"Elections are sugar-coated oppression."

"You can't exist today, much less be a dodgy, widely hated world leader, and not assume that your every action is being documented."

Infomocracy, by Malka Older, describes a future world operating on the principles of microdemocracy. Every 10 years, everyone worldwide votes for a government in their centenal, a kind of riding or district of 100,000 people, a representative democracy, where the party that wins the majority of centenals, wins the Supermajority — basically, runs the world. But crossing from one centenal to the next, an individual may be subject to a vastly different set of rules.

There's a push from some factions for electoral reform for nanodemocracy, to bring global government closer to one person, one vote. The technology of the future makes this perfectly feasible.

There's a passage from David Graeber's The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy that has always stuck with me:

Consider the ATM machine. In the last thirty years, I can't remember a single occasion in which I have asked an ATM machine for money and gotten an incorrect amount. Nor have I been able to find anyone I know who can. This is so true that in the wake of the 2000 U.S. presidential elections, when the public was being regaled with statistics on the 2.8 percent degree of error expected from this type of voting machine, or the 1.5 percent expected from that, some had the temerity to point out that in a country that defines itself as the world's greatest democracy, where elections are our very sacrament, we seem to just accept that voting machines will regularly miscount the vote, while every day hundreds of millions of ATM transactions take place with an overall zero percent rate of error. What does this say about what really matters to Americans as a nation?

According to Graeber, it would seem, America values money over democracy. The future of Infomocracy indicates a mature global economy; money and voting as values may be seen as equivalent. Electoral technology is accurate. But it is still susceptible to tampering.

Elections are administered and monitored by an organization, a great bureaucracy, called Information. The future is chockfull of big data, and Information watches it and processes it. It's an always-on Googly-glassbook, instastats, mega-infobubble world.

Given all the election difficulties plaguing our current world, Infomocracy's future system — where nationhood cedes to community-based voting blocks — makes sense on many levels. Until you remember two things: 1. Technology can be hacked. 2. Information is power.

"Information is a public good," one of the older men says with finality. "It may fail for technical reasons, and we may strategize about the best technical approach to get it back up. but we will not withhold Information once it is in our power to make it available. We cannot give ourselves the power to see and leave everyone else blind."

So, all is good, so long as we aspire to be our better selves. But it wouldn't be much of a thriller if that were all there were to it. Remind me someday to tell you about the busride last fall when I realized that maybe people aren't basically good.

"Surely you would prefer for the election system not to exist? We are working to eliminate it, or at the very least make it more realistic..."

The open question breaks the tension, and the sheikh laughs. "Why would we want to change it? There is nothing that suits us more than most of the world believing that their will is being carried out by governments that do exactly as they please."

Infomocracy is definitely a thriller, but who wins the election is not nearly so interesting a problem as the electoral process itself and the mystery of how information is wielded. I'll definitely be looking up the next books in this planned trilogy.

Living in an infomocracy.
Excerpt. (Chapters 1-5 are available online.)

Working, seeing, being

Some of the things I've been reading and thinking about this week...

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs, by David Graeber, Strike! Magazine:

While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing and maintaining things; through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves, not unlike Soviet workers actually, working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organizing or attending motivational seminars, updating their facebook profiles or downloading TV box-sets.

The answer clearly isn't economic: it's moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the '60s). And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.

Learning How to Live, Jenny Diski, New Statesman:

An unquenchable passion for work might be a panic-stricken way of concealing the fear of a lack of passion for life itself.

[...]

Children are always being told to stop doing "nothing" when they're reading or daydreaming. It is lifelong training for the idea that activity is considered essential to mental health, whether it is meaningful or not. Behind the "nothing" is in part a terror of boredom, as if most of the work most people do for most of their lives isn't boring.

Teach Your Kids That What's Good For Them Is Bad, by Sophia Dembling, Psychology Today:

I have heard frequently from parents whose children's teachers have expressed concern about a child's tendency to play alone or lack of a large social circle. Learning to play together nicely is part of the lesson plan, learning to happily play alone is not. Daydreamers are chastised. School campuses have few spaces that facilitate solitude; school schedules rarely accommodate quiet time.

The Art of Looking: What 11 Experts Teach Us about Seeing Our Familiar City Block with New Eyes, by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings [a review of On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes, by Alexandra Horowitz]:

Her approach is based on two osmotic human tendencies: our shared capacity to truly see what is in front of us, despite our conditioned concentration that obscures it, and the power of individual bias in perception — or what we call "expertise," acquired by passion or training or both — in bringing attention to elements that elude the rest of us.

[...]

And so we return to the straitjackets of our perception, that disconnect between seeing and knowing what to look for, filtered through the uncompromising sieve of our attention.

Indebted

I watched Payback yesterday, the documentary based on Margaret Atwood's book — Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth — that served as the 2008 Massey Lectures (a book I believe I have a copy of, but have not read).

It covers the notion of debt, but primarily non-monetary debt: paying one's dues, paying for one's crimes — a debt to society.

This film looks at some particular cases: a code of family honour and revenge in an Albanian village, one man's time in prison for breaking and entering and his guilt for the seemingly irreparabe damage he did to an old lady's sense of security, the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, and the working conditions of Mexican migrant tomato pickers in Florida. Conrad Black and Raj Patel have supporting roles.

The pacing's a bit slow (I've seen better documentaries lately, for example, Freakonomics), and it doesn't cover the material I'd expected to (I've read better treatments of the subject, like the anthropoligical persepective in David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years, which I admit I haven't yet read the whole of).

The movie finally comes together for me when the concept of debt, or payback, is rephrased as making reparation — what sets the balance right again. Money, time, spiritual penance? And of course there will be differing views on whether a debt has been settled depending on whether you're talking to a labour lawyer, a victim of crime, a priest, etc.

What makes this movie interesting to me, though, is that I watched it against the backdrop of a weekend in which I was immersed in Lilith's Brood, a trilogy by Octavia Butler in which extraterrestrials salvage humans and other species after Earth's nuclear destruction. The Oankali restore the humans and the planet, and restore them to each other, kind of.

The book makes me think of debt insofar as it questions: what do we owe our planet, our species, other species; to what do we owe our humanity (and how much of that debt is cultural versus genetic); to what extent would we owe someone or something for saving our life (or saving our species) and at what price?

That's fairly superficial, but there's something else too. I get the feeling we wouldn't have a sense of debt if there weren't a sense of honour or pride which could be injured. And that sense can originate within an individual, a family, a community, a species — any debt we feel is based in the thing, the unit, the code to which we feel allegiance.

So suddenly, this little science fiction trilogy is about a lot more than repopulating the planet — it's become socioeconomic. The Oankali call themselves a species of traders — they trade in knowledge and genetic material. A communal species with high intelligence, they claim their primary sense of debt is to the preservation, or continuity, of life.

The feelings of frozen hearts and the dreams of unfeeling heads

Some quotable bits from the first 205 pages of The Doll, by Bolesław Prus, with a few thoughts.

P 10:
At eight in the evening they closed: the clerks went off, and only Rzecki remained behind. He made out the day's accounts, checked the cash, planned his activities for the morrow and wondered whether everything had been done that should have been done that day. For he paid for any neglected duties with insomnia and dismal dreams of the shop in ruins, of the final decline and fall of the Bonaparte dynasty and with the thought that all the hopes he ever had in his life were only nonsense.

"Nothing will ever happen! We're doomed, and there's no hope," he groaned, tossing on his hard mattress.

— I find this is pretty funny, though perhaps in other times it was normal to feel such strong concern for the state of one's nation, or one's political heroes.

P 36:
Then they sat down to supper, at which mouths ate, stomachs digested and little shoes under the table talked about the feelings of frozen hearts and the dreams of unfeeling heads. Then they would separate, to regain their strength for the dream of life in real sleep.

— I love this. The mouths, stomachs, shoes are disembodied! There are a few passages (and a dream sequence among them) that border on surreal.

P 43:
At this point the conversation ceased; it had been in Polish, copiously ornamented with French, which made it resemble a face disfigured by a rash.

— How very insulting. I'm guessing French would be used among the aristocracy, as a sign or education, worldliness, fashion. But whose point of view is this in the conversation between Izabela and her countess aunt? Is it Izabela's view? Does she view the aristocracy of which she is a part with disdain? Or is this the stamp of our omniscient narrator?

P 49:
"And is there no war on today? It is the weapons that have changed, that's all. Instead of an axe of scythe or scimitar, they fight with roubles. [...]"

— A pretty progressive thought for 1878, no?

P 65:
What a stupid life!... We're all of us chasing a dream in our hearts and it is not until the dream escapes us that we realise it was an illusion.

P 72:
"Experts say first love is the worst," Wokulski murmured.

"Not so. After the first, a hundred others are waiting, but after the hundredth, there's nothing."

— Wokulski's got it bad. His every move — financial, social, charitable — is to attract her attention.

P 99:
"[...] They insist you want to kill the industry. Is the competition you are creating really so dangerous?"

"It is true," Wokulski replied, "that I have three or even four million roubles credit with the Moscow manufacturers, but I do not yet know whether their products will suit our market."

"A huge sum of money, to be sure," the Prince murmured. "Do you not see a genuine threat to our factories in it?"

"Not in the least. I see only an insignificant decrease in their own immense profits, which are no concern of mine. My duty is to concern myself with my own profits and give my customers good value; for our goods will be cheaper."

— There are a lot of similar discussions throughout. Wokulski clearly sees that the factory owners are exploiting their workers and their customers.

P 120:
Gradually the smoke died away. As far as the eye could see we saw what looked like scraps of white or navy-blue paper scattered in disorder on the trampled grass in various places. Several carts were moving around the field, and some people were placing these scraps in them. The rest remained. "So this is what they were born for," Katz sighed, leaning on his rifle, overcome by melancholy.

— This battle interlude — the Hungarian uprising of 1849, which many Poles joined — reminds me a little of War and Peace. It is particularly sobering for Rzecki, the old clerk in Wokulski's shop, his illusions of the glory of war, of purpose, being stripped away.

P 125:
During the entire journey I felt as though the quilt over my knees was more densely populated than Belgium.

P 138:
This young man proved to me, by quoting very clever people, that all capitalists are criminals, that the earth ought to belong to those who cultivate it, that factories, coalmines and machines ought to be the property of everyone, that there is no God or Soul which priests invented to trick people into paying tithes. He added that when they start the revolution (he and the three "prikashchiki"), then we shall all work only eight hours a day, and enjoy ourselves for the rest of the time, even though everyone will have a pension when old, and a free funeral. Finally he said that paradise will not come to this world until everything is held in common: the earth, building, machines and even wives.

— "Work only eight hours a day"! Damn Socialists.

P 158
"[...] They are all somewhat scatterbrained, as you will have noticed, but they're men of good will . . . They want to do something, they're intelligent and educated — but they lack energy. A sickness of the will, my dear sir, their whole class is affected by it . . . They have everything — money, titles, respect, even success with women, so they want nothing. But without that urge, Mr Wokulski, they cannot help becoming tools in the hands of new and ambitious men . . . We, my dear sir, we still want many things," he added in a still lower voice, "they are lucky to have found us . . . "

P 192:
"Well, and what have you to say to all this, doctor?"

"Only what I have already said," Szuman replied, "we're approaching the fifth act. Either this is the end of a gallant man, or the start of a whole series of follies..."

"And the worst sort, for they will be political," Mr Rzecki interposed.

— Wokulski has demanded satisfaction, so there is a duel! Barely a third through the novel, we can be fairly certain this is not his end, but rather as Szuman suggests merely the beginning of his end. I almost missed the insult and the challenge, they were so underplayed. Wokulski's head is so full of love that other, significant events happen in a blink.

I have not quoted here from the 5-page encounter with Izabela's cousin, Julian Ochocki, scientist, and his obsession with flying machines, which surely would prove to be a turning point for the world. But there was more to the conversation than that. Something about it was bitter to Wokulski, reminding him of pursuits he'd given up. I expect we'll meet Ochocki again.

Coincidentally I've been dipping into David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years this week, and it's complementing my reading of The Doll in terms of the role of usurers and the development of a class of tradesmen. It casts a light on Wokulski's sense of financial and moral obligation, and how closely they are tied.