Neal Stephenson: The Diamond Age

Neal Stephenson. The Diamond Age: or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (1995). Cross-posted from C4SS.

In Four Futures Peter Frase poses, as a thought experiment, an “anti-Star Trek”: a world that shares the same technologies as Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s post-scarcity communist society, but in which those technologies of abundance are enclosed with “intellectual property” barriers so that capitalists can continue to live off the rents of artificial scarcity.

“…[I]magine that unlike Star Trek, we don’t all have access to our own replicators. And that in order to get access to a replicator, you would have to buy one from a company that licenses the right to use it. You can’t get someone to give you a replicator or make one with their replicator, because that would violate their license and get them in legal trouble.

What’s more, every time you make something with the replicator, you also need to pay a licensing fee to whoever owns the rights to that particular thing. Captain Jean-Luc Picard customarily walks to the replicator and requests “tea, Earl Grey, hot.” But his anti-Star Trek counterpart would have to pay the company that has copyrighted the replicator pattern for hot Earl Grey tea.”

In such a world, earning the money to pay for the things will be a problem, since there is no need for labor to actually make anything. What remaining work there is will be a small pool of intensely competed-for jobs designing stuff, some amount of guard labor enforcing “intellectual property” against piracy and protecting the accumulated property of the rich, and an odd assortment of work in household service or hand-crafting luxury goods for those in the propertied classes who value the status symbolism entailed in such things.

This is the world of The Diamond Age.

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Review of Peter Frase’s Four Futures

[Cross-posted from C4SS]

 Peter Frase. Four Futures: Life After Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 2016).

Frase’s book builds on Rosa Luxemburg’s prediction a hundred years ago in the Junius Pamphlets that “[b]ourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.” Specifically, he sketches — in very broad strokes — two versions of socialism and two versions of barbarism as possible alterative futures all resulting from large-scale automation. As Frase himself admits, “my approach is deliberately hyperbolic, sketching out simplified ideal types,” or “simplified, pure models…, designed to illuminate a few key issues that confront us today and will confront us in the future.”

Popular press treatments of automation, Frase notes, range from pessimistic predictions of technological unemployment to “liberal bromides” about “entrepreneurship and education.” But all of them are missing one thing: “politics, and specifically class struggle.”

This outlook ignores the central defining features of the society we live in: capitalist class and property relations. Who benefits from automation, and who loses, is ultimately not a consequence of the robots themselves but of who owns them.

Peter Frase: Anti-Star Trek

On an economy of post-scarcity technology in which rentier capitalism is nevertheless maintained through artificial scarcities like “intellectual property”:

Ami Angelwings on the Utopianism of Star Trek TNG

Ami Angelwings noted that Q chose Picard to test, as a representative specimen of humanity, because as a personality he illustrates the biggest change from what he’d have been in the past (reformatted into paragraph form from @Ami_Angelwings Twitter, May 7, 2015):

I realized that the reason Q tests Picard, is that he represents the part of “humanity” that they need to see has evolved from the past. While we know him as an intelligent mature guy, he was a brash womanizer as a kid, who got into fights & loved em & left em. He left home, only freshman to win the marathon, he became the youngest captain, he has all these gary stu heroic stories. He’s a white straight cis male who shot to the top, he’s not the smartest guy, even as an explorer he’s still a military commander. Geordi could’ve solved the paradox, Crusher could’ve solved Farpoint. Point is that in other times, Picard would be the privileged oppressor. The test isn’t can ANY human expand their mind to figure out a paradox, or can ANY human have the compassion to solve Farpoint? The test is “can your white cis straight dude captain with the gary stu past who commands the strongest ship, figure that stuff out?”

Reading Between the Lines of Star Trek TNG’s Utopianism

[A dialogue with Josh Marsfelder of Vaka Rangi blog, based on a Twitter exchange. My comments are in bold.]

The Federation’s attitude towards treaty obligations in Ensigns of Command, The Vengeance Factor and The Hunted seems to value an interstellar equivalent of the Westphalian nation-state for its own sake. Put that together with the Prime Directive, and the central value of the Federation seems to be stasis. Reminds me a lot of George Bush standing by & letting Saddam suppress the Shia/”Marsh Arab” uprising in Iraq after the war.
Yeah, that sounds about right to me. Do bear in mind where the Enterprise crew’s values stood in relation to that though. And also how Captain Picard’s description of life in the 24th Century in “The Neutral Zone” seems to contradict that. Or, for that matter, the sheer number of times the crew have been put up against Starfleet Command/Federation administration. Once you get to TNG Mark II and DS9, you’ll see how the war with Cardassia might have given the Feds a reason to act that way. A four year war about petty border disputes where entire planetary populations were used as bargaining chips by both sides.

Behind the DRM Curtain: Three Cory Doctorow Stories

[Note — this is crossposted from C4SS].

These three short stories all come from the same Cory Doctorow collection, Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present St (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2007). Free download here. The three are all set against a background of what I call the “DRM Curtain,” a transnational corporate Empire based on artificial scarcities enforced through a maximalist version “intellectual property” rights, promoted through trade deals written and lobbied by the proprietary content industries, and ultimately backed by the military force of the American state. The DRM Curtain’s corporate ruling class is as dependent on police state surveillance and the restriction of information flow as was the bureaucratic oligarchy that ruled the old Soviet empire behind the Iron Curtain.

My Review of Daniel Suarez, Daemon and Freedom(TM)

[Cross-posted from P2P Foundation Blog]

Daniel Suarez.  Daemon (Signet, 2009); Freedom(TM) (Dutton 2010).

I should have known how good these books would be when I saw John Robb of Global Guerrillas listed among Suarez’s advisers on the Acknowledgements page of Daemon.  If you’ve been following Robb the last year or so, you know he writes a lot about resilient communities and darknets.  Recently, against the backdrop of disruption of the Icelandic volcano, he stated the two principles of resilience:

*Localize production
*Virtualize everything else

Those are, perhaps not coincidentally, the central organizing principles of the new society that emerges in Suarez’s two novels.  As Robb describes it in his review of Freedom,

it is a fictional account of the next American revolution (AR 2.0) using resilient communities, open source warfare, systems disruption, individual super-empowerment, parasitic predation, hollow nation-states, etc, (all staples of global guerrilla thinking) as central themes.  Very cool.

Any regular reader of this blog, anyone on the P2P Research or Open Manufacturing lists, anyone who follows John Robb, Jeff Vail or David Ronfeldt, should run—not walk—to buy both of these books.