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We live in a world where people pretend money can buy you anything, so money becomes the point, so we all work for money. Money is thought of as value.” “Okay, I get that. We’re broke and I get that.” “So good, keep hanging with me. We live by buying things with money, in a market that sets all the prices.” “The invisible hand.” “Right. Sellers offer stuff, buyers buy it, and in the flux of supply and demand the price gets determined. It’s crowdsourced, it’s democratic, it’s capitalism, it’s the market.”
“The prices are always too low, and so the world is fucked. We’re in a mass extinction event, sea level rise, climate change, food panics, everything you’re not reading in the news.” “All because of the market.” “Exactly! It’s not just that there are market failures. It’s that the market is a failure.” “How so?” “Things are sold for less than it costs to make them.”
lots of businesses do go bankrupt. But the ones that don’t haven’t actually sold their thing for more than it cost to make. They’ve just ignored some of their costs. They’re under huge pressure to sell as low as they can, because every buyer buys the cheapest version of whatever it is. So they shove some of their production costs off their books.” “Can’t they just pay their labor less?” “They already did that!
But now we’re chewed up. We’re squoze dry. We’ve been paying a fraction of what things really cost to make, but meanwhile the planet, and the workers who made the stuff, take the unpaid costs right in the teeth.”
But it’s still too many. You never hear about sixteen of anything. There are the eight noble truths, the two evil stepsisters. Maybe twelve at most, like recovery steps, or apostles, but usually it’s single digits.” “Quit that. It’s sixteen laws, distributed between the World Trade Organization and the G20. Financial transactions, currency exchange, trade law, corporate law, tax law. Everywhere the same.”
“Sixteen I’m telling you, and they’re encoded, and each can be changed by changing the codes. Look what I’m saying: you change those sixteen, you’re like turning a key in a big lock. The key turns, and the system goes from bad to good. It helps people, it requires the cleanest techs, it restores landscapes, the extinctions stop.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. Money, n. A blessing that is of no advantage to us excepting when we part with it. —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
Drowned, hosed, visiting Davy Jones, six fathoms under, wet, all wet, moldy, mildewed, tidal, marshy, splashing, surfing, body-surfing, diving, drinking, in the drink, drunk, damp, scubaed, plunged, high diving, sloshed, drunk, dowsed, watered, waterfalled, snorkeled, running the rapids, backstroking, waterboarded, gagged, holding your breath, in the tube, bathyscaping, taking a bath, showered, swimming, swimming with the fishes, visiting the sharks, conversing with the clams, lounging with the lobsters, jawing with Jonah, in the belly of the whale, pilot fishing, leviathanating, getting
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The truth is that the First Pulse was a profound shock, as how could it not be, raising sea level by ten feet in ten years. That was already enough to disrupt coastlines everywhere, also to grossly inconvenience all the major shipping ports around the world, and shipping is trade: those containers in their millions had been circulating by way of diesel-burning ships and trucks, moving around all the stuff people wanted, produced on one continent and consumed on another, following the highest rate of return which is the only rule that people observed at that time. So that very disregard for the
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Too late, of course. The global warming initiated before the First Pulse was baked in by then and could not be stopped by anything the postpulse people could do. So despite “changing everything” and decarbonizing as fast as they should have fifty years earlier, they were still cooked like bugs on a griddle.
Even tossing a few billion tons of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere to mimic a volcanic eruption and thus deflect a fair bit of sunlight, depressing temperatures for a decade or two, which they did in the 2060s to great fanfare and/or gnashing of teeth, was not enough to halt the warming, because the relevant heat was already deep in the oceans, and it wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon, no matter how people played with the global thermostat imagining they had godlike powers. They didn’t.
It was that ocean heat that caused the First Pulse to pulse, and later brought on the second one. People sometimes say no one saw...
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They published their papers, and shouted and waved their arms, and a few canny and deeply thoughtful sci-fi writers wrote up lurid accounts of such an eventuality, and the rest of civilization went on torching the planet like a Burning Man pyromasterpiece. Really. That’s how much those knuckleheads cared about their grandchildren, and that’s how much they believed their scientists, even though every time they felt a slight cold coming on they ran to the nearest scientist (i.e. doctor) to seek aid.
For Lindsay
But now, damned if I hadn’t gone super-long on Jojo herself, in essence making the same kind of mistake: lost liquidity, desire for equilibrium, dislike of volatility, attachment to a particular static situation, which even the Buddha warns against. And in that very dangerous situation, my intended partner in the mutual project of coupledom, which was also a kind of venturing of capital, had not hit the strike price. She had walked on her option.
The intertidal zone of lower midtown sloshed back and forth over an area with a lot of old landfill, and that double whammy had brought a lot of buildings down. Thirtieth to Canal was a wilderness of slumped, tilted, cracked, and collapsed blocks. A house built on sand cannot stand.
Here in the first rush of skybridge building a group of investors had suspended a mall about forty stories above the ground, in the middle of four skyscrapers that anchored the skybridges holding the mall in air. This had thrilled people until the weight of the mall had pulled the four towers abruptly inward, dropping the mall five stories at once and breaking everything in it before somehow the towers held. After that people had gotten a lot more careful, and now the Great Intilt Quad stood there like a bad Stonehenge, reminding people never to hang too much weight outside the plumb line of a
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And you couldn’t make rents high enough to keep people away, because they dodged the rents and squatted wherever they could. The drowned city had endless nooks and crannies, including of course diamond bubbles holding the tide out of aerated basements. People living like rats.
Always grow. This meant that once the island’s surface was filled to the max, you first shot up into the sky; then when that effort reached the limit of the material strengths of the time, you had to dive. After the basements and subways and tunnels were aerated, no doubt people would start carving caves deeper and deeper, extending an invisible calvinocity down into the lithosphere, excavating earthscrapers to match the skyscrapers, buildings right down to the center of the Earth. Geothermal heating available at no extra charge! Apartments in hell: and that was Manhattan.
We lingered in New York till the city felt so homelike that it seemed wrong to leave it. And further, the more one studied it, the more grotesquely bad it grew. —Rudyard Kipling, 1892
“You can either believe that voting lawmakers into office means they work for you, so you keep voting, or you can admit that doesn’t work, and quit voting. Which doesn’t work either.”
if you use the currently existing legal system to vote in a group of congresspeople who actually pass laws to put people back in charge of lawmaking, and they do it, and there’s a president who signs those laws, and a Supreme Court that allows they are legal, and an army that enforces them, then—I mean, is that a revolution?” Jeff is silent for a long time. Finally he says, “Yes. It’s a revolution.” “But it’s legal!”
In the 1920s a plan was proposed to dam and drain the East River, from Hell Gate to the Williamsburg Bridge, afterward filling in the emptied channel and thus connecting Manhattan with Brooklyn and Queens, while also creating for development approximately two thousand acres of new real estate.
Every ideal and value seemed to melt under a drenching of money, the universal solvent.
“Fuck money,” she said, surprising herself. “It isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Because everything is not fungible to everything else. Many things can’t be bought. Money isn’t time, it isn’t security, it isn’t health. You can’t buy any of those things. You can’t buy community or a sense of home.
But they are only stopgaps. You are the queen of stopgaps.” “Stopgaps?” “That’s what they are. Because in the long run, only a system fix will work. Until then, we try our stopgaps. We do what we can with the handouts of the rich. We try to save the world with their table scraps.”
“We like to keep things simple,” he said to begin the lecture she chose first, which made her smile. “In reality things are complex, but we can’t always handle that. We usually want there to be one master rule. Pöppel called that monocausotaxophilia, the love of single causes that explain everything.
It would be so nice to have that single rule, sometimes. So people make them up, and give them authority, like they used to give authority to kings or gods.
now it’s the idea that more is better. That’s the rule that underlies economic theory, and in practice it means profit. That’s the one rule. It’s supposed to allow everyone to maximize their own value....
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“So what’s a better master rule, if we have to have one? There are some candidates. Greatest good of the grea...
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Instead of working for profit, we do whatever is good for the land. That way we could hope to pass along a good place to the generations after us.”
Federal Reserve chair Lawrence Jackman and the secretary of the treasury, both of course veterans of Wall Street, met with the big banks and investment firms, all massively overleveraged, all crashing, and they outlined a bailout offer amounting to four trillion dollars, to be given on condition that the recipients issue shares to the Treasury equivalent in value to whatever aid they accepted.
Earlier shareholders would be given haircuts; debt holders would become equity holders. Depositors would be protected in full. Future profits would go to the U.S. Treasury in proportion to the shares it held.
In other words, as a condition of bailout: nationalization. Oh, the tortured shrieks of outraged dismay. Goldman Sachs refused the deal; Treasury promptly declared it insolvent and arranged a last-minute fire sale of it to Bank of America, just as it had arranged the sale of Merrill Lynch a century before. After that, Treasury and the Fed offered any other company refusing their help good luck in their bankruptcy proceedings.
Meanwhile China’s central bank officials politely observed that state intervention in private finance was often quite useful. They had achieved mostly good results with it over the last three or four thousand years, and they suggested that possibly state control of the economy was better than the reverse situation.
Finally Citibank took the deal offered by Treasury and Fed, and in rapid order all the other banks and investment firms also took the deal. Finance was now for the most part a privately operated public utility.
These new taxes and the nationalization of finance meant the U.S. government would soon be dealing with a healthy budget surplus. Universal health care, free public education through college, a living wage, guaranteed full employment, a year of mandatory national service, all these were not only made law but funded.
And as all this political enthusiasm and success caused a sharp rise in consumer confidence indexes, now a major influence on all market behavior, ironically enough, bull markets appeared all over the planet.
That making people secure and prosperous would be a good thing for the economy was a really pleasant surprise to them. Who knew?
Remember not to forget, if your head has not already exploded, the nonhuman actors in these actor networks. Possibly the New York estuary was the prime actor in all that has been told here, or maybe it was bacterial communities, expressing themselves through their own civilizations, what we might call bodies.
This story is about New York, not Denver, and the city is as ruthless as an otter. Its stories will always convey that awful New York mix of hypocritical sentimentality and stone-cold ambition.
So sure, a leftward flurry of legislation got LBJed through Congress in 2143, but there was no guarantee of permanence to anything they did, and the pushback was ferocious as always, because people are crazy and history never ends, and good is accomplished against the immense black-hole gravity of greed and fear.
capitalism will be flattening itself like the octopus it biomimics, sliding between the glass walls of law that try to keep it contained, and no one should be surprised to find it can squeeze itself to the width of its beak, the only part of it that it can’t squish flatter, the hard part that tears at our flesh when it is free to do so.
The two men shrug again. They are like a synchronized shrugging team.
“Some people like to fuck things up.” She nods. “Like about half the members of Congress.” “So how do you deal with them?” “I don’t. I yell at them. Right now we’ve got the momentum, so I do my best to steamroll them.
Hands over her head, she twirls, she waves; she could not be more off the rhythm. Jeff yells in Mutt’s ear, “Our gal is a terrible dancer!” “Yeah, but can you take your eyes off her?”
