It makes me sad that I've been thinking about this so much for the last few days only to find that Arthur C. Clarke, who is the basis of most of the navel gazing I have been sucked into, along with most of science fiction and academic space exploration, has died. Really sad.
The short story here: the streets will run with the blood of the non-believers. Unless it doesn't.
Would Lenin have attempted to overthrow Stalin or Brezhnev or Kruschev if he'd known that the Bolshevik movement would have landed in their hands? That it wouldn't resemble the people's government at all? That the "supreme soviet" actually was the highest ranking oligarchy in the nation and didn't represent the Marxist proletariat or Lenin's
workers at all? Like, not even in the least?
My guess is yes. I suspect Lenin would have stabbed that fucker in the eye.
Here's the problem. Lenin was okay with bloodshed. So was Castro, and we all know what happened to
Ceaucescu when revolution came to Romania. There are lots of examples of this throughout history. The lesson learned here is that there's no such thing as a quiet, bloodless revolution.
How do you simply raise your voice and say, "hey, maybe this whole system is flawed and we need to change it"? Is there even a mechanism for submitting this sort of commentary?
My wife and I were discussing this over dinner – she's been telling me to shut up about all this for weeks, and I finally said, listen, I'm not going to discuss "what I'm thinking" with you if you just tell me to shut up – and her essential reaction was that people do not deserve freedom if they do not understand they are not free. "People are stupid," she says. "They're like cattle." This really pisses me off. It doesn't matter whether they're cattle, amoebae, or hyper intelligent pandimensional mice. The principle is that people should be free, and if they're not, that's cause for freeing them.
There's a catch, though. You can't free a population without killing a portion of it off. Believe me, I've been looking for examples of a quiet, peaceful revolution, in which people are told of their condition ("You're not free! You're being tricked by the oligarchy! You've been
had!"), and there just aren't any. The reason for this is pretty simple. Whether they started with the intent to govern fairly, after they're governing, these people don't want to give up what they've got, no matter how rotten it is.
Furthermore, let's just say that I'm as charming as can be, and I want to run a campaign to put myself into office, peacefully, and change things peacefully. Before I even get started, I have to get the support of special interest groups. Whether these are
bona fide groups of people needing help (because after all, we should probably pay attention to the needs of other people if we're claiming to free them for their own good), or they're groups acting as blockades to the change or exchange of power, the result is the same: nobody can rise through the ranks without becoming tarnished by this currying of favor,
quid pro quo game.
So what's the only thing you can do in this scenario? Well, we've seen this happen often enough: a small group of people are disenfranchized, disillusioned, or whatever, and they either cannot or will not effect change through force. They leave. They splinter off and form their own colonies and eventually forge what they feel is a fair and just state. Whether that's America, whether it's jews forming a zionist oblast in eastern Russia, or any other state, we've seen that geography has always served as a sort of check-valve for political pressure.
But geography is no longer a buffer. One can't simply leave, because there's just nowhere to go. There isn't a
I'm leaving, who's coming with me? moment. Imagine some delegation of people going to New Zealand or some other far-flung corner of the world to establish a New, Better and Free Government. Everyone knows you can't do that without somebody (usually a
lot of somebodies) getting killed. Governments know this, and citizens know this. It is because of this, and because the status quo is comfortable, that change – even just change – is opposed (as Sandy says, "They're cattle. They don't deserve freedom."). Laid back as they are, I can't imagine the kiwis accepting some delegation of disillusioned people seeking to start a new society on their particular corner of the planet.
Let's digress briefly and discuss Cory Doctorow. A nominally unremarkable and benign dude, hardly a revolutionary. As such, I don't think he knew what he was saying when he wrote
Eastern Standard Tribe. The principle is pretty simple: you take the entire internet as a society, and fragment it into rough aggregations of timezones (because these are the people most likely to be awake when you are). It's easy to miss the underlying premise here if you're snoozing (and I think Cory missed the larger implications of his story, although he's certainly free to correct me). The internet is
not a society. Technically, in the Eastern Standard Tribe, you'd have people from the eastern seaboard of the US, your average
quebeqois, and maybe even some people from South America. You'd probably also have people from nearby timezones as it became apparent that there were more people of a certain caste in each "tribe."
Now, I just called Doctorow a benign and unremarkable dude. Conversely, I've lauded Charlie Stross as being a particularly bright dude, and I think he built on Cory's idea (Stross seems to have found Curious Yellow through Cory, so it would seem that Doctorow deserves at least a little credit for this) with
Glasshouse. The notion, again, is that when you have a society, you can create metasocieties (Asher and Stross have both called these "polities," and I think RKM did as well) "underneath" the "proper" society. In the case of
Glasshouse, nobody really knew what these new polities were doing, but the simple fact was that underneath this larger, proper, recognized society, there was an underlying society created [ for whatever reason ]. Stross was probably dead-on when he painted an incredibly violent separation of these metasocieties once they stop being "meta" and start being "proper." This is probably the root of all the swordplay in
Glasshouse, which otherwise was entirely out of place – it was almost reminiscent of Kovacs'
I was a tank monologues in Richard Morgan's books.
How plausible is this? The first, easiest example of this happening outside science fiction (which is, uh, speculative at best) is Palahniuk's
Fight Club.
Look, the people you are after are the people you depend on. We cook your meals, we haul your trash, we connect your calls, we drive your ambulances. We guard you while you sleep. Do not... fuck with us.
Does this seem farfetched? While it's frequently cited, unfortunately,
Fight Club is a tragically flawed example for a number of reasons. First, the people flocking to the idea are the very people that don't recognize the group-think evident in those who have seceded from society ("Project Mayhem"). This is most clearly evident in the rather disturbing scene eulogizing Bob, in which the revolutionaries begin chanting in unison,
In death, we have a name. His
name was Robert Paulson. The fact that the revolutionaries themselves are compromised by groupthink, and the fact that their own revolutionary leader was himself arguably insane, tarnishes the ending in which the protagonist (I use the term loosely) actually embraces the destruction of society.
But, and this is actually pretty remarkable, it has
actually happened. A group of people, loosely bound by the same ideals of (
ironically) hatred and anonymity ("
because none of us is as cruel as all of us"), have actually managed to form an anarchist society in which taking power is actually perceived as a failure to actually
command power. This isn't an example of "you do not talk about [ noun ]", it's actually a pretty sophisticated system of checks and balances that are decided by the mob (for lack of a better term). As soon as one group evolves that appears to be more powerful than another group (as we see here with the ever lovable Furries), or that one group has actually coalesced from the anonymous, chaotic masses, new terms of derision, new forms of provocation and dismissal are created to deny the emergent group any new power over the non-members. This means that there are no real tangible boundaries, as the boundaries expand and contract as users fragment off the main group, but it maintains enough momentum that the group maintains cohesion.
I think with this group of people, you sort of have to be a member to understand it. "Becoming a member" is a lot harder than it sounds, although optimally, it's simply a matter of stating one is a member, and then denying any knowledge of it; there's an incredibly dense vocabulary and lore that has to be assimilated before anyone can actually even understand what in the hell is going on.
If you know me well at all, you can see where this is going. Stross points at Jupiter as a good place to found a new polity. I don't think anyone would really have to travel quite so far. In fact, I think the simple act of getting a few dozen people into orbit would be enough. Getting them up there creates a situation of trade between the people on the ground and those in orbit. There's a continual need for skilled labor and resources in orbit, which is why we keep sending up these astronauts to fix things. But we have no permanently airborne caste of people who can tend to these galaxies of equipment. I think, for example, that the US would have opted to repair their recently shot down "spy satellite" rather than to destroy it. How much do you think that would have cost? My guess is the repair would have been a lot cheaper to perform once you're already in orbit. My guess is if you were one of the people up there offering your services to those on the ground, if you offered to do it for a hundred million dollars, you'd still beat their cost by orders of magnitude. How many times do you have to do this before you can start sending
Falcon vehicles up with more supplies for yourself, and so on?
With the advent of technologies like the Falcon and
inflatable habitats, the cost of actually living in space has been drastically reduced. We're still not at the point where thirty people can be sent up and start offering services (there are so many to offer; heavy ions for propulsion, communications relays to the ground, repairs for spacecraft, additional "tenants", ...), but how far away, exactly?
I'm saddened to see that I seem to be one of the only people actually talking about a Jovian economy as though it's a plausible and feasible goal. Is the only reason we aren't actually talking about how to get there the actual
getting there? This is nowhere near as hard as it seems, especially if you don't really care about coming back. I was thinking about this as recently as
last October. There's a critical mass that has to be obtained, but after that point has been reached, I don't think it's even going to require money to get yourself into that, uh, polity. At some point, skills become more important than currency, because the influx of currency is disproportionate to the cost of attaining more skill. If, for example, your aim is to provide heavy ions, you need electrical engineers up there to actually accomplish that work. If you're providing communications, you need IP engineers (or, really,
name your protocol). The same goes for orbital astronomy and so on down the line. The point is that, while it might cost a few million dollars to get an astronomer or EE into orbit, the work they can accomplish in orbit is worth many times what it is worth on the ground. While I may charge as much as $125 an hour for my work, I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that charging $10,000 an hour (at today's labor and ground-to-orbit costs) is feasible. After I've been around a while, the influx of currency to the breakaway society more than outweighs the cost-to-orbit.
(and, again, as capitalism tends to self-regulate, people attempting to break away in this fashion have to keep their eye on the ball, lest they become obsolete by somebody beating them at their own game; this is not a bad thing — it requires more people to splinter off from proper society)Could that actually become an economy based on skill rather than currency? It certainly provides the exit strategy that the aforementioned metasociety requires to release political pressure (geography was that buffer before; on the internet, it's the principle that if you want to leave, you can — it's big enough that there is room for everyone to have their own polity if required). If you don't like it,
leave. In America, we have this sort of tradition already. We are told, correctly, that the United States is a union of independent republics. While federal law is very clear, states are given wide latitude to revise federal statutes. This week, in fact, we're hearing the Supreme Court deciding whether the District's handgun ban is constitutional. In the past, we've had California's Proposition 215 declared null. While both of these are examples of states losing power to the federal government, it works both ways. The notion is that staes are governed by their local populace, and that if you aren't comfortable with your neighbors (personal note: if you're in Virginia, you can see this right now as Fairfax County is
bucking hard against the rest of Virginia – traditionally very conservative – over the usual political jihads, like gun ownership and concealed carry), you can
leave and go somewhere there are people who are more in line with your point of view (say, Massachusetts). Whether that's to the next "hab" over, or indeed out into the depths of space, one thing is clear: there aren't going to be any peaceful revolutions on Earth.
(while I don't normally want to give myself too much credit for aggregating the ideas of other people, I think this may be the most cogent argument yet against the militarization of space; by doing so, one forces the hand of the existing society into reacting when it loses power or citizens)There really is only one place left to go:
up.
(I have no idea who these people are)
