Cyberpunked

Some lighter material today. I want to pump the youtuber Quinn’s Ideas who is a wonderful creator of scifi discourse content. I realize it is pretty hilarious that my blog which no one seems to read is desiring to pump a youtuber who needs no pumping (550K+ views not uncommon). But… you know… 500K people is a sniff of the number of eyeballs that should be watching decent indie content. If I can get just two people to subscribe to Quinn’s Ideas my work will be done for today.

Quinn

A quick prelude: I found Quinn’s Ideas a decent channel to have on my yt subs because he has an undertone of anti-capitalist or post-capitalist critique of the capital order (q.v. Clara Mattei) . But he’s mainly a scifi guy, and has good reading recommendations and for those who don’t mind TLDR scifi he does fictional world history and sociology, of sorts. That’s what I like in scifi myself, not just good narrative, but social commentary.

Charles Dickens and Jonathon Swift did a lot of this, Swift more cleverly. They were telling entertaining gripping stories, but a clear purpose was a critic of normative (so you might say Conservative, or reactionary) society. For me, good scifi does the same, but looks ahead, not just critiquing modernity today, but warning of future dystopia. Cautionary tales.

This is a powerful thing with scifi. the writer artist invents an alternative reality, so can critique modernity without risk of defamation lawsuits. It’s a balancing act though. The critical artist wants to make it obvious who they are attacking as regressive, but to make the attack more severe it has to be fiction. Too overt and it veers into non-fictional satire, hence open to possible defamation actions (I suppose, I do not really know the cases to cite here, pehaps there are none). But certainly George Orwell had no one charging him with defamation. Who wants to identify themselves as a Pig or a Dog?

If you are a hard or “ultra” leftist you’ll probably think Quinn is some weak tea, but that’d be very unfair. People come to anti-capitalism from many angles. I have a few “pro-capitalism” friends who are anti-Kapital. That is, they favour private enterprise, but recognize the gross injustices of Kapitalism qua Marx. I’ll leave that as stated and let you figure out what I mean — except to add that “capitalism” is not one single idea of wage slavery, it has flavours, and although all flavours are indigestible for a hard leftie, I’ve yet to meet any non-Tankies who do not admit some liberalism is necessary as both; (i) escape valves for individual creativity and mistake-making (an important part of evolution, and (ii) expression of broad emancipation, or “no bosses” means also no State authoritarian.

The idea being the democratic state exists legitimately only to support labour — which means supporting “the public” — because we should all be workers. The more people working for public purpose the less hours any one person needs to work. And by supporting labour this is support for private enterprise. If private enterprise is not well-regulated (and by that one must mean what your society gravitates to want as public purpose and private pursuit) then you have less freedom not more.

Note this MMT derived stance is the opposite of “fetishising work” — because we seek to minimize works hours, without reducing standards of living. Get rid of the cruft of profit-driven capitalism, i.e., bullsh1t jobs.

By placing workers at the centre of society we both minimise their labour hours and maximise their importance. This is what we want. We want “idolisation” of the proletariat not the capitalist. Know where your bread and butter comes from.

The modern “boss-farmer” is not a worker, they’re a capitalist, we don’t need ’em, the labour they employ are the actual farmers, who would be quite capable managers, or some among them. Hierarchy in an organization is important, but in a more worker cooperative or merely worker-centric model of production the managers are the workers, and the workers can vote on who they want as manager and treasurer and organizational secretary and so forth.

The unstructured “leftie” workplace is a disaster. See the story of the contemporary debacle at the leftist publishing outfit Current Affairs . An unstructured anarchic workplace is perversely anti-labour. The proper true left or left-populist outlook is that the hierarchy should not be an asshole creating power structure. In part the way to avoid asshole generating power structures is to give the bottom line workers “the vote” in the workplace. A meaningful vote, not a sham of a democracy like neoliberalism.

Sound too “militant” for you? If so, I have nothing else to say to you, enjoy your libertarian capitalist dystopia.

I’m not saying “kill your masters” like posers such as Killer Mike, I am saying kill the whole boss mindset.${}^\dagger$ A good workplace manager is not a master, they are a comrade. They help the workers, in harmony, produce the goods we all desire to consume by lowering burdens on the workers, so we can advance a peaceful civilization.

${}^\dagger$OK, that is probably what Killer Mike has in mind too, his lyrics are not to be taken literally I have to assume! LOL. As a poser Mike at least doesn’t totally suck.

Which brings me back to Quinn.

Cyberpunk

What I wanted to write about was the issue of why so much scifi is dystopian. Why the heck is that? Makes for grittier stories? Yes, I think that’s a large part of it.

Writer artists in scifi have not really learned how to write in a hopeful vein. That’s understandable given we live in a neoliberal dystopia.

The counter-revolutionary critic will of course always point out how fantastic things are with technological advances that “only capitalism could have realised.” We have to call bullsh1t on that. An awful lot (over 90% I would say) of technological and scientific advance comes from genuine curiosity and desire to know, not from desire to profit. The science or engineering worker or artist is paid a wage, but the profit goes to the boss. Does that mean the boss is the source of the science advancement? Give me a break dude.

Big government science and engineering projects are legendary, and have often been the source of later derivative, though useful, private sector innovations.

I’ve never considered myself to be particularly unique, so I have to assume many other scientists and mathematicians think like I do: which is that we love the work because the profit is intellectual. The monetary wages are incidental — nice if we can get them. A grifter like the Theranos lady, or the Silicon value bros and crypto- bros and gals, with their vaporware and ponzi schemes, are not true scientists in this regard, they are profit-driven, which is why their ventures fail. They produce crap.

Such people may exist throughout history under any political economy, after all, hoarded nominal wealth is always realised in savings as some form of currency (credits on a ledger). This is true for all societies from the dawn of written records.