But they are your fellow citizens! This is what makes it less than desolating— your fellow citizens are a real thing, a real feeling.
Seeing this, my friend Charlotte pointed something out to me one day as we stood in line waiting for a refill, feeling unwashed and parched and apprehensive, Charlotte’s usual cynical sardonic attitude now almost jaunty, almost amused— she gestured at the line in front of us and said, Remember what Margaret Thatcher said? There is no such thing as society!
We laughed out loud. For a while we couldn’t stop laughing. Fuck Margaret Thatcher, I said when I could catch my breath. And I say it again now: fuck Margaret Thatcher, and fuck every idiot who thinks that way. I can take them all to a place where they will eat those words or die of thirst. Because when the taps run dry, society becomes very real. A smelly mass of unwashed anxious citizens, no doubt about it. But a society for sure. It’s a life or death thing, society, and I think people mainly do recognize that, and the people who deny it are stupid fuckers, I say this unequivocally. Ignorant fools. That kind of stupidity should be put in jail.
Then on the twenty-third day of our crisis, on October 4, it rained. Not just the ambivalent sea mist we often get in the fall, but a real storm, out of nowhere. How we collected that rainwater! Individually and civicly, the rain fell on our heads and in our containers, and I don’t think a single drop of it made it downstream in our little river out of the city limits. We caught it all. And we danced, yes, of course. It was carnival for sure. Even though we knew it wasn’t the total solution, not even close, as the drought was forecast to continue, and we still didn’t have a good plan— nevertheless, we danced in the rain.
42
Asked Mary for a meeting with her and Dick Bosworth, to go over some of the economic plans the software team was developing. She cleared an hour at the end of a Friday and meeting convened in her seminar room.
What’s up, Janus Athena? she said, a bit brusquely. She’s always visibly skeptical that AI could contribute anything substantive to her project.
Went to the whiteboard and tried to show her how AI could help. Always awkward to explain things to computer illiterates, a translation problem, a matter of deploying metaphors and finding gross generalizations that aren’t too gross.
Started this time with rehearsal of Hayek’s argument that markets deliver spontaneous value, and are therefore the best calculator and distributor of value, because central planning can’t collect and correlate all the relevant information fast enough. So planning always got things wrong, and the market was just better as a calculator. The Austrian and Chicago schools had run with that opinion, and thus neoliberalism: the market rules because it’s the best calculator. But now, with computers as strong as they’ve gotten, the Red Plenty argument has gotten stronger and stronger, asserting that people now have so much computing power that central planning could work better than the market. High-frequency trading has been put forth as an example of computers out-achieving the market proper, but instead of improving the system it’s just been used to take rents on every exchange. This a sign of effective computational power, but used by people still stuck in the 1930s terminology of market versus planning, capitalism versus communism. And by people not trying to improve system, but merely to make more money in current system. Thus economists in our time.
In fact, entirely new organizational possibilities now emerging with power of AI. Big data analyzed for best results, all money tracked in its movement all the time, allocations made before price competition distorts real costs into lies and universal multi-generational Ponzi scheme, and so on. Particulars here got both pretty technical and pretty theoretical at the same time, but important to do one’s best to sketch out some things Mary might both understand and consider worth ordering team to do. Dick already up to speed on most of this.
Mary sighed, trying to focus on computer talk without boredom. Tell me how, she said.
So often they don’t even understand the nature of the need. Reminded her that Raftery modeling still showed the vast bulk of the most probable twenty-first centuries experiencing an average temperature rise of 3.2 degrees Celsius. Chances of keeping average temperatures below 2 degrees C were five percent. Keeping it under 1.5 degrees C were one percent.
Mary just stared. We know it’s bad, she said acidly. Give us your ideas to help!
Told her about the Chen paper, useful for its clarity, and now getting discussed in several different discourse communities, it being one of the earlier of various proposals to create some kind of carbon coin. This to be a digital currency, disbursed on proof of carbon sequestration to provide carrot as well as stick, thus enticing loose global capital into virtuous actions on carbon burn reduction. Making an effective carrot of this sort would work best if the central banks backed it, or created it. A new influx of fiat money, paid into the world to reward biosphere-sustaining actions. Getting the central banks to do that would be a stretch, but them doing it would be the strongest version by far.
Mary nodded grimly at that. A stretch, she repeated.
Persisted with arguments for carbon coin. Noted that some environmental economists now discussing the Chen plan and its ramifications, as an aspect of commons theory and sustainability theory. Having debunked the tragedy of the
