In all this turmoil and uncertainty, the market sought something to be sure of. Volatility was good for traders, sure; but at the end of the day you had to have somewhere to hang your hat. Short the dollar— really? Short everything? Maybe, but where then did you hide your emergency fund in case everything went pear-shaped? The cash-in-the-mattress move wasn’t the same as going long, which actually at this point was looking almost impossible. This meant things were getting more and more existential, as it was a question of ultimate value, of trust in the act of exchange itself. And when definitions of value shifted from talking about interest rates to talking about social trust— when finance and theories of money fell through a trapdoor in daily normality, down into the free fall of philosophy’s bottomless pit— when people began to wonder why money worked at all— wonder why some people were as gods walking this Earth while other people couldn’t find a place to lay their head at night— it turned out there was no very good answer. Certainly no answer at all when it came to investment strategies you could count on.
Money was made of social trust. Which meant, in this spasmophilic moment, with everything changing and the ground falling under one’s feet in immense tectonic jolts, that money itself was therefore in limbo. And that was scary.
Vast amounts of paper turned to vapor. The banks of the developed Western world were too connected to fail; if one or two of the big ones went down, the rest would shrink in on themselves and wait for the state to reestablish trust before either lending money or even paying what they owed. Why pay a creditor that might be non-existent next week? Best wait and see if they survived to press that debt in court.
In other words, liquidity freeze. The various forms of paper that are in effect IOUs between banks all became worthless; the only money was cash. But that couldn’t work, because every day there were trillions of dollars’ worth of exchanges on the various markets, including the dark pools where people working in unregulated data space were trusting each other to pay despite the lack of regulatory oversight; and honor among thieves is kind of a feudal notion, more appropriate to Robin Hood and his merry men than to the world of contemporary finance. No. Since money is an idea, a system based on social trust, when things go south, and trust disappears in a poof, then there simply isn’t as much money as there used to be.
This was not shocking news to some; which was why much of the wealth on the planet was invested in property. Real estate values may drop, but ownership of that capital asset still remains, and will be there later no matter what happens. But property is not liquid. So the money problem remains even if the latent wealth problem has been solved in advance by buying up land, houses, apartments in Manhattan towers, and so on.
So with groans and clanks and huge ripping sounds, the world’s economy ground to a halt. A great depression was back at last and in full, after almost a decade of recession. The depression they had been living in up until now, now got called the Little Depression, or the Super-stagnation, and so on. This new one was the Super Depression, here at last. Very little money out there; and without money, people can’t be paid. No loans, no purchases. Unemployment quickly surpassed the 1930s high-water mark of twenty-five percent. Indeed, this time it looked like unemployment could rise to— to what? Fifty percent? Seventy percent? No one had any idea.
People spoke of barter coming back, especially in rural areas, where one could almost believe in it. But not really; barter was always mostly an idea in the minds of economists, a fantasy history. And in the cities it didn’t work at all. The pawnshop is the bartering site in cities. But that’s just money for stuff, stuff for money. It only works if money works. Same with the internet, only more so. The internet as a market didn’t work when no one trusted money.
Local currencies were proposed and introduced, backed by the town one lived in; but the town needed local banks; and the local banks needed central banks. A lively set of exchanges nevertheless began in many local regions, often watersheds big enough to support their populations; and people began to use their YourLock accounts as sites for digital microbanking that was of some real use, and showed potential for some kind of post-capitalist crowd banking.
But all this was too new, too provisional; there were too many people, and all of them strangers. Despite all the interesting efforts, as the economy circled the drain, it became clearer: for this moment, it was the central banks or nothing. They were the Dutch boy’s finger plugging the leak, the last stitch that might stop the hemorrhaging. The central banks spoke for the state. The states in question were there with their armies and police to back these central banks, all of them in theory owned by the public they reported to. If public banks held the line somehow— perhaps by creating more money, by keeping all the private banks afloat by way of even more quantitative easing— then all might be well.
Since some people had been pinning their hopes on the central banks anyway, this sudden onset of chaos and disorder was seen as an opportunity. Possibly the public could now insist on the right to be properly repaid for public money backing private banks, as they had been all along. Extract reparations from the profit takers; abolish profit if it was necessary to create the reparations. If the private banks objected, let them crash, then move to a fully nationalized financial system, owned by the public and used for the benefit of the people.
So strangely, in this new utmost financial crisis, people, ordinary people en masse, as the material manifestation of “the public,” now seemed to hold the ultimate power. When push comes to shove, it’s always humans looking at humans; and when a thousand people stand looking at one person, it’s clear who has more power. So it was a matter of realizing that, then acting on that realization. Maybe that shouldn’t have felt strange, but it did; it felt like free fall. Inventing the parachute after leaping off the cliff.
Which meant it had to be arranged fast.
Thus the shadow government devised by the Ministry for the Future in Zurich, Switzerland, became one template for a new plan. Not completely new, of course. In fact it was a rearrangement of various elements of old plans, in many ways. Mondragón, Kerala, MMT, blockchain, Denmark, Cuba, and so on: all the elements had been out there working all along. Which made the new methods easier to implement. Not complete revolution, no ten-day weeks with new names and so on, no dive into that revolutionary euphoria that tries to change everything at once. Just ownership adjustments. Numbers. Representations. Reversals in some valences of value. Improvisations. The sun still rose, plants kept growing. But people lived in ideas, so despite the sun in the sky and so on, things felt crazy. It was a panic spring.
But as it became clear that the central banks were stepping in to keep things stable and liquid, certain markets calmed. Bakeries kept baking. The US Congress got very busy adopting new laws. Chinese people ended their demonstrations and went back to work, with a different standing committee in charge. Kurdistan secured its borders and signed treaties with every nation and organization that would co-sign. People began to look for ways to earn a carbon coin or two. Only a few of these would be a lot in the local currencies. Surely sequestering a hundred tons of carbon couldn’t be so hard. DIY DAC became a vibrant side activity, like growing a truck garden for food; and sometimes the two were even the same thing.
It was quite a month, then quite a year; a year that became one of those years that people talk about later, a date used as shorthand for a whole period. A tectonic shift in history, an earthquake in the head.
76
I joined the US Navy out of high school. I wanted to get out of town. See the world kind of thing. From Kansas this seemed like a good way. My mom was worried but my dad was proud. The Navy needs more competent women, he said. You’ll show them what for. I love my dad.
So I put in eight years. Parts of those years were messy, mostly relationship stuff, I’m not going to go into that, everyone is the same, we all fuck up until we get lucky, if we do. Then if you’re smart enough to see your luck and act on it, things can work out.
They have for me. But this is about the US Navy. When I joined I was paid about 25 grand a year. It doesn’t sound like much, but I was also given free room and board, and educated in a number of different jobs, so I was free to bank most of my salary if I wanted to, and I did. Eventually it adds up. More on that later.
The main thing I want to say is that being Navy was something I was proud of. This was not at all uncommon among my fellow sailors. We had good esprit de corps. I don’t know if it’s the same in the other branches of the military, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was, although we often made fun of them for being stupid compared to us. Not unusual I know. The thing is, the Navy is well-run. I have the impression it’s one of the more widely respected and well-run institutions anywhere. Among other things, we’ve run 83 nuclear-powered ships for 5,700 reactor-years, and 134 million miles of travel, all without nuclear accidents of any kind. I lived within a few feet of a nuclear reactor for three years, no harm no foul. My dosimeter showed just the same as yours would, maybe better. How can that be? Because the system was engineered and built for safety, whatever the cost. No cutting corners to make a buck. Done that way, it can work. Probably the Navy should run the country’s electricity system, I’m just saying.
A couple more things about Navy: now that pebble mob missiles exist, none of our ships could survive an attack by hostiles who have such systems. It just wouldn’t work. Nothing can stop those. You don’t have to have gone to Annapolis to figure this out. The upper brass don’t talk about it, no one talks about it, because it would be too mind-boggling. Would you just throw in the towel, say Whoops, we are now like the cavalry, or flint-tipped spears or a sharp rock in the hand? No, not right away you wouldn’t say that. So what it means is that the submarine fleet is all we’ve got in a real war. Since the threat from submarines is nuclear, as in atomic end of the world kind of stuff, hopefully they won’t ever be used. So in practical terms, until the subs re-arm, maybe with pebble mobs of their own, I wouldn’t doubt that that has even already happened, as a military force the Navy has been taken completely off the table. All navies have. In any real war, the whole surface fleet would soon be on the bottom. Not a happy thought.
But so think of the Navy in peaceful times, and given these pebble mobs, maybe peaceful times are what we’ve got now, very fucked-up peaceful times, low-intensity asymmetric insurgency terroristical climate-refugee peaceful times. And in that kind of world, the surface fleet of the US Navy can serve to deploy protective services, and also emergency relief. Like the Swiss military over the last few centuries, its main function will be to bring disaster relief in coastal areas. A force-for-good, US ambassador to the world kind of organization. You’ll see, I’m not just making this up— if the Navy persists at all, it will be doing these kinds of things. It already has been for quite some time.
Then the last thing I want to say about the US Navy is this. Occasionally our ships would get visited by admirals. Even destroyers and mine-sweepers get visited, like for inspections or courtesy tours or whatever. And as they wander around, they see a female able seaman, they sometimes stop to chat and ask questions. These were usually older men, once a woman, that was fun. They all started at Annapolis and made Navy their life, and no matter how fast they rose through the ranks, they’ve lived on ships and know the drill. So they’re well-informed, and interested in how things are for sailors now. Curious and friendly, I’d say, and surprisingly normal. Like a captain, but less pretentious.
Then later I looked it up and learned that admirals’ salaries top out at $200,000 a year. No one in the Navy gets paid more than that per year. So they call this the pay differential, it’s sometimes expressed as a ratio from lowest pay to highest. That ratio for the Navy is about one to eight. For one of the most respected and well-run organizations on Earth. Sometimes this gets called wage parity or economic democracy, but let’s just call it fairness, effectiveness, esprit de corps. One to eight. No wonder those admirals seemed so normal— they were!
Whereas in the corporate world I’ve read the average wage ratio is like one to five hundred. Actually that was the median; one to 1,500 happens pretty often. The top executives in these companies earn in ten minutes what it takes their starting employees all year to earn.
Ponder that one for a while, fellow citizens. People talk about incentives, for instance. A word from business schools. Who is incentivized to do what in a wage ratio of one to a thousand? Those getting a thousand times more than starting wage earners, what’s their incentive from out of that situation? To hide, I’d say. To hide the fact that they don’t actually do a thousand times more than their employees. Hiding like that, they won’t be normal. They’ll be bullshitters. And for the lowest income folks, what’s their incentive? I’m not coming up with one right off the bat, but the ones that do eventually come to mind sound cynical or beat down or completely delusional. Like, I hope I win the lottery, or, I’m going to shoot up now, or, The world is so fucked. You hear that kind of thing, right? Maybe incentive isn’t the word here. Disincentive, to keep it in that lingo. When you get one pay amount, and someone doing something easier gets a thousand of that pay amount, that’s a disincentive to care about anything. At that point you throw a rock through a window, or vote for some asshole who is going to break everything, which may give you a chance to start over, and if that doesn’t work then at least you have said fuck you to the thousand-getters. And so on.
So, what if the whole world ran more like the US Navy? What if the standard, or even the legally mandated, maximum wage ratio was set at say one to ten, being so easy to calculate? With the lowest level set high enough for life adequacy or decency or however you want to call it. Enough for a decent life. Which then, ten times that? That’s a lot! I mean think about it. Count it on your fingers and thumbs, seeing the enough amount on the tip of each digit, all ten stuck together at the end of your arms looking back at you. Enough times ten is fucking luxurious.
Works for the US Navy. Hooyah!
77
Everyone knows me but no one can tell me. No one knows me even though everyone has heard my name. Everyone talking together makes something that seems like me but is not me. Everyone doing things in the world makes me. I am blood in the streets, the catastrophe you can never forget. I am the tide running under the world that no one sees or feels. I happen in the present but am told only in the future, and then they think they speak of the past, but really they are always speaking about the present. I do not exist and yet I am everything.
You know what I am. I am History. Now make me good.
78
He flew into Lucknow and got on the train into the city and then took the subway and bus out to the branch of the City Montessori school that he had gone to as a child. Biggest school in the world, winner of a UNESCO Peace Prize, it had been a turning point in his life for sure. His father having married a Nepali woman, he could have ended up in Nepal forever, in a Rawang hill village where the police station had been blown up by Maoists and never rebuilt. His father had been stubborn and had not wanted to expose his wife to the pressures of Lucknow. The second-happiest city in India could be tough on hill folk. So he could have lived his whole life in the middle ages, trapped by parents who had met through a young man’s desperate matrimonial answered by a girl who could read and write, and dream.
But a German had passed through with an aid group, and when he got caught stealing from them, by no means the worst of his boyhood crimes, it was Fritz who sat him down and interrogated him, as stern as a policeman, but cheerful too, skeptical of his badness, unconvinced by his tough demeanor. Fritz said to him, firmly but kindly, To get anywhere in this world you must hitch your tiger to your chariot. No more stealing, that only hurts you. You’re clever and you have a burning desire, I can see that in you, so use your cleverness and get yourself a freeship to a school in a city. That way you’ll get what you want without hurting people. Learn all you can in your school here, that won’t be much of a challenge for you, I can see
that. And then Fritz had spoken to his father, saying, Send this boy to the city. Give him a chance. And his father had done it and he had ended up in Lucknow, his father’s home town.
The city amazed him, it stunned him. It was such an upgradation of his fortunes that he had not slept more than three hours a night for the rest of his childhood and youth, and all because of the violence of the spin of thoughts in his head, the day’s inrush tumbling up there like clothes in a washer. Lucknow: now luck. The place had made him.
And now he was back. He wandered away from his old school, off into the tight dense neighborhood south of it, the crush of old buildings caught between the subway line and the river, between the present and his past. He had done a lot of stupid things here. Despite the city’s many exhilarations he had not discontinued the truant ways of his Nepali childhood, he couldn’t remember why. Chain-snatching, market theft; maybe all that had been somehow a way to stay connected to home. His parents would have beaten him had they known what he did in the city, so senselessly endangering everything, but maybe the danger of it had been part of the allure. He liked doing it, and he liked the toughs he did it with. He was one of them. They reminded him of himself. He was a hill beast, no city could tame him. He took what he wanted and no one could stop him. Only a close call entailing a broken arm had slowed him down. And then when he moved to Delhi he had changed again, given up all that kind of thing. Again he couldn’t remember why he had done it, how he had justified it to himself. It was just the way he had been then. Things happened. Even though he had rarely slept in Lucknow, he had not really ever woken up until he moved to Delhi. At that point many things came clear, and he never looked back.
The Ministry for the Future Page 38
