Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future

This review is published in STIR. Consider supporting them with a purchase, donation, or subscription. I also wrote another review here.

Kim Stanley Robinson. The Ministry for the Future (Orbit, 2020). 

In contemporary science fiction, Kim Stanley Robinson is something of a titan. His books tend to be a little titanic, too: big in themselves, and about big disasters involving humans, nature, and technology. His characters are more often scientists, policymakers, and bureaucrats than space pirates or rampaging AIs, but the stakes are as high as in any multi-dimensional sci-fi caper. Sometimes those characters might save the world. Sometimes they rearrange the deck chairs.

Robinson is probably still best-known for the Mars trilogy, published in the 1990s. In good utopian fashion, it’s a tall tale in an exotic locale which, rather than being mere escapist fun, probes pressing problems in the real world. What happens on Mars doesn’t stay on Mars. No, it defamiliarises the world around us, and hopefully helps us to see its possibilities anew: if we could start from scratch (sort of), what laws and institutions would we choose? The more recent Aurora (2015) feels like a pained clarification: OK I know I wrote all the stuff about terraforming Mars, but we do only have one planet! Robinson’s chonkiest book is Green Earth (2015) – originally three chonky books – which adroitly explores the intersection of science, policy, and climate. It paved the way for his latest, The Ministry for the Future (2020).

The Ministry for the Future is a fizzling cornucopia pouring forth vignettes, micro-essays, lists, fictional eye-witness accounts, notes from meetings, and even prose-poem riddles, to peer ahead into the coming decades. It really tries to tell the story of the whole planet — refugees, billionaires, protestors, policymakers, partygoers, carbon atoms, caribou, all of us — while confessing that task to be impossible. The two threads that tie it all together are climate change, and the titular Ministry for the Future, established to

advocate for the world’s future generations of citizens, whose rights, as defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are as valid as our own. [...] [The Ministry] is furthermore charged with defending all living creatures present and future who cannot speak for themselves, by promoting their legal standing and physical protection [...] 

The vision laid out is guardedly optimistic. It is also evasive. Sometimes, a commitment to realism means finding ways to leave things out. Novels often tell us, “This happened, so that happened.” But this novel more often tells us, “This happened. Then that happened. Maybe they’re connected?” Nevertheless, I’ll plunge in with a summary, however crude. This novel definitely won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. The more summaries the better.

So what does Robinson’s positive vision of the future look like? I think it involves six main factors. First, Robinson imagines a proliferation of diverse economic models, at many different scales, adapted to local settings. Within that pluralism, there is an overall trend toward re-commoning and democratising. He argues that there is a postcapitalism already rooted in a patchwork of existing movements: “a rearrangement of various elements of old plans [...] Mondragón, Kerala, MMT, blockchain, Denmark, Cuba, and so on: all the elements had been out there working all along.” But he also points to the importance of planning alternative economic arrangements in the abstract, even if many details must be provisional. When a crisis strikes, there must be models to turn to. 

The second factor is speculative climate technologies. Negative emissions tech draws carbon out of the atmosphere; scientists and engineers pump water out from under glaciers in an attempt to slow their slide into the sea; planes trail aerosols into the atmosphere like plumes of artificial volcanic ash; and vast tracts of the Arctic Sea are dyed vivid butteryellow to bounce more sunlight: 

Geoengineering? Yes. Ugly? Very much so. Dangerous? Possibly. [...] Necessary? Yes. Or put it this way; the international community had decided through their international treaty system to do it. Yet another intervention, yet another experiment in managing the Earth system, in finessing Gaia. Geobegging.

The novel is careful not merely to cheerlead for geoengineering. It’s very clear that techno-fixes are no substitute for deep political and economic system change. But nor does the novel dramatise any of the worst-case geoengineering scenarios, nor explore, in the words of Climate Engineering in Context, “the unequal capacity between states to research and deploy the technologies,” or how to empower “countries and demographics that will suffer from the changed environmental conditions that result from engineering the climate.” For what it’s worth, I think Robinson is far too soft on geoengineering. The unintended consequences of climate technology (or attempts at novel technology) is an area where hard science fiction could have a lot more to say.

Third, with palpable reluctance, Robinson gives state power a leading role. Another recent novel, Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway (2017), arrives at an optimistic future via a more anarchist route. Robinson’s Ministry for the Future might be read as a tacit rejoinder, saying: some things we can’t walk away from, however much we want to. Instead, Robinson has a consortium of central banks roll out a novel financial technology. They issue a “carbon coin,” initially valued at one coin per tonne of CO2 sequestered. Robinson imagines plain old carbon taxes too, to make market prices better reflect the real social and environmental cost of goods and services. However, it’s carbon coin that gets the limelight:

[...] the proposal for a carbon coin was time-dependent, like a budget, with fixed amounts of time included in its contracts, as in bonds. New carbon coins backed by hundred-year bonds with guaranteed rates of return, underwritten by all the central banks working together. 

The logic here is that of money creation. These carbon coins are created out of nothing to pay for decarbonisation projects. The complexity of certifying decarbonisation, including the temptation to deceive – especially whenever you can get paid to not do something! – gets noted, but not really dwelled upon.

The fourth factor is dethroning Big Tech, and adopting its tools for new purposes. The Ministry for the Future rolls out “YourLock,” a kind of socially-owned data trust platform: “a single account on YourLock, which was organized as a co-op owned by its users, after which you had secured your data in a quantum-encrypted cage and could use it as a negotiable asset in the global data economy.” This sounds a bit better than Andrew Yang’s recent Data Dividend proposal (“Yang’s data dividend would ultimately reinforce existing inequities by playing corporations’ own game,” writes Edward Ongweso Jr. in Vice), although the devil’s in the details. The novel is also keen on blockchain, especially as a tool against tax evasion. However, it doesn’t dwell much on the carbon footprint of blockchain at scale (the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index would be a good reference here), or how useful a cashless society can be to authoritarian surveillance and control (something Brett Scott has written about eloquently).

Rewilding and ecological restoration, including the creation of huge wildlife corridors, is the fifth major factor in this optimistic narrative. In a way, the novel itself is mimicking the goal of the Ministry for the Future. It seeks to uplift voices, to unstop the myriad strange throats strewn throughout nature. A vast and varied polyphony is assembled here, encompassing the human and more-than-human world. The novel even plays with non-human first person narration. These chapters are gleefully, nuttily anthropomorphic. It's not a sober, philosophical search for “what it is truly like to be a carbon atom”; it’s more like the carbon atom popping up like Clippie: “It looks like you’re trying to make the planet unlivable! Would you like some help?” 

I think there are two wolves inside Kim Stanley Robinson. There is a strong reverence for the sanctity of the more-than-human universe. And there is the reverence for the extremely human scientific and bureaucratic nature-based solutions that rewilded those two damn wolves in the first place. One inspiration is the Half-Earth Project, “working to conserve half the land and sea to safeguard the bulk of biodiversity, including ourselves.” So while there is a chapter about what might be the founding of a new religion “to express our love, to take the responsibilities that come with being stewards of this earth, devotees of this sacred space, one planet, one planet,” it’s really in this preoccupation with wildlife corridors – plus a few scattered scenes of natural description, as characters skirt over Antarctic ice, or observe the revelry of marmots amid Alpine wildflowers – that Robinson conveys a sense of nature’s inherent value.

The novel also commendably pulls together the perspectives of slaves, prisoners, refugees, the displaced, the grief-stricken, the heat-scarred. At the same time, I do wonder about weighting and emphases here. For instance, refugees are an important part of the story, but a passive one. A new generation of Nansen passports are introduced, as international protection for the world’s vast and growing refugee population. But we don’t really see them in use. Similarly, popular protest and grassroots activism is declared every bit as significant as the politicking of politicians and non-government organisations ... but don’t quite get the column inches to prove it, notwithstanding some euphoric revolutionary fervor in France, plus some amazing stamina from Hong Kong. Automation and post-work imaginaries don’t really feature at all.

Then there are the paramilitary actors. And here we have this optimistic vision’s final puzzle piece. Blowing up things – and often people. These paramilitary campaigns aren’t Leninist vanguards trying to seize state power. Rather, they aim to change the environment in which commercial power operates. “After several years of container ships being sunk on a regular basis, taken out by drone torpedoes of ever-increasing speed and power, the shipping industry had finally begun adapting to the new situation.” At the same time, this violence isn’t just about incentive design. It’s also about self-defense, desire, justice, and revenge. It is personal.

It was a question of identifying the guilty and then finding them and getting to them. The research and detective work was done by another wing. A lot of the guilty were in hiding, or on fortress islands or otherwise protected. 

The paramilitary action happens mostly off-stage, like the battles of Ancient Greek tragedies. Mainly the novel focuses Mary and Frank, two characters at the edges of this underground war. At first I strongly disliked that decision.  For a novel usually so intent on solutions, however uncomfortable and uncertain, it didn’t feel right to depend so much on these paramilitary operations, yet say so little about them: like they were someone else’s problems. But I think the decision has grown on me. Frank and Mary are at least what Vicky Osterweil calls “not-non-violent.” Frank seeks to join a paramilitary cell and is rejected; he tries to operate as a lone wolf but flounders. Mary heads up the Ministry, and approves the finances for its black ops wing, although she has no real idea what they’re up to. These are perhaps stories that don’t get told often enough: the stories of folks who don’t find themselves on the front lines, yet who also don’t distance themselves psychologically, politically, or ethically from those struggles. They do what they can. 

If this is an optimistic vision of the future, let’s remember what counts as optimistic in 2020. This is still a future which contains almost unimaginable suffering and loss. Robinson gives us a glimpse of that, quite early on. Then he largely sets it aside. That early glimpse lingers throughout the book, and beyond. 

There is plenty to quarrel with in this book. It is a book about blundering on with as much wisdom and hope as you can muster, and it puts its carbon coin where its mouth is. A book like this is meant to spark conversation. I hope some sparks fly.

Slightly tweaked from published version.

Marta-Led Demons

Didja miss me don't even answer that shut up you're not even that funny okay you are. There is a snippet below about labour theories of value in the era of Quantified Self.

Here's the context (or skip to the snippet): I've been finishing up a Creative Writing PhD, which is a funny sort of thing. Actually, it's several funny sorts of things, because there's a fair bit of formal variation from university to university, and from PhD to PhD. Which is a good thing. I understand in Coventry, evaluation of the practice component focuses quite heavily on your performance, with respect to the other PGRs in your intake, within a vast verdant combat arena tucked full of traps, weaponry, intrigue and heartbreak. But in every practice-led PhD, there's always a 'practice' component -- for me, that means some fiction, including "Froggy" and Marta -- and then a critical/reflective component.

I initially found that critical/reflective bit quite difficult, since it wasn't a mode of writing I was familiar with / fruitfully unfamiliar with when I got started. But I think I more or less have got it now, which is pretty cool because I'm supposed to hand it in next week.

One aspiration for afterwards, BTW, is to spin off my two cents on practice-led research (also known as practice-as-research or practice-based research, although each phrase has its own connotations) and especially on how it formally relates to speculative fiction.

• Speculative fiction may sometimes aspire to 'lead' research, offering to shift our technoscientific imaginary, and opening spaces which stricter R&D methodologies may explore (shout out DARPA you avant-garde murderous fucks). 
• 'Hard' speculative fiction may also be implicated with expert discourses (whether that's physics or sociology), in a way which resembles the dialectic between the creative and the critical/reflective components of practice-led research. 
• Both speculative fiction and practice-led research are prone to adopting a slightly tricksterish attitude toward external evaluation, eluding or deferring judgment by a kind of bait-and-switch which insists that you've usually evaluated the wrong thing, and that they know more than they're letting on. Speculative fiction's version of this is, of course: "oh no, of course I don't claim to predict the future, ha ha ha" (zooms meaningfully away on hoverboard with fixed wide-eyed stare). 

In a nutshell, I feel like practice-led research and speculative fiction have stuff in common, which means things can actually get quite awkward (but interesting) when you try to do both of them at once.

All of this serves as a kind of apology for various aspects of the following snippet (which probably bug only me anyway), which is a fragment of reflective commentary, about a very brief passage in the mini-novel Marta and the Demons. 

(So it's me talking about some fiction I wrote. But in this bit, the themes of money, labour, and Quantified Self predominate. The yys are because I haven't done the page numbering yet and/or because I generously "allow readers to decide for themselves". Also, I've shouted it out before, but Tim Maughan's sf-ish vignette "Zero Hours" is great and still really relevant here).

Work as Money

[...] This scene [a drunken conversation between Myeong and Carly, about trying to invent a labor-based currency,] was partly inspired by schemes such as Local Exchange Trading Systems and time‑based currencies.[1] Under such systems, a member might earn one credit by working for one hour, which can be spent to hire an hour’s labor from another member. It was easy to imagine Carly thinking along these lines; at this moment in Carly and Myeong’s relationship, it felt right that Carly might have recently re-calibrated her speculative faculties, and be eager to support inchoate wishes, while still ready to feel like the grounded pragmatist of the pair.

Carly comes up with the name “WorkCoin,” and envisions WorkCoin’s value deriving from “the number of hours [worked]” (M: yy). But for Myeong, whose entrepreneurial obliviousness is reaching its peak, the word ‘hours’ is already enough to cut Carly short. 

One objection to time‑based currencies is that every hour of work is qualitatively different to every other hour. Of course, flattening such heterogeneity according to egalitarian principles, rather than market mechanisms, may be part of the appeal of time-based currencies. But I wanted Myeong to focus on something different. Myeong wants to preserve the qualitative heterogeneity of work, conceived primarily as a phenomenological heterogeneity, but with gestures toward the importance of third-person perspectives.

My second inspiration for this scene was Viviana Zelizer’s account of money’s own heterogeneity. Zelizer contests money’s reputation as a uniform, impersonal, and fungible social relation. For Zelizer, “people are constantly creating new monies, and they do so by segregating different streams of legal tender into funds for distinct activities and relations” (Zelizer 2011: 89). Money “may well ‘corrupt’ values into numbers, but values and sentiment reciprocally corrupt money by investing it with moral, social, and religious meaning” (Zelizer 2011: 97). Myeong, Zelizer, and I conspired to flesh out Myeong's aspiration, barely acknowledging Carly's contributions. Instead, Myeong would aspire to use technology to accentuate, extend, and rationalize money’s existing heterogeneity, in order to reflect the heterogeneity of work. Every hour of work is different from every other. Every penny is different from every other. Why shouldn’t we map one set of differences onto the other?

Myeong’s vision is probably ultimately incoherent. Formulating it coherently certainly offers a challenge. First, how should work be demarcated from non-work (cf. §2.5.2)? We certainly cannot get by, in this context, with the approximation that paid work is ‘real’ work (not without begging the question). Nor should we really want to. Nancy Hartsock tersely invokes the theme of what counts as ‘real’ work by describing “a third person, not specifically present in Marx’s account of transactions between capitalist and worker (both of whom are male),” who “follows timidly behind, carrying groceries, baby, and diapers” (Hartsock 1983: 234). Second, since any sum of WorkCoin will have passed through many hands, whose work should count as “what real people [have] really done, to make that money exist” (M: yy)? Third, even if work could somehow be legitimately demarcated and documented, how can WorkCoin legibly represent such data for human subjects? Who could experience something like WorkCoin, and what would they experience? How could WorkCoin’s quantifications be visualized, aestheticized, and perhaps – given Myeong’s desire for a WorkCoin in which “you could see the workers” (M: yy) – embodied and personified? Fourth, even if a legible WorkCoin were possible, why should that materially alter labor’s subjugation within some interlocking “matrix of domination” (Collins 2000: yy)? In other words, a fine-grained mapping of labor to value may sometimes lead to fairer compensation. But it can also – as the example of Amazon shortly shows – lead to something else entirely. On a larger historical timescale, the questions multiply. How would Myeong’s WorkCoin reflect the particularity of work, when that work is implicated with events – such as the production of the means of production – which have taken place long before WorkCoin came into being? Or when some properties of today’s work may take months or centuries to surface? How would something like WorkCoin function as a transferable IOU (cf. §3.4.2, §4.1), connected not only with past labor, but also with promises of future labor? Whenever I tried to extend the quantification of labor deep into the past and future, I felt it lost its particularity again. It became more nebulous and colorable, more manipulable by existing power hierarchies. Beyond these questions lay further concerns about access and exclusion, about privacy, and about energy and sustainability.

While I tried to position WorkCoin as a wild and impractical fancy, it is also “essential that estrangement leads to the realization that things do not have to be the way they are” (Spiegel 2008: 370). I expected WorkCoin could create a space for speculation about more practical implementations of a labor-based currency, both in terms of its enticements and its dangers.

One precedent is the Quantified Self phenomenon – loosely what Myeong has in mind when she refers to “fuddy-duddy, gamified, making-flossing-fun, improve-the-way-you-sit bullcrap” (M: yy). Quantified Selves are people who aim to improve their self-knowledge and autonomy through “novel ways of self-tracking with the help of digital technologies” (Lupton 2016: 9).[2] Gary Wolf, one popularizer of the term, describes his fine-grained self-tracking in a work context:

Taking advantage of the explosion of self-tracking services available on the Web, I started analyzing my workday at a finer level. Every time I moved to a new activity – picked up the phone, opened a Web browser, answered e-mail – I made a couple of clicks with my mouse, which recorded the change. After a few weeks I looked at the data and marveled.

(Wolf 2010: n.p.)

Similar tracking technology is also used in factories, warehouses, and other workplaces; a high-profile example is Amazon’s avant‑garde brutalizing of its workforce, “in the use of monitoring technologies to track the minute-by-minute movements and performance of employees” (Head 2014: n.p.):

With this twenty-first-century Taylorism, management experts, scientific managers, take the basic workplace tasks at Amazon, such as the movement, shelving, and packaging of goods, and break down these tasks into their subtasks, usually measured in seconds; then rely on time and motion studies to find the fastest way to perform each subtask; and then reassemble the subtasks and make this “one best way” the process that employees must follow.

(ibid. n.p.)

While such monitoring technologies come nowhere near to disentangling “real people” or “[o]ur own true selves” (M: yy) from the abstract figure of the worker, they do enrich that figure with fine‑grained data. They suggest how Myeong’s first bold vision of WorkCoin, as a marvellous money inscribed with all the heterogeneity of work, might yield to something more practicable. Instead of expressing “[o]ur true selves,” a WorkCoin analogue might simply express some salient data about the work which underlies it.[3]

Some time later, after attending a workshop involving time-based currencies, and speculatively exploring hybrid forms of monetary value – with price determined by interactions of supply, demand, and labor time – I did consider fleshing out WorkCoin further, perhaps in a later story. At the same time, I was wary that, merely seeking to estrange money, I might inadvertently glamorize, celebrate, normalize or naturalize the use of such intimately oppressive tracking technologies; or I might point to unlikely ways of appeasing, containing, or mitigating technologies that are hungrily bent on coercing workers “to squeeze every last drop of labour-power from their bodies” (Moore and Robinson 2015: 7). For the time being at least, I decided to let WorkCoin, like the incomes perceived by Li Shu (M: yy), and like Encarl’s Smartgularity (M: yy), remain a faintly implied shape, only partly jutting into story cycle’s representational field. 

The difficulty of theoretically demarcating work from non-work, and the brutal and exploitative history of such demarcation as it has practically occurred, could be no security against the possibility that technologically accomplished quantifications of work might in principle gain legal backing or widespread social acceptance. Stock prices already make a resounding claim to quantify the future flourishing of firms; the reputation metrics of digital matching platforms such as Uber and Airbnb make a fairly resounding claim to render precise and legible the trustworthiness of taxi drivers or holidaymakers. It seemed important to confront the possibility of some specific socio‑technological ecology of data collection, extraction, warehousing, analysis, and visualization and gamification, making a resounding claim to render ‘work’ – or perhaps ‘smart work,’ ‘hard work,’ or even ‘happy work’ – as precise and legible data.

The stories Moneykins, and perhaps especially ‘Alice,’ often feature imagery of bodies surfacing and stretching free from the media in which they have been obscured and imprisoned, and even in which they have been constituted. For instance, the Weaver breaks free from her cloud and its enigmatic Chesses, and the leprecoins from their magic metal (M: yy, yy). These images arrived in my writing of their own accord, but I started to think of them as small, scattered allegories about humans disentangling themselves from money, whether partly or fully, temporarily or for good.

At the same time, as explored in §2.1-§2.5, money can be tenacious, adaptable, and stealthy. It can linger in the places it has explicitly been banished from. Bewitchingly detailed representational regimes – such as Quantified Self technologies, the reputation metrics of the sharing economy, Doctorow’s Whuffie, or Myeong’s WorkCoin – may promise to extricate humans from money’s power, to create alternative ways of organizing collective action, and to in effect “render gold and silver of no esteem” (More 1997 [1516]: 44). Yet they may actually end up extending the power of money, in new forms, deeper into human lives. [...]

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[1] See e.g. The Economy of Hours (www.economyofhours.com) and TimeRepublik (www.timerepublik.com); for historical background cf. Warren (1852).

[2] I prefer to say ‘Quantified Selves’ because I am a little reluctant to call Quantified Self a ‘movement’ with ‘members.’ There is an awkwardness around the term, perhaps because it tends to emphasize the agency and knowledge of the quantified individual, and downplays the way in which, even in the most sanguine circumstances, the Quantified Self is inevitably also a Quantified Other. But the term has widespread recognition, and I find even the awkwardness itself sometimes useful, a constant reminder of the unwieldiness and counterintuitivity of the subject matter.

[3] For instance, a few important dimensions of distinction might include tedium, discomfort, and other affective states; freedom and constraint; the ‘embedded labor’ of prior training and experience; the ‘quality’ of the work as measured by innumerable metrics; the danger and luck involved; and of course the work’s financial productivity. These evade tracking technologies to different degrees and in different ways. “WSTT [Wearables and other Self-Tracking Technologies] measure only users, creating an illusion that the precarian worker – constructed by a particular affective and social field of which these technologies are a part – is identical with humanity,” and the illusion that this worker figure is also “the defining point of human bodily capabilities and the point from which we should start – an outer limit of ‘human nature’ which restricts political and social possibility” (Moore and Robinson 2015: 5; cf. also Maughan 2013).