M: I guess it makes sense.
T: Yes. Fifty million in the hand is worth a billion in the bush. Maybe it’s the rich who are most like homo economicus was supposed to be. They have all the information, they pursue rational self-interest, they try to maximize their wealth. But if a maximum level of wealth gets mandated by society, fighting that isn’t rational. Especially if you’ve got something like twenty times as much as you need to be secure.
M: I don’t know about that. The kind of ambition that gets you a billion won’t be brooked. It’s a sociopathic thing. There’s nothing rational about it. It’s a man thing, most of the time. Although I’ve met women who feel just as entitled.
T: Of course.
M: So they’ll lash out.
T: Some of them, sure. You’re always going to have crazy people. It’s the system I’m talking about. If crazy people lash out in a sane system, they do some damage but then they end up in jail, or someone kills them. So it’s the system that matters. And that’s where I’m seeing results.
M: Is the Russian government on board with all this?
T: Hard to say. Maybe so. Soviet nostalgia is getting stronger. And Siberia is melting, which turns out to be no joke. Some people thought it would be a good thing, that we would grow more wheat and so on, but turns out we just get a bunch of swamps, and you can’t drive on the frozen rivers like they used to. It’s a mess. Also it’s releasing so much methane and CO2 that we might make jungle planet. Nobody in Russia wants jungle planet. It’s too messy, it’s not Russian. So ideas there are changing.
M: So they’re coming around.
T: Maybe so. It’s still a battle inside the Kremlin, but the evidence is clear. And that Soviet regard for science still holds for a lot of Russians. It’s a Russian value too. And they think it’s funny that the Soviet way might save the world. It’s a kind of vindication.
M: Every culture wants respect from all the rest.
T: Of course. Now the Chinese have it, and India too. The ones still hungry for it are Russia and Islam.
M: So how do you get that respect?
T: Not by money. The Saudis showed that. They were fools. Obvious fools get no respect. In Russia we worry about that. We think we are always seen as fools. The great bear, dangerous and uncouth. Provincial.
M: Best novels in the world, best music in the world?
T: That was all czarist stuff. Then the Soviet Union, it had some respect for standing up to the Americans, and getting out there in the sciences, and standing for solidarity. Or so it gets remembered. Now we are just the great losers to the Americans. And with the whole world speaking English, that impression can never go away. Not unless we use Soviet methods to save everyone from American stupidity.
M: Or go back to the czar.
T: Yes, that’s the bad response. We saw that with Putin. But the Soviet dream is better. We assume our past, use it to save the world. Mother Russia saves the day.
M: I hope so. Someone’s got to do it. I don’t think America will.
T: America! They are the rich person who has to accept owning just fifty million rather than infinity. They’ll be the last ones to come around.
M: I guess I should go to San Francisco again.
82
Stores are bottlenecks, being distribution centers and not that numerous. You kick them in the balls when you attack their distribution centers. Their stock price drops at news of such attacks, and they have no way to counter that. And their valuations are already at historic lows. Of course police might arrest and prosecute, but that doesn’t bring the share price back up. A hundred thousand dollars of physical damage can leverage a hundred million dollars in lost asset value. Big pension funds notice there’s a problem and move their monster assets elsewhere, then endowments and trusts and universities and non-profits and hedge funds all notice the big dogs moving, and they try to get out of the house before it falls on their head. And suddenly a big famous corporation, which is also of course a legal person, has suffered something like a stroke, and is now lying there paralyzed in a hospital bed, on life support, his heirs arguing over who gets the last of his stuff.
So stores were torched, sure. In the past that would have been the end of it. People like direct action because it’s quick, and afterwards you don’t have to face any real change. But around this time the Householders’ Union backed the Student Debt Resistance in support of its payment strike. That was non-compliance in action, meaning stay-at-home for almost every job. It’s a form of general strike.
Then on July 16th big parts of the internet, the online store of stores, stopped working. That felt freaky. And we had done it. Was it smart? Wasn’t the internet like our nervous system now? It was like that guy who cut his arm off to get out of a canyon in Utah. A very desperate measure. We had cast ourselves out into an interregnum, the chaos between dynasties. The Crisis, Year Zero: oh my fucking god.
In a situation like this, there has to be a plan. You can’t make it up on the fly in the middle of the breakdown. Not in the modern era of hyper-complexity. Say the internet stops working, your savings suddenly vanish and money
