Lake of Darkness x Nexus of Joy

Sci-fi author: I created the Joy Nexus to show how a better society is within reach - sure, it’s not perfect, but it’s a start. Readers: The Joy Nexus is a chilling dystopian warning. We must never let it happen

— Jo Lindsay Walton (@jolwalton.bsky.social) 3 January 2025 at 10:14

Adam Roberts’ Lake of Darkness (2024) offers a highly automated, post-work, post-scarcity ambiguous utopia. 

These kinds of utopias are probably by now familiar to many SF readers, so Roberts has latitude to bring his own distinctive twists and emphases.

Social organisation is based on ‘fandoms.’ The society is mostly post-literate (or at least post-typography, accustomed to interacting with texts by speaking and listening to AIs). There is a lot of attention given to variety and mobility:

These two things – a vast, almost endless proliferation of different societies, different human-climates, different modes of living – and the rapid and easy ability to pass on to any of them – constitute the key to our contemporary utopia. [...] For some, just knowing that they can leave is enough to ensure their happiness wherever they are. But though human utopia reaches across thousands of worlds and habitats, it cannot reach everywhere – or to be precise, its core quality, the guarantor of viability, the open exit door, cannot be accessed everywhere.

Then Satan, imprisoned in a black hole, recapitulates the argument that toil is necessary for humans to live meaningful lives. 

Your utopia. It’s all a bit trivial, don’t you think? You’re all just playing games, as children do. None of you are really doing anything, really achieving anything. Where is your Homer? Your Shakespeare, your Beethoven, your Chi Lin, your Yin Lui? You’re paddling around your paddling pool with the puffed-up armbands still on your pudgy little arms. Don’t you think it’s time to put all that behind you? Let me out, and the baby-comforts of your collective existence would be demolished. There would be suffering, I don’t deny it. But without that friction nothing truly great, nothing truly enduring is possible. Something something cuckoo-clocks, something something Borgias, Leonardo and the Renaissance. 

There is a hiss on the word “Renaissance”: Roberts really does seem to bend over backwards to remind us that this argument, MADE BY THE DEVIL, may be a dodgy one. 

Something something cucko-clocks, something something Borgias, Leonardo and the Renaissance. This is a reference to The Third Man, and the (inaccurate but great) zinger that five hundred years of Swiss democracy and peace produced nothing but the cuckoo clock. The devil's half-assedness here is the point: the argument is so familiar, it barely needs to be said, is always on the tip (or tips) of your tongue.

So I don't think we're really meant to come away from Lake of Darkness reinvigorated and pumped for more scarcity and more work ethic. However, the Joy Nexus effect -- whereby contemporary readers are predisposed to read all utopias as dystopian -- is as strong as ever.

"Not all Utopias are Utopian," comments one Amazon reviewer. Another ponders "whether the pursuit of happiness without realy investment in working for it has any external value." (Makes you think is a thought-terminating cliche). On Goodreads, one reviewer describes the book as "critiquing utopianism," while another comments: "Also typical are the sort of general conclusions of the author that we see in other novels, namely that utopia infantilizes humanity and people need toil and suffering to live meaningful lives."

Maybe we're already post-literate? Or is it just me? Or is it possible that Roberts, like Milton, is a true poet and of the devil's party without knowing it?

I really liked Lake of Darkness in the end, one of my favourites by him of those I've read. A little infuriating.

Expertise and class consciousness

I wonder if terms like expertise and specialist knowledge could shake up a more Marxist terminology of class consciousness, reification, praxis, false consciousness, and ideology?

The idea that capitalism objectifies human labour and relationships—making constructs like money, markets, and institutions appear natural and inevitable—was a big deal for 20th century Western Marxism. Reification ('thingification'), it was argued, established an illusion of inevitability. It made systemic change feel impossible. Understanding that things are actually not inevitable is the first step toward actually changing them.

I guess this did blow my mind at some point. But today, that critique feels less urgent. Does anyone really think any of this is inevitable? Don’t most people already know that commodities, institutions, and systems are produced by human activity, whether or not the specific people can be seen? Isn’t the air thick with comparisons? We operate in a hyper-visible world, where models and practices are endlessly contrasted. The alternatives are already real—just very unevenly distributed. 

Pretty much anything could be different from what it is. Things are quite different year to year: centrist-liberal hegemony has truly slipped, the Overton window is screeching through space, national borders are fragile, climate change can be seen and felt, disruptive tech start-ups absorb millions of investment dollars and then expire, genocide is live-streamed by the murderers and the murdered, and the destruction of fine towering cities is available as before and after pictures. The status quo doesn't describe anything.

Yet so what? Putting weight on mystification has become unfashionable. With good reason, too. It verges on a patronising insistence that we are all dupes, missing the significance of our own lived experience. It risks slipping into bad conspiracy theory, where reality is nothing but a rival fandom. In its most reductive form, it invites the caricature of a self-satisfied Marxist bro (#JeSuis) splaining to you what your feelings really mean. 

Lots of people have lots of good reasons for believing untrue things in our day-to-day lives. Beliefs do lots of things—emotionally, socially, aesthetically—besides model reality. It feels like the challenge is no longer exposing violence as constructed, but surviving it despite this awareness. Contingency is well-known, because precarity is well-known.

Yet I also wonder if some of the original critique can be repaired?

For me, focusing on how expertise or specialist knowledge could be radically reconfigured feels far less banal. There’s a living provocation here: the idea that areas of practice we take as determined by the specific properties of the things involved—medicine, engineering, music, economics, governance, biology, something like that—might not have to be constrained in the ways they always have been. 'Forms of practice are, typically, more interesting than states of consciousness,' writes Göran Therborn in 'Why Some Classes Are More Successful Than Others' (2012).

I feel like expert practice can carry an aura of inevitability which social and economic institutions and systems don’t really carry. What might this or that expertise look like if it were genuinely democratic, collective, adaptive, and responsive to the diverse needs and perspectives of those it serves? 

How might we understand class consciousness as expertise?

An anxiety about the proper role of expertise, I’d suggest, has even been at the bottom of a lot of the longstanding disagreement around state abolition, and therefore the left's internal spectrum between anarchism and socialism. 

‘The differences between revolutionary dictatorship and statism are superficial,’ wrote Bakunin in Statism and Anarchy (1873). ‘Fundamentally they both represent the same principle of minority rule over the majority in the name of the alleged “stupidity” of the latter and the alleged “intelligence” of the former.’ 

A big part of what is at stake in seizing the state, or steering well clear of the state, is to do with expertise. Does the revolutionary movement — whether that is the proletariat as for Marx, or some kind of Leninist vanguard, or a bunch of constructivist anarchists being the change we want to see in the world, or the peasantry of the Global South, or ex-Leninists getting into Indigenous cosmologies, or some other coalition or multitude — does the revolutionary movement know something that everybody else doesn’t? Does whatever teaches you to prepare and deliver a revolution also teach you enough to sustain it? Does it perhaps strip you of it? What do you do with these strange moments, which may be collective or solitary, dramatic or quiet, when you suddenly find yourself standing in the halls of power, wondering what it is that you thought you knew?