Distraction - Bruce Sterling [116]
Greta’s postindustrial action was a highly unorthodox “strike,” because the strikers were not refusing to do their work. They were refusing to do anything except their work. The general tenor of the Strike strategy was highly public noncooperation, combined with passive-aggressive cost-cutting.
The scientists were continuing their investigations, but they were refusing to fill out the federal paperwork. They refused to ask for grants, refused to pay rent on their barracks rooms, refused to pay for their food, refused to pay their power bills. They were refusing everything except for new instrumentation, a deeply embedded vice that simply could not be denied to scientists.
All the Strike Committee’s central members were also refusing their salaries. This was a deeply polarizing maneuver. Reasonable people simply couldn’t bring themselves to hold their breath and leap into the unknown in this way. Most of the lab’s “reasonable people” had long since made their peace with the Collaboratory’s institutional corruption. Therefore, they were all on the take. It followed that they were personally compromised, at war with themselves, riddled with guilt. Greta’s stalwart core of dissidents were made of sterner stuff.
So, through this swift and unpredictable seizure of the tactical initiative, the Strike won a series of heartening little moral victories. Oscar had arranged this situation deliberately, in order to build community self-confidence. The rent strike seemed very dramatic, but a rent strike was an unbeatable gambit. There was no internal competition for the rents in the Collaboratory. If the strikers were somehow thrown out of their lodgings, the buildings would simply stay empty.
The power strike succeeded in a very similar way, because there was no effective method to shut off the electricity for nonpayment. By its very nature as a sealed environment, the Collaboratory dome always required uninterrupted power, supplied by its own internal generators. There simply wasn’t any way to shut it off. It had never occurred to the original designers that the dome’s inhabitants might someday rebel and refuse to pay.
Each successful step away from the status quo won Greta more adherents. The long-oppressed scientists had always had many galling problems. But since they lacked a political awareness of their plight, they had never had any burning issues—they’d simply endured a bad scene. Now, organization and action had shattered their apathy. Aches and pains they’d long accepted as parts of the natural order were searingly revealed to them as oppression by evil know-nothings. A new power structure was aborning, with new methods, new goals, brave new opportunities for change. The Hot Zone had become a beehive of militant activism.
Within a week, the dome’s internal atmosphere was charged like a Leyden jar; it crackled with political potential. Greta’s unflinching radicalism had whipped the place into a frenzy.
Having built up a manic pressure for change, Greta took action to shore up her official legal situation. The Directorship had never been a strong executive post, but Greta engineered the forced resignations of all her fellow board members. The original board was, of course, deeply unwilling to leave power, but the sudden resignation and departure of Dr. Felzian had left them stunned. Outmaneuvered and discredited, they were soon replaced by Greta’s zealous fellow-travelers, who trusted her implicitly and granted her a free hand.
The Collaboratory’s party of the status quo had been decimated before they could organize any resistance. Years without serious challenge or controversy had made them fat and slow. They’d been crushed before