Welcome to Selections. Where we slide a book off the shelf or a record from the stack, and talk about it. I’ve got something just for you.
It’s one of the chief delights of science fiction reading: the moment when an author’s carefully imagined world starts a chain reaction of ideas, folding and connecting together in your mind, so that you come to a new understanding, not of the imaginary place, but your own. That delicious moment sometimes fuses faint hunches and unspoken coronas of thought that you’ve been struggling to name and capture for years, snapping them together with a feeling of intellectual rightness that is almost a physical relief. It’s a feeling that I experienced often as I slowly read through the three volumes of the METAtropolis short story collection during my college and early adult years. This shared-worldbuilding project, starting from the release of the first volume in 2008, still seems to be something of an unknown quantity. I’m here to fix that, and will probably have to review most of the stories in the series before I’m satisfied.
METAtroplis is an anthology of stories set in a near-future Northwestern U.S., after soft apocalyptic forces have destroyed much of the economic vibrancy and political power structures binding the nation as a unit. The world thus created has a consistent sense of being patched together, jury-rigged and intended to improve on the option of total chaos rather than to seek utopian perfection. This keeps the stories, although firmly in the territory of environmentalist solarpunk, from feeling overly or naively idealistic. This is a world slowly falling apart, and the characters who inhabit it are working together (or opposing one another) in their attempts to save something significantly less ambitious than the world. For example, maybe just one’s city would be a good start.
Buckell’s short story Stochasti-City centers on a veteran trying to mind his own business in the rotting suburbs of Detroit. He gets sucked into a conflict between a mysterious band of eco-anarchists and the city’s fearsome hired law enforcement, ending up coordinating a decentralized riot as cover for an overnight takeover and renovation of an abandoned skyscraper. While none of the stories in METAtropolis are standouts from the perspective of literary aspirations or narrative invention, Buckell does a credible job of characterization, and his classic “doing this for the money with a heart of gold” protagonist manages to avoid total trope territory and give us an outsider’s viewpoint into a fascinating alternate society. And futuristic visions of society is where the mind-expansion can be had.
I don’t know why it’s called turking. Taking a complicated task and putting it up online, divvying up the parts of a task between multiple people and paying for the results, that had been going on a long time.
~ Tobias Buckell, Stochasti-City
Decentralized and anonymized tasking for real-world jobs isn’t all that far-fetched even with today’s technology. Buckell simply imagines what would be possible if it became a seamless and ubiquitous process, then adds a dose of sci-fi growth hormone and examines the ensuing chaos. Soon you are imagining pop-up idealistic gangs and flash mobs of internet-coordinated mischief-making in your own city. The author envisions future Detroit as a space teetering on the brink of chaos, and incites in the reader the realization that urban spaces are a honeycomb capable of hiding numberless actors with goals antithetical to the establishment. The core of this vision is the idea that a group of people united by a motivating ideology and armed with advanced technological levers are in effect their own city. Whether they exist fully within the confines of a single urban area or sprawl across continents, these groups can manipulate and change the physical environment and dominate the realm of ideas in ways previously reserved for co-located metropolitan populations.
You may already be familiar with this concept and its’ dizzying ramifications if you’ve stood in the downtown district of a major city and realized, possibly from observing the visual evidences hidden in plain sight, that an entire parallel underworld of criminal activity inhabits the exact same physical space where you are sightseeing. This secondary layer of society mixes and interacts with the primary layer, and people pass back and forth constantly. But to individuals without the correct entry knowledge and bona fides, the underworld might as well not exist. Meanwhile, those within the parallel world transact and cooperate, in some unmeasurable way changing the lives of people who would never dream of breaking the law and couldn’t find a way to locate the black market even if they desired it.
We have no allegiance to country, city or company. We’re neo-tribalists at best, but even then, not forming around any constitution or hierarchical structure. We’re per-project affiliations, with reputation economics as our bond. Some of us stick from one project to another, others are committed to the larger plan of trying to create substantial mimetic change to our urban environments.
~ Tobias Buckell, Stochasti-City
This, I think, is what people are grasping at when they (when I) say things like “web3 is going to change the world.” They don’t (or shouldn’t) mean that human nature and broken systems are about to vanish in a colorful poof of utopian glitter. But if you know where to look, you can almost see the rails for a new alternate layer of society being laid down. When a state actor can mobilize $50 million within a week to purchase nonlethal military supplies, sourced from global unconnected donors through trackable cryptocurrency payments, all during a full-scale invasion of their territory, you can see the networks forming. This is an event that would not have been possible two decades ago. In that sense, the world is changing. The possibility now exists for underworlds, and overworlds, to spring up at dizzying speeds. This is not entirely an exciting and hopeful prospect. I know that I insist on taking the optimistic view, but that is only possible once we confront the reality of the situation. Buckell’s vision of explosively active and unstoppable meta-state actors bending the traditional powers to their decentralized will is only enjoyable to contemplate if you whole-heartedly endorse whatever idea galvanized the meta-state cooperative in the first place.
And make no mistake, “turked out” mobs of anonymous actors serving the real-world goals of a distributed entity is no longer purely a speculation. We’re going to see more of this, and soon. And just like in Buckell’s vision, where squads of bicycle-riders appear from nowhere to stall traffic, not everyone will be in on the joke. Even some of the participants will be unwitting, unaware of the type of game they were really playing when they accepted the request or took the job. At the moment, it is slightly far-fetched to imagine functional meta-states having enough capital and a strong enough motivating ideal to command allegiance in the real world. But it won’t be for long. Look at your own Twitter and Discord; who might you be turking out for even now?
Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms? The band itself is made up of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince, it is knit together by the pact of the confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed on. If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it holds places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes the more plainly the name of a kingdom, because the reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity.
~ Augustine, The City of God
Power with impunity is a dangerous combination in state actors, creating much of the suffering that has existed through history. Therefore, in a world that is growing less centralized and more feudal seemingly by the hour, we would do well to choose carefully who the new wielders of impunity will be. In your lifetime, you may have the optionality of choosing a new primary allegiance that agrees with your worldview and outlook more than that of the physical nation-state where you reside, and may even come to impact your life in a more immediate way as well. Many of us have already been living in this world for millenia. If we are all going to float around in the same geographies while holding invisible ties to any number of overworld organizations, then we had best choose wisely. In fact, some of us should prepare ourselves to be the wielders of this new power, not only the anonymized masses participating with motes of their time and presence.
Could it all be an ephemeral dream, born of an overly trusting relationship with technology and a naïve assumption in the ability of humans to organize and pursue goals? Absolutely. But in this new age the land grab for digital fiefs and city-states is already beginning. Is there no ideal for which you would be willing to risk some of your credibility and forfeit an opportunity cost or two? In every emerging paradigm, those who are early enough effect a real change also risk loss and embarrassment. It would have been far safer for the protagonist to stick to the knowable decline of his surroundings, but at some point he chose to risk action. I’ve already committed my life to the service of Christ, through a non-state global overworld with goals of its’ own. None of these goals are fully realized, and there are plenty of cynics who safely insist they’ll never be. I suppose we could all wait around for somebody to tell us what to do instead. There’s always Amazon.
The importance of “turking” as used by both Buckell and Bezos is the reference to the Mechanical Turk, a famous 18th-century magic trick performed in parlors throughout Europe in which an automaton beat world leaders and luminaries at chess. The secret, of course, was the very intelligent boy hidden inside. And whether the machine is a global DAO, a multinational corporation, a community collective or a cryptocurrency, there is always somebody inside. The machines are already present in our world, laying scattered around silently waiting for visionaries to take their place, destabilize, and build back again. Choose your overworld wisely and the levers you pull could make a real difference.