The Ministry for the Future

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Then one day Janus Athena came into her office. This person was the opposite of all that bankerly masculine erotic charge; the project for J-A was to efface gender, to exist in that very narrow in-between, the zone of actual gender unknowability. Which itself was a new gender, presumably. Mary wouldn’t even have believed that zone existed if it weren’t for Janus Athena standing before her every day, completely unknowable in that aspect of self, or to put it better, neither masculine nor feminine as any kind of dominant. This could only be the result of an extensive and canny effort.

  Mary regarded her mysterious AI expert with her usual curiosity. She wanted to say, J-A, what gender were you assigned at birth, if any?

  But this would be to break the social rules which either J-A or Mary, or society at large, had imposed on her. It would be to intrude or to interfere with J-A’s project. Probably J-A got asked this pretty often, one way or another, but Mary wasn’t going to. Acceptance of the other and their project; this was crucial.

  “What have you got for me, Janus Athena?”

  “The AI group is making open source instruments that mimic the functions of all the big social media sites.”

  “So people can shift over to this new set?”

  “Yes. And it will protect their data for them using quantum encryption.”

  “Then China probably won’t let their people use them.”

  “Maybe not. China is under huge pressure to change, so, unclear how that will play out. For everyone else, using these sites means they’ll control their data, rather than it being used and mined. That privacy can then be a resource to them. They can sell their personal data if they want. That plus the security of encryption, and the public ownership of these sites as a commons, should be enough to entice every user on the planet to shift. Publicize it, make it easy, set a date, be ready to handle the influx, boom.”

  “How many do you think will shift?”

  “Maybe half. After a few years, everybody.”

  “So, the decapitation of Facebook.”

  “And all the rest like it.”

  “Replaced by a system owned by its users, in effect.”

  “Yes. Open source. A distributed ledger. The Global Internet Cooperative Union. GICU.”

  “Is that a good name?”

  “Is Facebook a good name?”

  “Better than GICU.”

  “Okay, think of a better one. Then if it works, it will serve as the operating platform for ICU.”

  “Which means,” Mary prompted, playing along.

  “International Credit Union. A people’s bank. The team has set that up too. Lots of bank mirroring, and credit unions are already a thing. This won’t be quite like a credit union, because it would be an open network of people who make a distributed issuance of credit, issuing carbon coin fractions to each other on proof of good action on carbon. People deposit their savings and create new value in a customer- and employee-owned distributed ledger. Their bank, as one function of their YourLock account. It invests mindfully as a group mind, a kind of planetary mind, that has to always be funding biosphere-friendly activities. Also, a place to go if everyone removes their deposits from current private banks at the same time. Those banks are so over-leveraged that they will immediately crash. Then individuals have to have a safe harbor. For-profit banks will go running to central banks to ask for bail-out, and legislatures will panic and agree to let central banks create however many trillions the central banks recommend. That’s been the template so far. So, for any planned attack on private banks, best to have a safe harbor ready. Then you can tell the legislatures to approve central banks’ bail-out QE, but only on condition of buying equity in them.”

  “Nationalizing the banks, you mean.”

  “Yes, but that puts it too simply. Central banks take possession of private banks, having saved them from bankruptcy or death. Good as far as it goes, but legislatures also need to take possession of their own central banks, by increasing political control of them. It’s a double action. You need both.”

  “Will it work?”

  “Is it working now?”

  Mary sighed. “Point taken. Can you get the future into the names somehow? Since we’re the Ministry for the Future?”

  “The internet interface name could be, I don’t know: Children, Own Your Data. COYD?”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “Some people are not good at names.”

  “I’ve noticed.” As for instance, the names Janus and Athena had nothing to do with each other. But that was neither here nor there. “Let’s make the name a game. Get the whole gang down to a dinner at Tres Kilos and see what they come up with.”

  “As long as you’re picking up the tab. Pitchers there are ridiculously expensive.”

  “Right.”

  “And so, what about these projects?”

  “Oh yes,” Mary said. “Let’s try it. Something has to be done. We’re still losing.”

  That night at Tres Kilos, over dinner and a couple pitchers, they came up with some ideas for names for the Facebook replacement, which Mary scrawled down on her napkin: DataFort, EPluribusUnum, WeDontChat, OnlyConnect, A Secure and Lucrative One-Stop Replacement for Your Many Stupid Social Media Pages, TotalEncryption, FortressFamily, FamilyFortress, HouseholdersUnion, Skynet, SpaceHook, WeAretheWorldWeArethePeople, PourquoiPas, Get Paid To Waste Time!

  “Maybe we’re still looking,” Mary concluded as she read the list on her napkin. “Although I do kind of like WeDontChat.”

  55

  La Vie Vite! It was a time.

  The gilets jaunes shifted the model for how to proceed, away from May 68 or any fainter impressions of the Commune or 1848, not to mention 1793, which it has to be admitted is now like a vision from ancient history, despite the evident satisfactions of the guillotine for dealing with all the climate criminals sneaking off to their island fortress mansions. No, modern times: we had to get out into the streets day after day, week after week, and talk to ordinary people in their cars stuck in traffic, or walking past us on the sidewalks and metro platforms. We had to do that work like any other kind of work. It wasn’t a party, it wasn’t even a revolution. At least when we started.

  But soon we saw that people wanted to talk to us. They all knew they were being used, that they were just tools now. I myself was a kid, the main thing that got me out there was how much I hated school, where I had always been made to feel stupid. I was slotted into the bottom classes early on and my life was sealed at that point, on a track to servitude, even though I knew I had real thoughts, real feelings. So the main thing for me in that initial break was to get my ass out of school. Although parenthetically I have to admit that I later on became a teacher.

  Something then caused us to all converge on Paris. In France, that’s where you go. No one had to direct us. It was Trotsky who said the party is always trying to keep up with the masses. Strategy comes from below and tactics from above, not the reverse, and I think that’s what happened here, some trigger or combination of triggers, the extinction of some river dolphin, or another refugee boat going down offshore, who knows, maybe just lost jobs, but suddenly we were all headed to Paris together, often on foot when the highways jammed. Of course once we got there we couldn’t take on the police or the army, that would be suicide, we had to overwhelm them with numbers. And eventually there were so many of us we couldn’t be contained, everything ground to a halt. At that point problems immediately jumped out of the pavement and hit us in the eye. Some were simply logistical, a matter of food and toilets. Others were ideological. The younger we were the more we wanted. Older people were hoping just to make things a bit better. So the traditional infighting began, but I have to say this was mostly a discursive battle, we weren’t like Spain in Franco’s time, killing each other or watching the Russians kill us. It was France on its own now, and really we are the country of revolution. Now we had to show what could happen in our time. So we took over the city, Paris was ours by way of sheer bodies
jamming the streets. And of course some of us had read about the Commune and realized if we didn’t win decisively we would be hunted down and killed, or at best jailed for life. So at that point it was win or die, and we buckled down to making it work as an alternative system of life, a kind of commons that was post-capitalist, even post-money, just people doing what it took to keep everyone fed. And I must say, so many Parisians came out and helped us, cooked food, provided rooms, manned the barricades in every way, that again we had to realize that it wasn’t just those of us in the streets, it was all France, maybe even the world, we couldn’t tell. But for sure what happened then was the most intense and important feeling I could ever live in this existence. Here’s what it was: solidarity. We could see so many others with us, all on each other’s side. Paris was a commons, France was a commune. So it felt. Later that proved to be impressionistic to that time, but while it lasted it was amazing.

  But also exhausting. To live without habits, making it up day by day, trying to get a shower, a meal now and then, find the right way to pitch in, it’s much more work than if you’re just a wage slave. Much more. But people felt it was important, all over they were dropping what they had been doing and joining the fray and giving it all they had, and it felt right. Somehow we kept finding the ways to give it our all. This we felt was a French thing above all, a kind of political improvisation that our whole history and even our language made us good at, if we could figure it out and pull it off.

  Help came from weird places. When the internet was killed the union of proof-readers, historically anarchist which is of course very funny, came out of their tiny niches in the publishing industry and plastered the city with posters— posters on walls, as if the world was still real! And we realized that social media actually meant many things we had forgotten, and could be taken back under our own control, at least sometimes. Simply talking was the strongest social media of all of course, it was obvious once we rediscovered it, but those posters made the city itself our text, as it had been more than once before.

  But under all that, the right was regathering their forces. And in fact we didn’t have the logistics set up to keep it going forever. We didn’t have a good plan to change government itself, and we argued with each other about how to proceed. A movement without leaders is a good idea in theory, but at some point you have to have a plan. How to make one wasn’t so clear. State power is a mix, first of the government proper in all its parts, but then also the military, finance, and the population’s support, and you need all of these working together to make any lasting progress. In our case, supporters in the populace began to complain they couldn’t get to their usual bakery, it wasn’t open when they got there, and so on. And if there’s no plan, if there’s nothing that follows the moment of occupation, or the moment of the Commune, then we’re stuck in helplessness and a drift back toward the center. And as someone said, in France the center has neither a left nor a left. So we were in trouble.

  And so the police waited until after midnight one night, and charged us. Pepper spray and men with giant shields, like Roman soldiers in a nightmare. I had a paving stone to throw at them, but at the last moment I couldn’t, because a vision of a wounded man came to me, of what it would feel like if that heavy stone in my hand hit me. So I threw it at the ground itself, I was weeping with fury that I couldn’t fight properly, and then I joined all the rest who lay down and forced them to drag us off to their vans. They beat us with batons and pepper sprayed us right in the face, the spray was amazingly painful, my whole face convulsed and tears poured out of my eyes and nose and mouth, even out of the top of my head it felt like. But all through that I kept thinking fuck it I don’t care, I refuse to care, if they kill me here and now at least I’ll have died for something I believe in. And in the end they just tied our arms behind our backs and dragged us off. There were so many vans.

  After that it was all over but the shouting, which of course has never subsided. No one agrees on what happened or what it meant. But I know that a lot of what we did mattered, and it was supported at the time by ordinary Parisians, especially the women of the city, they were the real organizers when it came down to it, not the people at the microphones. And now of course a lot of us are back in yellow vests talking to people driving by in the roundabouts, and there is a lot of support for what we say. One driver when the traffic had stopped leaned out his window and said to me, Look it’s all about how we treat the land, the revolution will happen there. Another man said I don’t own my kids’ teacher, I don’t own my doctor, I don’t need to own my house. I just want to pay the collective for it, not some landlord.

  So maybe someday the solidarity will overcome the splitting. I hope so. During the occupation I didn’t want reform, I wanted something entirely new. Now I’m thinking if we can just get the fundamentals working, it would be good. A start to something better. I don’t like to think of this as giving up, it’s just being realistic. We have to live, we have to give this place to the kids with the animals still alive and a chance to make a living. That’s not so much to ask.

  Of course there is always resistance, always a drag on movement toward better things. The dead hand of the past clutches us by way of living people who are too frightened to accept change. So we don’t change, and one hard thing now is to go through a time like that, like ours during Paris, two hundred days of a different life, a different world, and then live on past that time in the still bourgeoisified state of things, without feeling defeated. For a time everything seemed possible, you felt free. You feel things so intensely when you’re young, and really it’s the first time I spoke to the world, the first time I wasn’t just the stupid kid in school, but a real person with a real life. Those seven months made me, and I’ll never forget it, never be the same. I only hope to live long enough to see it happen again. Then I’ll be happy.

  56

  The International Criminal Court was separate from the UN, founded by its own international treaty to prosecute crimes that were somehow outside of nation-state court systems’ jurisdiction. It was targeted toward individual crimes, and could be effective only when a combination of factors came into an unlikely conjunction. The US and several other big countries had withdrawn from the court’s jurisdiction after negative rulings against their citizens.

  The World Court, more properly named the International Court of Justice, was a UN-sponsored body, so that all member states of the UN were theoretically bound to follow its rulings; but it was designed to adjudicate state-to-state disagreements, and all UN agencies were forbidden to bring cases before it. The Ministry for the Future was an agency created in the implementation meetings of the Paris Agreement, but the Paris Agreement had been brokered under the umbrella of the United Nations; so the ministry was forbidden to bring cases to the World Court.

  What it came down to was that to prosecute a state, you needed to be a state, and not the UN or an individual. More than that, you had to be a state that had agreed to be within the World Court’s jurisdiction. To prosecute an individual outside a national court system, you needed to convince one of the international courts to take your case, and historically this had been hard to do. In short, these two international courts, both located at The Hague, were not well-designed as places to litigate climate justice.

  Tatiana was getting more and more frustrated by this situation. If the ministry had been founded to bring legal standing and therefore lawsuits on behalf of the people of the future and the biosphere itself, fine, she said, fine fine fine: but in what court?

  Tatiana concluded one of her reports to Mary with this:

  — If legal action has to occur in the various national courts, even though the crime is global, and committed by those same states whose courts would be asked to judge against them, the actions will not prevail.

  — If we convince a signatory nation to go to the World Trade Organization and file a complaint to the effect that destroying the biosphere contravenes WTO rules against predatory dumping a
nd the like, this is so tenuous and slow as to be useless.

  — Meanwhile the fossil fuel companies keep pouring vast sums into buying elections, politicians, media, and public opinion. Even when they come to the table to negotiate with us, they never stop these other aggressive actions. Because the best defense is a good offense.

  — This last is true for us as well as for them.

  Mary read this and ground her teeth. Tatiana was one of her fiercest warriors. They were now at atmospheric CO2 levels of 463 parts per million.

  The crash in insect numbers put every ecological system on terrestrial Earth in danger of collapse. Collapse— meaning most of the species currently on Earth dead and gone. The surviving species subsequent to this event would be free to spread in all the empty ecological niches, spread and evolve and speciate, so that in twenty million years, maybe less, maybe only two million years, a differently constituted array of species would fully re-occupy the biosphere.

  Mary replied to Tatiana’s memo with an instruction: Pick the ten best national cases from our point of view. Do what you can to help them.

  The inadequacy of this, the futility of it, made her shudder. Hoping to counter this desperate feeling, she convened her nat cat group. Natural catastrophes: it was possibly a contradiction in terms, maybe the group should be called anthropogenic catastrophes, but anyway, them. Also the infrastructure and ecology groups. She needed to get away from legal abstractions.

  They spoke enthusiastically of carbon-negative agriculture, clean energy, fleets of sailing ships, fleets of airships, carbon-based materials created from CO2 sucked out of the air and replacing concrete; thus direct air capture of CO2, a necessary component of the drawdown effort, would provide most construction materials going forward. Cheap clean desalination, clean water, 3-D printed houses, 3-D printed toilets and sewage, universal education, vastly expanded medical schools and medical facilities. Landscape restoration, habitat corridors, ag/habitat combinations—