Distraction - Bruce Sterling [109]
Oscar shut his laptop. It was quite an intriguing report—a federal lab in Davis, California, was sorely infested with hyperintelligent lab mice, provoking a lawsuit-slinging panic from the outraged locals—but he found Kevin very worthwhile.
“So,” Kevin said, “what happens next?”
“What do you think happens next, Kevin?”
“Well,” Kevin said, “that would be cheating. Because I’ve seen this sort of thing before.”
“You don’t say.”
“Yeah. Here’s the situation. You’ve got a group of people here who are about to all lose their jobs. So you’re gonna organize them and fight back politically. You’ll get a lot of excitement and solidarity for about six weeks, and then they’ll all get fired. They’ll shut the whole place down and lock the gates in your face. Then you’ll all turn into proles.”
“You really think so?”
“Well, maybe not. Maybe basic research scientists are somehow smarter than computer programmers, or stock traders, or assembly-line workers, or traditional farmers.… You know, all those other people who lost their professions and got pushed off the edge of the earth. But that’s what everybody always thinks in these situations. ‘Yeah, their jobs are obsolete now, but people will always need us.’ ”
Oscar drummed his fingers on his laptop. “It’s good of you to take such a lively interest, Kevin. I appreciate your input. Believe it or not, what you’re saying isn’t exactly news to me. I’m very aware that huge numbers of people have been forced out of the conventional economy and become organized network mobs. I mean, they don’t vote, so they rarely command my professional attention, but over the years they’re getting better and better at ruining life for the rest of us.”
“Oscar, the proles are ‘the rest of us.’ It’s people like you who aren’t ‘the rest of us.’ ”
“I’ve never been the rest of anybody,” Oscar said. “Even people like me are never people like me. You want a coffee?”
“Okay.”
Oscar poured two cups. Kevin reached companion-ably into his back pocket and pulled out a square white baton of compressed vegetable protein. “Have a chew?”
“Sure.” Oscar gnawed thoughtfully on a snapped-off chunk. It tasted like carrots and foam.
“You know,” Oscar ruminated, “I have my share of prejudices—who doesn’t, really?—but I’ve never had it in for proles, per se. I’m just tired of living in a society permanently broken into fragments. I’ve always hoped and planned for federal, democratic, national reform. So we can have a system with a decent role for everyone.”
“But the economy’s out of control. Money just doesn’t need human beings anymore. Most of us only get in the way.”
“Well, money isn’t everything, but just try living without it.”
Kevin shrugged. “People lived before money was invented. Money’s not a law of nature. Money’s a medium. You can live without money, if you replace it with the right kind of computation. The proles know that. They’ve tried a million weird stunts to get by, roadblocks, shakedowns, smuggling, scrap metal, road shows.… Heaven knows they never had much to work with. But the proles are almost there now. You know how reputation servers work, right?”
“Of course I know about them, but I also know they don’t really work.”
“I used to live off reputation servers. Let’s say you’re in the Regulators—they’re a mob that’s very big around here. You show up at a Regulator camp with a trust rep in the high nineties, people will make it their business to look after you. Because they know for a fact that you’re a good guy to have around. You’re polite, you don’t rob stuff, they can trust you with their kids, their cars, whatever they got. You’re a certifiable good neighbor. You always pitch in. You always do people favors. You never sell out the gang. It’s a network gift economy.”
“It’s gangster socialism. It’s a nutty scheme, it’s unrealistic. And it’s fragile. You can always bribe people to boost your ratings,