The Resisters

by Gish Jen

It is so hard for a new parent to imagine a child any different from the one he or she has—children do so have their own gravity. They are their own normal.

because I could be, as my mother liked to say, lazy as a rock at the bottom of a hill.

as for the resulting reality, was it not disconcertingly like the sea level rise and heat and wind we knew, long ago, would come with climate change but have since come to call normal? No one would have willfully chosen the stranding of whole office parks and schools and neighborhoods by the flooding we saw now. No one would have willfully chosen the generating of the places we called marooned places, just as no one would have chosen the extinction of frogs and of polar bears, or the decimation of our pine forests by the explosion in bark beetles. And yet it was something we humans did finally choose.

After a...

was not the earth that chose it, or any other creature. It was we who made our world what it was. It...

She, too, was an embodiment of that tornado that is girlhood—that glorious whirlwind of silliness and sophistication that seems to dance and spin and touch down just exactly where it likes.

as a father, all I wanted was to see my daughter, in all her giftedness and idiosyncratic humanity, bloom.

We Cannon-Chastanets were an unusual Surplus family, that’s to say, in having inherited a land right on Eleanor’s side of the family. We were, as a result, not relegated to an AutoHouseboat but boasted an actual 3-D-printed blue-and-yellow plastic AutoHouse, complete with garden.

Grief deranges, we said. To which she echoed, “Grief deranges.” Healing is slow, we told her. “Healing is slow.”

how assiduously the young will reject exactly what it seems to their parents most important to

get.

“Better to grasp at straws than not to grasp at all,”

Aunt Nettie didn’t have to segregate Netted from Surplus, in short; what with Basic Incomes so modest, we self-segregated as easily as sand and water. Of

Of course, Netted lives were full of pressure—I had heard that. And I did think I could see it in the way these people trudged up their beautiful stairs. They were not lighthearted; they were preoccupied. Where we Surplus had to concertedly consume, after all, they had to concertedly produce. And what a life it could be, I remembered—the meetings, the conferences, the politics. The anxiety about success—how you fought to define it for yourself, even as others blithely defined it for you. People said that the Netted looked at our lives with envy. To be state-supported! To draw a Basic Income for doing nothing! Gwen once showed me an online chat in which a Netted, somehow crossing into Surplus Space, claimed that he’d change places with one of us in a heartbeat. Naturally, he was missing a lot of the picture, as Gwen could have pointed out. Instead, she had simply collapsed his 3-D figure, first into 2-D, and then into a point. “What an asshole,” she said. She was contemptuous. Yet as I watched the people file into their beautiful house, I could not help but notice their air of exhaustion. Maybe they had just had a long day. But they did not exactly walk as if reveling in their good luck in being Netted. They walked as if they had enormous boulders to roll up a hill and no RockBots to help. ◆

“The lax are never lax just once.”

either we’re makers or just made.”

All people grow out of their baby clothes,

Finally she said, “You don’t understand.” “And here we believe that it is you who doesn’t understand,” said Eleanor. “How can I not understand?” “Because we are often the worst explicators of our own actions and motivations, much less their consequences,” said Eleanor. Was this what now came with lemonade and cookies?

the bigger the bigot, the bigger the boot.

knew you would understand me better than I understood myself.”

I guess I came to see—not if you’d forgive me,” said Ondi. “But if there was a way of straightening things out. Not that I think there is.”

it’s one thing Aunt Nettie may never get about us,” she said. “That we’re irrational and perverse. That we destroy things we love, then want to fix them. Where’s the algorithm that explains that?”

“Homo regrettus,” said Gwen. “Isn’t that what you used to call us?”

Eleanor gave a wan smile. “What a pleasure to realize you hear wh...

“There are worse things,” I put in, “than being willing to state the cold truth.”

“To answer your earlier question: you came because you had something to get off your chest.”

there were few signs in ordinary life of just how suddenly you could be pitched into an unremittingly brutal reality.

Might as well go out swinging.

parents everywhere are astonished by their child’s unfolding capacities—at the talents and interests that come into view like mountain range upon mountain range as you ascend a high peak.

“The fact is that for most of history the question had been how we could produce enough to feed people, to house people, to clothe people,” she said. “And capitalism, it turns out, was a great answer. It had some serious drawbacks but it worked better than anything else people tried.” “Like what kind of drawbacks?” Eleanor explained about exploitation and inequality, and how while capitalism brought out the philanthropy in some, it mostly brought out people’s greed. “Especially as corporations focused more and more on shareholder profit and forgot about the greater good,” she said.

why haven’t we gone to a four-day workweek?” I said. “Why don’t we have job sharing? Why don’t we define taking care of children and the elderly as real work, regardless of whether or not it supports a ‘productive’ member of society? And while we’re at it, why can’t we call cleaning up the environment ‘work’ even if it doesn’t result in a product that can be sold? Why do we behave as if producing is still the be-all and end-all, when it’s not?” Eleanor took up the thread. “And why are the Netted so upset about paying Basic Incomes when there’s more than enough to go around? Why do they treat us like parasites when they’ve gone out of their way to deny us work? Is it because now that Big Tech doesn’t need us, they just want to winnow us? Especially as that solves the population problem, too? It’s not their first-choice solution no doubt. But what are they going to do now that they see moving to Mars isn’t going to work out, right?”

“But could we really have used Automation and AI to rethink capitalism?” Gwen asked. “Weren’t we, like, worried about ChinRussia, and that if our system didn’t win, we’d all have to live under theirs?”

“Quixotic. What if it’s just resistance for the sake of resistance. So I’m not complicit. Is that a stupid way to live?”

A good woman is hard to stop.

Maybe Aunt Nettie had realized that baseball—Unlawful Assembly or not—kept us out of trouble.

bottom sheet and working it under the mattress, “is to assume the best of people. Try to distinguish ignorance from malice.”

enjoy the silver linings because there will be clouds,’

Children grow up. It is in the order of things.

An empty nest was a well-used nest.

“Like problems with voting,” answered Sylvie. “Like when Facebook became a utility and gave all that data to Aunt Nettie? That’s where all those DelectableElectables came from. Those perfect candidates they learned to design.” Pink was quiet. “Candidates who sure enough got voted in and then approved expanding the Autonet,” Sylvie went on. “It’s like the Autonet gets voters to vote for itself. And who knows if the Autonet’s taken everything over at this point or if there are even people behind it.” “Like what people?” asked Gwen. “Like Big Tech,” said Sylvie. “That’s what my parents say. Though they think maybe even Big Tech has lost control.”

the Bach playing, I did not have to be. “ ‘After Automation something had to be done,’ ” recited Pink. “That’s what they told us in school.” “Because it was tens of millions of Unretrainables,” said Sylvie. “And because there were riots. And because the Autonet predicted that after the Automation Riots, there were going to be even bigger riots.”

“Well, at least I know what can happen,” answered Gwen. “While you think it can never happen to you.”

But I did hear her ask her roommates all manner of other questions. For example, Why were they so worried all the time? “We have to get good grades so we can get a real job,” explained Sylvie. “Meaning a job and not a gig.” “Are there a lot of gigs?” asked Gwen. “A lot more gigs than jobs,” said Pink. “Some of which people in other countries can do, too.” said Sylvie. Because it’s all virtual work.” “Does that mean you have to produce?” said Gwen. “Do we ever,” said Pink.

Nettie?” said Gwen. “Exactly,” said Pink. “We Netted really are netted, if you know what I mean.” “You mean, you’re not exactly free,” said Gwen.

Like have you ever heard of this book, Michael Kohlhaas?—which Coach says is his favorite book because Michael Kohlhaas is just so stubborn! And when I said he sounded like Bartleby the Scrivener, he said that was exactly right, and isn’t it amazing how interesting we find characters who say no? In life we like people who say yes, but in books we like people who say no,

“Anyway, he says things really aren’t so bad for the Surplus. He says consuming is nowhere near as hard as producing, and that the Surplus don’t try very hard to get themselves out of their situation. Like he says he worked and worked to get himself into Net U, but most of them don’t. Because they’re on the whole pretty passive, he says, which is why even if AutoAmericans Against Apartheid succeeds and we allow more Cross Overs, they aren’t necessarily going to come. Because they’ve got a great deal, right? Why not let us work and support them?”

“I can see you haven’t changed.” “No, you’re right. I was always comfortable in my own skin, and lo and behold—here I am still in it.”

There was peace of mind in knowing less, and I was glad she had it. At the same time, the less she knew, the more distant she felt. We held her close by holding her away.

even if we returned to the dirt and the wind and the rain like the plants and the animals, we had a bigness in us.

“Actually, you were rebellion personified.” “Maybe I was myself personified,” said Ondi. “And maybe I am still.”