The Ministry for the Future

money now traveled within a panopticon that was in itself a global state of sorts, unspoken as yet, emerging from the fact of money itself. Another brick in the controlocracy, some said of this recorded money; but if the public kept ultimate control of this new global state, by way of people power exerted by the ever more frequent strikes and non-compliances, then the people too would be seeing where all the money was and where it was going, move by move, so that it couldn’t be shuffled into tax havens or otherwise hidden, without becoming inactivated by law. Digital distribution of the total blockchain record through YourLock and other sources meant there was a kind of emerging people’s bank, a direct democracy of money. So now the various old private cryptocurrencies were only being used for criminal activities, and traded at fractions of a penny. Lots of investors who still held these worthless coins were looking for a moment to get out with a minimal haircut. Others had simply cut their losses and sold for mills on the million. Holders of the various cryptocoins owned trillions of them, but trillions multiplied by zero still came to zero, so they were mainly done for; their owners might as well have been holding piles of copper pennies, except copper was more valuable.

It was still argued by some that the Super Depression of the previous decade had created the greatest part of the carbon drop observed. They were burning less because the global economy had tanked. But this would only explain the flattening, not the reduction; and besides, even with the depression, the world’s GWP, and even all the better measurements of human economic activity, showed activities worth nearly a hundred trillion US dollars a year. It was still big, but it didn’t run on carbon anymore. It was this and the drawdown efforts that explained the drop.

So this was the financial and the carbon situation, what Mary thought of as the two macro signals, the global indexes that mattered. And at the meso- and micro-levels, the good projects that were being undertaken were so numerous they couldn’t be assembled into a single list, although they tried. Regenerative ag, landscape restoration, wildlife stewardship, Mondragón-style co-ops, garden cities, universal basic income and services, job guarantees, refugee release and repatriation, climate justice and equity actions, first people support, all these tended to be regional or localized, but they were happening everywhere, and more than ever before. It was time to gather the world and let them see it.

Sick at heart, she was going to declare victory. Declare victory as if sticking a knife in the heart of her worst enemy, with a feeling not unlike posting a suicide note. And if the real truth was that in fact they had somehow lost, then she was going to try to see to it that the evil ones were winning a Pyrrhic victory. They were going to be the losers of a Pyrrhic victory; and the losing side of a Pyrrhic victory could be said to have won. They were therefore the winners of a Pyrrhic defeat. Because they were never going to give up, never never never. History was going to go like this: lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, win. And the evil ones in the world could go down under the weight of their damned Pyrrhic victory. They could go fuck themselves, murdering cowardly bastards that they were.

90

Today we’re here to discuss the question of whether technology drives history.

No.

I’m sorry, are you saying that technology doesn’t drive history, or that you don’t want to discuss it.

Both.

Well, let’s focus on the first no instead of the second, and see if we can get some clarification on just why you would say that.

It’s a ridiculous question.

And yet it has been the title of books, essays, seminars, conferences, and the like. We ourselves are poor forked radishes, to quote someone, unless we augment our poor powers with tools. We are Homo faber, man the maker, and our tools are the only thing that allow us to cope with the world. We even co-evolved with our tools; first stones were picked up and sharpened, then fires started on purpose, and these tools made us human, as it was our precursor species who invented them, and after that we evolved into ourselves, and then on from there. Clothes to keep warm. The moment we find bone needles in the archeological record, for instance, we see people moving twenty latitude lines farther north than before.

So what?

So what? Excuse me? The question is, where would we be without our tools?

We think of ways to do things. If one way doesn’t work, we find another way.

But these are the ways we’ve found!

Path of least resistance. Dealing with the laws of physics. Picking up a rock for instance. It’s just trial and error.

Well, say we call that technology then! Doesn’t it follow that technology has been the driving force in history?

We are the driving force in history. We make do, and on it goes.

All right then. Enough of philosophy, I’m afraid I’m getting confused.

Yes.

Let’s move on to some specific examples. Have you heard of those drones developed to shoot mangrove seeds into the mud flats, thus seeding hundreds of thousands of new trees in terrain difficult of human access?

Very nice, but that same drone could shoot a dart through your head as you walk out your door. So it illustrates my point, if you care to think about it. Our tools are expressions of our intentions, so what we want to do is the key driver.

I’ll save that for our next foray into philosophy, which we will certainly schedule soon. Meanwhile, what do you think of these new bioengineered amoebae that are now grown in vats to form our fuel, while also drawing carbon out of the atmosphere? Kind of a next-stage ethanol?

Useful.

And other amoebae grown in vats can be dried to make a very tasty flour, thus