Mediaboss Marketing

by Rob Harding

Lets leave the sordid world of Earth behind for a bit, and explore the potential of a concept thats kind of easy to dismiss out of hand.

In his venerable Culture series, Iain M Banks describes a future society based around Minds, unimaginably super-intelligent AIs that control vast ships and space-going habitats, on which a massive collection of alternately hedonistic and depressed lesser-biological beings (assumed to be human, although its never made explicit) live pampered and comfortable lives. The Culture is semi-utopian, although, if it resembles any society, it resembles the US in its relations with other civilisations, The books frequently focus on both the skulduggery necessary to keep the civilisation running and the injustice of being born outside it. Nonetheless, it is a portrait of a society in which humans (probably) are protected, cared for and treated equally through advanced technology.

Because utopias arent easy or fun to write, few societies like the Culture have appeared in fiction before or since. There is one notable version, however, in the form of an oddly idealistic leftie meme: Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism.

FALGSC (Sometimes just called FALC, because space is admittedly unlikely and gays apparently arent allowed to be involved in these things) is often an expression of frustration, tempered (especially recently) with a fatalistic sense of humour and understanding that well never get there. In a world that sees Trumps and Assads, Dutertes and Al-Baghdadis, in a world where petty fascist shitheads are coming out of the walls on every continent and fundamentalists grow louder with every day, something as optimistic is impossible. More knowledgeable people scoff that Communism is a flawed system vulnerable to human nature, they delicately refuse to engage with the Gay part and make accusatory comments about entitlement because of the Luxury bit.

However you parse it, FALC and FALGSC are envisaged as post-capitalist utopias.

However you parse it, FALC and FALGSC are envisaged as post-capitalist utopias. As is pointed out in this video, capitalism as a civilisational operating system is starting to run into serious and systemic problems. As such, its time to start planning what society could evolve into, because there are some nasty failure stakes. Traditional extinction is on the table, of course. But, worse, we could end up with a capitalist kleptocracy, like that envisioned in William Gibsons The Peripheral, where only the rich survive the near-apocalypse, or else either a hideous famine-stricken fascist dystopia ruling the starving masses, or a segregated post-oil nightmare.

FALGSC provides an alternative to all this. Its not going to be easy to get to vested interests, human nature and conservatism all stand in the way

Bots are getting smarter and more numerous every day, and, in recent years, even self-taught neural networks have started development a huge step on the road to a self-sustaining AI. Capitalist systems almost always automate to improve efficiency from the stone-age woodcutter assembling an axe to cut more wood, to the self-service checkout in Tescos, theres always a machine to help fewer people do more work. Under a capitalist system, this process is focused on profit. This is a problem our unemployment crises worldwide are bad enough, and in many countries birth rates are still increasing. People are living and working longer, making it harder for the generations after them to get jobs, even without the economic inequality thats developed alongside that. Unemployed people can create big problems even if youre the kind of heartless Tory bastard who doesnt care about humans being starving to death the Arab Spring is partly attributable to massive unemployment rates and stunted labour markets in many Middle Eastern countries.

If you think robots cant do your job, youre being naive. Yes, even repair other robots. Even create art. All of it. Image credit: Wikipedia Commons.

Traditional capitalist automation only makes this much worse robots and bots are much cheaper to run than humans, so even businesses that want to reject them and hire only humans are dooming themselves to obsolescence and rapid undercutting. Automation hasnt started to bite properly yet, and already its predicted that one in three jobs are at risk within the next twenty years. Within my lifetime, we could be looking at a society where its no longer economical to hire human workers for 90% of the jobs out there.

Universal Basic Income is a potential patch to this problem, but its a limited one and its unaffordable for many of the economies where mass automation will bite hardest the manufacturing-heavy developing countries and the industrialising third world. What happens when a third of a billion Chinese workers are out of a job thanks to automation? What happens to Indias already high unemployment rate when the robots come for everyones jobs?

Tarir Square, February 2011. Economic problems are believed to have played a key role in the Arab Spring. Image credit: Wikipedia Commons.

Worse still, under a capitalist system, those that own the machines (free of the constraints of having to support a workforce) will be able to become extremely wealthy. With the natural tendency of the wealthy to want to pay as little tax as possible, and with nearly everyone else relying on universal basic income to survive (assuming a fully functional semi-universal UBI system can be implemented at all, against heavy ideological opposition from hidebound conservatives the world over), taxation becomes almost useless. We then end up in a situation where governments cant pay for themselves, or the potentially billions of unemployed, because no-ones hiring any more and the hyper-efficient automated industrial base cant sell its products because no-one can afford them. (Or maybe the new auto-industrialists will consent to paying 95% taxes and somehow keep the whole system afloat by themselves which would raise a dozen ethical questions if it wasnt blatantly unrealistic.)

FALGSC provides an alternative to all this. Its not going to be easy to get to vested interests, human nature and conservatism all stand in the way (and what the hells their plan for this? I suspect it runs along the lines of fuck you, got mine, like it usually is.). Join me next week to explore some of the winding, difficult roads that might lead to the promised land of Fully Automated Luxury Gay (Space) Communism. Its more practical than youd think.

Featured image credit: James Vaughan, Flickr.Text reads Soviet anthem is our triumph in space!

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THE ROAD TO FULLY AUTOMATED LUXURY GAY SPACE COMMUNISM: PART 1 - Norwich Radical (blog)