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.

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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.

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“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.

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#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.

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#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.

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Warning: Contains some spoilers

Interstellar empires. They are a staple of science fiction, but we don’t often see how they arise. They’re just…sort of there, with their ‘Romans with spaceships’ vibe. John Scalzi’s Interdependency trilogy departs from convention by giving us both a backstory and a look under the hood. The series, comprised of The Collapsing Empire, The Consuming Fire, and The Last Emperox, tells the story of the eponymous interstellar empire confronted with an existential crisis, as its interdimensional hyperspace network starts to unravel. Like other human societies that preceded it, what the Interdependency does not do is pull itself together to avert disaster. Instead, its ruling elite descend into lethal court intrigues to gain control over the limited number of proverbial escape pods on the rapidly decompressing imperial spaceship. Across three fast-paced books, Scalzi puts the reader at the centre of power to find out whether the ruling class will pull itself together, or apart, and the rest of society with it.

Scalzi’s worldbuilding makes for a really interesting setting, and a creative new take on the interstellar empire trope, with plenty of nods to our contemporary world that are either humorous, insightful or both. Which is why it is such a shame that as the series progresses, the Interdependency itself fades increasingly into the background, obscured by the interpersonal dramas and vendattas of the main characters. The end result is something akin to what you might get if Frank Herbert’s Dune was the basis for a season of Eastenders.

None of this is as apparent in the first book, which I felt to be the strongest in the series. The Collapsing Empire benefits from introducing us to Scalzi’s intriguing world, its characters, and the central point of the plot. We learn that the Holy Empire of the Interdependency is a refuge for a spacefaring human civilization that has long since lost contact with Earth, consisting mostly of habitats either on or orbiting otherwise inhospitable planets. The precarious nature of the Interdependency is due to its reliance on the ‘Flow’, an interdimensional network of hyperspace lanes that allow for faster-than-light travel, but only between specific star systems, most of which do not contain planets capable of supporting human life. Despite their high level of technological sophistication, the Interdependency’s systems could not function in isolation, therefore the overriding purpose of the empire is to maintain both inter-system trade and enduring political stability and stasis.

Of course, this system works better for some than for others, and it works particularly well for the noble houses and guilds that have monopolies on the manufacture and trade of life’s essentials. The political economy of the Interdependency is the logical endpoint you would get to when applying Cory Doctorow’s process of enshittification to an entire economy: everything, from starships to citrus fruits, can only be produced by a single house and is legally and technologically shielded against reverse engineering. One cannot wonder if the architects of the Interdependency read Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism as an instruction manual:

A monopoly, once it is formed and controls thousands of millions, inevitably penetrates into every sphere of public life, regardless of the form of government and all other “details”.

This, however, is all about to come to an end as the Flow connections begin to fail, threatening to leave each system isolated and facing slow but certain collapse. By the end of The Collapsing Empire, this news has finally reached the new emperox (yes, the title is gender neutral) Grayland II, who as the second-in-line made an unexpected ascencion to the throne and is already finding herself beset with intrigue, assassination and attempted coups. On top of which, she now has the imminent collapse of all human civilisation to contend with.

Unfortunately, the imminent collapse of civilisation remains eclipsed by said intrigue, assassinations and attempted coups in the remaining two novels, as Grayland II is under continuous assault from the ambitious Nohamapetan noble house. That is not to say that the Flow collapse disappears from the story, but for much of it it functions more as a political complication or liability within the ever shifting allegiances of different factions. Apart from a handful of paragraphs, we learn nothing about the response of the billions of people whose existence is at stake. The denizens of the Interdependency suffer from what I’ve come to think of as ‘prole syndrome’: a debilitating lack of agency and presence, which means their salvation can only ever come from the outside or the top down. We also saw this in Oryx & Crake, and it is taking 1984’s O’Brien at face value when he says:

Or perhaps you have returned to your old idea that the proletarians or the slaves will arise and overthrow us. Put it out of your mind. They are helpless, like the animals. Humanity is the Party. The others are outside — irrelevant.

There is a potential comparison here with the contemporary response to climate change. We, too, live in a society faced with an approaching existential threat. We too are governed by elites that are either unable to avert catastrophe, or have decided that they will be just fine, actually, and the death of millions is a small price to pay for ‘number go up’. Scalzi himself has indicated the analogy was not intended as directly, but that he was nonetheless inspired by the realisation that it will take us caring for one another if we are to survive because, to borrow a phrase from one of his characters , ‘the universe doesn’t give a fuck’.

Yet for all that, care or mutual aid are conspicuously absent from the Interdependency. We are told most of the Interdependency’s citizens assume matters will work themselves out, and only a handful either prepare for the End Times, or beseech their representatives to avert it. If this is a reflection on our contemporary state of affairs, it is a cynical and fatalistic one. Yes, more could be done, but we know that the vast majority of people want more action to be taken. Any limited progress we have made in the fight against climate change has been extracted from elites through organised collective action, rather than being benevolently gifted to us from above. Maybe an alternative version of the story could have seen boycots of trading guilds, occupations of space stations or the hijacking of starships as the citizenry of the Interdependency forcefully asserts its right not to be annihilated.

With its focus on court intrigue as it is, the Interdependency series can’t help but invite comparison with other galactic empire stories, perhaps most immediately Frank Herbert’s Dune. Despite being mostly confined to a single planet, the narrative in Dune feels grand, whereas in the Interdependency the interpersonal conflicts resemble the scale of a dysfunctional university fraternity. In Dune, the conflict between its noble houses is encoded into the fabric of its society in a way that believably inflects everything about how the nobility acts and reacts, relying on careful long-term planning to attain victory. In the Holy Empire of the Interdependency, violence is deployed so casually that the universal incompetence of everyone’s security services begs the question how anyone in the leading houses is still alive by the time the story rolls round.

Of course this comparison is unfair, and so is judging the Interdependency series for something that it is not, but the contrast was productive in helping me identify that my disappointment with the novels traced back to the separation between the world and the story set within it. The concept of the Interdependency holds much creative potential, yet the series never fully realises it. Whether that is due to the focus on the upper classes, the pace of the stories or the limited length of the series, is hard to tell.

That is not to say that the Interdependency series isn’t worth reading, as there is still much to enjoy in it. For one, although functionally Scalzi leans heavily into the Great Person Theory of History, he is happy to show us that up close, these people are anything but Great. Scalzi’s heroes are flawed, with doubts and foibles and endearingly humane concerns. Even his villains, while mainly murderous sociopaths, have compelling and interesting characters. All three novels are pleasantly fast-paced, which means it is neither surprising nor problematic that none of the characters show any real development over the course of the story, and have neatly Newtonian trajectories that can be predictably inferred from their starting positions. Instead, the plot proceeds through a couple of only mildly contrived deus-ex-machinas that move the story in an interesting direction without nullifying all dramatic tension the way we saw in Remembrance of Earth’s Past. The Last Emperox then sticks the landing with a solid and satisfying finale, handing the villains their just desserts without making it too easy on the heroes. The Interdependency is easily enjoyed as a literary light snack, and I will certainly give other Scalzi’s a go. Yet I cannot help but wonder if, with the same ingredients, something more substantial wouldn’t have been possible.

Notes & Suggestions

• In the last few months, I have enjoyed The Ten Percent Thief and One Battle After Another as examples of artworks that centre the agency of ordinary people, rather than ruling elites.
• Unfortunately I have not yet found the time to read Cory Doctorow’s recent hit Enshittification, but his previous book The Internet Con is equally worth a read, and also covers the dangers of unfettered monopolies reaching directly into our homes and lives.
• If you don’t want to feel like a mindless prole, unable to exert any power or agency in the world, consider joining any form of collective organising. Whether it be a workplace or tenants union, environmental campaign group, or political party, we can show the pessimists that people power can still change the world.
• The scenario where the elites simply exterminate the surplus population in order to achieve fully automated luxury communism is one of the four paths discussed in Peter Frase’s Four Futures.
• If you haven’t yet read Dune, but you enjoy science fiction and space operas, go and read Dune.
• And if you want to be thoroughly depressed and read about how some really existing elites happily let millions of people starve to death in order to protect profits, consider picking up Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocausts.

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Warning: Contains spoilers

Hamnet is a Shakespeare movie, except it is not actually about Shakespeare. Sure, William Shakespeare (played by Paul Mescal) features, but a bit like Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson in One Battle After Another, he is neither its central character nor commands the majority of screentime. According to my local cinema’s blurb, Hamnet concerns ‘the healing power of art and creativity’. That is not untrue insofar as the movie culminates in a performance of Hamlet, which the movie portrays as Shakespeare’s means of processing his son’s death. Yet to interpret the movie by its finale alone seems to me to deny the centrality of Anne ‘Agnes’ Hathaway (played by Jessie Buckley), and her embodiment of the universal grief over the loss of those who die before their time.

Hamnet’s unflinching portrayal of visceral sorrow has ignited a debate among critics on whether the movie emotionally manipulates its audience to the extent that it could be considered ‘grief porn’. This is a surprising argument to me. Objecting that a movie about the death of a child centres grief feels like objecting that a Marvel movie contains superheroes and mediocre CGI. Rather than fault a movie for our discomfort, it is worth considering if it is not our cultural inhibitions around emotions that is to blame.

None of this matters yet at the beginning of Hamnet, when Agnes and William are just falling in love. Each in their own way, they are both outsiders. Like her hawk, Agnes is a forest creature, representative of a fading medieval tradition of herbalism and (witch)craft. Will is an aspiring poet by night, impoverished Latin teacher by day, who, as the audience knows, will become one of the foremost incarnations of the early modern period that is set to eclipse medieval norms and customers. We are witness to a transition where the rooted magic of plants and place will give way to the illusory magic of show and spectacle. And a transition that, it should be noted, was often carried out by violence against people like Agnes who stood accused of witchcraft.

Agnes’ second pregnancy symbolises this traumatic rupture with the Old Ways when she is forcefully denied giving birth in the forest and instead made to deliver at home – though a birthing stool is still more sensible than the methods 'modern’ science would inflict on future generations of women. Compounding Agnes’ distress is the sudden realisation that she is giving birth to twins, despite premonitions that she will be survived by only two children. From that moment, she is quietly convinced that her unexpected second daughter will pass before her time.

For a time though, things are go well for the Shakespeares, although Will is mostly absent from both his family and the screen, building his career as a playwright in faraway London, leaving it to Agnes and William’s extended family to care for their children. Their domestic life is beautifully captured by director Chloé Zhao and cinematographer Łukasz Żal, conveying a moderate yet not impoverished existence that feels plausible, which reminded me of similar scenes in 2023’s Znachor – despite the latter being set four centuries later.

Yet in the end, misfortune strikes as plague sweeps the land, afflicting first Judith but ultimately killing Hamnet instead. Buckley’s portrayal of Agnes’ grief over Hamnet’s death is raw and visceral, as is her depiction of Agnes’ subsequent bitterness at the absence of her husband, whose sorrow is more restrained and distant. This is where the debate over Hamnet’s emotional interaction with its audience, and its reliance on tropes of feminine and masculine ways of expressing grief comes most to the fore.

It is undeniably true that Hamnet seeks an emotional response from its audience, and that the death of a child is not exactly a subtle way to extract this. Some critics contend that this in and of itself invalidates any appeal the movie might make to our emotions. Viz. the BBC:

But as most of us already know that the death of a child is devastating, they seem more exploitative than insightful.

This is an odd line of argument. Most of us also already know that guns kill people, yet there is no shortage of movies containing copious amounts of gun violence. An entire franchise has been built on the premise that a man going on an intercontinental murderous rampage is a reasonable response to him losing his dog.

Rather than attributing our discomfort to Hamnet’s portrayal of tragedy, I wonder if it does not instead originate with our societal and cultural inhibitions on grief and mourning. The welcome triumphs of modern medicine over a host of lethal ailments are undeniable, but also seem to have engendered a collective need to disavow infirmity, illness and death altogether. Our desire to believe that science now holds the cure for any ailment, possibly driven by capitalist imperatives to forever be productive, means we must banish from sight any signs to the contrary. Hamnet is a timely reminder of our not-so-distant past when death was a more familiar companion.

For while Hamnet’s lure is that we are witnessing a grief that is special, its power lies in showing that it is universal. In the end, I’m not particularly invested in whether Hamlet really was Shakespeare’s way of processing his grief over Hamnet’s death. The movie posits rather than demonstrates the connection, and it makes for a satisfying and moving finale, but the story leading up to that point does not require it. Instead, the most poignant scene for me is a rather understated exchange between Susanna and Shakespeare’s mother Mary (played by Emily Watson), where we learn that she, too, has lost some of her children.

Here is universal, intergenerational sorrow. The silent pain, both individual and collective, over the loss of children taken before their time. Of generations of women dying in childbirth. Of brothers and sisters succumbing to mysterious plagues and diseases, chance infections or simple misfortune. Of family and friends taken by and natural calamity.

In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction Ursula K. Le Guin persuasively argues there is an alternative mode of telling our stories and histories: the story of life, of the bag that carries home the food or medicine, the shelter that is home or community. Despite the centrality of death, Hamnet is what Le Guin would call a ‘life story’. A story about grief, and how we heal from it through community (as we saw in Small Acts of Love).

And it is a story about rage. Le Guin’s carrier bag is also a medicine bundle, representing human efforts throughout the ages to heal, to prevent suffering, or to ease pain where no cure was available. Grieving loss can transform into fury against uncaring gods or the vast universe for whom the death of our loved ones pales beyond insignificance, fueling resolve to spare future generations the same fate. Where these efforts are frustrated not by the impersonal obstacles of nature, but by human forces who seek to prevent or even negate our collective capabilities to prevent suffering, rage is surely the justified response.

At its best, Hamnet reminds us that while grief over the passing of those we love is an inseparable part of what it means to be alive, so is the ability to overcome it through connection, community and love. Rather than denying our mortality and its attendant sorrows by hiding its manifold expressions from our view, we must learn how collectively give them space and process them. Yet where our pain results not from blind, impersonal chance, but the choices of those who hold power over us, we must also resolve to do what we can to spare others from the same fate. To adapt the famous last words of Joe Hill: first mourn, but then organise.

Notes & Suggestions

• To contribute to efforts to provide care and minimise suffering right now, consider supporting Medecins Sans Frontieres, the International Committee of the Red Cross, or similar organisations.
• Joe Hill’s original, oft-quoted exhortation is of course “Don’t mourn – organise!”. However, as we saw in Hannah Proctor’s Burnout, refusing to mourn our losses impairs our ability to organise over the long run.
• Collective action through a union, tenants or neighbourhood organisation, political party, or other campaigning organisation can be a powerful antidote to grief or anxiety.

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Something is wrong with the internet. What once promised a window onto the world now feels like a morass infested with AI generated garbage, trolls, bots, trackers and stupendous amounts of advertising. Every company claims to be your friend in that inane, offensively chummy yet mildly menacing corpospeak – now perfected by LLMs – all while happily stabbing you in the back when you try to buy cheaper ink for your printer. That is, when they’re not busy subverting democracy. Can someone please switch the internet off and switch it on again?

Maybe such a feat is beyond Cory Doctorow, author of The Internet Con, but it would not be for want of trying. Doctorow is a vociferous, veteran campaigner at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a prolific writer, and an insightful critic of the way Big Tech continues to deny the open and democratic potential of the internet. The Internet Con is a manifesto, polemic and primer on how that internet was stolen from us, and how we might get it back. Doctorow has recently gained mainstream prominence with his neologism ‘enshittification’: a descriptor of the downward doom spiral that Big Tech keeps the internet locked into. As I am only slowly going through my backlog of books, I am several Doctorow books behind. Which I don’t regret, as The Internet Con, published in 2023, remains an excellent starting point for anyone seeking to understand what is wrong with the internet.

The Internet Con starts with the insight that tech companies, like all companies, are not simply commercial entities providing goods and services, but systems for extracting wealth and funneling this to the ultra-rich. Congruent with Stafford Beer’s dictum that the purpose of the system is what it does, rather than what it claims to do, Doctorow’s analysis understands that tech company behaviour isn’t governed by something unique about the nature of computers, but by the same demand to maximise shareholder value and maintain power as any other large corporation. The Internet Con convincingly shows how tech’s real power does not derive from something intrinsic in network technology, but from a political economy that fails to prevent the emergence of monopolies across society at large.

One thing The Internet Con excels at is demystifying the discourse around tech, which, analogous to Marx’s observation about vulgar bourgeois economics, serves to obscure its actual relations and operations. We may use networked technology every day, but our understanding of how it works is often about as deep as a touchscreen. This lack of knowledge gives tech companies tremendous power to set the boundaries of the digital Overton Window and, parallel to bourgeois economists’ invocation of ‘the market’, allows them to claim that ‘the cloud’ or ‘privacy’ or ‘pseudoscientific technobabble’ mean that we cannot have nice things, such as interoperability, control or even just an internet that works for us. (For a discussion of how Big Tech’s worldview became hegemonic, see Hegemony Now!)

What is, however, unique about computers is their potential for interoperability: the ability of one system or component to interact with another. Interoperability is core to Doctorow’s argument, and its denial the source of his fury. Because while tech companies are not exceptional, computer technology itself is. Unlike other systems (cars, bookstores, sheep), computers are intrinsically interoperable because any computer can, theoretically, execute any program. That means that anyone with sufficient skill could, for example, write a program that gives you ad-free access to Facebook or allows you to send messages from Signal to Telegram.

The absence of such programs has nothing to do with tech, and everything with tech companies weaponising copyright law to dampen the natural tendency towards interoperability of computers and networked systems, lest it interfere with their ability to extract enormous rents. Walled gardens do not emerge spontaneously due to some natural ‘network effects’. They are built, and scrupulously policed. In this Big Tech is aided and abetted by a US government that forced these copyright enclosures on the rest of us by threatening tariffs, adverse trade terms or withdrawal of aid. This tremendous power extended through digital copyright is so appealing that other sectors of the economy have followed suit. Cars, fridges, printers, watches, TVs, any and all ‘smart’ devices are now infested with bits of hard-, firm- and software that prevent their owners from exercising full control over them. It is not an argument that The Internet Con explores in detail, but its evident that the internet increasingly doesn’t function to let us reach out into the world, but for companies to remotely project their control into our daily lives.

What, then, is to be done? The Internet Con offers several remedies, most of which centre on removing the legal barricades erected against interoperability. As the state giveth, so the state can taketh away. This part of The Internet Con is weaker than Doctorow’s searing and insightful analysis, because it is not clear why a state would try to upend Big Tech’s protections. It may be abundantly clear that the status quo doesn’t work for consumers and even smaller companies, but states have either decided that it works for some of their tech companies, or they don’t want to risk retaliation from the United States. In a way I am persuaded by Doctorow’s argument that winning the fight against Big Tech is a necessary if not sufficient condition to win the other great battles of our time, but it does seem that to win this battle, we first have to exorcise decades of neoliberal capture of the state and replace it with popular democratic control. It is not fair to lay this critique solely at Doctorow’s door, but it does worry me when considering the feasibility of his remedies. Though it is clear from his more recent writing that he perceives an opportunity in the present conjuncture, where Trump is rapidly eroding any reason for other states to collaborate with the United States.

The state-oriented nature of Doctorow’s proposals is also understandable when considering his view that individual action is insufficient to curtail the dominance of Big Tech. The structural advantages they have accumulated are too great for that. Which is not to say that individual choices do not matter, and we would be remiss to waste what power we do have. There is a reason why I am writing this blog on an obscure platform that avoids social media integration and trackers, and promote it only on Mastodon. Every user who leaves Facebook for Mastodon, Google for Kagi, or Microsoft for Linux or LibreOffice diverts a tiny amount of power from Big Tech to organisations that do support an open, democratic and people-centric internet.

If the choice for the 20th century was socialism or barbarism, the choice for the 21st is solarpunk or cyberpunk. In Doctorow, the dream of an internet that fosters community, creativity, solidarity and democracy has one of its staunchest paladins. The Internet Con is a call to arms that everyone who desires a harmonious ecology of technology, humanity and nature should heed. So get your grandmother off Facebook, Occupy the Internet, and subscribe to Cory Doctorow’s newsletter.

Notes & Suggestions

• Numerous organisations and individuals are engaged in what Doctorow calls ‘the war on general purpose computing’. You can check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation or a similar organisation specific to your country, as well as other creators such as Paris Marx with their podcast Tech Won’t Save Us.
• The question over who controls technology, and what we get to use it for, is also central to Pantheon and its exploration of a future where minds can be uploaded to the cloud.
• The discussion on the use of standards to consolidate certain system configurations and prevent others from emerging reminded me of the concept of the ‘Technical Code’ as proposed by Andrew Feenberg in his book Transforming Technology. The General Intellect Unit podcast has an in-depth three part discussion on the Technical Code as a means of understanding how societal use of technology is structured and codified.
• Even though The Internet Con uses the feudal system as a metaphor for Big Tech’s walled gardens, my sense is that Doctorow doesn’t subscribe to a recent current of Left analysis that contends we have moved beyond capitalism and into a new epoch of ‘technofeudalism’. This is because technofeudalism seems predicated on the premise that the tendency to hyperconcentrated platforms is essential to networked technology, whereas Doctorow clearly holds the opposite view, and sees walled gardens as a consequence of copyright restrictions. For an argument in favour of the technofeudalist analysis, there is Yanis Varoufakis’ Technofeudalism. For an argument against, the Culture, Power, Politics podcast by Jeremy Gilbert has a two-part discussion.

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Warning: Minor spoilers

At a time when you’re only ever six feet away from a ‘thinkpiece’ about how AI will take our jobs, kill us all, or possibly both, it is easy to forget that General Artificial Intelligence is just one of the many aspirations of our techno-futurist overlords. Memento mori comes easy to the narcissistic, and Musk, Bezos, Thiel and their ilk are aggrieved that eventually they will have to die like the rest of us losers. Serious money is being thrown at various anti-aging schemes such as dietary supplements, hormone therapy, or vampirism to stave off the inevitable. But all of those really just extend the shelf life of our mortal coil. The real prize is to shed it altogether and transcend the physical realm by uploading our mind to the cloud. But say that we manage to upload our souls to the Metaverse, horrifying though that thought might be, what would happen next?

That is the question that Pantheon, a short but remarkable animated series, attempts to answer. Pantheon imagines a future where not Artificial Intelligence, but Uploaded Intelligence (UI) is the revolutionary technology ushering in the singularity. Based on a series of short stories by Kevin Lui, Pantheon covers an impressive range of philosophical, technological and social questions in its mere sixteen episodes. It’s excellent animation and strong voice cast make it a pleasure to watch. For Silicon Valley’s elite, UI is the answer. For Pantheon, it is a dialectical question which spirals outward to cosmic dimensions.

Pantheon starts small, with teenager Maddie Kim receiving strange messages encoded only in emojis from an unknown sender. We discover these were sent by Maddie’s deceased father, David Kim, who had been illegally and secretly uploaded by his employer two years prior after succumbing to cancer. From this starting point, Pantheon rapidly covers serious philosophical ground, establishing that once a mind exists on a server, it really isn’t that much different from an mp3. It can be copied. It can be deleted. It can be modified. It can be used. David Kim may be immortal, but rather than this enabling an infinite journey of self-actualisation, he finds himself pruned and stuck in a virtual cubicle, forced to work for his erstwhile employer, Logorhytms. Because, like an mp3, a UI can be treated as someone’s property.

Things get worse when we learn that uploading a mind destroys the organic original, which is why Logorhytms developed the technology covertly. Eventually though, the secret gets out, and Pantheon lifts its perspective from the personal to the societal level. While UIs are at first the preserve of national security agencies engaged in an arms race to use their superior digital capabilities in destructive acts of cyberwarfare, it is impossible to contain the technology once its existence is revealed.

There are obvious parallels here with the splitting of the atom, another dangerous technology that moved from theory to ubiquitous societal adoption via the crucible of national security. Like nuclear power, UI proves divisive, with some people refusing to regard it as proper life, and others desperate to escape illness or age.

Pantheon firmly takes the perspective that once the technological genie is out of its containment chamber, there is no putting it back, but it also rejects technological determinism. In the world of Pantheon, choices about how we use technology matter, as does who gets to make those choices. Compressed within its limited runtime are multiple possible futures, from those imagined by sociopathic techbros and megalomaniac UIs to emergent intelligences and humanity at large. Pantheon convinces you that all these futures are plausible, and that it is our actions, rather than the technology, that will determine the path we take.

Ultimately, Pantheon’s future is an optimistic one, though it does not come without struggle, conflict and suffering. It is one of the series’ strengths that even as it zooms to a global view, it never loses sight of the human condition. Its treatment of its characters is mature, and it manages the rare feat for animated television of portraying both its adult and teenage characters as relatable, believable and interesting.

The show does have to make some debatable assumptions to achieve its optimistic, heartfelt and mind-bending ending. For me, it skated too easily over the question of how an increasing population of virtual citizens would be sustained by a decreasing organic population. Pantheon avoids the fallacy that uploading represents complete transcendence of the physical realm and recognises that even virtual minds run on material substrates (i.e., servers) that need energy, water and upkeep. To avoid this materiality trap Pantheon envisages a political economy where UIs acting through robots can efficiently replace most human or machine-assisted labour, delivering on the promise of fully automated luxury communism. At a time when running barely coherent LLMs requires the use of most of the planets GPUs and a projected electricity consumption equal to a medium-sized country, this is not particularly convincing. Similarly, the conceit that a long-term solution to human/UI conflict is to move all the servers into space rather uncritically copies current Silicon Valley fantasies without giving due regard to the phenomenal technical challenges that would entail. Even Mass Effect, which otherwise doesn’t excel in the hard science department, understood that heat management in space is decidedly non-trivial.

Notwithstanding the excellent animation quality, Pantheon also struggles to depict the virtual existence of its uploaded characters. This is a common challenge for visual art that depicts a virtual environment, which must balance presenting something suitably alien with keeping things visually intelligible for the audience. Unlike The Matrix or Tron, Pantheon did not adopt a specific aesthetic to represent its virtual domain, but renders them as quite similar to the material world. Regardless of an early acknowledgement that, like Neo, UIs don’t need to be constrained by a mere three dimensions or physical coherence, Pantheon’s virtual environments are mostly familiarly human, like the Metaverse. The computational prowess of UIs is expressed through changes to the virtual environment and superhuman abilities, and the resulting conflict between UIs is rendered somewhat discordantly like the combat you’d expect in Dragonball Z or Bleach. It is possible that this is a deliberate homage, but it felt like more creative options were missed.

These are minor quibbles compared to Pantheon’s excellent story and inquisitive treatment of its subject matter. There is far more to the series than I have covered here, but revealing more would deprive potential viewers of many of the shows best moments and revelations. Suffice to say that Pantheon’s exploration of its subject causes it to fractal out to unexpected spatial and temporal scales. And yet, at the end, it brings it back to the profoundly and deeply human. What Pantheon really shows us is that in the face of (im)mortality, real power lies not in our technological prowess, but in how as humans we choose to relate to one another.

Notes and suggestions

• Another excellent interrogation of the dilemmas posed by virtual existence is Iain M. Bank’s novel Surface Detail, in which interstellar civilisations go to war over the nature of the virtual afterlife.
• The Imaginary Worlds podcast has an episode on Pantheon featuring some of the people connected with the show.

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Warning: Some minor spoilers

There are two common misconceptions about meritocracy. The first, that we live in one and that our position in society results from merit rather than luck, wealth or other structural factors. Second, that living in a meritocracy would be desirable in the first place. We have forgotten that ‘meritocracy’ entered the English vocabulary as a pejorative and something to avoid. Evaluating people on merit rather than connections or wealth is certainly desirable, but the corollary of granting power based on merit is the disenfranchisement of everyone considered insufficiently deserving.

The Ten Percent Thief, Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s debut novel, skillfully takes aim at both misconceptions. It is a bold, creative and excellent satire of contemporary fixation on merit and productivity, true to Ursula K. le Guin’s dictum that the best science-fiction illuminates the present rather than prophesises the future. The title of the book is derived from an eponymous stratum in Lakshminarayan’s fictional society, which divides its citizen into an upper 20%, middle 70% and lower 10% based on their productivity. One’s placement on this curve within the corpocracy of BellCorp, a self-described ‘meritocratic technarchy’, determines one’s rights, privileges and access to consumer technology, creating a constant race to the top. Failure to perform results in demotion, expulsion from BellCorp’s Virtual City to the adjacent Analog slums, or a one-way trip to the vegetable farm. The Ten Percent Thief is not always subtle in drawing its parallels with the present, but that makes it no less effective.

The novel’s first move is immediately brave and unconventional. The Ten Percent Thief foregoes protagonist and linear plot for a linked chain of chapters that carry the narrative arc over a period of, I’m guessing here, about fifteen years. From the first chapter where we meet the titular Ten Percent Thief, we jump to a middle-manager within Bell Corporation fearing their performance review. Then we jump back over the force field separating the glittering Virtual city from the Analog slums to a young teenager drawn into the resistance, then back to a Virtual citizen stuck on a trajectory down into the bottom 10%. And on it goes. Each chapter offers both a different vantage point for the workings of Bell Corp society, and a different character through which our perspective is filtered. We meet frantic influencers and supervised retirees, upper management and frontline workers, exiles and infiltrators. The Ten Percent Thief does precisely what Ada Palmer and Jo Walton call for in their essay on the Protagonist Problem, and it does so brilliantly.

It is a creative and courageous choice, with excellent results. The kaleidoscopic view that Lakshminarayan gives of the world of the Ten Percent Thief helps us see it from different angles and perspectives, much more so than a story confined to the point of view of a single or small set of characters. Lakshminarayan artfully uses her succession of vignettes to construct a holistic picture of the world of the Bell Curve emerges, showing us the injustices of this world at both the macro and micro level, and the harm it inflicts on both its victims and its supposed victors.

For while Apex City’s Virtual citizens may have access to the latest technologies and amenities, the constant spectre of potential demotion for insufficient productivity prevents any real enjoyment. The ‘virtual’ in Virtual citizen denotes an abundant access to technology that fosters isolation and conformity rather than connection and community. This is not fully automated luxury communism, but fully automated precarious capitalism.

Capitalism though, but to what end? From what we can tell, Bell Corp is a monopolistic megacorp with full control over the Earth’s remaining resources. It is not in competition with anything, is mostly autarchic, and has achieved remarkable levels of automation. In other words, while its ethos is based solely on the valorisation of productivity, it is never clear what this productivity is for. Most of Apex City’s citizens appear to be engaged in proper bullshit jobs, with productivity measured through social media presence, body function monitoring or online popularity contests.

This paradox allows The Ten Percent Thief to deliver its satire with a two-punch effect, because you realise that every element that seems implausible does actually have a parallel in our own world. From the ultra-wealthy influencers to the pointless upper management, every time your willing suspension of disbelief is about to break, you remember that Elon Musk, Kim Kardashian and their ilk exist.

If I was being critical, I would say that Lakshminarayan trades off the impact of her satire against the coherence of her political economy. Absent a market economy, BellCorp has to simulate competition through internal contests. Cultural conformity is enforced through social pressure or, failing that, electroshocks and cybnernetic neural rewiring. There is an obvious critique of online culture here, and while it is largely on point, it misses the nuance that under actually-existing-capitalism it doesn’t matter if people tire of your flagship superhero franchise, as long as you also own all other shows available. For capitalism, diversity is just another opportunity to sell people the means of individuation.

Neither do Apex City’s top 10% need the armies of impoverished and precarious workers that underpin our own capitalist economies, as most socially necessary production (manufacture, teaching, healthcare, agriculture) has been automated. It is difficult to say for sure as you never really get a feel for the size of Virtual society, but it’s reasonable to wonder if its lower rungs merely serve to make the elite feel good. There is no point in being on top if you cannot lord it over some other humans in a sort of Nietzschean master/slave dynamic. Maybe the purpose of the Bell Curve is simply to sustain the Bell Curve. It wouldn’t be the first system that came to care mostly about perpetuating its own existence.

Still, I was reminded of one of the futures in Peter Frase’s Four Futures, in which the elite eventually conclude that they don’t need the proles anymore, and the sunlit uplands of fully automated luxury communism are reached by deleting the entire ‘surplus’ population. It is not entirely clear why the upper echelons at Bell Corp haven’t long reached the same conclusion. It is not as if we’re short of Malthusian ultra-rich in our own world, after all.

The weaker political economy in The Ten Percent Thief’s worldbuilding is maybe the reason why the novel’s ending, while satisfying, feels a bit contrived. Having thoroughly disempowered the subaltern classes in her world, Lakshminarayan has to reach for a technological deus ex machina to resolve her plot.

These criticisms, however, are minor. On the whole, The Ten Percent Thief is an excellent novel that captures and excoriatingly satirizes our present moment, while also managing to step away from the eurocentrism that remains so pervasive in science-fiction. Its creative form brilliant supports its substantive argument, and it was great to read an example of a novel that overcame the ‘protagonist problem’ so effectively. On the Bell Curve of works of speculative fiction, I would most certainly put The Ten Percent Thief in the top 10%.

Notes & Suggestions

• It was particularly stimulating to read a novel that overcame the protagonist problem so soon after grappling with it in my review of Mass Effect 3.
• For a more in-depth analysis of how neoliberal capitalism manages to extract value and maintain compliance without the type of direct coercion we see in The Ten Percent Thief, Hegemony Now! is a good starting point.
• It has been nearly a decade since I read it, but I remember Peter Frase’s Four Futures as a short, sharp, stimulating essay on four potential extreme endpoints of our current capitalist trajectory.
• The depiction of a ‘resistance without a centre’ reminded me of the precepts from the Tao Te Ching and The Art of War that a formless or empty force cannot be defeated.

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