to you at length, and suffering from other causes. which seems an unmitigated bad? \This seems to me an open question because you could recast all suffering as a frustration of desire — my desire to be alive, to be free of pain, and so on as well as my desire for that toy! now!! — which is perhaps one way of understanding Buddhism — but I don’t think this is helpful and I’m not sure it even makes sense. Even Buddhism has to postulate that our true desire is to be rid of desire. Which brings me back to the idea that it is the ordering and harmonisation of desires that matters.

This might bring us a long way from Doctorow but I’m not sure it does. One of the things I find unconvincing about the book sketches the problems of people wanting the wrong things, or the right things in the wrong order, and comes nowhere near a convincing solution.

15

F. Foundling 04.30.17 at 10:32 pm

>This is the fundamental argument for democracy and is at least strong enough to ensure that neither side can ever triumph in the long run, however strong their evidence appears to be at any given moment.

This strikes me as a rather bold prediction. After all, human history so far hasn’t presented some kind of pendulum regularly swinging between authoritarianism and anti-authoritarianism. During most of recorded history, the authoritarian perspective was virtually unopposed (with a few remarkable exceptions). The progress made since the Middle Ages has involved the increasing influence of the anti-authoritarian view, and for a while it seemed that this tendency wouldn’t end. At present it seems that we’re on our way back into authoritarianism and, again, much as I’d like to, I don’t see any obvious reason to assume that this development will ever reversed again during the remaining lifetime of our species. And in any case, all of these changes can hardly be ascribed to changes in the relative objective merits of the arguments in question, including the empirical evidence in their favour – rather, they have resulted from shifts in the balance of power in societies.

>What’s more, it turns out that software that isn’t paid for is only really good when it is used by the people who make it.

I find this statement rather surprising. I am not a programmer, and I regularly use various pieces of perfectly decent user-friendly, ad-free freeware and open-source software for various purposes. Sure, this hasn’t turned the world into a utopia, but I will venture to say that it’s still quite nice.

>There seemed to be more than enough of everything people really needed to go round. It turned out, with the oil shock and afterwards, that this was not true.

I’ll second Astra Taylor in the other review: there already *is* enough of everything people really need to go round, the problem which we haven’t solved is the way it is distributed.

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