mahiwaga

Ursula K. Le Guin, in her fantasy world of Earthsea, comes up with a brilliant system of magic, one predicated on, essentially, words.

The dynamics of magic in this world, just like the dynamics of human nature in this world, is based on the gradient between what-is, and what-is-not-but-could-be. The power of the word makes what-is and what-is-not-but-could-be congruent.

In a way, it’s not really all that different in our world. While we can’t (quite yet) conjure up balls of flame out of nowhere or summon dragons, we are able to very powerfully alter the nature of our environment. If you have any doubts, just think about the billions of dollars churning through advertising and marketing. Think about how financial empires rise and fall just on the rumor of change.

And think of how the American media has successfully co-opted the truth and spun it into a mythical yarn about “the new American century.” On the basis of words alone, our very own tin-pot dictator has managed to remain esconced on his throne, despite the very real and ominous grumbling that gathers over the land like a storm cloud. (And at times like this, I can’t help but think of John Titor and his prophesy of a new American Civil War.) If he lived in Earthsea, Rupert Murdoch and his ilk would be magi non pareil.

But the interesting thing is that the Rebel Alliance pretty much exists mostly in the form of words. In the immediate aftermath of September 11, it was hard to find people who were still willing to defend freedom. Neocons say what they will about their opponents, but some of us refuse to be surrender-monkeys. It is absolutely no accident that (despite their outright racism and elitism) the Founding Fathers decried the idea of surrendering freedom in the name of security. Every sane person knows that total security is impossible in this world, and living under martial law is not an acceptable sacrifice. But as the sheer terror of an attack on American soil waned, sanity actually held sway. People seemed to regain their senses pretty quickly, and despite the rapid run-up to the nonsensical war on Iraq, and the rabid, insane cheerleading by the so-called liberal media, the blogs ran bright with photons, but more importantly, the defense of the Republic seemed to exist at least in words, thousands upon thousands spewed upon the wondrous creation known as the Internet. (Is Al Gore our savior or what?)

It is fitting that today’s battles revolve around the flow of information and who gets to control what story gets told, as this government begins its crackdown on leaks (that they don’t sanction, at least. Can anyone say Valerie Plame?) As you start connecting the dots, it becomes clear why the NSA and this corrupt, morally bankrupt administration wants to eavesdrop on every single call. I really think they want to control every single bit of this narrative. And if they can whittle away at our lines of communication, literally one bit at a time, if they can somehow manage to keep us who still faithfully defend this Republic and its Constitution from staying in touch with one another, then we are just that one step closer to the new Dark Ages.

I can’t help but think that these nefarious plans have been a long time in the offing. Perhaps it is merely a continuation of the evil machinations of Richard Nixon, which were oh-so inconveniently interrupted by—surprise, surprise—the Truth™. But Reagan, Bush the Elder, and Bush the Younger have readily carried out this hell-bent mission, and we are on the verge of becoming the very Evil Empire that we had claimed we were out to vanquish.

We have glimmerings of their perfidy in the jungles of South and Central America, and I know what sort of poison they sowed in the homeland of my ancestors (and still somehow, for at least that brief moment, the People managed to triumph), and it becomes all too clear what these people are all about when you look at Abu-Ghraib, when you hear about the secret torture camps in Europe, and the prisoner abuses at Guantanamo.

But I am going off on my screed here. What I wanted to mention was this powerful, moving keynote address given by Rebecca Solnit, a writer and activist who gave this address to U.C. Berkeley’s Department of English Commencement this year (first sighted off of Parallax) In it she mentions very strikingly the starkness of Orwell’s vision of 1984, alluding painfully to the Doublespeak-infected world we now currently live in. Somehow it turns out that Orwell got everything right except for the economic and political system. Instead of communism and socialism, the enemies of most people in this world are the unfettered malice of global capitalism and so-called “American style” democracy (of which, I suppose, George W Bush is the prototype, although I’m also familiar with the CIA-backed Ferdinand Marcos and likely many people from South and Central America will also recognize similar counterparts, not to mention Saddam Hussein himself.)

And 1984 is pretty much a story bereft of hope, except that Orwell probably knew that certain things about history are inevitable, and one of them is decay. The Cold War really was supposed to be the perfect, unwinnable, unendable war, the perpetual motion machine of the war industry, but it takes two to make a fight.

Which brings me back (rather randomly) to my main point: human beings of all animals are probably the only ones who can see the world not as how it is, but as how we want it to be. This is probably the immediate cause of why we became such facile tool users.

And while some of us are for some reason enamored with death and destruction and the weapons of war, others of us are interested in life, and dreaming up of those impossible things that no one has ever heard of.

These days are the point of some kind of fulcrum, and I guess it isn’t just me that has this sense that the future, even the immediate future, is completely unpredictable.

I just thought about an imaginary society that decided that it was a bad idea for the wealthy to become powerful, and for the powerful to become wealthy. I think this idea came forth when I heard how former Governor Jerry Brown (now mayor of Oakland) was decried as a hippy for not wanting to live in a mansion and not wanting to drive an expensive car.

So basically all their public officials would be stripped of their property and other assets, forcing them to live entirely off of the state. And the richer you were, the less you were allowed to have influence on politics. Like maybe even how much your vote weighed was inverse to how much income you made. This wouldn’t be a communist/socialist society per se, it could still be rabidly capitalist, it’s just that there would be a strict separation between money and power. And I don’t think this would destroy the incentive to be rich. After all, with all that money, you could still buy all the stuff you wanted, you could live comfortably in a big house with a fancy car, with servants and assistants and valets. You just wouldn’t be able to parlay all that wealth into political power.

And if politicians were forced into a vow of poverty, essentially giving away everything they own to either their supporters or to the state itself, it would be less meaningful to bribe them. You would have to either bribe all of his/her supporters (which would be rather difficult to keep secret), or at most, you could be a puppeteer, manipulating your penniless politico with promises of favors after their term expired. A rather tenuous proposition, if you ask me.

Do I think such a society could exist? I am doubtful. But it would be an interesting basis for a story.

Before I completely lose sight of this thought, I wanted to talk about this post on crisis theory and this post on the world of 1984. I think crisis theory does make useful analogic predictions about the future. (OK, I don’t for a moment purport to truly understand crisis theory, but I think I have some gist of it.)

I think that crisis theory can be mathematically explicated as a divergent singularity (as opposed to a convergent one.) In physics, singularities give rise to the phenomena we know as black holes (and conversely, although I don’t think we have any data that they exist, they should also give rise to white holes). A black hole would be an example of a convergent singularity—as you approach you will get closer and closer to the actual singularity itself, although you will actually never reach the singularity—this can also be thought of as an example of Zeno’s paradox—you start infinitely dividing the distance to the singularity in half and then half again and then half again and if you discount the fact that tidal forces would have long ago spaghettified you, and if you completely ignore the possibility of superluminal travel, you will really never, ever reach the singularity.

The divergent singularity is the antithesis of a black hole. This theoretical counterpart is known as a white hole, which would “blow” instead of “suck” But the weird thing about a white hole would be that the harder you tried to reach the singularity, the harder it would repel you. I think this is ultimately the basis of crisis theory—the more capital you burn trying to develop a non-sustainable endeavor, the quicker you will actually cause it to fail.

In other words, the anti-global capitalists can rely on the physics of capitalism itself to aid them, in keeping with some of Marx’s ideas. I mean, Marxism in toto is not a scientific theory, in the sense that you could falsify it (and yes, I am geek because I took a philosophy of science class, and there is a technical definition for falsification in this context.) It was more along the lines of Freud, in that, when considered with its ad hoc hypotheses, it was unfalsifiable, and that it is more of a philosophy than an actual theory.

But I guess we could all be wrong. Maybe we are only now seeing the end-stages of capitalism, which kind of makes sense. Prior to our century, capitalism could function rather easily because of the trade and technology gradients that existed between different cities, and later, different countries, and then between colonies and homelands. Capitalism’s starting conditions require a sort of inequality at the outset, a free-energy gradient, if you will, for capital flow down. (Yes, here we go again with the trickle-down mumbo-jumbo.) If there is no scarcity or abundance, then economies stagnate. This is easy to maintain when there are obvious trade and technological gradients between different nations and cultures, and even easier to do when there are barriers to contact and transportation, but the thing that globalism will do is that it will eventually homogenize everything. I mean, we’re already at the stage where aboriginal people are wearing T-shirts with Nike swooshes on them instead of their traditional garb. You can get CNN and MTV from pretty much anywhere in the world, whether or not you even have running water in your house. The most technologically disadvantaged cultures will simply leap-frog to the gooey, chocolatey creamed-filled consumerist center, facilitated by the fact that businesses are trying to capture larger and larger markets, even if they have to create the markets themselves brick by brick.

No one has ever yet had to think about what happens when the market can’t get any bigger (except for maybe the normal birth rate, offset by the normal death rate.) Maybe it won’t happen in my lifetime, but it will probably start becoming a consideration in about a generation or so. (Man, isn’t exponential growth absolutely astounding? And people wonder how they can die from flesh-eating bacteria…)

And no one has ever had to think about what happens when innovation doesn’t happen fast enough to keep consumption going. In a fully globalized economy, we will end up in situations where people will stop buying stuff because nothing catches their interest. I mean, sure, one plasma screen TV is pretty neat, one iPod is nice, but you start running out of reasons for buying more than one pretty soon. People can only add so many rooms to their houses, and ultimately they’ll only have so many walls to cover with plasma screens. And even the most voracious music-consumer will probably need at most four or five iPods, even if they have one for home, one for the office, one for the morning jog, one for the car, and one for the other car.

And the fact of the matter is that poor people can’t buy stuff, so it is ultimately in the best interest of capitalism for rich people to give them some cash. But this only further degrades the gradient of scarcity and abundance.

One day, Walmart will have everything priced at the lowest possible denomination they can go without simply giving things away for free.

OK, maybe this are all wacko scenarios, but I think they’re the logical conclusion if global capitalism continues to run full-tilt, without any contingency plans. If anything, capitalism needs to start entering the second stage. You know how forests have primary stages and then secondary stages? Something like that. Or maybe we can talk about Saturn V rockets and their boosters.

But my point is that we are actually entering an era where Marxist scientific theory can actually be tested. When the stage I engine of capitalism has exhausted the fuel provided by the gradient of scarcity and abundance, jettisoning the empty husk of the fuel canister to burn up in the atmosphere, what form of propulsion will stage II be comprised of? Science fiction writers have come up with some ideas, the most appealing and probably most logical in these security-obsessed times of ours is the currency of reputation. When everybody has money, and everybody can buy the same old shit, what else will there be to trade but trust itself?

Now, my own personal theory of capitalism is pretty fatalistic and Darwinistic. My prediction is that if it continues at full-speed like it is, the reason why poor people won’t exist is that they will probably get wiped off the face of the earth. My sister wrote an interesting paper about Glamis Gold Ltd.’s disregard for the environmental rights of the indigenous people in Guatemala (which I might post someday if I feel inclined to translate a Word document to HTML) and it looks like a typical David and Goliath situation, except that we seem to live in a world where Goliath typically wins about 9 times out of 10, or better. Be it as it may how global capitalism achieves this homogenization, I think it will happen, although I can see how perpetual war could keep the Stage I engine running (almost) forever. (Bear in mind that the more times you bomb something, the less it will be worth bombing the next time around.)

Anyway, the other thing that crisis energy makes me think of is a neurological phenomenon known as intention tremor. It is actually a manifestation of cerebellar disease, and is the phenomenon where someone’s tremor gets worse as he/she gets closer to his/her target. You can elicit this by asking someone to touch your finger with one of their fingers, and if they have this problem, you’ll see how they have to keep correcting their trajectory as they get closer to your finger, because they keep overshooting.

Like dysmetria and intention tremor, divergent singularities are destabilizing. They basically graph out into what looks like seismographs, as the values wildly fluctuate between the two sides of the asymptote, and I mean wildly. As much as Vernon Vinge believes that there will be an AI singularity approaching, I really do think we will also be soon approaching an economic singularity as well, and the descent into hell is going to be absolute madness.