In which I offer some explanation for my churlish words—Pour elle—Un jour je serai de retour prés de toi
There is something wrong in the world. Sometimes it feels like I’m living a double life. In one world, I want to worry about dating and getting a stable job and my career and what my parents think. In that world I get to grow old and retire into obscurity. I get to spend my days doing something not-too-harmful, probably involving computers, and spend my free time enjoying my hobbies. (I wanted, when I was young, more than anything else, to be a designer of toys and games.) In this world capitalism works, democracy works, the trees are green and the sky is blue. This is the world that capitalism promised for us, that career advisors and high school principles promised for us, that politicians and the news and most books still promise for us. It is also increasingly no longer the world I believe I live in.
In the world outside my window, in the world I see on my phone screen and reflected in the eyes of my friends, it is much worse than we all think. There is an air of panic and anger, anger at a future we will never get, hatred for those whom we blame for taking it from us. The trees are turning grey and the sky is bleeding red: Red from the smoke and the flame, red from the madness and the terror inside our hearts. Maybe you feel this too, that a hurricane is headed for us all, a hurricane that uproots social systems and ecosystems and our very concept of world and time. You cannot negotiate with a hurricane.
The distance between these two worlds drives me crazy. Half of me says that I’ve lost my mind, that I have delusions of grandeur and some apocalyptic tendency. The other half screams that I’m standing by while the world burns, plucking a lyre and designing my little amusements. I’ve written versions of this essay over and over again. Every time, it seems like the situation gets worse. Every time, I use less and less elaborate language, less and less obfuscation. Every time I can see the truth a little more clearly, the truth that I try to hide from myself even now. Here I quote Peter Watts:
I’m not claiming that I don’t tell my stories against a dystopian backdrop. Take the Rifters trilogy, for example. The desperate rearguard against ongoing environmental collapse, the neurochemically-enslaved bureaucrats deciding which part of the world they’ll incinerate today to hold back the latest plague, the exploitation of abuse victims to run power plants on the deep-ocean floor — none of this is the stuff of Hallmark Theatre. But in a very real sense, these are not my inventions; they are essential features of any plausible vision of the future. The thing that distinguishes science fiction, after all — what sets it apart from magic realism and horror and the rest of speculative horde— is that is fiction based on science. It has to be at least semiplausible in its extrapolations from here to there.
Where can we go, from here? Where can we go, starting with seven billion hominins who can’t control their appetites, who wipe out thirty species a day with the weight of their bootprints, who are too busy rejecting evolution and building killer drones to notice that the icecaps are melting? How do you write a plausible near-future in which we somehow stopped the flooding and the water wars, in which we didn’t wipe out entire ecosystems and turn millions into environmental refugees?
You can’t. That ship — that massive, lumbering, world-sized ship — has already sailed, and it turns so very slowly. The only way you can head off those consequences by 2050 is by telling a tale in which we got serious about climate change back in the nineteen-seventies — and then you’re not talking science fiction any more, you’re talking fantasy.
— Peter Watts, “Are We There Yet? En Route to Dystopia with the Angry Optimist”
I agree with him that any writing grounded in reality, fiction or not, gets more grim by the day. I agree that the future will contain horrors that make today seem impossibly utopian. Where I differ from him is the idea that this is somehow some fatal flaw of homo sapiens, that we are somehow destined to destroy ourselves because of some dark nature of ours. I still believe that complex collectives can change and improve.
So that comes back to these essays. They are my way of squaring the circle, of planting the tree now that should have been planted twenty years ago. It is my hope that the tools we can develop, assistive tools that claim their lineage from Xerox PARC and HCI rather than the sterile profiteering of Jobs and Gates, can make us better at figuring out coordination and cooperation. I hope that being able to process data and spot patterns at scale will allow us to see through deception, find useful heuristics, and address problems before they arise. I think allowing 8 billion people to coexist on a planet is a difficult problem and I want to try and help solve it somehow by providing better frameworks for thinking about problems like that. Call it a moonshot, call it delusional: That is why all the text on these pages, all the code I have linked, is free to redistribute and reuse. I would rather someone take my ideas and make them work than lay claim to dead thoughts. I want to buy humanity time to solve their problems. The problems won’t slow down, so we need to accelerate the way humanity thinks collectively.
Finally, I ask of you only this. Read these words and disbelieve them, if you want. Call me crazy and delusional, if you want. But if there is something hopeful or helpful that you want to do, some intervention you think has a chance in hell of improving the world we live in, try it now. Don’t wait.
It only gets harder from here.