The Ministry for the Future

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  So as we were paddling around in our kayaks, people were saying to each other, This whole fucking place is gone! Everything is going to have to be torn out! The entire city of Los Angeles is going to have to be replaced.

  Which was great. Maybe we could do it right this time. And I myself am going to find a different job.

  60

  Spring came and Mary began to swim again from the Utoquai schwimmbad, first once or twice a week, then every day. Then tram back up to the office. She gave the final nod to Janus Athena’s YourLock, and J-A posted the website address to the internet and they watched it go through its unobtrusive birth, a slow week as it turned out, as it was just one spike in the endless interference patterns of discourse. Then people began to share the news that you could transfer everything going on in the rest of your internet life into 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, agreeing to sell your data or not to data-mining operations out there who quickly saw the new lay of the land and began to offer people micro-payments for their data, mainly health information, consumption patterns, and finance. The royalties for being oneself in the world machine were not insignificant, a kind of lifetime annuity, small but useful. And so people began to make the shift, and one day that tipping point arrived where a non-linear shear occurred, like an earthquake, and suddenly everyone had a YourLock account and would henceforth be conducting their internet life by way of it. A whole new internet ecology, the much-hyped but previously vaporwaresque Internet 3.0.

  This was news, of course, remarked on everywhere. But on the other hand, when Mary went down to the lake in the mornings to swim, everything looked the same; and this was true everywhere. Global revolutions these days were strange, Mary thought, being as virtual as everything else. And of course in the virtual world it had indeed caused an uproar. What did it mean? Who owned this new system? It was open source, some said, no one owned it. People working in the gift economy had made it, which meant maybe just people playing around. So who profited from it? Other people said its users were its owners and thus made whatever money it made, mostly, as always, by way of advertising fees. It was somewhat like a credit union, perhaps, inserting itself into the social media discourse space. As with a move from bank to credit union, instead of the company using the consumer, the consumer used the company, and owned it too. What did the company per se get out of it? Nothing, because a company was nothing. It was just an organization devised to help its employee-owners, nothing more. Like any other company, in the end. If you thought that was what they were.

  All this was going over very poorly in China, where the stance had always been that the Chinese Communist Party was precisely a company in that mold, owned by its consumers and only in existence to advance their welfare. So they kept the new YourLock site outside their Great Firewall, as they had so many previous Western internet companies. But the Great Firewall was riddled with holes, and although some argued that most Chinese netizens were completely absorbed and happy in their Chinese space, it did seem to be true that many of them kept links to multiple accounts they had going all over the world. The internal migrants in all the big cities of China, sometimes called the billion, were still an exploited labor force to the point of wanting some outside leverage over the hukou system that had made them illegal for moving to the cities; and the prosperous middle class was always interested to slip some assets offshore. So in some sectors of the Chinese populace, the site was also being taken up in significant numbers.

  Days passed, and as far as Mary could tell in Zurich, the impact of all this internet turmoil was minimal on daily life. Possibly it was the global revolution that internet advocates had been calling for since the beginning of the internet, but as no previous manifestation of this poorly defined revolution had ever come to pass, unless one counted the great privatization of the late 1990s, no one could say for sure what it would look like when it happened. Indeed the internet’s earlier rapid colonization and capitalization of the mental life of so many people had occurred in a similarly invisible fashion, so Mary wasn’t sure people even knew what they were wishing for when they postulated an internet revolution.

  But her team knew— or they were imagining it. Now everyone who signed up for YourLock and started using it was also helping to sustain it, by hosting their part of a blockchained record of its history from its beginning. A distributed ledger: it was only by way of work given for free (meaning not just the labor but the electricity), by many millions of people, that this new organization could function at the level of the computing required. Even if that worked, Mary wasn’t sure it was going to represent a net gain in terms of a sustainable civilization. Probably it would depend on what this new network was used for, or on what people did in the physical world. As always, the decisive moves were still to come. Possibly it was true that they would happen first in the realm of discourse, then afterward in the realm of material existence.

  She tried to focus on that latter part of life. Morning swim in the Zurichsee, its temperature creeping up as spring turned to summer. Tram and trudge to work, trudge home. Take a weekly tram ride down into the city center and the Gefängnis, to visit Frank May. This was some kind of duty.

  He seemed to be doing all right. The Swiss prison system was typically Swiss— practical, benign, a kind of community college dorm that you couldn’t opt out of. Frank spent his days out around the city doing public work of various kinds, from street cleaning to nursing assistant, depending on the need and that month’s schedule. He was either calmer and happier than on the night they had met, or else subdued and depressed— Mary didn’t know him well enough to be able to tell. Possibly a bit of both, if that was possible. Other people: if they didn’t want to share with you, you had no way to tell. When she visited, he regarded her curiously, not surprised anymore that she was showing up, just perhaps a bit discomfitted, or mystified. But not enough to ask her why she came. If he had, she wouldn’t have been able to answer him very well. In her head she staged conversations with him that were completely unlike what really happened when they were together. Tramming back up the Zuriberg she would watch the other blue cars of the tram, bending ahead and behind in the switchbacking S turns that the tracks made to get up the slope, saying to the Frank in her mind, If you would just ask me, I would say to you, I visit you because I want to rest easier, because I am helping you to rest easier. My conception of the world going well is a world in which even you look at it and feel it possible to rest easier. A world in which you gave yourself a break, and forgave all the rest of us our sins, and forgave yourself too. And in these mental conversations he would often nod and say, Yes Mary, I feel better about things. Your stupid ministry has put its shoulder to the wheel and helped to shove the cart out of the ditch. Although it’s not out yet, not by a long shot. Because the ditch was eating the road.

  Nothing remotely like that ever passed between them in their actual meetings.

  She kept track of Badim’s informal work in private meetings away from the office, in the pattern they had established. They didn’t meet often, nor was there any way to communicate in the office that wasn’t subject to surveillance, so pretty often it was a matter of handwritten notes left on her desk, never direct messages but rather lines attributed to Rumi or Kabir or Krishnamurti or Tagore; she didn’t know these poets’ work, and wasn’t sure if the quotes were real or made up. The gods are in disarray. It is the theory which decides what one can observe. A great comet will appear in the sky tomorrow. Look to windward. These phrases, as gnomic as Nostradamus, were only meant to tell her that things were happening, it was time to meet again. Or so she assumed. If there were specific messages encoded in them, she wasn’t getting them.

  So she kept reading the news. Two days after a note had appeared on her desk that said only riot strike riot, she read that Berlin, London, New York, Tokyo, Be
ijing, and Moscow had experienced simultaneously, in the very same hour no matter the local time of day, teacher and transport worker strikes. This caused chaos in the streets and in the markets. Already the past year’s chaos had been sufficient to cause a massive drop in most of the stock markets, and they had never really recovered from Crash Day, so that was low indeed. The bear of bears. Of course the slack was soon enough taken up by risk-seekers looking to buy low and sell high later, but the sense of panic didn’t go away, the sense that bubbles were about to burst all over the place. The striking workers in the big cities returned to work, but before the situation had settled, the seemingly endless drought afflicting the Middle East, Iran, and Pakistan suddenly intensified into another killer heat wave, this though it was still only May. But the high pressure that sat on the area had jacked temperatures briefly up into the wet-bulb 35 zone, mainly this time a matter of sheer high temperature rather than humidity, and at the same time some cities there were running out of water. Refugees from the area were pouring across Turkey into the Balkans, also north into Armenia and Georgia and Ukraine and Russia, also east into India. India, a refuge from heat waves! But the Punjab was also caught in a drought, so India had sealed its border with Pakistan, already militarized and easy to close. Disaster all around. Pakistan threatened war, Iran threatened war. Something like ten million people were on the move and in imminent danger of dying. The humanitarian aid programs were overwhelmed, as were the national militaries.

  Esmeri Zayed, her refugee division head, told her that if the current refugee population were a country, it would have about the same population as France or Germany. A hundred million people were out there wandering the Earth or confined in camps, displaced from their homes.

  In the midst of this situation, an atmospheric river struck southern California, and though its winds were not as forceful as the winds of cyclones or hurricanes, its rainfall was at least as intense, and longer lasting. It looked like it might be something like a repeat of the catastrophic winter that had struck California in 1861–62, arriving several hundred years earlier than would have been expected by the US Army Corps of Engineers, as they had labelled the earlier storm a thousand-year storm, but of course all those probabilities were useless now. The tall mountains hemming in the LA basin had caught the truly torrential rain and poured it down onto the mostly paved surface of the basin, and the devastation was universal. Initial estimates pegged the death count to a remarkable low of seven thousand or so, but the infrastructure damage dwarfed anything the Angelenos’ much-feared earthquake would have done to them. Actually there were scientists warning that the weight of that much water might trigger that very earthquake. The Big One, right in the middle of a mega-storm! Only in LA, people said, feeling shivers of schadenfreude, tinged with regret: the world’s dream factory was being destroyed before their eyes. No more Hollywood faces to haunt the global unconscious; that age was over. Restoration costs for the damage they were seeing on the raindrop-spattered images would cost more than thirty trillion dollars, Jurgen estimated.

  So now one could imagine that the American people might support action on the climate change front. Better late than never!

  But no. Already it was becoming clear that LA was not popular in Texas, or on the east coast, or even in San Francisco for that matter. In fact, no place that was not LA cared about it at all. The dream factory for the world, universally unpopular! People had not liked those dreams, perhaps. Or had not liked having their dream life colonized. Or maybe they just didn’t like being stuck in traffic.

  In any case, California’s government, one of the most progressive in the world, and the US federal government, one of the most reactionary in the world— both were making efforts to help. Love it or hate it, LA was important to them. And really, Mary thought, keeping the death count down to seven thousand was an amazing accomplishment of civil engineering and citizen action, also rapid deployment by the US Navy and the rest of the military, and the quick actions of the citizens themselves. The initial rush of the flood had been the most fatal part of it, and after that it was just an accumulation of small accidents. So it was an admirable emergency response. Really the US was in many respects the gold standard for infrastructure, a brick house in a world of straw; those stupid raised freeways, built strong enough to withstand the Big One, had served as refugia for the entire population of the city, and the subsequent evacuation had proceeded successfully. A very impressive improvisation.

  Despite LA’s uneven popularity across the world, it was for sure immensely famous. The dream factory had accomplished that at least. Many people all over the world felt they knew the place, and were transfixed by the images of it suddenly inundated. If it could happen to LA, rich as it was, dreamy as it was, it could happen anywhere. Was that right? Maybe not, but it felt that way. Some deep flip in the global unconscious was making people queasy.

  Despite this sense that the world was falling apart, or maybe because of it, demonstrations in the capitals of the world intensified. Actually these seemed to be occupations rather than demonstrations, because they didn’t end but rather persisted as disruptions of the ordinary business of the capitals. Within the occupied spaces, people were setting up and performing alternative lifeways with gift supplies of food and impromptu shelter and toilet facilities, all provided or enacted by the participants as if in some kind of game or theater piece, designed mainly to allow unceasing discourse demanding the official governments respond to the needs of their people rather than to the needs of global capital; and the governments involved had to face either siccing their police and militaries on their own people, or waiting out the occupations for what could be months, or actually changing in the ways demanded. Time to dismiss the people and elect another one! as Brecht had so trenchantly phrased it.

  Meanwhile flying was still much reduced, except for an increase in battery-powered short flights, and an immense surge in airship construction. Ocean trade was disrupted; millions were out of work; millions were in the streets. Online, people were joining YourLock and abandoning the other social media sites, now called the predatory social media. So many people were withdrawing their savings from private banks and depositing them in credit unions and alternative cooperative financial institutions that another financial crash not only was happening but was the deepest in over a century. The banks had all been so over-leveraged for so long that what that actually meant had been lost; so now, in a crisis as big as this one, most of them had been brought to their knees, and were stumping to their governments’ central banks to squeal for salvation. This time the governments’ treasuries, although still in the hands of financial industry veterans, found they could do nothing like what they had done in the 2008 bail-out; that crash was looking minor compared to this one, and because of the 2020 recession, awareness of what was happening, and why, was much higher. It was a different time, a new structure of feeling, a new material situation. Already people were saying this was bigger than 2020, bigger than the Great Depression, maybe the biggest economic crash ever— because it wasn’t just economic. The whole damn merry-go-round had spun off its flywheel and was disintegrating as it fell.

  So Mary called up the heads of the various central banks around the world and got them to agree to gather to talk things over yet again. Many of them wanted her to come to them, and she almost agreed to hold the meeting in Beijing: the Chinese would be key to any solution. But the Chinese were punctilious about joining international meetings, and would go anywhere the meeting was held, she judged; they didn’t care so much about national prestige that they would refuse to join a settlement being worked out elsewhere. The puffy nation in that regard would be the United States, but Mary was pretty sure Jane Yablonski would also come to the meeting wherever it was. And the Bank for International Settlements’ annual meeting in Basel was coming up soon anyway. So she told them to please come to Zurich too, right after the BIS meeting. Air travel being now so fraught, specially arranged stealth military flights wou
ld bring them all to Switzerland; or now, quite a few would fly in on airships.

  Hosting a meeting of a dozen or twenty of the most powerful people on Earth, which meant also accommodating large staffs for each of them, was a big job, but one that the Swiss were used to performing. For this meeting there were too many people for the ministry offices to hold, so they held the meeting in the Kongresshall, down by the lake.

  The morning they convened, the broad picture windows spanning the south wall of the big room provided them with the pathetic fallacy in full measure: a spring storm lashed the Zurichsee, with low shifting gray clouds dropping black brooms of rain onto the silvery lake surface, the windows running wild with deltas of rainwater kaleidoscoping this view. Nothing unusual in that, no LA-like climate apocalypse here, just Zurich spring weather as usual; but still very fitting, given the mood in the room, which was one of grim virtue. They would weather this storm, they said to each other while looking out at it, and all the stark emotion in the room was heightened by the dark metallic sublimity of the rain-lashed whitecaps on the lake, the sound of the wind ripping through the flailing trees.