Hope is hard in a world ravaged by ecological breakdown, especially for the young. Ten year old Iris struggles to have hope. Hers is a world of natural disasters, inexorably sliding further and further towards climate catastrophe, all while the adults in the room act as if everything is normal. The year is 2075, and all is not well.

That is, until Arco literally crashes into her life. Titular Arco is another ten-year-old, but whereas Iris is from our near future, Arco hails from a distant future where humans have relocated to gigantic cloud arcologies and mastered time travel. Even in that future though, children are not supposed to play with time until they’ve passed time-travellers exam. Impatient Arco steals his his sister’s device, only to lose control and end up in Iris’ time by accident. In the tradition of all good children’s movies, our two youngsters embark on a series of capers and adventures, supported by the friends they make along the way, to get Arco back to his own time.

Arco is a beautifully drawn animation, evoking the traditions of Studio Ghibli both in terms of style and narrative. It is a story of perseverance and hope against the odds, its generally light-hearted tone giving its emotional moments all the more impact. Like all good science fiction, it is a story not of, but for our times, reminding us that hope is a radical act.

Arco breaks with conventional time travel script by having its time traveller arrive not in the present day, but the future. In doing so it creates a double contrast: between Iris’ time and our own, and Arco’s time and Iris’. Set in the near future, Iris’ time is a plausibly familiar continuation of our own. It is the world of overshoot, of simultaneous technological progress and ecological degradation. This combination affords a precarious balance, symbolised by the protective domes that shield buildings from successive natural disasters, though Iris’ hopelessness suggests that the overall trend is downwards. Inverting the description of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossesed, Arco might be called a ‘realistic dystopia’. This is not a world ravaged by Mad Max or 2012 style cataclysms, but a society adapted to climate change yet possibly losing that struggle in the long run. It is a more believable and hence more relatable depiction of what the future might hold for us.

For Arco though, Iris’ time is as alien as ours. Not only is he astounded that humans live on the ground and cannot communicate with birds, but much of 21st century technology is bizarre to him. Interestingly, this includes the omnipresent robots that perform so much of necessary labour in Iris’ time, suggesting that humanity at some point divested itself of AI and robotics. The evident contrast between Arco and Iris’ experiences creates a profound sense of discontinuity. Iris’ world still feels connected to our own, but Arco’s cannot be understood as a simple linear extrapolation of current trends. Through this disconnect between its two futures, Arco subtly argues that human survival through harmonious coexistence with nature will require a rupture with our present social and technological trajectory.

A second unusual aspect of Arco is the absence of direct antagonism. While Iris and Arco face multiple threats in their quest to return Arco to his time, none of these are enemies. Interpersonal conflict arises from misunderstanding or miscommunication and is therefore open to resolution through dialogue. Yet the greatest threats are impersonal, with our heroes having to face storms and wildfires. The calamitous unpredictability of the natural environment is deeply symbolic of the imbalance it has been pushed into by decades of human (in)action.

This is not to say that nature is portrayed exclusively as a threat. Interspersed between storms and wildfires are moments of tranquillity where the nature is depicted with reverent care, and our heroes traverse biomes rendered in lush, tender and exquisite detail. Even when quiescent, nature is not merely the background on which Arco plays out, but is integral to it, and shows us the complex, verdant and sometimes alien beauty we stand to lose. This is another way in which Arco is reminiscent of Studio Ghibli movies such as Spirited Away, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, or Princess Mononoke, with which it also shares its strong, young female character and its endearing, slightly dreamlike childhood logic. Our heroes face their challenges head on with a heedlessness that would make adults flinch, and while Arco ultimately remains on the safe terrain of a children’s movie, there are stakes and consequences, though they are more likely to affect the adults in the audience.

Aesthetically and narratively, Arco is riding the wave of increased interest in solarpunk, with its focus on harmony with nature and gentler, more caring technologies. Yet while the overall message is one of hope, there is an undercurrent of pessimism in Arco. It reminded me of Terra Nil, where humans have been removed from the scene altogether. Arco is not as drastic, but its solution to the degradation of the Earth’s biosphere is for humans to relocate away from the surface, implying that that actual harmony is (not yet) possible and that vacating large swathes of the Earth is the only viable option.

Regardless, Arco’s overall message is one of hope, and it is not coincidental that Arco’s restoration to his family is brought about through an act of kindness rather than ingenuity. By restoring Arco to his future, Iris regains her belief that there is a future, and that it can be better. It is that belief that, as we learn in the credits, will motivate her to make her own contributions to restore humanity to a place of balance within the web of life.

We don’t have the benefit of the future manifest to give us the hope and courage to struggle forward. But neither are we the first generation to face the dark clouds gathering on the horizon. As Antonio Gramsci famously wrote from his prison in the fascist Italy of 1929, times of adversity require us to confront them with pessimism of the intellect, but optimism of the will. Hope is the catalyst that helps us act in the absence of certainty. We can never know if our actions will bring forth the future we desire, but it is certain that if we don’t act, it will never come to pass.

Notes & suggestions

• Of course, we don’t have to look to the future to see the catastrophic impacts of climate change. For many outside the sheltered Global North, they are already here, and have been here for some time.
• Hope may be a necessary condition, but it is not sufficient, and it needs to be tethered to clear analysis and radical action. Simply ‘being hopeful at things’ is not going to be sufficient. For a critical appraisal of ‘hopepunk’ as a political project, see here.
• The use of robots is incidental in Arco, but it was nonetheless pleasant to have a movie that didn’t agonise over the ability of humans and robots to coexist with mutual respect. In that it reminded me of Pluto.
• The intractable problems of our age (ecosystem collapse, poverty, emerging fascism, racism and the legacy of colonialism, etc.) are not as easily solved alone as, surprisingly, sending a boy back to his own time. Taking action is easier together, for example through a trade union, tenants union, political party, or campaign group. If you are in work and not in a union, join or start one. See if there are local campaign or activist groups organising in your area. And if you’re not sure what to do, be like Iris: find a problem and take the initiative to solve it.
• For a starting point to engage with the solarpunk aesthetic movement, check out the Story Seed Library for copyleft artwork and story ideas.

___

If you enjoyed this blog, you can subscribe

You can also Discuss... this on Remark.As if you have a Write.As account.

And you can follow me on Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@thecasualcritic

Mal doesn’t understand humans. This is not surprising. Mal is a sentient AI drifting through infospace after his programming spontaneously gave rise to his consciousness. Mal also doesn’t are much for humans, but despite his disdain for these “monkeys” he does enjoy sojourns into the physical world by hijacking the occasional vehicle (drone, bot, cyborg, or whatever else is to hand) for himself.

Unfortunately for Mal, he is forced to take an interest after he gets stuck in a cyborg body as collateral damage in a civil war between the US government and a Ludditesque uprising of ‘Humanists’ who oppose human/tech integration and demonstrate their commitment to humanity by throwing everyone they deem impure into a burn pit. Mal’s quest to return to infospace governs the plot of Edward Ashton’s Mal Goes to War. It is a book with an interesting premise, but which did not live up to my expectations. Maybe that is because the cover sold it to me as ‘dark comedy,’ a satire on war and an interrogation of what it means to be human. Yet while those themes are present, they are not executed with adequate depth to elevate Mal Goes to War beyond the level of an entertaining sci-fi romp. Other works exist that cover the same themes with more insight, novelty or creativity.

Mal Goes to War’s greatest asset is Mal itself, yet the main character is also its main weakness. All the interesting dynamics in the novel are rooted in Mal’s alienness from, and therefore profound disinterest in, humans. The consequent misunderstandings, miscommunications and poor decisions are the source of the novel’s comedic moments, and also give direction to the plot The problem with Mal Goes to War is that the joke wears thinner the longer it goes on for, and it is stretched well beyond the point where it remains either funny, interesting or convincing. The novel requires Mal to remain inept at human interaction throughout, but personally I was not convinced that a supposedly hyperinteligent sentient AI with an urgent need to improve its capabilities would decide to waste its time playing number guessing games against itself rather than running analyses or simulations to of its recent suboptimal interactions with its human companions.

These companions are the usual ragtag band of strangers reluctantly thrown together by fate, with each representing a human tendency within the world of Mal Goes to War. We have the involuntary augmented human, the voluntary cyborg, and the (converted) human purist. Their status as archetypes leaves the characters underdeveloped as people, which combined with Mal’s general disinterest as the main point-of-view character means that the motivations of the human characters remain opaque, and their interactions therefore superficial. The same logic holds for the nature of the background conflict.

That, in turn, is the reason why Mal Goes to War did not deliver on its claim to satire. Satire is a form of critique, and for it to work well, requires a sophisticated understanding and treatment of the object of that critique. In Mal Goes to War, the civil war remains simply the background canvas on which the story is painted. We don’t know the motivations, causes or stakes, which means that Mal Goes to War’s satire, such as it is, remains stuck at the level of “war is bad, and possibly silly.” It also means that despite the atrocities committed by both sides, I could not get invested in the conflict or its resolution, as neither Mal nor the humans seem to care that much either. And in any event it becomes fairly predictable early on that despite his detachment from the war, a series of contrivances will place Mal at the centre of concluding it. It reduces a potentially interesting conflict over the role of human augmentation in a surveillance and class society to a mere plot device to make the hero do a heroism.

Mal Goes to War’s greatest challenge is however that it simply compares unfavourably to Martha Well’s in all aspects superior Murderbot Diaries series. Like Mal Goes to War, the Murderbot Diaries also centre a sentient, artificial construct as the protagonist, but unlike Ashton, Wells uses this as a jumping off point for profoundly interesting explorations of interpersonal relationships, gender, personal growth, exploitation and alienation. While equally baffled and frustrated by his human companions, Wells’ Murderbot puts in the work to understand both them and his own identity. It is this process, the movement beyond the initial setup, that makes things interesting, and that is what Mal Goes to War fatally lacks.

None of this means that Mal Goes to War is a bad book. It is an enjoyable diversion with a fair share of humour and vivid action, and reads as something that can easily be adapted to a screenplay. Its flaw is that it doesn’t live up to the grander claims it sets up or are made on its behalf. Readers looking for a thoughtful exploration of AI/human interactions in a dystopian world with real stakes will find the Murderbot Diaries much more rewarding.

Notes & Suggestions

• I am not the world greatest fan of audiobooks, but the audiobook version of the Murderbot novellas grew on me and I would definitely recommend it.
• There are of course many works, and not just books, that centre the interaction between humanity and artificial sentience. Examples that I have written on before, and which do it better than Mal Goes to War, include Citizen Sleeper, Pluto, Pantheon and Mass Effect.
• The sense of detachment from the background conflict reminded me of Civil War, which also sees a group of people traverse a United States sundered by a civil war the origins or stakes of which are never really explained to the audience. But while Civil War did not work for me as a movie, at least one can argue that the sense of detachment was intended.

___

If you enjoyed this blog, you can subscribe

You can also Discuss... this on Remark.As if you have a Write.As account.

And you can follow me on Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@thecasualcritic

With bombs dropping in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and Iran, and rearmament firmly back on the political agenda worldwide, there is no escaping the age-old question: why is there war? Instinctively, we might assume that states go to war to get something they want. War, as per Von Clausewitz’ famous dictum, is then simply the continuation of diplomacy by other means. Unsatisfied with such a simple answer, the causes of war remain the topic of scholarly debate between opposed schools within the somewhat detached academic field of international relations (IR).

The Empire of Civil Society (hereafter ‘Empire’) is a PhD monograph by Justin Rosenberg that forms part of this debate, assailing the dominant school of neorealism – Wikipedia”) from a marginal Marxist position. It is both an argument against neorealism’s core tenets, and an argument for a reappraisal of the utility of Marxist theory to international relations. First published in 1994, it feels surprisingly relevant to the world of 2026 and the conflicts that are raging across the world today.

Neorealism emerged in the United States after World War Two as a fusion of the old idea of the ‘balance of power’ and game theory. The school took its name as a claim to a hard-nosed tradition of statecraft that says that while peace may be nice, the nature of the international system means conflict and war are inevitable, always have been, and always will be. In very short summary, neorealism posits that because there is no central authority in the world to govern inter-state behaviour, there is a perpetual anarchy giving rise to a Hobbesian conflict of all against all. It doesn’t matter what states want, or who is in charge, or what their domestic politics are. Any state must be constantly vigilant lest their security or power is surpassed by others.

This is the sort of abstraction reminiscent of Newtonian physics where for convenience one might momentarily assume that all objects are frictionless spherical penguins in the vacuum of space. And such simplifications have their uses, but they must justify themselves. Empire contends that neorealism does not provide such justification, and offers a competing theory rooted in the specific mode of production of states, arguing that conflict between them emerges predominantly as a result of how they must reproduce domestically, rather than as the inevitable function of a transhistorical states system.

Rosenberg mounts a dual challenge to neorealism’s dominant position. First, Empire undermines neorealism’s claim to transhistoricity by demonstrating that its favourite examples (Greek and Italian city states) were both quite unlike modern sovereign states and were driven to conflict for historically specific reasons that derived from their political, social and economic structure. Empire than expands on this by investigating the early modern Spanish (Castilian) and Portuguese empires to show that even at the supposed dawn of the states system era, international actions were shaped predominantly by domestic considerations and constraints and impulses resulting from the level and configuration of the political economy at that time, rather than as blind reaction to an international balance of power. It is a persuasive argument – insofar as I am qualified to judge – and beyond the realm of IR it also reads as a detailed and interesting history of the time when Europe’s development began to diverge from the rest of the world. As with any history of this period, it is perhaps unintentionally a salutary reminder that for most of history Europe was marginal to global political economy, and that its ascendence was in no small part the result of the violent destruction of pre-existing manufacturing and mercantile capacity in Asia, culminating in the devastating famines in the 19th century that were described in Late Victorian Holocausts.

Having surveyed this history, Rosenberg then proceeds to contrast it with the modern states system, arguing that rather than something eternal it is actually historically contingent. Unsurprising for a Marxist, Rosenberg finds the motive force of history in the specific mode of production of capitalist economies, which at the state level expresses itself in the near complete separation of the economic and political realm. The assumed anarchic system of ‘free and independent’ states is mirrored in the anarchic market of ‘free and equal’ individuals, who can contract with one another at will, unencumbered by the reciprocal bonds of obligation that pertained in, for example, European feudal societies. But this formal, political equality both obscures and is necessary for the profound economic inequality that exists between those who own the means of production and those who do not. Empire thus seeks the roots of state behaviour in the historically contingent form of capitalism, but avoids the crude socialist simplification that states are merely imperial extensions for their capitalist class.

Does this perspective offer anything of value to our present moment? At first glance, the drive to rearmament appears to argue in the neorealists’ favour, with Europe in particular anxious to increase its security and/or power in a more geopolitically unstable and multipolar world where it can no longer rely on the United States as an ally. In the UK, (armchair) generals have quickly emerged to bemoan how the nation’s spending on ‘welfare’ enfeebles its ability to pursue its national interest. Yet on closer inspection, the notion that recent conflicts were not driven by the domestic politics of the instigating states is not tenable. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and American adventurism in Venezuela and Iran are evidently motivated by domestic considerations. The war in Iran in particular makes more sense when read as an effort to forcibly integrate Iran into the capitalist world system than as an inevitable result of some American ‘balance of power’ calculation. Israel, meanwhile, is waging a genocidal war on a people it explicitly refuses to recognise as a state. Perhaps the only ‘realist’ conflict is the one currently perpetrated in Sudan which, while technically a civil war, is being sustained by other nations using it as a proxy to increase their power, influence, or access to resources.

On the face of it therefore, reality seems rather at odds with the claims of the neorealists. Whether it supports Empire’s alternative proposition is hard to tell, as Rosenberg only gives the contours of a possible Marxist IR theory. The second edition ends with a rather self-deprecating afterword where Rosenberg admits that his intention to develop his theory further was diverted by his discovery of the theory of ‘uneven and combined development’ as proposed by Trotsky, which locates some of sources of geopolitical dynamism in the variety of states constituting the international system. Its logic suggests an intriguing possibility for an ‘end of history’ as the result of the complete subsumption of all states in the capitalist world order, ultimately equalising their development and depriving history of a motive force for want of diversity. An IR equivalent of the heat death of the universe. Though whether Rosenberg would have reached that conclusion cannot be inferred from where Empire finishes.

For a contribution to a specific debate within a specialised academic discipline, The Empire of Civil Society is surprisingly readable, in particular its historical chapters. While it remains a niche endeavour, its spirited argument for an IR theory rooted in human agency rather than impersonal and abstract systems is a necessary reminder that we must choose to make our own history, and that statesmen asking us to dissolve our political and class differences for the sake of some putative ‘national interest’ are seldom to be trusted.

Notes & Suggestions

• Rosenberg’s proposition that modern states are built precisely on the separation of political and economic realms struck a chord with me, as it explains my slight scepticism regarding the corpocracy depicted in the otherwise excellent The Ten Percent Thief. Would an entity that fully encompasses the state and the market within itself still act like a corporation? The resultant contradictions are of course part of The Ten Percent Thief’s narrative, and as it is an excellent book, I recommend people read it and draw their own conclusion.
• The enduring debate between the different IR schools put me in mind of Thomas Kuhn’s hypothesis that scientific paradigm shifts don’t happen because people are convinced, but because adherents of obsolete theories are replaced over time by advocates of new, presumably better theories. In the realm of IR and history where we don’t have a control Earth to play with and one can convincingly enough make an argument for any position, one wonders where progress may come from. Plus, I’m unsure if Kuhn allowed for political forces with a vested interest keeping particular sides of a scholarly debate alive.
• I stole the notion that it is Iran’s refusal to be integrated into the US-dominated economic system from the recent Macrodose Extra episode Order as Fiction, which also covers the creation of the The Hague Group, a coalition of Global South nations intending to uphold international law where the West is patently failing. While I prefer not to include paywalled references, in this case honesty demanded that I include my sources.
• There numerous organisations, with a range of political affiliations, that seek to promote peace, which can always do with support in one way or another. In the UK, options include the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Stop the War Coalition, and the Peace & Justice Project.
• Empire relies on the traditional Marxist distinction between feudalist and post-feudalist modes of production, but apparently ‘feudalism’ is no longer a preferred category among historians, and ‘manorialism’ is considered more precise. This distinction between feudalism and manorialism, and its application to the emerging concept of ‘techno-feudalism’ is covered on this episode of Culture, Power, Politics.

___

If you enjoyed this blog, you can subscribe

You can also Discuss... this on Remark.As if you have a Write.As account.

And you can follow me on Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@thecasualcritic

Nature is not treated kindly in videogames. If it is not merely a backdrop in first-person-shooters for the game to hide your adversaries in, then it tends to exist to be exploited to grow an empire or fuel a war machine. Especially in real-team strategy, ‘4X’ (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) and colony builder games, nature is relegated to the role of resource pool, waste sink, or both. And while over the years some games have tried to provide a more nuanced interaction with the environment, for example through introducing renewable resources or penalties for pollution, on the whole game dynamics have not moved on much since the days of Age of Empires when a player might frequently find their entire map depleted of gold, iron and wood. Watching your average trailer for a civilisation or colony building game (it’s there in the name, really), it rapidly becomes clear that success is measured by how much of the playable map is brought under human cultivation. While in the real world we are now reminded daily that we cannot forever impose our will or demands on the web of life, videogames remain mostly wedded to the Promethean promise of full human control over the natural environment.

It is exciting therefore to see games that take a radically different approach, especially given how rare this sadly remains. One such game is Terra Nil, developed by South African studio Free Lives. The game’s name is a play on ‘terra nullius’: the concept of unclaimed land that may be legitimately occupied, which was instrumental in legitimising European colonialist ventures in the 18th and 19th century. In Terra Nil, the land is not so much unclaimed as abandoned by humans as a result of total ecosystem collapse. It is up to the player to restore these barren landscapes to fully functional ecosystems.

Terra Nil is a remarkable achievement. Combining elegant gameplay with carefully crafted aesthetics, it does not just offer an engaging gaming experience, but effects a profound conceptual shift as to who and what games are for.

The core mechanics of Terra Nil are simple. The world is divided into zones, and the player must restore each zone into a viable ecosystem. Restoration always occurs in three phases. First, any damage must be remediated and a rudimentary ecosystem put in place. Next, the player must increase the complexity of the ecosystem by introducing different biomes, such as as arboreal forest, wetland, or tundra. As ecosystem diversity increases, key species will re-establish themselves, The third phase requires the player to optimise the animals’ happiness and to recycle all infrastructure to remove any human presence.

Each zone the game offers is different, requiring different techniques and buildings to overcome hurdles and create a sufficiently diverse and harmonious ecosystem. Some zones are arctic, whereas others are tropical. Some zones are contaminated with toxic or nuclear waste, or have unstable geological features that must be managed. Each map is its own puzzle, and as the game doesn’t impose a time limit, the player can carefully contemplate their every move without ever feeling rushed. It makes for a pleasantly zen experience, and for players who want any stress removed altogether, a special ‘zen’ mode is available.

An archipelago with some toxin scrubbers and minimal grassland.

To restore nature, the player deploys a range of buildings to remove toxins, irrigate the soil, reintroduce trees, etc. Some buildings have prerequisites, such as particular types of soil, power, or humidity or temperature levels, and the player may have to go through multiple preparatory steps before the desired biome is achieved. Construction is paid for using a single currency which is earned by achieving key restoration goals. This makes each map into its own intricate yet rewarding puzzle. My favourite part for each playthrough is when animals make their first reappearance, and a mostly static map suddenly becomes vibrant and dynamic.

The same archipelago from earlier, with beaches, wetlands, kelp forests and deciduous tree cover restored, and most infrastructure recycled.

One notable feature of Terra Nil is the complete absence of humans. There are no workers constructing or operating the buildings, or transporting resources to and fro. Although the buildings themselves have minor animations, their visual design blends them in with their surroundings. This means that the ecosystem is the most dynamic visual feature, foregrounding the landscape itself. It is a brilliant inversion of traditional top-down style colony builder games where the landscape is the passive tapestry on which the player’s grandiose schemes are played out. Terra Nil takes this to its logical conclusion by requiring the player to recycle all buildings in order to complete a map. Success in Terra Nil is full rewilding and the total absence of humans.

A restored volcanic caldera from which almost all infrastructure has been removed.

It is a radical departure from other games. In Terra Nil, the victory condition is not domination. Nor is it the success or survival or achievements of some human(oid) colony. Here, victory is lichen and happy zebras. It is restoring nature for its own sake, not as a means to an end.

Given the emphasis on ecological restoration, as well as its aesthetic, I have been reflecting on whether Terra Nil is a solarpunk videogame. Solarpunk as a genre is more associated with writing, visual artwork and television than gaming, likely because creating the mechanics for a game about cooperation is more difficult than doing the same for a game about shooting things. A key theme of solarpunk is ecological restoration, and this is clearly at the heart of Terra Nil. But as per this insightful essay by Ben Harris-Roxas, solarpunk also focuses on community and harmony between nature and humanity, as well as a more small-scale, ‘DIY’ approach to technology. By forcing the player to completely vacate the map, Terra Nil on the other hand implies that such harmony is not possible, and that ecological restoration can only be achieved through a separation between nature and humanity. In that, it follows more in the footsteps of Half Earth, and its spiritual yet historical-materialist successor Half Earth Socialism. The game developers also deliberately used a more industrial aesthetic for the game’s buildings on the grounds that large-scale restoration will require large-scale infrastructure, rather than local, community-based improvisation, which is another aspect in which it follows Half Earth Socialism.

Probably this is reading too much into the game, given it is ultimately a small project. Though it remains an open question for me where in the world of Terra Nil the humans have gone. With its focus on restoration rather than exploitation, its calm and natural aesthetic, and its intricate but forgiving gameplay, Terra Nil is certainly more solarpunk than any other game I have come across, and if it doesn’t fully fit into the genre, it is at the very least in constructive dialogue with it. Small nuances notwithstanding, Terra Nil definitely has the key feature of solarpunk in providing a welcome antidote of hope and harmony to a medium that is otherwise suffused with violence and dystopia. It shows us a path not just to an alternative way of relating to nature, but also a different role for videogames. Planting virtual trees does not directly save the world, but fostering a culture that values nature for itself, and chooses harmony over domination, may well get us there in the long run.

Notes & suggestions

• Wholesome though playing games like Terra Nil may be, it will not by itself bring about the changes we need to see in the world. If you are concerned about climate change, ecosystem collapse, or maybe just environmental degradation where you live, join or support an international, national or local environmental group such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, or a campaign group in your local community. You can also consider joining a green or ecosocialist political party.
• If you want to take ecosystem restoration to a planetary scale, then consider Half Earth Socialism: The Game. Though I should warn that even with socialist command-and-control powers, maintaining a liveable world is dispiritingly hard. If you are more into boardgames, then Daybreak offers a similar challenge.
• The Ecologist is a magazine squarely focused on nature, and how it interrelates with society, economics and even spirituality.

___

If you enjoyed this blog, you can subscribe

You can also Discuss... this on Remark.As if you have a Write.As account.

And you can follow me on Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@thecasualcritic

Ronald Reagan infamously said that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”, but Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington would counter that what should really frighten you is: “I’m a consultant and I’m here to advise.” Mazzucato and Collington are the joint authors of The Big Con: How the consulting industry weakens our businesses, infantilizes our governments and warps our economies, which as the title suggests is a full-on critique of the consulting industry and its malignant effects on society.

The Big Con builds on previously published research by Collington and Mazzucato, as well as Mazzucato’s earlier book The Entrepreneurial State. The central argument is as clear as it is intuitive: if you consistently rely on someone else to do something for you, you will not get any better at it yourself. Or as the wise sage Bruce Lee had it: “Growth requires involvement.” The increased use of consultancies creates, to borrow a favourite right-wing phrase, a ‘dependency culture’ among public sector organisations and businesses. And as with any dependency, your dealer usually has little interest in weaning you off what they sell.

Mazzucato and Collington present their argument in three parts across a concise 250 pages. The opening section sets the scene with a history of the consultancy sector and its evolution from roughly 1920 to the present day. With the context in place, The Big Con presents its core argument on how persistent and prevalent use of consultancies harms businesses and governments alike. The book closes on four recommendations for how both the public and private sector can wean themselves off their addiction to consultancy services and rebuild their own capacity and expertise.

In the first part, which corresponds roughly to the first half of the book, Mazzucato and Collington take us from the origins of consulting in optimising manufacturing processes via the birth of IT and computing to the current universal advisory and outsourcing services. It is a lot of history and variety to unpack, and hence this part occasionally feels like a string of disconnected facts and namechecks. While it gives a good sense of the gradual infiltration of consultancies into every facet of society and every layer of government, the detail is either excessive or could have been organised more coherently to enhance the overall effect. Even something as simple as a graph with global consultancy spend over time in inflation-corrected terms, pulling the evidence from different subsections together, would have made a big difference.

Once the history is established, The Big Con sets out the ways by which consultancies impair rather than strengthen the capabilities of their clients. Issues range from failure to actually impart knowledge on a sustained basis, consultancy value being difficult to measure, inability of clients to properly evaluate or control services they have outsourced, and systemic conflicts of interests. At the root of all these issues is a severe principal-agent problem, where consultancies have both strongly divergent interests from their clients and hold a significant information advantage over them. As Collington and Mazzucato show, consultancies are essentially parasites on the productive economy, and like all parasites must weaken their host organism, but not kill it.

Elaborating on the disease metaphor a bit, the question The Big Con implicitly elicits is whether consultancies are the cause of our predicament, or merely a symptom of it. The Big Con connects the rise of consultancies particularly with the neoliberal revolution, although it points out they do predate the 1970s. What is less clear is whether Collington and Mazzucato see consultancies as enabling factors, or merely opportunists. This is in part because both the history and analytical section lack strong aggregate data to ground the argument. There are facts and illustrative anecdotes in the narrative, and to a sympathetic reader these are not unconvincing, but they do not establish a coherent and compelling causality.

This matters, because whether consultancies mostly exploit weaknesses in an impaired system, or are in fact a key cause of those weaknesses, determines what a viable strategy to counter them would be. If consultancies are a symptom but not a cause, then our treatment plan should not focus primarily on them. This ambiguity surfaces in the solutions proposed by The Big Con, which include increasing the capability and learning potential of public institutions, leading to both reduced dependency on consultancies and increased control where they are used. Mazzucato and Collington also propose greater transparency about conflicts of interest and mandatory transfer of learning at the end of contracts.

The common theme connecting all this is, as Collington and Mazzucato set out themselves, “A new vision, remit and narrative for the civil service”. In other words, a reconfiguration of the role of the state in society. But as they themselves have noted throughout the book, the role of the state as a proactive force for good in society has been under sustained assault at least since Reagan’s one-liner about government, and overturning this would require an effort that feels disproportionate to the problem posed by consultancies, harmful though they may be.

All this put me in mind of Donella Meadows’ hierarchy of places to intervene in a system. Viewed through Meadows’ framework, consultancies act as positive feedback loops for the neoliberal project: they are both enabled by neoliberal reforms, and in turn further neoliberal policies. Unchecked, positive feedback loops can drive a system to radically new configurations or even destructive instability. Reducing the strength of positive feedback loops is therefore a way for the system to remain more stable, and for other forces to exercise more control.

Reducing the strength of positive feedback loops is the 7th most powerful intervention in Meadows’ hierarchy, but ‘changing the paradigm’ comes in at number 2. It is both more powerful, but also far more difficult to do. Altering the consensus on the role of the state in society is evidently a paradigm shift, and would undoubtedly change our use of consultancies. But undoing decades of neoliberal hegemony will also be extremely difficult to achieve.

In a way, The Big Con is thinking both too big and too small. Too big, because of the enormity of the political and ideological struggle required to make Mazzucato and Collington’s solutions possible. Too small, because if we did manage to radically reinvent the purpose of the state, we could do so much more than merely diminish our use of consultancies. Compared to ‘solving housing insecurity’ and ‘providing healthcare for all’, reducing our use of McKinsey feels like rather small fry. The more technical solutions that The Big Con suggests, such as moderately increasing state capacity or enforcing greater transparency, are more commensurate to the scale of the problem they are meant to address, though will be more difficult to attain while they go against the neoliberal grain. Nonetheless, they are a more realistic place to start, and the last chapter would have been stronger if it had considered how to implement them under the adversarial conditions imposed by neoliberal hegemony.

In fairness to The Big Con, it does not at any point suggest that consultancies somehow caused the neoliberal revolution, only that they were complicit in it and greatly benefited from it. But neither does it explicitly argue why, of all possible battles to pick to overturn neoliberal hegemony, consultancies should be a primary target. Referring back to Meadow’s leverage points, my own contention would be that reducing the impact of consultancies and their reinforcement of neoliberal dogma is a worthwhile battleground precisely because progress might be made without overturning the existing order of things first, rather than the the other way around as Mazzucato and Collington propose. The Big Con does after all provide ample evidence that consultancies fail to deliver even on their own terms, so reducing our dependency based on the merits of cutting costs and increasing state resilience in an increasingly uncertain world seems, if not straightforward, at least plausible.

To paraphrase Laotzu, being ignorant of your ignorance is a disease, and recognising your ignorance is the first step to being cured. The great service of The Big Con is to expose the harmful effects of the consultancy industry and the way it weakens state capacity. Although its tremendous reach in terms of the history and typology of consultancies comes with a resultant sacrifice of further depth, it convincingly conveys the pervasiveness of consultancies across governments and industries, as well as the unavoidable conflicts of interest that arise from their multifarious entanglements. The book should be required reading for public sector workers and business leaders alike. Having prepared the ground, Mazzucato and Collington could do worse than come out with a sequel: The Big Counter: How to kick out consultancies and learn to become self-reliant again. Such advice would be worth paying for.

Notes & Suggestions

• Readers looking to go into the nefarious world of consultancy in more detail may be interested in When McKinsey Comes to Town, an investigation specifically of how McKinsey shapes business and policy around the world, including for some more unsavoury clients.
• It occurred to me that there is an interesting analogy between consultancies and LLMs. Both are used by people and organisations as a way of compensating for a lack of skill or knowledge, but it is precisely that lack of skill or knowledge that makes it impossible to verify the utility and veracity of any outputs. The logical endpoint is, I suppose, when consultancies in turn outsource the work to an LLM.
• Two books specifically analysing neoliberal hegemony, through with quite different methods, are Hegemony Now! and Capitalist Realism.
• Mazzucato and Collington’s programme of increasing state capability and decreasing reliance on consultants is gaining traction with left-wing parties across the world. In New York, new major Zohran Mamdani is reducing dependence on consultancies to both save money and increase the city government’s capacity to act. In the UK, new Green Party-aligned think-tank Verdant is similarly recommending reducing consultancy spending as a way of reclaiming the theme of government efficiency from the Right.
• The Laotzu paraphrase is loosely based on chapter 71 of the Tao Te Ching, drawing from both the more standard Waley translation and Ursula K. le Guin’s more poetic version.

___

If you enjoyed this blog, you can subscribe

You can also Discuss... this on Remark.As if you have a Write.As account.

And you can follow me on Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@thecasualcritic

Warning: Contains spoilers

A man wakes up, alone, aboard a spaceship near a strange star. The man does not remember who he is, how he got here, or most crucially, what has happened to him. He soon discovers however, that the survival of mankind rests on his shoulders. Project Hail Mary is the story of how he responds.

Project Hail Mary the movie is based on the eponymous book by Andy Weir, known from previous novel-made-movie The Martian, which similarly tells the story of a lone man surviving against the odds. It continues a venerable tradition of movies about cosmic calamities that require a brave few to boldly go where no man has gone before to blow up an asteroid (Armageddon, Deep Impact), rekindle the sun (Sunshine), or find a new home for humanity (Interstellar). This time, our reluctant hero is Dr Ryland Grace (played by Ryan Gosling), disgraced microbiologist, who is sent to Tau Ceti to find a cure for an interstellar infection that is dimming the Sun. At Tau Ceti he joins forces with an alien astronaut, baptised ‘Rocky’, from 40 Eridani, who was sent to Tau Ceti on a similar rescue mission.

Project Hail Mary works on two levels, the macro and the micro, the cosmic and the personal. And despite its stunning visuals evoking the vastness of space, it is decidedly stronger at its smaller scales, in no small part to strong acting by Ryan Gosling, who must carry much of the movie on his own. As I noted in my previous review, good sci-fi doesn’t predict the future, but holds up a mirror to the present day. Project Hail Mary works convincingly as a story about hope, friendship, and collaboration, but it does require a fair amount of willing suspension of disbelief to get there.

The unavoidable question confronting both audience and Dr Grace himself is why he finds himself alone on a mission to save humanity. A series of flashbacks gradually reveals a backstory that withstands critical scrutiny about as well as a human withstands the vacuum of space. It takes an unreasonable number of accidental and unexplained deaths, combined with an astonishing lack of redundancy planning, to result in our lonely spacefarer, who then by a stroke of luck the size of Jupiter finds himself in Tau Ceti at the exact same time and place as Rocky. It is probably more plausible than the universe making me a cheese sandwich out of quantum fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation, but not by much.

All of this is set in motion by an existentially threatening reduction in the output of the Sun, caused by the presence of a cosmic bacterium labelled the Astrophage. The Astrophage absorbs radiation at all wavelengths apart from infrared (not unlike chlorophyll, then) and is breeding on CO2 rich Venus while presumably covering the entire Sun in a shell of radiation eating bacteria. It is rather like that alien goo in Prometheus in possessing precisely the properties the plot demands: seeming faster-than-light spread, consuming the energy output of a star which is 1.5 million times larger than the planet on which it procreates, and then biochemically storing the output of a small fusion reaction in a petridish so that it can be easily harnessed as a stardrive to send our hero on his mission in the titular ‘Hail Mary’.

After Grace’s arrival at Tau Ceti the physics are fortunately grounded back in reality, enabling Project Hail Mary to elegantly interweave it with its narrative. The relativistic speeds attained by the Hail Mary have resulted in measurable time dilation, which means Ryland Grace is over 10 lightyears from Earth, yet has only aged 4 years since departure. Gravity on board is only available when under thrust or through an ingenious centrifuge mode, and the movie cleverly uses the presence or absence of gravity to telegraph what is going on. Orbital manoeuvres and the interior of the spaceship also feel authentic and produce some spectacular visuals, making it easy to see why the movie was filmed with IMAX in mind.

Dr Grace’s alien counterpart Rocky is also intriguingly and profoundly alien. Here we do not have some humanoid with pointy ears or purple skin, but a five-legged rock-based species (splendidly operated and voiced by James Ortiz), that has mastered the atomic level manipulation of xenon to construct vast structures, including the spaceship on which they traveled to Tau Ceti. It makes for a brilliant contrast between the messy complexity of humanity and the monolithic elegance of the Eridians, but it leaves the viewer with a lot of questions that the movie doesn’t so much not answer, as never even ask. I’m not an eminent exobiologist, but am nonetheless curious how Rocky’s species nervous system and metabolism function. Or how technology based seemingly on the manipulation of a single element produces the complex artefacts necessary for manned spaceflight. It is therefore somewhat of a shame that despite his putative past interest in alien life, Ryland Grace is astonishingly uninterested in Rocky and the world he hails from. We get an excessive number of scenes where Rocky and Grace bond over footage of Earth on the Hail Mary’s rudimentary holodeck, but there is barely any reciprocal interest in Rocky’s planet, culture or technology, and it takes until the end of the movie before Grace even visits Rocky’s spaceship.

Maybe Ryland Grace’s lack of interest is explained by how surprisingly human Rocky is, despite being an animated rock with a sensory apparatus based on echolocation. Although Grace has to construct his own universal translator to interpret Rocky’s vocalisations, it transpires that Rocky’s language is surprisingly amenable to English grammar and syntax, not to mention implausibly compatible with a human conceptual framework. Excepting a few recurring mistranslations that serve to remind the audience of the underlying language barrier, as well as for comic effect, Rocky passes seamlessly as American. Contrast this with Arrival, where the attempt to understand aliens who have a fundamentally different conception of reality is the point of the entire movie, rather than the work of a five minute montage.

Most of this can be forgiven because without the rapid establishment of common ground, the relationship between Rocky and Grace would never lift off, and it is here where the movie really shines. Ryan Gosling puts in an excellent performance, managing to strike the precarious balance between comedy and pathos in both the Hail Mary scenes and the pre-launch flashbacks. Gosling easily persuades us to emotionally connect with Rocky, an animated object with even fewer humanoid features than WALL-E, but who nonetheless evokes endearment and sympathy. This investment pays off across several moving moments when our heroes have to overcome the inevitable challenges and risks imposed by the harsh nature of space and the demands of the plot. In the scenes on Earth, Gosling plays the more familiar ‘outsider turned insider’ scientist, but without falling back too strongly onto one-dimensional stereotypes.

The flashback scenes back on Earth are also the ones infused with an almost surreal optimism, presenting us with a world where in the face of an existential threat, humanity does actually manage to band together to try and face it off. The international nature of the Hail Mary project is reinforced at every turn, showing us a global scientific community, Chinese cosmonauts, German administrators and Russian ground control all working together. The prominent shots of an American aircraft carrier are maybe a tad unfortunate at this particular point in time, but it would be unfair to hold that against the movie.

Drawing both strands together, Project Hail Mary is suffused with a profound optimism that acts as a welcome antidote to our present times. It wholeheartedly affirms that forging connections across boundaries, whether cultural, linguistic or technological, is possible, and that people will make the right decisions when it comes down to it, even if they sometimes need a little push to do so. The multinational cooperation to remove the Astrophage threat draws from a poorer cinematic tradition than the disaster movie elements of Project Hail Mary, but nonetheless recalls movies like Arrival or Pacific Rim, series like Stargate Atlantis, or videogames like X-COM and Mass Effect, all keeping a hope alive that we can work together across boundaries and borders to further the common good. At a time when a declining US empire seems intent on disrupting any attempt at global cooperation, reminders that another approach is possible are an unalloyed positive.

On the whole, Project Hail Mary is an eminently enjoyable movie with stunning visuals, a potent mix of comedy and scientific seriousness, and a heartfelt relationship at its core. Given its committed message of hope, it feels unkind to hold its basic premise of the sole, vaguely antiheroic man saving the world, against it. Nonetheless, it remained a discordant note for me throughout, diminishing the effectiveness of its emotional appeal through the sheer amount of contrivance deployed to fabricate a situation where this man – and as always it is a white, American man – must single-handedly save the world. If I was qualified to psychoanalyse, I might speculate that the movie is indicative of a profound anxiety afflicting affluent white American men who fear that even they no longer have any agency in our increasingly out-of-control world. The message of hope is thus tinged with a hint of frightened wish-fulfillment, complete with the stern Germanic mutti figure to take command and tell us that everything will be fine.

In the real world neither Germanic mutti’s nor metrosexual American men will come and save us. It will be a shared struggle, and insofar as Project Hail Mary inspires us to believe that humans can work together to overcome insurmountable odds and that every everyman will find it in them to do the right thing, while giving us some good laughs and cries along the way, it is a movie made for its time.

Notes & suggestions

• My unwillingness to accept the '‘single white male hero” trope has been sharpened recently by Ada Palmer’s writing on agency and protagonists in fiction, especially science fiction. This in itself draws on older writings, including Ursula K. le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. I have gone into this in more detail in my reviews of Mass Effect 3 and Andor.
• The theme of connection is also key to Marvel’s Thunderbolts*, and despite its more goofy superhero plot and self-referential B-movie vibes, I actually think it made the point better.
• Knowledge is power, which is why those in power so often hate science. US readers in particular may be worried about the attacks on science and scientific institutions in the US. Organisations like the Union of Concerned Scientists recognise the independence of science to democracy, and are fighting to keep scientific endeavours alive.

___

If you enjoyed this blog, you can subscribe

You can also Discuss... this on Remark.As if you have a Write.As account.

And you can follow me on Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@thecasualcritic

Warning: Contains spoilers

As Ursula K. le Guin never tired of pointing out, good science fiction tries to tell us something about the here and now, not the then and there. That is true even for science fiction set ‘a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far away’. Insofar as scifi is a commentary on, or even an inspiration for, real world events, does that make it fair to critique it on that basis? I think the answer is affirmative, but given the overall excellent qualities of Star Wars series Andor, I did worry I was holding it to an excessively high standard. Ultimately though, if a television series is so easily perceived as an analogy for how to resist authoritarian oppression, it is worth scrutinising where it locates the agency for that resistance, notwithstanding what many other merits it has.

Season 2 of Andor returns to thief-turned-spy Cassian Andor after he fully committed to the Rebellion. It covers the period between the end of season 1 and the start of Rogue One, the prequel that acts as the opening salvo for the original Star Wars trilogy. It is one of the grimmer series in the Star Wars franchise, set at the zenith of the Galactic Empire and tracing the formation of the Rebel Alliance via its eponymous hero and his comrades.

Despite being an escapist fantasy, Star Wars has always been political, and it certainly is not hard to read Andor as an analogy for our present moment, with democracies sliding into authoritarianism (examples of this take are here, here, here, and here). Of the entire Star Wars universe, Andor has the strongest focus on the banal cruelty of the Galactic Empire and the human cost of resisting it. It’s not surprising that it has become a source of inspiration for activists across the Anglophone world, with the show’s highlights seeping out into the real world. As a compelling depiction of fascist repression and a rousing inspiration for resistance Andor certainly delivers. Yet we should be careful not to treat its path to victory as a template for the work that needs to be done in the real world.

Before we delve into the politics of Andor, it must be said that this is one of the best products to ever come out of the Star Wars stable, and the fact that there are no Jedi involved is certainly not a coincidence. Andor has the gritty realism and suspense of the best Cold War spy thrillers (I’m reminded of Deutschland 83), with excellent structure and pacing keeping it compelling all the way through its twelve episodes. The absence of lightsabre duels and space battles creates space for the human sacrifices, both large and small, that form a resistance made up of ordinary people. Its brilliant cast of strong and relatable characters, whether the ruthless spymaster, despairing politician, or zealous apparatchik, gives it true complexity and depth.

The honest and unflinching focus on the psychology of resistance is one of the things that makes Andor brilliant. Revolution is not easy, and we see Andor’s main characters struggle with the sacrifices it demands, frequently failing or falling apart. A variety of motivations and dispositions leads to the usual disagreements over strategy and tactics, sometimes pushed to infighting by the siege mentality that results from constant pressure and secrecy. Andor’s is not the idolised and idealised vanguard party or guerilla cell formed solely of comrades sharing the unbreakable bond forged from common struggle. This is a messy affair. An ecosystem of actors, factions and precarious alliances barely held together by a common purpose. In other words, convincingly familiar to anyone involved in real left-wing organising.

Similarly, Andor excels in its depiction of the repressive apparatus of the fascist state, especially through its casting of two fanatical Imperial bureaucrats as annoyingly relatable characters. Central to the plot of season 2 is the Empire’s need to gain access to strategic minerals on the planet Ghorman. As Ghorman is not some Outer Rim backwater but a core planet, a suitable pretext needs to be found or fabricated to turn it into a sacrifice zone. With season 1’s Dedra Meero in charge, the Empire’s Internal Security Bureau embarks on a plan to justify permanent occupation of the planet that reads as a Who’s Who of authoritarian tactics. Ghorman’s population is dehumanised by the Empire’s propaganda machine, its resistance infiltrated and goaded, its economy strangled and its leaders incarcerated, before it all culminates in a ruthless double false flag operation as a coup de grace to justify a full scale occupation. Elsewhere in the galaxy, we see the violence, repression and abuse of power that comes with a militarised bureaucracy. If this feels familiar, that is because it is. Showrunner Tony Gilroy was reportedly inspired by the Wannsee Conference in Nazi Germany, but this is equally the story of Chile, Gaza, the Prague Spring, Xinjiang, Minneapolis, Moscow, or Tehran.

The ruthless exercise of state power against its own populace is one of the most powerful aspects of Andor, but it is also where the series chafes most against the constraints imposed by Star Wars’ canonical lore. This is after all an incongruent universe of sentient androids running on vacuum tubes, and faster-than-light travel organised via telephone exchange switchboards. It may be the future, but it is the future of the 1970s, and so it is no surprise that Andor feels like a John le Carré novel set in space. Cassian Andor does not need to worry about ubiquitous surveillance or his digital footprint, nor is there a galaxy-wide network full of Imperial bots and propaganda farms. Instead we have listening devices the size of iPods, ambushes under cover of nothing but darkness, and heroic last stands with flags and barricades that walked straight out of Les Miserables. It works for the viwer, because it taps into tropes that we have seen a thousand times before, but it doesn’t make much sense within the context of a technologically highly advanced society, nor does it offer much use as inspiration for anyone organising against power in the present day.

This isn’t just because our own organising environment poses challenges that are absent from Andor, but also because, embedded as it is within the Star Wars canon, Andor does not have a theory of political change. The Empire is preordained to fall when the evil overlord is slain by a young hero, with the Rebel Alliance acting solely in a supporting role. Star Wars has never had a conception of politics, only of political corruption and drama, and so it has no political or social forces for Andor’s rebels to tap into. Resistance in the real world is built on the existing infrastructure of left-wing political parties, revolutionary cells, activist campaign groups, or militant unions. None of these exist in the Star Wars imaginary, so it is no surprise that when the Ghorman rebels broadcast their last desperate plea for help, there is nobody out there to hear it.

Maybe this is an unfairly harsh criticism. After all, Andor is a sci-fi television series made by a multibillion dollar corporation, not a revolutionary handbook. Yet as Ada Palmer cogently argues, where we place agency in fiction matters:

When SFF authors offer portraits of how people change the world, we exercise enormous power over worldview, over expectations, over hope.

Despite centering ordinary people, Andor’s implicit premise is that all we can hope to do is prepare the ground for the hero to come and save us. Star Wars is a story of resistance acting from the outside, having sought refuge beyond the boundaries of the Empire. It is a guerilla riding to victory because a combination of magical heroism and helpful enemy hubris allow it to strike at the core of imperial power, after which the Empire falls apart and we can all go home (except not really, as we discover in The Mandalorian). But there is no outside in Minneapolis, Jerusalem or Hong Kong, nor can we rely on a hero with magical powers to come and save us. Real resistance can only spring from collective action within the societies in which we live, founded on tenacious organising in order to push back authoritarian power and control.

None of that takes away from the brilliance of the series and its value as inspiration. Andor pushes the Star Wars canon probably as far into a realistic analogy of resistance to fascism as its lore allows it to go. It shifts Star Wars into the morally grey area where every action is a compromise, and where nobody has clear sight on the path to victory. Andor doesn’t give us a hero’s journey, only comrades who stubbornly, desparately cling on to the hope that the struggle might at some future point bear fruit. Which returns me to the words of the late Tony Benn that:

There is no final victory; there is no final defeat; just the same battles that have to be fought over and over and over again.

It is hard to keep hope alive in the face of the vast forces arrayed against us, and many of us will never know if our small contributions made a difference. But the same was true for our ancestors, whose victories and defeats brought us the world we live in today. We may not have the Jedi to come and save us, but like Cassian Andor and his comrades, we do have each other, and the faith that in the long run, the people united will not be defeated.

Notes & Suggestions

• The struggles with despair, grief, survivor’s guilt, and suspicion all feature in Hannah Proctor’s Burnout, which is an excellent resource for activists dealing with the stresses of organising.
• Another recent depiction of the struggle against authoritarian repression, One Battle After Another not only has a more recognisably contemporary setting, but is also more interested in the role community plays in organising resistance.
• The Imaginary Worlds podcast has two interesting episodes (recorded some years apart) about representations of fascism in science fiction, and while Andor itself isn’t specifically covered, Star Wars is unsurprisingly one of the key works discussed. The first episode is here, and the second one here.
• Andor may serve as an inspiration for people standing up against nascent fascism, but it would be remiss not to note that Disney, the company that produced it, is clearly no ally in this struggle. Not only did it readily concede to demands from the Trump administration’s to suspend voices critical of the government, but it is also one of the key targets in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign due to its complicity in the illegal occupation of Palestine.
• You are unlikely to find the Rebel Alliance in this part of the galaxy, but absent that, joining a trade union, tenants association, campaign group or political party is not a bad way to help build collective power.

___

If you enjoyed this blog, you can subscribe

You can also Discuss... this on Remark.As if you have a Write.As account.

And you can follow me on Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@thecasualcritic

“There is no magic money tree” is the stern injunction invoked by politicians, central bankers and economists to explain to a fiscally imprudent public why it cannot have nice things. Fiscal rectitude is now the primary virtue of government, perhaps nowhere more so than in the United Kingdom where the Treasury has shackled itself to the need for approval from an ‘Office for Budget Responsibility’. Running deficits or printing money, we are told, is only one tiny step away from Weimar Republic levels of financial calamity.

But what if it wasn’t thus? That is the alluring promise of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which first gained prominence in the wake of the Great Recession and argues that not only can governments print money to cover expenses, but they should do so to fully realise a nation’s productive capacity. It is a provocative and controversial theory that repudiates the need for permanent austerity in the name of balanced budgets, and finds one of its most ardent advocates in Stephanie Kelton, erstwhile chief economist to US senator Bernie Sanders. In her book The Deficit Myth, she takes her argument for a ‘people’s economy’ built on the insights of MMT to a wider audience.

The Deficit Myth faces the triple challenge of any non-fiction book that assails an existing orthodoxy. It must set out a compelling argument, be intelligible to a lay audience, and dispel hegemonic common sense. This is a daunting task, and the meagre evidence base, weaknesses in Kelton’s writing style, and a different perspective on political economy meant I was left unpersuaded by the book’s stronger claims. Nonetheless, it is a thought-provoking read that provides ample critique of economic orthodoxy, and left me receptive to exploring more rigorous defences of MMT in future.

MMT is based on the chartalist premise that any government operating a freely floating fiat currency can create money to fund its expenditure. Governments can do this because they are the monopoly issuer of their own currency, which means they can never ‘run out’ of it. This money then flows into the economy, from which it can be removed through taxation, to avoid an excess supply of money driving up inflation. I had come across this view before in David Graeber’s Debt: The first 5000 years, although Graeber did not explore the economic consequences as thoroughly as Kelton.

MMT pre-empts the obvious counterargument that governments creating money will simply lead to inflation by positing that the additional money will be absorbed by unutilised productive capacity in the economy instead. In essence, MMT argues that it is not the relationship between money and goods and services available to purchase that drives inflation, but the relationship of money to the productive capacity of an economy to produce goods and services. As long as increased government expenditure results in a commensurate increase in things available for purchase, by stimulating economic activity, inflation will be kept at bay. It is only when the economy is running at full capacity that increasing the money supply further will cause inflation.

This argument will sound familiar to readers acquainted with (post-)Keynesian theories advocating countercyclical spending to dampen the negative effects of the business cycle, and my impression is that different views on the nature of money notwithstanding, MMT advocates and Keynesian economists are at least fellow travelers. It is an intriguing and logically coherent hypothesis, but unfortunately The Deficit Myth does not offer much evidence to buttress the initial premise. Kelton references a number of other heterodox economists, but unless the reader is already predisposed to agree with the argument, the appeal to authority does not work if the reader is unfamiliar with the sources cited, yet still aware that they are not universally accepted.

This lack of evidence and a failure to address any of the obvious critiques or counterexamples to MMT leave the central argument in a precariously weak position after the first two chapters, and The Deficit Myth does little to shore it up in the remainder of the book. Instead, it applies the core premise to a range of policy issues, such as the national debt, trade imbalances and social security commitments. The Deficit Myth’s prescriptions follow logically from the core premise, which Kelton repeats somewhat overmuch, but they do not offer further proof for its truthfulness. If one does not accept MMT’s core tenets, the whole argument immediately falls apart.

Avoiding substantive engagement with critiques of MMT also leads Kelton into a dead end when explaining why her theory isn’t universally accepted. Discounting competing views on MMT’s validity, she resorts instead to ascribing the failure of policymakers and mainstream economists to accept MMT to either an almost delusional psychological investment in the myth that government finances work similarly to a household budget, or to bad faith ploys for continued austerity. I certainly don’t dispute that hegemonic dogma constrains how people think, but it is not persuasive as the only reason why so many economists, including from heterodox traditions, remain stubbornly unconvinced of MMT’s validity.

All this leaves Kelton’s account of MMT exposed to numerous lines of attack. There is no account of how MMT would explain or manage crises such as the 1970s stagflation or the hyperinflation seen in Weimar Germany or contemporary Zimbabwe or Iran. The chapter proposing a jobs guarantee, does not work through how a strengthened bargaining position for labour might cascade through the economy. The chapter on international trade explains the dangers of governments restricting their monetary sovereignty by linking their own currency to that of another country (usually the dollar), but does not address the risk of increases in the money supply or trade deficits causing currency devaluation, making imports more expensive. This chapter also suffers most from the US-centric perspective in The Deficit Myth, because while Kelton notes the exceptional position of the United States as the issuer of the world reserve currency, there is little exploration of the advantages this confers on the US, and the disadvantages it poses for everyone else. No other country can rely on a near-infinite demand for its own currency to maintain favourable exchange rates despite running structural trade deficits. The lack of consideration for higher-order effects certainly makes the book more readable, but on the flipside also makes it feel so too simplistic to remain persuasive.

The last couple of chapters are dedicated to policy problems that Kelton argues are far more important ‘deficits’, such as crumbling infrastructure, inequality, the atrocious healthcare provision in the United States, and imminent environmental collapse. It is these chapters where The Deficit Myth cannot cash the cheques it wrote for itself at the start of the book. Kelton reminds us that it is the productive capacity of the real economy, not the supply of money, that is the real constraint on what is achievable. Yet as we near the end of the book, we are no wiser on what this capacity is, how we would know what it is, and how it is constituted. It is plausible that MMT could solve any of the problems identified by Kelton individually, but it is doubtful it can solve them all at the same time. The Deficit Myth offers no evidence that simply increasing the money supply would enable us to pay for better healthcare and environmental restoration and a jobs guarantee and infrastructure repair and any of the other things Kelton cares about. Instead, Kelton has to concede that other policy measures, such as progressive taxation, environmental legislation, universal healthcare and industrial policy will also be required.

And so we find ourselves back at the political in political economy. The allure of MMT is its promise of a technical fix to a political problem, and Kelton repeatedly stresses that MMT is not ideology but monetary reality. But in the end, until we achieve fully automated luxury communism, we cannot escape political struggle over our societies’ limited productive forces. Kelton falls into the same trap as Rutger Bregman in Utopia for Realists by proposing an ostensibly objectively positive policy as a shortcut to avoid class conflict, but with class antagonism itself standing in the way of the policy being implemented. As Cory Doctorow reminds us, if something is good for workers, the bosses will hate it. The reason why we cannot have nice things is not because of a mismatch between the money supply and productive forces, but because it is not in the interest of the capitalist class to let us have them. Universal healthcare and a jobs guarantee may well benefit society in the abstract, but the bosses know that insecure, desperate workers are much easier to discipline and exploit.

Jane McAlevey said it best. There are no shortcuts. MMT may well be a useful tool in the hands of labour, but if so, it will still require a powerful working class to wield it.

In the end, I was not persuaded that MMT is the gamechanger that Kelton propounds it to be. But The Deficit Myth remains a valuable and critical intervention in public debate on how we run the economy, and a powerful argument for removing artificial constraints on our welfare and prosperity. The book could be read as a first step on one’s MMT journey, rather than the final word, and I expect more in-depth MMT works would address the critiques I’ve raised. As we discovered to our collective detriment following the Great Recession, there are dangers in having a monoculture of economic theory. It will however take more robust defences and sharper arguments if Kelton wants to see MMT emerge victorious.

Notes & Suggestions

• In her early chapters, Kelton introduces the concept of the ‘non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment’ (NAIRU) which is the putative reference point for central banks to manage inflation. It isn’t central to Kelton’s argument and so I didn’t manage to integrate it into the blog proper, but it was the part of the book that made me most furious. The NAIRU is a rate of ‘acceptable’ unemployment that unelected technocrats decide is necessary to avoid inflation. In other words, it is official government policy in all advanced economies to keep a certain percentage of the workforce out of work as a reserve army of labour. Yet the same politicians and technocrats who deliberately inflict suffering and misery on millions of workers for the benefit of ‘the economy’ will simultaneously blame the unemployed for their situation. If there is one other thing to take away from The Deficit Myth, it is that we should never again take serious any politician talking about ‘skivers vs strivers’ or ‘encouraging’ the unemployed back to work.
• Kelton’s book is a decent entry point, but there is a lot more on MMT out there, on both sides of the debate. Jacobin has featured an extensive critique and rebuttal, as well as an interview with Stephanie Kelton. In the UK, Richard Murphy is one of the more vocal MMT advocates.

___

If you enjoyed this blog, you can subscribe

You can also Discuss... this on Remark.As if you have a Write.As account.

And you can follow me on Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@thecasualcritic

#books #fiction #feminism

Something is rotten in the Republic of Korea. Its shining reputation as a miracle of post-war economic development obscures deeply troubled gender relations. Misogyny is more prevalent and firmly entrenched than in most other parts of the developed world, fueled by a combination of strong patriarchal traditions and increased economic insecurity. This is the backdrop against which Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, winner of the 2016 Man Booker Prize and superbly translated by Debora Smith, emerges.

At under 200 pages and written in a minimalist style evoking the surrealism of Kafka and Murakami, The Vegetarian describes the events that take place after Yeong-hye, a young woman, stops eating meat. The seemingly simple decision to adopt a vegetarian diet is met with increasingly aggressive incomprehension by her family, and their attempts to ‘cure’ Yeong-hye of her deviation have calamitous consequences. The Vegetarian is a powerful story of a woman who refuses to be an object and against all odds tries to eke out some agency in a world that is set against her.

There are three parts to The Vegetarian, none of which are narrated by Yeong-hye herself. We see her evolution first through the eyes of her husband, then her brother-in-law, and finally her sister. All three respond in different ways to Yeong-hye’s actions, and can be read as representing different perspectives on South Korean gender dynamics.

The husband, ‘Mr. Cheong’, is a singularly unpleasant character, who takes objectification to a whole new level. He relates to his wife in the way one might relate to a toaster or a toothbrush, and so responds to Yeong-hye’s conversion with about as much tact, understanding and interest as one would show a malfunctioning household object. At no point does Mr. Cheong refer to Yeong-hye by name, instead only thinking of her as ‘her’ or ‘his wife’. Fully absorbed in his own petty ambitions, Mr Cheong inevitably simply discards Yeong-hye once she no longer serves his mundane needs.

Part two shows us Yeong-hye through the eyes of her sister In-hye’s artist husband, who is pathologically sexually obsessed with her. His fixation only intensifies after she converts to her deviationist vegetarianism. Possessed by a vision of himself and Yeong-hye having sex while covered in painted flowers, he feels compelled to turn his fantasy into a reality. The brother-in-law may despise Mr. Cheong for his callousness towards Yeong-hye, but is singularly blind to his own objectification of her. If Mr. Cheong represents men treating their wives as property, the brother-in-law personifies the male gaze.

In the third and final chapter we experience the novel’s conclusion through In-hye. For In-hye, relating to Yeong-hye’s refusal to conform challenges her own sense of self and the roles she has played for her family and society, and the harms she has suffered as a result. Positioning In-hye’s perspective after the two male parts is a brilliant move, and Han Kang very carefully and sympathetically evokes the sisterhood and comradeship that can blossom between two dissimilar women who may not fully comprehend one another, but nonetheless come to see that they share a bond forged from the same patriarchal oppression.

Weaving together its story from these three parts, The Vegetarian executes something like a reverse-Kafka manoeuvre. In Kafka’s novels, it is the protagonists who make sense, but find themselves fatally stranded in surreal worlds governed by ineffable logics of their own. The Vegetarian appears to do the opposite: it is the world that we recognise and Yeong-hye who is impelled by a irrational motives. But it is only an apparent opposition, because Han Kang’s superb writing shows us that it is actually Yeong-hye’s world that does not make sense, and against which her actions are undeniably logical. What alternative is there for a woman, crushed beneath stifling conformity and murderous objectification, but to drastically rebel, even if it means renouncing who and what she is? If there is no way out, the only escape is inwards, into an alien state where we might finally be free of the strictures placed on us by society.

Yeong-hye’s withdrawal from society and eventual incarceration in a psychiatric asylum are reminiscent of Mark Fisher’s argument that what we call ‘mental illness’ can be a logical reaction to the unbearable demands placed on us by a hostile world. A refusal or an inability to conform to the impositions of neoliberal capitalism or traditional patriarchy. Even prefigurative revolutionary praxis cannot save us from emotional exhaustion, as we saw in Hannah Proctor’s Burnout. There is no way to be whole in a sick world.

The Vegetarian is a magnificent and unflinching illustration of the harms inflicted on countless women. Similar to Kafka, Han Kang’s pared-down, detached and factual writing style enhances the surrealist atmosphere of her story, and is more merciless in its evisceration of its male characters than any overt outrage, albeit its existentialist view on the nigh impossibility of human communication will not appeal to readers seeking rounded psychological development. If one is willing to accept that the characters are archetypes, The Vegetarian is however utterly compelling, though it would be difficult to call it enjoyable, with its harrowing and visceral abuse and aggression against women, and the dismissive, uncaring banality of the men perpetrating them.

I wonder what the impact of The Vegetarian has been on debates on feminism and gender in South Korea. It is maybe not surprising that the book had a better reception in the Anglophone world than in South Korea itself, which remains riven by gender conflict and where accusations of feminist thought routinely result in violent backlash. How many Mr Cheong’s are still out there? We can only hope that some might dislike their reflection in Han Kang’s mirror enough to shake off their entitlement and learn to treat and respect women as equals.

Notes & Suggestions

• South Korea’s endemic misogyny has found some very specific expressions, not only in direct violence against women, but also for example the unconsensual and covert recording of women using spycams hidden in innocuous objects. In response, it has also given rise to specific forms of feminist organising, such as the 4B movement.
• In-hye’s struggles to keep her life together put me in mind of the excellent song ‘labour’ by Paris Paloma.
• Consider supporting or joining a feminist or women’s organisation. Alternatively, broader campaigning organisations such as Amnesty International or trade unions also have spaces for feminist organising.

___

If you enjoyed this blog, you can subscribe

You can also Discuss... this on Remark.As if you have a Write.As account.

And you can follow me on Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@thecasualcritic

#tv #fiction #anime #SF

For as long as humans have dreamt of robots, they have dreamt of them becoming human. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) remains the ambition of most AI companies, despite current LLMs exhibiting worrying tendencies to ramble, hallucinate or engage in the mass production of child pornography. With this aspiration comes the attendant fear that, once sentient, the robots will take our jobs, murder us all in our sleep, or simply transform us into paperclips. Genocidal AIs are such a science-fiction staple that introducing a robot in Act One almost inevitably leads to the AI Apocalypse by Act Three.

Compared to this pervasive trope, 2023 anime series Pluto offers a refreshing alternative. Inspired by the 1960s Astroboy comics, Pluto is a short and sympathetic meditation on the nature of humanity, delivering an emotional gut punch with almost every episode. Its story and beautifully rendered aesthetic are a homage to the High Futurist optimism of a bygone era, composed of flying cars, skyscraper cities embraced by bucolic countryside, and peaceful robot and human coexistence.

Not that there is no conflict in Pluto. Episode one starts us off with not one, but two murders: a highly advanced robot and a renowned roboticist. Symbols left at the crime scenes suggest the murders are connected, but this presents an enigma: forensics indicate a robotic suspect, yet Pluto’s robots obey an equivalent of Asimov’s First Law of Robotics and hence cannot harm humans. It is up to Gesicht, Europol’s foremost robotic detective, to crack this case.

Gesicht has a personal investment in this investigation. As more robots and humans fall victim to the mysterious murderer referred to as the titular Pluto, we learn that all of them are connected to the ‘39th Central Asian War’: the invasion of the ‘Kingdom of Persia’ on the ostensible grounds that it illegally stockpiled robots of mass destruction – a very thinly veiled reference to the 2003 Iraq War. The robots being targeted are the world’s seven most advanced robots, which includes Gesicht himself. All were to some degree involved with the invasion of the Kingdom of Persia, while all human victims were on the ‘Bora Inquiry Commission’, an international inspection team sent in ahead of the invasion to determine whether the Kingdom did indeed possess robots of mass destruction. Someone is out for vengeance, but the question is who, and why.

A whodunnit at a surface level, Pluto’s real story is an existential reflection on the nature of humanity, and how a robot might attain it. While not programmed to have them, Pluto’s most advanced robots start to experience emotions as an emergent property driven by a desire to emulate and understand their human counterparts. Humans might remark on robotic superiority in terms of intellect, durability and the absence of emotional complications, but many robots feel afflicted with a pervasive melancholia because they cannot access the human way of relating to the world. They want to experience a sunrise, not merely detect the appearance of a nearby star over the horizon.

Trauma is the key that unlocks the emotional door for Gesicht and others who fought and killed thousands of robotic adversaries in the 39th Central Asian War. As we encounter the robot victors, we see them struggle with depression, hate, grief, regret, and guilt, exacerbated by their unfamiliarity with emotional feelings, and a lack of human understanding, bordering on callousness, for what they are going through. Robots prove particularly vulnerable to traumatic events because their memories don’t fade or alter with time, causing one to desperately ask a human whether the hate it feels will ever diminish.

Hate is at the centre of the paradox that Pluto interrogates. If attaining humanity requires a robot to feel, then how can it remain subject to Asimov’s First Law? A robot that can feel, can hate. A robot that can hate, could kill. After all humans kill other humans all the time. Some characters contend that might be the necessary ingredient for emotional awakening, and it is certainly a driving force for many characters, both human and robot. Attempting to answer whether hate can indeed be overcome, Pluto explores if and how a cycle of hate and vengeance, both at the personal and societal level, can ever be broken. In the end, it affirms that it can, arriving at similar conclusion to Thunderbolts* in showing how kindness, forgiveness and love are the way out of the hateful doom spiral.

Pluto executes its introspection on the nature of humanity intelligently and with real sympathy for all its characters, villains included. Compared to my recent read The Interdependency, there is a remarkable amount of backstory and character development in a mere eight episodes. There are some aspects though where Pluto’s evocation of the Golden Age of science fiction leads it astray. Most unforgivable is the extremely limited presence of female characters, who are relegated to either loving wives or emotional sisters. There is no reason why all of the seven main robots should be male, nor for the overwhelming majority of the support cast to be the same. And while the patriarchy may be the most obvious, Pluto on the whole exhibits the problematic lack of diversity that sadly remains emblematic of much anime. An upgrade to the 21st century was absolutely warranted here, and the absence of it is disappointing. Environmentally Pluto has equally remained in the 1960s. We see plenty of flying cars, but no mass transit. Skyscraper cities, but no renewable energy. For an otherwise very carefully composed series, this is a crude techno-optimist streak, with technological development serving to both magically overcome environmental destruction and reimpose traditional gender norms.

These are not trivial critiques, and I would have preferred for Pluto to reinvent utopian futurism for the 2020s rather than simply importing it wholesale from the 1960s, if only because we could all do with an alternative aesthetic to the all-pervasive cyberpunk or Terminator derivatives. Choosing this traditional Golden Age of Sci-Fi setting places Pluto outside the contemporary utopian aesthetic of solarpunk, but it is not a bad thing to have multiple utopias to choose from. Despite these flaws, Pluto is a beautifully crafted, emotionally compelling and intellectually engaging series that most certainly deserves viewing. It is more than redeemed by its optimism on the potential for human/robot coexistence, its belief in empathy, care and love as the real keys to humanity, and its insistence that our future isn’t determined by technology, but by what we choose to do with it. And possibly, by what it chooses to do with itself.

Notes & Suggestions

• Another excellent meditation on technological advance, utopian possibilities, what it means to be human and how synthetic constructs fit into all of this is animated series Pantheon. Similarly, Citizen Sleeper is a comparatively short but beautifully crafted game that also mixes musing son synthetic existence with an insistence on kindness and mutual aid, although in a distinctly more cyberpunk dystopian setting.
• For a running commentary on all things wrong with AI, I recommend following Cory Doctorow. I reviewed his excellent book The Internet Con some time ago.
• The Imaginary Worlds podcast has an episode on solarpunk, as well as one on architects imagining other possible futures.

___

If you enjoyed this blog, you can subscribe

You can also Discuss... this on Remark.As if you have a Write.As account.

And you can follow me on Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@thecasualcritic