Chatter chatter bang bang

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.