“I don’t get it,” said Amon. “How do you increase funding to services and supplies without raising quality? Where exactly does the money go? Into increased quantity?”
“Yes and no. The key here is Fleet. The best method the Philanthropy Syndicate has discovered for appearing to use donations efficiently without improving conditions is to provide disposable supplies made out of the substance. When donations increase, production of supplies is increased proportionately and the expiration date of each item is programmed to be shorter. Conversely, when donations drop production is decreased and the expiration date is programmed to be longer. In either case, the ephemerality of items supplied is set so that whether more units are produced or fewer, the total sum of the time all units exist remains constant—relative to bankdead population of course. More donations mean more items with higher ephemerality. Fewer donations mean fewer items with lower ephemerality. Ironically, the result is that increased donations not only fail to help the bankdead since they’ll get the same usage out of the supplies either way, it actually inconveniences them since they’ll have to make more trips to the supply stations to get replacements for the faster-dissolving items. The ephemerality of items is lower for the gifted, so they’re inconvenienced proportionally less, but the net effect of increased pity and the pitypromo that wields it is an increase in suffering to a certain degree for everyone in the camps.
“Meanwhile, the income from sales of supplies all goes to the Philanthropy Syndicate, since the members have nearly equal share in the entire supply chain, including the patent on Fleet. The costs are negligible as each stage of production—from energy harnessing to synthesizing the materials to manufacturing to shipping—is entirely automated, involving almost no action-transactions. The difference between sales revenue and costs is diverted as donations to venture charities, which gives the MegaGloms a reputation for compassion while helping to pay for Delivery infrastructure and labor, including the salaries of career volunteers and freekeepers. By this time, the accountability apps have lost track of the original donations, as they’ve already cycled from the donors to venture charities to Fleet manufacturers to the MegaGloms that own them before trickling their way through various subsidiaries back to the charities. So to the investitarians it appears that their money is going to those in need—and it is. Except here is the central point: the quality of service and total existence time of supplies relative to population stays at the optimum level to ensure yield tracks Free World population growth irrespective of how much they give. And if any questions are raised about the short lifespan of the supplies, the MegaGloms simply claim it is to prevent waste accumulation and urban blight, earning them extra points for environmental and socially responsible initiatives.”
Suddenly Amon was filled with the glow of clarity. For weeks he had built Fleet buildings, lived in Fleet rooms, and worn Fleet clothes, sensing a contradiction in the short-lived design of the ubiquitous material as everything within reach flaked and dissolved and crumbled around him. Now he saw the reason behind it all, and as convoluted and devious as the arrangement was, it made sense of all his daily experiences the moment he grasped it.
“Since bankdead need is indispensable for this system to function,” Hippo continued, “it is well worth the small investment in occasional sabotage, even if fines sometimes apply. They must be deprived as much as possible of the greatest asset the poor have possessed since time immemorial—resourcefulness. Thus there is no soil to grow crops, or materials to build anything—even the sewage-ridden Tokyo Canal and Sanzu River are too contaminated to fish. Xenocyst was intended to be a bubble of self-sufficiency that resisted these paralyzing policies and you’re probably wondering why it still stands in spite of what happened, so before we discuss this topic any further, I’d better tell you about that.”
“When Xenocyst was on the verge of collapse, a man came to strike a deal with me. Until I spoke to him, I’d been perplexed by the timing of the sabotage. The venture charities had known for a long time what we were doing, so why hadn’t they launched the lawsuit earlier? Now I understood. They could have easily crushed us when we were weak. But they could make better use of us now that we were strong.
“The man introduced himself as an independent investitarian. I’ve never seen or heard from him since, so I cannot verify who he truly was. In retrospect he must have been a mouthpiece for the Philanthropy Syndicate. He offered to arrange for supply shipments to be centicoptered in on a regular basis. Although they wouldn’t be exactly the same items as before, we would receive everything essential to our operations. He spoke as though he and his undisclosed partners genuinely believed I was providing real help to the bankdead and so on and so forth. Then he explained that his support had two conditions. First, I would stop providing our members with education of any kind about the Free World. Second, I would stop providing contraceptives.
“Why these two conditions? Well, the rationale wasn’t hard to work out when I considered the pre-existing educational arrangements in the District of Dreams. Delivery offers no educational services whatsoever, partly to reduce costs—though that isn’t all. For several generations, the crashborn have been without any kind of academic education or reliable information about what lies outside the camps. So by remaining silent on all of this, the venture charities encourage them to form their own understanding, or rather misunderstanding, of the Free World and the CG Economy. They know that the hole they insert their finger into reads their DNA and other hereditary structures and that their DNA determines whether the Market demands their offspring. However, as the majority have no background in even the most basic of scientific knowledge, most are unaware what ‘DNA’ even means, and few have ever used money so they are unable to grasp the word ‘market’ any better, let alone complex concepts like plutogenics. Since a person’s status as gifted or giftless can shift without apparent reason, DNA and the Market have come to be understood as the arbiters of fate and this has opened the door for the spread of superstitious beliefs like those of Opportunity Science, which is perfectly compatible with the interests of the Philanthropy Syndicate.”
“May I contribute to the discussion at this juncture?” asked Book from the back of the room as Little Book’s tapping drew silent, and Amon realized for the first time that they had been listening. “This is related to my field of interest as you are aware.”
Hippo nodded his assent.
Tap-ta-taptap … “The Xenocyst curriculum that the Philanthropy Syndicate representative requested us to abandon I specifically designed to combat Opportunity Science dogma and propagate a more empirically accurate understanding of our age. Hippo, in his wisdom, recognized that Free Citizens were a lost cause as their PR-opaganda inculcation filled them with a stock of truthy ‘facts’ to contradict anything we might teach them, whereas bankdead, lacking information technology, were tabula rasa as it were, and just as receptive to false religion as to our contrary lessons. Although our scope was limited due to resource restrictions, we held classes on basic literacy, mathematics, and other rudimentary subjects, for both children and adults, with more advanced seminars for precocious learners.
“On the basis of this primary education, we attempted to dissuade our students of prevalent misunderstandings about the Free World: that it is not a holy, otherworldly place or even all that exceptional a place; that the apparent health, cleanliness, beauty, and strange attire of the slum tourists, career volunteers, and other bankliving that visit the camps do not in any way prove they are blessed; that the drones, vending machines, and other technologies are in no way magical or ordained; that the preemptive foiling of resistance is not a manifestation of some supernatural moral order; etcetera, etcetera. Moreover, we made various positive assertions as well; that babies are considered so precious most bankliving are unable to afford them; that the bankdead are the ones who are the most truly alive and free.
“None of our instructors told anyone explicitly to refrain from gifting their babie
s—everyone in Xenocyst was encouraged to live as they deemed most appropriate. However, the slant of our pedagogy was manifestly obvious. Our objective was to help all bankdead—albeit women in particular—to realize that they had reproductive rights, including rights to their offspring, not to mention dignity, and that they ought to be honored at the idea of being a parent. Ideally, our graduates would learn to accept the adversity here and live the best lives they were capable of, rather than trade away the next generation for some fallacious ideal and pathetic bonus.”
As Book described the curriculum he had created and overseen, Amon heard his deep, nasally voice rise at points with something that sounded like passion, and his closing words he spat out with unmistakable contempt. Usually he spoke with such dry erudition that Amon was caught off guard by his sudden display of emotion and felt his own chest resonating with it. While Ty’s lifelong response to his struggles in the form of the tricycle was flashy and palpable, Book’s was less dramatic but perhaps a much greater threat in the end. The knowledge he provided was subversive, offering a way to make sense of the District of Dreams without succumbing to Opportunity Science or any other oppressive misperception, and Amon appreciated for the first time how important the education he had been given was.
“So, if the council were to accept the investitarian’s offer and cancel our academic program,” said Hippo, “our citizens would uncritically swallow the plutogenic hierarchy as before and might convert to Opportunity Science, or at least believe it inwardly. When I thought about how this would work in combination with the ban on contraceptives, the purpose behind the man’s offer became clear and I saw why the Syndicate had allowed Xenocyst to exist for so long.
“As you know, giftless parents occasionally give birth to marketable resources. Since Xenocyst had dramatically lowered the infant mortality rate and extended the average lifespan of fertile adults, we produced more total babies than a comparable area—and therefore more marketable babies. Some of our first-generation giftless had also produced gifted babies and we had not simply cast these out on genetic grounds, so over time our gifted population was increasing as well. This meant that we had unintentionally built up a store of human resources. Without education our members would be more likely to gift, and without contraceptives the growth rate would rise, increasing yield further. So by conceding to his conditions, we would produce a swelling population of giftless inclined towards gifting, some of whom would produce valuable people. Running services for the giftless like ours would have been too expensive for the MegaGloms because of all the labor costs involved. But if they could ensure already existing services fell in line with the Charity Gift Economy by investing a small amount in bringing us to our knees and then donating some cheap supplies to keep us in thrall, they could cultivate a more marketable gene pool.
“When first establishing Xenocyst, I had hired a team to do a cost-benefit analysis and they had determined it would be more expensive for the Philanthropy Syndicate to destroy us than to leave us be. Our attracting a segment of the giftless population would generate a marginal drop in yield, but this would be vastly outweighed by the costs of sabotage and other interventions. Although these calculations turned out to be correct, we hadn’t considered that greater long-term profits might be had by co-opting us. Arrogantly we had only done our calculations under the assumption we were a threat. None of us had considered that we might instead be an opportunity. The lesson was clear—no pun intended. All attempts to help the world’s poorest, and really help them by helping them help themselves, will either go up against the MegaGloms and become more profitable to destroy or appear lucrative and become profitable to take. There are no such things as xenocysts, no independent outsiders persisting in the belly of the beast. You are either part of the beast or in its maw.
“When the undeniable truth of this set in, I felt rage as powerful as that that night in my lab, and I had the man thrown out, though not before he calmly and smarmily told us where to find him in Delivery. As I stewed over what had brought us to this point, part of me began to regret using the funds I had amassed to build a passive xenocyst rather than organize the giftless into an armed insurgency against the Philanthropy Syndicate.” Hippo’s eyes widened fearsomely and his jaw shook as though he were imagining such a battlefield. “This was an entirely emotional response of course. I never seriously entertained the idea on an intellectual level because I knew it would be crushed before it gained any momentum whatsoever.”
“Is standing up to the charities really that hopeless?” asked Rick. “There must be some form of resistance out there.”
“Well, there are occasional incidents, but these are kept manageable.”
“How? There are so many people here, together they’d be unstoppable, wouldn’t they? And what stops them from turning to terrorism?”
“Terrorism? In the Free Era? Go to the library if you want to read about other times when terrorist cells were allowed or even encouraged to operate in underprivileged communities. As Book will tell you, this was to cultivate fear against an amorphous enemy and maintain national cohesion while focusing attention away from deficiencies in the ruling order. Nowadays, such benefits are thought to be outweighed by the economic instability terrorism causes. Instead, discontent is diverted from corporations and the elite with pitypromo, among other distractions. Aside from inducing donations with pity for those who have fallen into the bankdeath camps, promoguiltumentaries and all the rest make Free Citizens afraid of falling in themselves, as I was saying earlier. This keeps them too busy scrambling to earn enough for basic actions like breathing and eating in an extremely volatile market to even think carefully about who profits from this arrangement.
“As for organized resistance, the Philanthropy Syndicate can easily discourage it before it occurs through the simple regulation of supplies. Near-total dependence on supplies prevents bankdead from procuring the necessary weaponry and other tools while fostering a feeling of gratitude and reciprocity that counteracts discord. Feeding station calories are set in accordance with supply ephemerality so that needs are fulfilled just enough to encourage complacency but not so much that bankdead have the energy to try and better their situation after the exhaustion of constant shelter resettlement and supply pilgrimages. In other words, the total ‘quality of life’ provided by the supplies and services—from clothes to shelter to medical treatment—has been calculated and refined through research to approach as close as possible to despair without slipping over the line into desperation.
“Supply branding also discourages resistance by creating division. Visible differences between items disbursed to unbranded giftless and branded gifted, and between the different gifted brandclans, help the MegaGloms cultivate marketable gene pools while setting bankdead apart from each other psychologically. The gifted treat the giftless as inferior, and many giftless accept this, though not without friction and fighting. At the same time, the different brandclans develop rivalries, which can range from sport-fan-like aggression to mortal combat, though CareBots are sent in to reduce resource losses when conflicts escalate. Whatever the particulars may be, branding keeps bankdead groups too busy squabbling to even conceive of an external enemy. Meanwhile, the ephemerality of disposcrapers and the unpredictability of the plutogenic algorithms prevent the formation of excessively strong group solidarity and intergroup alliances by keeping them constantly on the move and making them uncertain when their membership in a brandclan or status as gifted/giftless might suddenly shift.
“Let’s not forget the threat of surveillance posed by the PanoptiRoaches either. This is a major obstacle to cooperation against the Syndicate as it leaves few with the courage to express their gripes and find others who share them. On those rare occasions when dissidents do take the risk of banding together, they are often tackled before they properly organize, which perpetuates fear of speaking out, as it suggests they might have been tipped off by monitoring equipment or spies.”
“So there a
re cases where affordable discouragement strategies fail, as there must be,” said Rick. “But I don’t see how the Syndicate can afford to respond to actual uprisings. If there was a coordinated push-back, we could throw off their whole business model!”
“If only it were so easy! I like your rebellious spirit, Shaké. Too bad you’re naive. The venture charities know just how to protect their business model—they’ve done so successfully for decades—by applying different compliance protocols in order of their cost. The least expensive of these is blacklisting. If the DNA of dissidents can be identified—and this is not difficult if SampleQuitos are deployed—they become hungry ghosts and are eliminated from consideration.”
Amon had heard of SampleQuitos and hungry ghosts and was curious to know what they were, but didn’t want to interrupt with such a minor question.
“If not but their general whereabouts are known, the skyscrapers in the entire region are demolished under the pretense of slum improvement. This is perfectly legal because bankdead are incapable of possessing property, and serves as an affordable way to encourage neighbors to snitch since no one wants havoc wreaked on their own heads. If in spite of all these preventatives, rebellious incidents occur, the last resort is CrowdCare.”
The Naked World Page 37
