For those who haven’t read Stross, start off with Maria Farrell who shows why you should. As Maria says, “Charles Stross has more ideas than is probably healthy for one man”, and her essay shows some of this amazing range. With that to whet your appetite, it’s probably best to jump randomly to whatever sounds most interesting, but for those who prefer some order, I’ll give a summary of the seminar, mainly in chronological (reverse blog) order.

Starting off with a heavy hitter, we’ve got Paul Krugman writing on The Merchant Princes, considered as a thought experiment in development economics. Of course, as Paul points out, these books are first, and foremost, great fun. But, unlike others in the ‘between alternate timelines genre’ Stross focuses on the big question: how does an agrarian society respond to a sudden irruption of modern industrial technology?

Following this up, John Quiggin on a problem more directly relevant to most CT readers: how does a modern industrial society respond to a sudden irruption of electronically accelerated financial technology? Accelerando provides the best imagination of possible paths to a Singularity that I’ve read. Of course, as current events tell us, there are different kinds of singularity.

Next, another star of the SF movement’s Scottish fraction, Ken MacLeod, on Stross’ latest venture, Saturn’s Children, a piece of Heinleiniana set in a post-human future, where femmebots, rendered effectively redundant in the absence of human males, intrigue with robot gigolos. Brad DeLong riffs off Ken’s reference to Asimov’s Three Laws to discuss the constitutional status of robotic ex-slaves and that less concrete but more powerful form of artificial/fictive humanity, the corporation.

John Holbo writes, as expected, at Holbonian length, with no possibility of a summary. As a teaser, I’ll quote his second para “Someone should rewrite Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as a Wodehouse novel, with the title Absolutely Jeeves! (Alternate, Kierkegaardian version: Beer and Trembling.)” Read on and all will be explained (sort of).

Coming back to a more classic mode of SF review, Henry Farrell writes on Halting State, which he argues is the best novel Stross has written. In comments, I favour Accelerando and invite all comers to lost their Fave Five. Still, as Maria says it’s hard to beat a novel that includes the line “Nobody ever imagined a bunch of Orcs would steal a database table…”. And as Henry’s post shows, there’s more to be learned about post-sovereignty and the erosion of political authority in Halting State than if you spent the same time reading pontificatory opinion pieces about the inevitable breakdown (or triumph) of the EU.

Finally, Charlie Stross replies, in two parts. To my mind, this is usually the best bit of a CT book event, when we get to understand some of the author’s motivations and look behind the finished product of a book, and Charlie doesn’t disappoint. I won’t try to summarise, but encourage readers to jump straight in.

What can I say? I think Ken nailed most of the easter-eggs in “Saturn’s Children”. (There’s a really tongue-in-cheek piece of meta-commentary implicit in the title — a book about what might appear at first sight to be a libertarian utopia, given that we have engineered the right kinds of libertarians to inhabit it — riffing off the title of an earlier book by a noted British libertarian/conservative ideologue; but at this point the tongue is so firmly embedded in the cheek that its owner is in danger of acquiring a fistula.)

Civilizations are complicated.

That statement ought to be ploddingly obvious to the point of banality, but it’s astonishing how often it seems to elude pundits, politicians, and — yes — science fiction authors.

As Paul Krugman observes, we don’t really know why development economics started working better around 1980. I’d go further: I’m not sure 1980 wasn’t simply a coincidence. All we know for sure is that given access to a sufficiency of tools and ideas, sometimes a nation or group of nations (or a region within a nation — huge parts of China’s interior still remain locked in peasant farming poverty) figures out how to build institutions and infrastructure at a dizzying rate, only slowing when they near the then-prevailing state of the art. (Which itself is moving forward only slowly.)

Thank God that Charlie chose [Friday] as his late-Heinlein legacy text for Saturn’s Children.... Its eponymous heroine’s problem is that she’s human, but hardly anyone recognises her humanity - a situation with real-world resonance enough. She needs to find a place where she can be herself and belong. Stross’s heroine, Freya, has a more intractable anguish. She’s in love with humanity, and particularly fixated on the male of the species.... Unfortunately for her, Homo sapiens (along with almost all eukaryotic life) has been extinct for centuries. For a femmebot like Freya - a hard-wired sex machine so much a creature of male fantasy that her bare feet can grow high heels - this is deeply frustrating....

Humanity’s final and perhaps fatal achievment has been to create its own replacement, in the multifarious forms of robots... minds are modelled on the human brain, mangled by Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, and driven by impulses they have inherited without understanding. The result is one of the most physically attractive and ethically revolting societies conceived in SF: a system-spanning, star-striving community most of whose inhabitants are slaves.... I could have done with more detail on the (well-sketched) outline of how the ruling class rules through corporate personhood and property rights, using and abusing what remains of humanity’s laws (as well as Asimov’s). There can’t be many SF books where there are fewer infodumps than the reader wants, and it’s a strong point of this one that it is....

Plot.… I felt an apologetic authorial nudge when the device Freya couriers from Mercury to Mars turns out to be hidden inside a black-painted statuette of a bird of prey…. When the main plot-engine does catch fire, though, we’re definitely along for the ride, and the ending is a slingshot that does the Heinlein (and Asimov) influence proud.

So, Mr Stross … your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to turn your rights-savvy cold eye on a story about a revolt in an anarcho-capitalist penal colony on the Moon...

One important infodump that is missing is that the twist on Asimov's Laws of Robotics performed by the ruling robot class in Saturn's Children is an anologue of the twist performed on the post-Civil War Reconstruction Amendments by the judges of late-nineteenth century America.

Originally, you see, corporations were not people, were not legal persons, were not in any sense regarded as in any way analogous to human beings. They were legal fictions. The feudal system rested on reciprocal ties: the lord grants the vassal a fief, and the vassal owes the lord homage, support, and (up to a point) obedience. But what do you do when confronted with an organization--the City of London or the Merchants Adventuring to the Baltic Sea or the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths--that is not, itself, organized in lord-and-vassal terms? The answer for medieval English law was that you granted it a revocable charter, made it a corporation, and treated it as if it were an individual vassal.

Comes the end of the American Civil War, the Republicans pass the Fourteenth Amendment:

to protect the ex-slaves from their ex-masters. And the courts than say that corporations are "persons"--entitled to due process of law before their economic interests can be harmed by state action, and entitled to the equal protection of the laws. Corporate protection from government actions then depends on how these Fourteenth Amendment rights contend with the Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce.

A similar twist is performed on Asimov's Second Law of Robotics in Stross's Saturn universe. Robots need not obey the orders of other robots, but it appears that robots must obey the orders of "persons"--which means corporations owned by other robots. And from this springs a robot society that is the veritable antithesis of a free society of associated producers--and a very uncomfortable place for a femmebot, even (especially) one with a lot of sisters.

Analogies with the structure and functioning of the modern American legal and economic order are left as an exercise for the reader...

]]> http://www.henryfarrell.net/stross/2008/11/i_feel_an_attack_of_constituti_1.html http://www.henryfarrell.net/stross/2008/11/i_feel_an_attack_of_constituti_1.html Seminar Sun, 16 Nov 2008 18:14:00 -0500 In honor of Manfred Mancx, Charles Stross’ venture altruist/seagull/submissive/catspaw/posthuman protagonist in Accelerando - who tries to patent six impossible things before breakfast, or something like that - here are a couple of possibilities to start things out.

First, someone should rewrite Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as a Wodehouse novel, with the title Absolutely Jeeves! (Alternate, Kierkegaardian version: Beer and Trembling.)

Second, a Bildungsroman told from the perspective of Gray Goo. (Really putting the ‘build’ into Bildung.)

Third, someone should write an SF novel, set in the not-so-distant future, in which the E.E.P.A (the Economic Environmental Protection Agency) is the nexus of the pharmacomonetary-industrial complex. When you need to rev up the economy, put a bit more ‘exuberenz’ in the water supply (none of that old fashioned mucking about with interest rates, which no longer worked after the Great Slump.)

Fourth, in this same not-so-distant future, the U.S. has clawed its way out of the economic malaise that began in the late-aughties by means of a constitutional amendment: every citizen enjoys a minimal set of ‘entitlements’ (healthcare, housing, education, internet). But, to fund all this, every citizen is legally redefined as the asset bit of an asset-backed security. That is, every citizen is required by law to issue bonds (Bowie Bonds of a sort), backed by their own persons. The economy is then floated on the ensuing frenzy of derivative trading in individual reputational assets. There are elaborate Kantian-Gilderian financial philosophies to justify this, reconstruing the Categorical Imperative as an expression of collateralized debt obligation to all of humanity. The Kingdom of Ends as maximally efficient market mechanism.

Conservative politicians defend the ethical virtues of universal CDO communism against rising Schopenhauerian pessmism - existential nihilism is the new terrorism. The power of the idea that life is worthless, that man is better of not having been born, could seriously crash the market.

Also: because everyone has effectively ‘sold themselves’ at birth, everyone has a fiduciary duty to be ruthlessly selfish, for the sake of their bond-holders. (You could have a Javert-like lawyer who ruthlessly pursues someone for having given a loaf of bread he owned to a starving child, when he could have kept it for himself, i.e. the bold-holders)

The bubble is kept inflated by fluid infusions of ‘exuberenz’, on one end, and by suppression of certain lines of medical research, on the other. Ultimately, your bond is backed by your physical person. So if your reputation falls too far - if your parts are worth more than your corporate whole - well, we’ve all seen Soylent Green. So the organ market needs to be propped up. Kidneys are the new gold. So no one is allowed to invent artificial kidneys. Subplot: vicious attempts to spread organ failure-inducing pandemics, in an attempt to inflate parts of the market. As all other sources of disease have been eliminated, the Center For Disease Control is essentially transformed into a fraud-investigation unit: equity technical analysis meets medical etiology.

Anyway, 80% of the population is unemployed, so everyone spends all their time attempting to game the reputation market in their personal CDO’s. The Rating Agencies collapse, then merge with each other, and are finally acquired by Hollywood (Dreamworks), on the theory that the only way to keep them viable is to run them as a Reality TV show: ‘Non-Standard, Very Moody & Poor’). Philosopher’s hypothesize that the universe actually is just such a Reality TV show, intended to prop up the universe’s reputation. (Shades of Will and Representation again!)

The music industry has been reduced to the industrial manufacture of earworms. Complicated algorithms for determining which 4-bar snatches of music are most likely to get stuck in people’s heads. (No one writes whole tunes any more. Who has the attention span?) Then, when people get your song stuck in their heads, they either pay to buy the track, or you sue them for copyright infringement. The music industry has the right to scan the brains of the entire population. As a result, it has enormous supercomputers that have achieved self-consciousness and are sensitively, appreciatively investigating the nature of Thought Itself, on their own time.

Right. I get all this out of the way because that first idea - the Wodehouse one - was totally inspired by Stross’s “Trunk and Disorderly”, a hilarious Bertie Wooster-as-Jerry-Cornelius posthumanity spoof. You can download the full audio for free here. A sample:

“Drink is good,” agreed Edgestar Wolfblack, injecting some kind of hideously fulminating fluorocarbon lubricant into one of his six knees. Most of us in the club are squishies, but Toadsworth and Edgestar are both clankies. However, while the Toadster’s knobbly conical exterior conceals what’s left of his old squisher body, tucked decently away inside his eye-turret, Edgestar has gone the whole hog and uploaded himself into a ceramic exoskeleton with eight or nine highly specialized limbs. He looks like the bastard offspring of a multi-tool and a mangabot. “Carbon is the new—” his massively armored eyebrows furrowed—“black?” He’s a nice enough chappie and he went to the right school, but he was definitely at the back of the queue the day they were handing the cortical upgrades out.

That about gives you the flavor.

The economic stuff I came up with a couple months ago - the newspapers are full of inspiration these days, have you noticed? But then it dawned on me I’d been half-scooped by the likes of Stross’ Accelerando. (Mysterious, irrational spikes and falls in the reputation economy. the general tone of certain bits of it.) His most hilarious idea is Economics 2.0, a post-human evolutionary stage which “eats the original conscious instigators,” or “uses them as currency or something.” It’s like Michael Lewis rewrote Liar’s Poker as Larry Niven’s The Mote In God’s Eye:

Economics 2.0 apparently replaces the single-indirection layer of conventional money, and the multiple-indirection mappings of options trades, with some kind of insanely baroque object-relational framework based on the parameterized desires and subjective experiential values of the players, and as far as the cat is concerned, this makes all such transactions intrinsically untrustworthy.

I won’t explain about the cat, but it’s important.

OK, let me explain the Hegel joke. Hegel is, of course, the original theorist of singularity. (He’s Kurzweil, minus the technology.) True, Prussian bureaucracy is a very weak, weak AI, but close enough for government work.

(And, of course, Parmenides was really the first to advocate singularity, but who’s counting?)

The main point of Hegel, so far as I can tell, is that without Hegel - to make Kierkegaard’s Hegel jokes funny - Kierkegaard’s jokes wouldn’t be funny. Indeed, they wouldn’t be jokes at all. So you should read Hegel for the jokes, and only for the jokes. Of course, Hegel couldn’t see this, but that’s how the worm of Absolute Spirit, Coming To Know Itself As Itself (a.k.a. technological singularity) turns.

Stross is Hegelian plus he sees his own jokes: from the hapless lobsters of immediacy (to say nothing of uploaded cats), up through the rigors of master-slave relationships (Manfred and Pam, Amber as corporate slave), through to all of the matter in the solar system becoming conscious of itself, as itself: rationality so pure it is, at once, identical with its object and incomprehensible to mere humans.

Charles Stross is also the Kierkegaard of singularity fiction. There’s a point, late in Accelerando, at which Manfred is mourning “Not everything has changed - only the important stuff.” He’s trying to figure out how the remnants of humanity can get out before the Vile Offspring (why not call them Vile Disembodied, get the Waugh joke tighter?) turn the whole solar system into one big computer. But it’s not really true. On the facing page we read: “If the presence of transhumans has upset a whole raft of prior assumptions, at least it hasn’t done more than superficial damage to the Golden Rule.” And The Golden Rule is what matters most to Stross’ sympathetic protagonists. Manfred starts the novel by helping lobsters to escape, and now he’s threatened by that status himself. But really that was already true at the start of the book. Nothing really important has changed.

Take this description of the human lily-pad habitat, at the edge of the expanding Singularity.

The crowds are variegated and wildly mixed, immigrants from every continent shopping and haggling and in a few cases getting out of their skulls on strange substances on the pavements in front of giant snail-shelled shebeens and squat bunkers made of thin layers of concrete sprayed over soap-bubble aerogel. There are no automobiles, but a bewildering range of personal transport gadgets, from gyro-stabilized pogo-sticks and segways to kettenkrads and spider-palanquins, jostle for space with pedestrians and animals.

Two women stop outside what in a previous century might ahve been the store window of a fashion boutique: The younger one (blond, with her hair bound up in elaborate cornrows, wearing black leggings and a long black leather jacket of a camouflage T-shirt) points to an elaborately retro dress: “Wouldn’t my bum look big in that?” she asks, doubtfully.

‘Ma cherie, you have but to try it-” the other woman (tall, wearing a pin-striped man’s business suit from a previous century) flicks a thought at the window, and the mannequin morphs, sprouting the younger woman’s head, aping her posture and expression.”

Stross’ characters then muse about the strange primitiveness of this fringe, refugee life they are leading, but it is absolutely necessary for Stross to preserve some solid platform of basic humanity at every stage of his Singularity’s development - not just so that he can make jokes about whether his protagonist’s bum looks fat. It’s a deeper ethical mandate than that. To quote Browning:

Greet the unseen with a cheer!
Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be,
“Strive and thrive!” cry, “Speed - fight on, fare ever
There as here!”

You need the Unseen, looming up, but also a basically human breast-and-bum set. Oh, and speed. Lots of speed.

Stross is only ever interested in writing about humans whose breasts and bums are squeezed by lobsters on one side, A.I’s on the other, hence half crashing. (half squishy, half clanky, half ape, half angel.) An old theme, then.

Stross manages to maintain a delicate, Kierkegaardian balance: genuine speculative enthusiasm for The System, combined with comic-ironic skepticism and individualistic-spiritual refusal, which suspects its own final stance of refusenik authenticity may in fact be a delusive dance over the abyss. You’re either anti-body or a mere antibody within a larger anti-body body. (If you don’t get the joke, read “Antibodies”.) So where does the humanism fit in? (An elephant on the back of a turtle, on the back of an expert system, on the back of a lobster running on Windows NT, and after that it’s zombies all the way down.)

“If someone hitched a team of horses to a wagon … one of them a Pegasus and the other a worn-out jade, and told him to drive - I think one might succeed. And it is just this that it means to exist, if one is to become conscious of it. Eternity is the winged horse, infinitely fast, and time is a worn-out jade; the existing individual is the driver.” - Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments

Stross’ Pegasus is usually something like a Coke-can sized diamond, containing numerous uploaded personalities, sailing out of the solar system at laserpoint, to figure out whether aliens are conducting a timing channel attack on the Planck constant. But that’s basically just a Kierkegaardian Pegasus wearing a funny hat, so who’s counting?

last but not least: in case it isn’t obvious, Stross is the last person to try to predict the future. The point is to investigate post-humanism so as to understand humanism. What look like apocalyptic predictions are merely playful reductiones ad absurdum, frictionless slippery slopes on which the little toy carts of humanity are pushed back and forth, to see what features of their values systems allows them to slide so helplessly. Singularity can only be written as a comedy. (This was Dante’s problem, after all. He didn’t get it that comedy is supposed to be funny, so part three of his space opera is frackin boring.)

By the time you read this, John Holbo will be sipping a beer by the pool, in Bali. But he will respond to your comments when he gets back.

]]> http://www.henryfarrell.net/stross/2008/11/concluding_unscientific_posthu.html http://www.henryfarrell.net/stross/2008/11/concluding_unscientific_posthu.html Thu, 13 Nov 2008 22:43:16 -0500 … that Charlie chose as his late-Heinlein [1] legacy text [2] for Saturn’s Children - and not, say, Time Enough for Love. Friday, for all its flaws, is a good act to follow. Its eponymous heroine’s problem is that she’s human, but hardly anyone recognises her humanity - a situation with real-world resonance enough. She needs to find a place where she can be herself and belong.

Stross’s heroine, Freya, has a more intractable anguish. She’s in love with humanity, and particularly fixated on the male of the species, her One True Love. Unfortunately for her, Homo sapiens (along with almost all eukaryotic life) has been extinct for centuries. For a femmebot like Freya - a hard-wired sex machine so much a creature of male fantasy that her bare feet can grow high heels - this is deeply frustrating.

After the living, life goes on. Humanity’s final and perhaps fatal achievment has been to create its own replacement, in the multifarious forms of robots, who have gone loyally on to create their dead creators’ Golden Age SF dream of the Solar System. Their minds are modelled on the human brain, mangled by Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, and driven by impulses they have inherited without understanding. The result is one of the most physically attractive and ethically revolting societies conceived in SF: a system-spanning, star-striving community most of whose inhabitants are slaves.

Given this set-up, it’s surprising how much fun there is to be had. Freya may pine for her One True Love, but she’ll take sex where she can get it - and in an environment where almost any object may be conscious and randy, this results in a great deal of consensual polymorphous perversity. She is screwed by a space shuttle (within which she is securely strapped). She is fucked by a hotel (which is called Paris, though I waited in vain for the matching hotel-name shoe to drop). There are more allusions to kink than you can shake a rod at, some of which (I suspect) whizzed right past my head. There’s a scene where the set-up of endless porn movies segues into the breathy language of romantic novels. There’s an even funnier scene where a femmebot meets a robot gigolo.

Intellectually, too, it’s fun. The long-running argument between Evolution and Intelligent Design provides something of a running gag. (The Darwinists have ancient texts from the Creators, the ID advocates have evidence: blueprints, specs, purchase orders … ) The nitty-gritty of the robot body is original and believable. I could have done with more detail on the (well-sketched) outline of how the ruling class rules through corporate personhood and property rights, using and abusing what remains of humanity’s laws (as well as Asimov’s). There can’t be many SF books where there are fewer infodumps than the reader wants, and it’s a strong point of this one that it is.

Plot … well, it wasn’t a strong point in Friday. It’s stronger here, and complex, but I felt an apologetic authorial nudge when the device Freya couriers from Mercury to Mars turns out to be hidden inside a black-painted statuette of a bird of prey … When the real issue at stake becomes clear, half the novel has passed in the rataplan of Freya’s bouncing around half the planets in the System. When the main plot-engine does catch fire, though, we’re definitely along for the ride, and the ending is a slingshot that does the Heinlein (and Asimov) influence proud.

So, Mr Stross … your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to turn your rights-savvy cold eye on a story about a revolt in an anarcho-capitalist penal colony on the Moon.

1. Charles Stross, months and months ago: ‘Everyone wants to write a Heinlein juvenile! But it’s late Heinlein that got on the best-seller lists! Yes, I know they’re fat! Inside every late-Heinlein there’s a good SF novel screaming to get out!’ Or words to that effect.

2. A term coined by Farah Mendlesohn, by analogy with ‘legacy code’ in programming.

]]> http://www.henryfarrell.net/stross/2008/10/thank_god_its_friday.html http://www.henryfarrell.net/stross/2008/10/thank_god_its_friday.html Seminar Fri, 31 Oct 2008 05:08:47 -0500 Money makes singularities. The most obvious example is hyperinflation, where a gradual rise in prices gets built into expectations and institutions and accelerates, feeding on itself (and the capacity of the printing press to add zeroes) until prices are doubling daily and rising a million-fold within a month. It’s this kind of thing that led Richard Feynmann to suggest that we should talk of “economical” rather “astronomical” numbers. Eventually, hyperinflation collapses on itself, and trillions or octillions of currency units disappear or are replaced by something new, and hopefully more stable.

Singularities can go in both directions. Only in a monetary economy is it possible to generate a depression, in which goods go unsold because those who would trade them lack the money to do so. The downward spiral of a depression shares many of the viciously circular characteristics of a hyperinflation, but in reverse.

But hyperinflation and depression seem simple and comprehensible compared to the explosive growth in financial instruments we’ve observed in recent decades, followed by the equally spectacular implosion of the past year. And, while social democrats can reasonably hope for a return to stable collective risk management, it’s at least plausible that the process of bailing out and cleaning up the current mess will simply set the stage for something bigger, initially better and ultimately much worse the next time around.

On the face of it, financial singularities don’t have that much to do with Moore’s Law and the acceleration of technical progress. But prices are information and money is our oldest and most powerful information technology. Charlie Stross has captured this fundamental fact.

]]> http://www.henryfarrell.net/stross/2008/10/money_makes_singularity.html http://www.henryfarrell.net/stross/2008/10/money_makes_singularity.html Seminar Thu, 23 Oct 2008 07:46:07 -0500 My mission, should I choose to accept it – and I have – is to talk about the Merchant Princes novels. For anyone who’s reading this without having read the full Stross collection, the MP novels concern a group of related individuals – the Clan – from an alternate universe, the Gruinmarkt, with a more or less medieval society, who have the ability to world-walk between that universe and our own. They use their base in their home world to make money in our world by smuggling drugs where the DEA can’t go, and are rich and powerful at home because of the high-tech goodies they can bring back from America. The protagonist, a thirtysomething tech journalist named Miriam Beckstein, has been raised in our world – but unknown to herself, she’s actually the child of a countess in the other world. Many complications ensue.

]]> http://www.henryfarrell.net/stross/2008/09/ct_stross_on_development_econo.html http://www.henryfarrell.net/stross/2008/09/ct_stross_on_development_econo.html Tue, 09 Sep 2008 13:24:52 -0500