Data as Bourgeois Morality

Data pervades everything. For those of us whose employment does not produce data, our consumption does as phones, computers, televisions, and our purchases capture our activity and feeds that into vast datasets. Here, the ghosts of our agency are carved up into distributed fragments, which are utilised by the business models of the platforms to sell advertising, and shape our attention through algorithmic selection of content that will catch our further attention.

But for those who work with data broadly - not just the digitised kind - it is embedded in the job description. Data is a system of concretised ethics enforced by the employment relation, in the first instance, and horizons of credibility, of social conventions based on the the affirmation and demonstration of evidence. As I am an academic, the concern for data determines the character of the presentation of research, the marketing and student experience efforts that cover my programmes, and must be invoked to justify changes to course content and assessment, the launch of new degrees, and the business case for taking on new staff. This is the lot of other education workers, particularly teachers with the vast trail of paperwork cataloguing their practice as educators, and also civil servants, mid-level managers across the public and private sectors, buyers in retail - every job that requires making decisions about the delivery of a service or the provision of a product.

And it directly governs. Since the emergence of modern wage labour in the English countryside, targets have been one tool among many used by employers to individuate and atomise workforces to enable their management. Today, when immaterial labour predominates and is simultaneously being attacked and deskilled, targets as a method have proliferated into a matrix of performance indicators for managing post-industrial labour. The worker, from the lowest paid to the relatively affluent are subjected (and subjectivated) by streams of algorithms and targets that measure aptitudes, define productivity, and determine the character of one's tasks. They shove (rather than nudge) labour along prescriptive circuits. The data points workers are judged by are often conjoined with those outside of their control - such as market conditions - and they are held to account against them.

Data as employed in capitalist societies is not just a practice/technology for managing workers, it has the characteristics of a moral code. Of, more precisely, a bourgeois morality. Like religion, the moralities of law and order, and the explicit statements of bootstraps neoliberalism, their subjects are the objects of exploitation. Bourgeois morality marks the bourgeoisie's innumerable, multitudinous others, and works to govern them. They themselves are, by and large, left unmarked. The neutral term. The starting point. That natural way of the world. Therefore, moralities spiritual and secular do not apply to them. The same is true of data.

How many CEOs "abbreviate" the evidence-based decision-making they enforce on their employees? How many politicians are impervious to the data-heavy briefings handed them by civil servants when they push particular policies? The further up the hierarchy one travels, the employment of data becomes more episodic, and its status as a tool of governance becomes all the clearer. These exalted levels operate with different sets of priorities: not what data tells them about what decisions would bring the greatest benefit to the greatest number, nor even in the narrower terms of using data to prioritise economic growth. No, data plays second fiddle to the politics of class maintenance. The successful exercise and preservation of class privilege and class power requires flexibility and opportunist nous. The realpolitik of our rulers depends on instinct and the feels in the first place, and the enforcement of decisions that reiterate their power-over. In these mundane circumstances of capitalism's everyday, data that shows they're wrong is simply noise.

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Labour's Enthusiasm for Artificial Intelligence

30,000 jobs are set to disappear with the closure of NHS England and its merging with the Department of Health and Social Care. Echoing the Tories, tens of thousands of civil service jobs are on the chopping block. And this planned massacre of livelihoods were presided over by a grinning Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting and presented to the media as unalloyed goods. This is set to cut down on duplication and save lots of money (£45bn, apparently). But something else is also on the cards: the replacement of jobs by Artificial Intelligence. In his enthusiasm at the prospects of jobless service provision, Starmer gushed that "No person’s time should be spent on a task where digital or AI can do it better, quicker and to the same high quality and standard."

This is the umpteenth speech in which the Labour leadership have espoused their enthusiasm for AI. For Starmer and his project of authoritarian modernisation, the technocratic attractions are obvious. A state that is neither bigger or smaller but works better is enticing, particularly when previous attempts at digitisation have been hit by delays and costly failures. Those long in the tooth will recall efforts at harmonising the NHS's IT systems, and the huge problems rolling out Universal Credit encountered. But the prize is the speeding up of the state's mundane activities, like answering HMRC inquiries and sorting out driving licences quickly. AI is part of Starmerism's answer to the crisis of government legitimacy. If the bureaucracy can be automated and the discharge of its functions be made as rapid as placing and receiving an Amazon order, belief in the efficacy of government and, possibly, the standing of politics could improve - to Labour's benefit. If only people could forget about winter fuel cuts.

Those are the good reasons. What are the real reasons? The PCS response argues that new innovations should be introduced and embedded in cooperation with staff and be used to enhance working conditions and job security. A position likely to have gone in one ear and out the other. This is because AI's promise speaks to the dominant pole of (right wing) Labourism: its relation to "working people" not as working people, but something far more passive and politically innocuous: as consumers. The ultimate aim is impeccably Blairite: the depoliticisation of politics, and the reduction of choice between the parties that offer the best value, best quality services. This alignment with Labourist assumptions is more a coincidence of congruence. As ever, it comes down to interests.

On plenty of occasions, Starmer has staked out his intention to transform the UK into an AI superpower. This does involve infrastructure like building the first reservoir for 30 years, which handily is earmarked for land not far from the planned expansion of data centres in Cambridgeshire. But more importantly, he's leveraging the state as the anchor customer for AI services and innovation. There is nothing particularly innovative about this. In the Blair years outsourcing, Public-Private Partnerships, PFIs, etc. were used to provide guaranteed markets for everything from cleaning companies to construction firms. The aspiration was to tie the interests of those firms to the largesse of New Labour ministers, thereby expanding the party's base among capital's exalted circles. When the crash came and Gordon Brown's government became a busted flush, they were happy to carry on accepting these sorts of contracts while transferring their allegiance to the incoming Conservatives - who continued with the same practice. Streeting's love-ins with far right tech oligarch Peter Thiel, the enthusiasm for using AI in patient-facing interactions, and the endless promises of using the private sector to "help" with the NHS are part of the same piece. This is the mood music designed to entice Silicon Valley and giving them a stake in the British state, while generating a home grown ecology of expertise around innovation and application. Something that could have the happy by-product down the line of sheltering the UK from Trump's tariffs, and making Labour - on paper, the political antipode to their brand of freakish authoritarianism - their preferred political partner this side of the Atlantic.

Everyone wins, right? No. Supposing AI can fulfill the grandiose claims made for it, the British state is being used as a test bed for, to borrow a recent phrase, feeding jobs into the wood chipper. The purpose of generative AI is not to make things more efficient, but to deskill and digitise as many of the properties of immaterial labour that are feasible. I.e. The social competencies that capital accumulation increasingly depends on can, after a fashion, now be separated from workers and therefore tip the balance of forces further away from labour. To all intents and purposes, as per previous waves of automation what the government are promoting is a power grab at capital's behest. If these schemes are successful, the next targets are millions of jobs across private industry for the benefit of shareholders. And Labour ministers who fancy themselves as future consultants on implementing AI "solutions" in large organisations when they're done with politics. Just like the Thatcher years, Britain could pioneer a new class settlement. And just like the 1980s, unless the left and the labour movement gets its act together it will be our class who loses.

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The Obscenity of Trump Gaza

"This could be so magnificent" says Donald Trump when waxing about the riviera real estate future he's imagining for Gaza. Others might call it the glitzy burial of an obscenity. Hollywood has a long history of glamourising colonial genocide, but this tacky AI-generated slop is something else.

AI as an Apparatus of Capture

You must have a heart of stone not to laugh. Hundreds of billions of dollars wiped off the value of leading US tech firms on Monday's markets as their expensive plagiarism machines, the misnamed language models trading under the name 'Artificial Intelligence', have been out done and out-performed at a fraction of the cost by the Chinese alternative, DeepSeek. Having announced untold levels of investments in new chips, new data centres, and new power stations, this vast supportive infrastructure designed to assure the dominance of Silicon Valley firms for the next century has seemingly evaporated as venture capital flees elsewhere. Egg on the face of far right oligarchs, and humiliation for Donald Trump's efforts at hitching his backward-looking project with the wave of the future.

America, the self-proclaimed home of buccaneering entrepreneurship and freedom stopped exporting advanced chips to China and showered the techbros with staggering sums. The ludicrous resources at their disposal brute-forced the pace of innovation. Think of all the money that has gone into producing applications less accurate than internet search engines, creates its own "facts" through "hallucinations", and has trouble drawing hands. A hell-for-leather effort that wanted to cement an unassailable technological lead. And that's been shown up by a network of Chinese coders using open source software, no state backing, and little but their skill and ingenuity. They have produced a better model with nowhere near the same demands on chips and energy. The tech oligarchs have got to be hoping the PhD-level language models, which according to the much-publicised rumour mill is weeks away, is more than a case of their getting high on their own supply. If not, some are looking at significant dips in their fortunes.

Yet none of this changes the fundamentals about so-called AI. It is a technology designed not to speed things up and make life easier. Like the vast majority of innovations in production, it's designed to deskill and disempower labour, forestalling the looming threat of a long-term shift in the balance of capital and labour in labour's favour. As discussed many times here, capital accumulation, particularly in the most advanced industrial countries, has become increasingly dependent on immaterial labour: the knowledge, skills, personalities, and social aptitudes. This is because capital itself is directly dependent on the production of information and relationships to sell a service of some description. However, the main force of production that counts is the brain, or rather the person of the worker. And it's inherently leaky. Despite the stringencies of copyright, industrial secrets, non-disclosure agreements, whatever competencies someone builds working with one employer remains with the worker, and can be the basis for future work elsewhere - be it for other employers (competitors), their own business, or outside the economy entirely. Capital ponces off the commons and whatever is produced "leaks" back into and builds the commons, leaving capital revealed as a parasitic social relationship. Whereas previous waves of technological development have increasingly done away with the masses of people production required and, more importantly, the knowledge of production that gave labour some leverage over the capital that employed them; the creativity, the ability to produce new information and maintain relationships appeared impervious, except around the edges where repetitive tasks were concerned.

AI changes this. The tech bro dream are machines that can code the software for other machines, which to a degree is possible now. They want to be able to generate their own images and text without having to bother with human artists and writers. Or the production of films, television, and music that can do without crews, actors, and musicians. In corporate and public sector bureaucracies, it's the automation of clerical tasks and, in some cases, front-facing work involving customers and clients that promises the most, freeing up managers for "strategy". Who themselves will become increasingly replaced by "thinking" machines. Even everyday communication skills, such as how to craft an email, is now something any old AI chatbot will happily do for you. What only a few short years ago was temporarily "captured" to generate surplus value is in the process of becoming absorbed into itself as 21st century fixed capital. AI might seem convenient, but it's first and foremost there at capital's convenience.

Opposition to so-called AI is not reactionary, or anti-technology. It is a healthy response to a power grab that will result in a privately-owned monopoly over creativity. This means, ultimately, to put hundreds of millions out of work globally and secure capital against its dependence on the intellectuality and sociality of human beings. These bots are "trained" by "reading" the sum total of our species' cultural output without any recompense whatsoever. What is presently ours becomes theirs, with the possibility of our common heritage being reduced to regurgitated AI slop that becomes a cultural staple, and one owned by the firms who end up winning the AI race. The loss of, the possibility of the privatisation of social competencies is real. Therefore, the rapid rise of DeepSeek and the humbling of the USA's richest companies, while funny, does not change the dynamics of the situation at all. Because this is capitalism, AI is more than a toy and a liberator of free time: it's the latest, and possibly the most complete means of capturing and imprisoning the soul.

Baudrillard Vs Trump and Musk

It's a while since Acid Horizon product was last featured as a gap filler on this blog, a tradition I'm happy to resurrect on nights where the writing isn't happening. In this episode the comrades use and think against our old friend Jean Baudrillard on the nature of evil. As good Deleuzians, the hypemeister of hyperreality is found wanting. But in addition there are interesting insights into the authoritarian character of the Trumpist/tech bro crossover project - particularly their fondness for the obsolete forms of disciplinary power, which is especially noteworthy as social media platforms are the basic technologies of the control society.

Elon Musk's Attack on Philanthropy

It is reported that Elon Musk has taken umbrage at MacKenzie Scott's philanthropy. In case readers are unsure about the who's who of the American oligarchy, Scott is Jeff Bezos's former wife who received billions in Amazon stock after the pair divorced in 2019. She has since been a paragon of the philanthropic turn among some US billionaires, gifting away $19bn to various charitable causes and non-profits. If Ms Scott is reading this and wants to handsomely support a blogger writing angrily about the world's ills with no strings attached, get in touch.

What has upset the world's richest man? He finds "concerning" the fact that among the many causes Scott supports are anti-racist organisations, LGBTQ+ advocacy and support, and a range of charities and social enterprises that try and patch up the gaping rents in the USA's social fabric. This you could put down to his adoption of anti-woke motifs following his rebrand as a Donald Trump supporter and chief bank roller of his successful re-election, but his animus pre-dates his coming out for the tangerine anti-Christ. In March he suggested "super rich ex-wives who hate their former spouse" are threatening the breakdown of Western civilisation with their charitable deeds. Blimey. Just another case of Musk shooting stupid from his pig ignorant hip?

No. In the last six or so years, Musk has moved from a fairly non-committal centrist figure (politically speaking) to fascist-adjacent. Some have sought this explanation in his personal history, particularly the fact one of his estranged children is trans, but since purchasing Twitter - which has become a far right propaganda machine with a sideline in news aggregation - Musk has grown increasingly enthusiastic for ideas that justify the obscenity of his wealth. For example, his support for the so-called philosophy of "long-termism". This Silicon Valley fad justifies actions taken today, such as private space programmes and the billions being thrown at AI plagiarism machines because, down the line, they will drive human evolution, spread life throughout the cosmos, and secure the future of our species for millions of years. From this standpoint, anything that arrests the glorious effort to such a gilded outcome is tantamount to denying trillions of people the chance of life. As such contemporary crises, such as climate change, joblessness, health inequalities, and so on pale against what might be. It's okay for AI and crypto mining to add to emissions because the dire consequences of global heating for billions of people in the global south is a price worth paying for Moon bases, Mars cities, and generation ships to the nearest stars - and those not yet born who are going to live there. This also means any tax on wealth, particularly tech bro wealth like Musk's, is a crime against the future.

Where his day-to-say opinions and politics are concerned, his taking up of openly racist culture war politics, the kinship he has with extreme right wing parties, and support for Trump's MAGA movement maps easily onto the long-termist garbage. They are the politics most appropriate to the unfettered pursuit of his class interests. They resonate with his being the embodiment of the greatest private accumulation of capital in history and, like many of his fellow billionaires, resent the claims others have on his fortune. This is where Musk's Department of Governmental Efficiency slots in, which in all essentials is a souped up version of the Tory approach to statecraft. I.e. Defund the state and allow it to decay so few (if any) make political demands of it. Though for Musk this is also about attacking the people he hates, such as public sector employees and the social security dependent, its consequences could force millions into the labour pool and tilt the balance of power even further in capital's favour. And there is the happy by-product of a defunded state not requiring as many taxes, which means more money for Musk's mooning.

This is the context for Musk's attack on billionaire philanthropy. If he represents capital that figuratively and actually wants to escape earthly entanglements, the likes of Scott, the Gates, and Warren Buffet are a reminder that capital can never cut itself loose. That it is embedded in a world on which it preys, and ultimately the only one that can sustain continued accumulation. Their philanthropy is relatively generous and ambitious because previous iterations of oligarchical politics has already gutted the capacity of the US state to support its people and regulate capital effectively. If Musk wants to depress the public power further, that members of his class are shelling out cash and salving their consciences is at cross purposes to the overt and absolute dominance of labour by capital that his project (and that of Trump's) is trying to accomplish. It's not about their largesse to the worthy poor making him look bad, it's more fundamental than that.

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Why the Migration to Bluesky Matters

Is this the end? Since the result of the US presidential elections, people leaving Twitter has reached a torrent and those signing up to Bluesky has exploded. 611m active users vs 15m shows the newcomer has a way to go before Elon Musk's plaything is eclipsed, but for many people - the very active users who are the core holding Twitter together - their defection has a disproportionate disaggregating effect. Not unlike those so-called "hero voters", the defectors from the Tories to Labour, that got Morgan McSweeney and friends excited. And if all the interesting content creators are migrating, their following will take wing too.

It couldn't have happened to a nicer billionaire. When Musk took Twitter over, its descent into dysfunctionality was rapid as he ripped out the staff and the infrastructure that made it a viable platform for big business advertisers. Instead, Musk substituted them for the peppercorn income of opt-in subscriptions and AI photo enhancement adverts. A year later, it was clear which direction the site under his stewardship was heading, and now what was previously Twitter's dark underbelly is the side it always shows to the sun.

Some have argued that as far as Musk was concerned, the site has served its purpose. He levered it to hand himself a plum position directing the oligarchical shakedown of the United States, but to argue that this was why he acquired Twitter in the first place affords him too much credit. He tried pulling out of the purchase, and was only able to carry through with it after getting Gulf oil interests and sundry banks on board. One might assume they would like a return on their investment. You could say they have with the most openly ecocidal president ever elected due to take office, but the point is none of this was pre-ordained or part of a master game plan. Like all billionaires and their toys, Musk found a way to get Twitter to serve his class interests, and that's how it will be until forever, or to the time when the site winks out.

No one can be blamed for not wanting a part of this. Even more so seeing as the new terms of service means that in two days' time, all messages posted to Twitter will be tossed into the data-hungry maw of Grok - Musk's AI/fancy plagiarism effort. It looks like I'll be spending a bit more time at the new place. This has, of course, invited some whingeing and moaning about the abandonment of Twitter. Dan Hodges, who if I recall correctly, was the first British politics commentator to marry performative 'just asking questions' stupidity with deep cynicism on the site, chides "the left" on leaving a platform it deemed influential on the outcome of the US election. And then we have Nick Tyrone who reckons the left is ceding Twitter to the right, thereby setting up the conditions for further defeats.

This is to not understand how Twitter is, or rather was, used. For Britain, like for many countries, its appeal was never generalised in relative terms as per Facebook but grew up catering for already connected communities of interest. It was, and for the moment remains essential infrastructure for how politics is done, for communicating lines to take, information exchange, and the breaking of news stories. With the Graun's announcement that it's downgrading its presence, that's the first sign this ecosystem is under pressure. As it and others begin their drift from Twitter to Bluesky, these channels of networked communication will have to spread across and keep a foot on both platforms. In other words, Musk's devastation of Twitter and the corresponding reaction has meant he's made a direct competitor for his site viable and one that can only become increasingly essential to pay attention to as British politics sets more of its shop up there. The "staying and fighting" perspective is therefore obsolete. This is not like the left and the Labour Party, it's a shift in the digital architecture of how politics is done. If you want to carry on getting attention in the attention economy, staying on Twitter only won't cut the mustard from this moment on.

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The Multiplicities of Infinity Gate

Since Murray Leinster's Sidewise in Time, alternative worlds and speculative history have proven a popular staple in science fiction. It even occasionally crosses over into the mainstream, with 1998's Sliding Doors and the late Paul Auster's 4 3 2 1 being popular examples. With this ubiquity of alt-history shows and thousands of YouTube channels exploring what if? scenarios, in the last 15 years, the diminishing band of commercially successful SF authors have mined this sub-genre seam. Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter's Long Earth sequence sees the action stretch across hundreds of thousands of parallel (and mostly empty) Earths. Adrian Tchaikovsky's The Doors of Eden sees multiple alien Earths, whose divergence is based on branches of the evolutionary tree playing out, collide amidst a multiverse-shattering threat and an inconvenient fascistic billionaire. Into this trend of dizzying parallelism comes MR Carey's Infinity Gate.

The first of a diptych that sits between Baxter and Tchaikovsky, and with a passing resemblance to Harry Turtledove's Crosstime Traffic books, the setting is the Pandominion, an empire comprising tens of thousands of Earths. The citizens of this empire are "selves", the generic term for all its sentient inhabitants regardless of their biological lineage (in these timelines, pretty much every mammalian species had a stab at filling the niche occupied by humans). The Pandominion is also a post-scarcity civilisation, having the inexhaustible resources of infinite Earths to draw on. But historical materialist friends of SF will be interested to note this doesn't mean the Pandominion is a classless society. The traffic between the Earths is monitored and controlled by a Moon-sized AI, and this in turn is employed by a capricious bureaucracy. This society observes the formal trappings of liberal democracy, but the reader is left in no doubt where the power lies. The bureaucracy also controls the Cielo, the Pandominion's force of enhanced and power-armoured super soldiers backed by a supply of inexhaustible and impressively destructive armaments. Yet the empire doesn't go in for conquering worlds - it appears every member has been admitted by consent. They exist, like all militaries, to secure the power of the ruling class and as insurance against external threat. Pandominion explorers have discovered around 17,000 scoured worlds. These are formerly habitable realities that, approximately 500 years before the discovery of step technology, were subject to a cataclysm that wiped out all life down to the microbial level. The speculation is this was the outcome of an unimaginably devastating war between realities, and it's part of Cielo training to give new recruits a tour of these tombstone worlds.

But all is not well in the Pandominion's extensive garden. Stumbling on a mining operation by an AI, a stupid incident in which a group of scientists and a small detachment of soldiers are killed sees the bureaucracy overreact and in it goes mob handed. Except the AIs, which are dubbed by their organic enemies as the Ansurrection, are no push overs and are more than capable of meeting and beating the pride of the Pandominion. There is war across hundreds of Earths, and both sides are in a race to build the mega weapons to defeat the others. Could a new scouring being imminent?

So much for the background. The story follows three characters. The first, Hadiz Tambuwal, is a scientist living on a billionaire-funded campus near Lagos. Her world is much like ours, except more polluted and exhausted of resources. Environmental catastrophe is compounded by swarms of earthquakes, and civilisation falls apart amid the poison and the devastation. She's left alone with a life time's food supply, and only an artificial intelligence experiment for company. With nothing else to do she carries on her research, and stumbles on the ability to step into alternate Earths. Finding the first pleasant but empty of civilisation, she mocks up drones and is able to initiate experiments where they step into hundreds of worlds per sortie, looking for any with signs of sentient life.

This is where we're introduced to Essien Nkanika. He's from a Lagos not dissimilar to our own, and has lived right at the bottom of the pile. He's been a slave, a scavenger at the city dump, and as we find him, a sex worker who prowls the bars down town. His experience has made him amoral and utterly ruthless. One night he encounters Hadiz, and they go back to her place in the docklands. Gradually he's inducted into the mysteries of stepping and quickly realises this could be the making of his fortune. If only Hadiz could be disposed of. Unbeknownst to both, their trips between worlds were noticed by the Pandominion and a small unit of Cielo are dispatched to meet them.

The final character is Topaz Tourmaline FiveHills, or Paz to her friends. She lives on Ut, and is a self whose species climbed the sentience tree from rabbits. She has floppy ears and powerful hind legs that enable her kind to run faster than practically any other Pandominion lineage. Also, though she's 19 she is officially designated as a child in her culture until she turns 30. Whether that's a comment on kidulthood and adulting is up to the reader's judgement. The war with the Ansurrection is raging, but Ut seems far away from the fighting. And besides, Paz has just made friends with the new girl in her class. Dulcie Standfast Coronal is, like her, a bit socially awkward and her AI familiar (not dissimilar to the demons in Pullman's His Dark Materials) doesn't appear to have the same functions as everyone else's. With reports of selves being kidnapped by the Ansurrection, might there be something fishy going on?

Spoilers below.

Carey has done an excellent job of producing a pacey, compelling, and interesting narrative with well-rounded characters and consistent plotting. Among its immediate peers in alternative history, it matches Tchaikovsky's Eden and avoids the aimless meandering of Pratchett/Baxter. In verve, the balance of action, and execution it's closer to Peter F Hamilton's space opera, the Salvation trilogy. For a thick book, there's no fat, but neither is there one improbable scrape followed by another. Like the Hamilton its tone is borderline young adult. The swearing, gore, and infrequent but functional sex scenes just about edge it out but there is a cartoon quality to proceedings. Less Hanna-Barbera unlike some) and more anime, or comic strip. Which isn't surprising considering Carey's pedigree. Over-the-top weaponry, especially the machines fielded by the Ansurrection used to butcher the Pandominion's forces lend itself to such an imaginary, but what cements it are the vestigial animal qualities of the selves. In addition to rabbits, Infinity Gate features characters whose species evolved from cats, dogs, hedgehogs, reptiles, bears, birds. I've probably missed a few. If that sounds like The Get Along Gang with guns, attitude, and timeline-hopping technology, you're not far off. A rabbit girl and adorable AI familiar plus power armoured cats wouldn't hurt marketing a film or streaming adaptation to a mass, teen-adjacent audience.

More interesting is the concern for multiplicity and a plea for difference. For all the diversity of selves in the Pandominion, the bureaucracy and the Cielo hold it together in a disciplined unity to keep the polity and, with it, the class power of their worlds intact. There are distinctions made by selves between those who matter - the empire's worlds and its citizens - and those who don't: the worlds, and therefore the civilisations that exist outside of it. They effectively do not exist, a point reinforced by the conditioning/brutalisation of the Cielo's new recruits. There is also a strong distinction between organic and artificial intelligence. The AI helpmeets used on Ut, and the huge computer that enables cross-time traffic are frequently likened to slaves, and there is some discussion of the ethics of stunting machine intelligences at a service level. AI in this culture is a tool with strictly circumscribed parameters. Despite the cybernetic enhancements enjoyed by Pandominion citizens this hard distinction remains in play. This prejudice frames their antipathy to the Ansurrection. AI isn't alive, it is an automaton. They are a form of non-existence that threatens the Pandominion with death, and has to be destroyed.

Through the point of view of Cammy, we learn the Ansurrection is alive as well. But different. They are fractal life forms, and multiplicity is at the core of their being. There are trillions of intelligences in their civilisation, but their individuality is not discreet. They combine, disassociate, copy, and flit between machine bodies. Their life is so different that they have a hard time believing the Pandominion is alive, let alone intelligent. Because selves are biologically discrete and "alone", the Ansurrection cannot fathom what they are - albeit their attacks on its worlds has been enough to designate them a nuisance. Hence the abductions and the infiltration of agents into Pandominion society. The AIs have got no conception of sociality. They are blind to biological multiplicity and brush it aside. The Ansurrection are indifferent to it as they grind up and strip mine worlds. Cammy then becomes Infinity Gate's most important character. Paz and Hadiz are comfortable with the hybridity she embodies, while for the Pandominion she is a target for capture and study.

Valorising multiplicity and difference is the zeitgeist of contemporary SF. It's deeper than mainly white, mainly Anglo-American authors peppering their narratives with queer female protagonists of colour. In Tchaikovsky's Doors of Eden, the solution to the coming death of the multiverse is not to try and save one at the expense of the others - the solution favoured by his fascist, white supremacist baddie - but allowing all the parallel Earths to bleed into one another. Only by embracing and reckoning with difference can we be saved. In Hamilton's Salvation, it's the military defeat of a hive mind monoculture trying to assimilate the galaxy to its religion. Their defeat not only saves humanity, but frees the scores of species they had interred to meet their God at the end of time (very similar to his Commonwealth novels, albeit those aliens, another hive mind monoculture, want to destroy everything else). It's not that variety and multiplicity is simply good, it is life. Therefore, without reading the sequel, Echo of Worlds, we can suppose that the antagonism between Pandominion and Ansurrection is heading one way. This might involve shedding their present forms (indeed, the narration is clear we're following the Pandominion's final days), but integration rather than annihilation is where we'll end up. The embracing of difference, a liberation of the postmodern sublime and the junking of their limiting oneness - or the rhizome and not the tree - waits at the end of Carey's many worlds.

Infinity Gate is not a deep book, but it is typical of the front rank of commercial SF in the 2020s. It is modish while escaping unoriginality, thrilling without being trashy, and cartoonish without the cringe.

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The Bourgeois Politics of AI

Nice to know how, during a quiet political period, Rishi Sunak prioritised interviewing Elon Musk at this week's Artificial Intelligence safety summit. Dubbing it Rishi Sunak X Elon Musk as if the Prime Minister's a veteran DJ/Producer sprinkling career magic on a talented new face, there wasn't much of substance said during their 50 minute conversation. Except Sunak got to show off his superficial knowledge of "tech", undoubtedly to position himself as a future silicon valley/roundabout angel investor after the curtain has fallen.

As inexperienced an interviewer as he is a politician, Sunak's gushing indulgence of Musk allowed him to go full hype with the potentials of AI. The throttler of Twitter talked about the exponential development of the technology, estimating its capacity grows between five/ten-fold per year. We don't really need to worry too much about economic impacts because the time will come when no one needs a job. The productivity and automation AI promises means we can look forward to a pampered future with our needs met through a 'universal high income'. Technology will be the great leveller and an age of abundance beckons. "Read Iain Banks!" enthused Musk, showing absolutely no awareness of the political edge that suffuses the Culture novels.

This techtopianism was too much for Sunak, who has spent nearly four years clamping down on any sign of political hope. At the risk of challenging his future boss/client he gently pushed back saying work is important because it's the source of people's drives. AI should "assist" people at work, not replace it. This philosophy, of course, has nothing to do with senses of self-fulfilment. Like all Tory governments the primary concern is the preservation of the wage relation, hence their hostility to four-day week experiments and anything that loosens the tie between income and employment, and with it the dependence of the worker on their boss. Not that Musk takes his own communism-lite vision mongering seriously. A look at labour practices in the firms he's owned over the years is enough to tell you that.

The only other couple of nuggets worth commenting on was Musk's attempted justification of introducing charges for using X/Twitter. Because generative AI makes faking identities or putting out false information much easier, charging users a nominal fee of around $1/year would get around this authentication problem because no bot farm would dole out anything to run hundreds of thousands or millions of fake accounts. If the initial pilot in the Philippines and New Zealand is rolled out globally, surely this would sound the death-knell of the platform for many of its users (see you on Bluesky). The second was safety and regulation. Musk is a proponent of 'longtermism', the fad interior decor many silicon valley moguls have adopted for their mind palaces. It worries about possible future apocalypses, such as Terminator-style rogue AI scenarios. Though, tellingly, not environmental crises and climate collapse. And so he praised efforts at regulating AI, including congratulating Sunak on making sure China was present at his summit. He noted they had signed the official communique and were very interested in safety - a welcome alternative to the reflex Sinophobia fast becoming de rigeur in bourgeois circles.

All told, what was the point of the summit? Was it just an effort by Sunak to bask in reflected glory, rub shoulders with people even richer than him and set him up for a Nick Clegg-style exit? That's too simple an explanation. As Musk rightly noted, London is second only to Silicon Valley as a centre of AI development. True, but this is hardly an "indigenous" development seeing how Deep Mind - a world leader - was acquired by Google a decade ago. But, as far as British statecraft and capital are concerned, there are good reasons to keep their seats at AI's top table with the US and China. As noted here and elsewhere many times, the management of the UK's decline as a world power has seen it assume as close an alliance with the US as possible in a sort of elder statesman and, occasionally, backseat driver role. This is the imbibed foreign policy common sense as far as both parties of government go. The development of AI is another opportunity to enmesh those interests more closely and ensure the Americans don't have a complete monopoly on AI-enabled military hardware and intelligence technologies. The second is the City. The automation of trades and the increasingly complex algorithms and modelling that goes with them has and remains a key driver of IT innovation. If the City is to remain the global hub of commercial and finance capital it has a clear interest in keeping abreast of, driving, and integrating the development of generative AI. Something Sunak is keenly aware of and helps explains why he takes this seriously. He is from that world, after all.

For all the hype around AI, we have to temper the official optimism with more earthy realities. Musk's flights of fancy are a crude progressivism: AI offers the possibility of a life of ease, which means everything in the meantime can be justified with that end in mind. Sunak's aversion to this is more honest in the sense that positing AI as a workplace "co-pilot" asserts its unambiguous articulation with existing patterns of class power and exploitation. Our position is the opposite, separating out the cover for capital the utopian impulse provides and marrying it resolutely to social critique. All previous machinery have reconfigured and reinforced exploitation, but it's the opportunities in the here and now AI and further automation offers that we should grasp. First, as an internal critique of the narrow purposes of accumulation to which it will be put, but also as escape. I.e. A forceful assertion of our politics of work and what it should look like. The better tomorrow won't come with the Sunaks, the Musks, and the AI they're getting excited about. Struggle is our only means of deliverance.

Why India is on the Moon

Congratulations to the Indian Space Research Organisation. In managing a successful soft landing at the Moon's south pole, they have won the distinction of ensuring India is the fourth nation ever to land successfully and the first in this tricky region of Earth's satellite. The Chandrayaan-3 probe and its rover are now poised to return a wealth of scientific data about the pole, which holds significant quantities of water ice and other minerals and chemicals that have been of interest to all the space-faring powers for some time. And for those of us who overdosed on too much science fiction and tech optimism, it's another step toward making humans an interplanetary species.

Let's not get too dewy eyed though. Space exploration, which should be for the benefit of all, most emphatically is not. As many a critique of space programmes have pointed out, it's obscene for resources to be expended on mucking about in the heavens when there are so many pressing problems on the Earth. This is especially so in India's case. According to the World Bank, most recent figures (2017) found between 10.4% and 13.6% of the population were in "extreme poverty" (i.e. subsisting on less than $1.90/day). A decline on the rates saw in 2011, but by no means keeping pace with the explosion in GDP. Undoubtedly, over the coming days a Tory MP will appear to question UK state aid to India, which was around £2.3bn between 2016 and 2021. But the point remains, with such levels of poverty in India, which amounts to well over 100 million people, how can a space programme be justified?

It can't in moral terms, but then realpolitik and capitalism don't owe much to morality. As the former president of India, Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam put it in his autobiography, "Very many individuals with myopic vision questioned the relevance of space activities in a newly independent nation which was finding it difficult to feed its population. But neither Prime Minister Nehru nor Prof. Sarabhai had any ambiguity of purpose. Their vision was very clear: if Indians were to play a meaningful role in the community of nations, they must be second to none in the application of advanced technologies to their real-life problems."

Following the withdrawal of Britain and partition in 1947, for decades the Indian ruling class were dedicated to a project of national independence. Loosely modelled on the Soviet Union, albeit with liberal democratic characteristics, India followed the path of many industrialising nations. Import tariffs, national infrastructure projects, and efforts at making the country less dependent on global markets dominated by the United States and the West. Under pressure from competition and border conflicts with Pakistan and China, from the early 1960s the Indian government encouraged space research that complemented its rocketry and nuclear weapons programmes, with its first bomb tested in the mid 1970s and the achievement of a range of guided surface-to-surface ballistic missiles by the late 00s. India's announcement about its rocket capabilities coincided in 2008 with Chandrayaan-1's orbit of the Moon, which confirmed the presence of water at the south pole. The development of the space programme after independence was relatively far sighted. Becoming a player in advanced aerospace technologies carved a niche out of an increasingly important sector, especially with the telecommunications revolutions of the late 1970s onwards. Added to that with its position close to the equator India is a sensible location for space launches for third party powers and telecommunications businesses. Decades of investment has produced a world class launch capability and technology that can compete with China, Russia, Europe, and the US. And behind that is the implied strength of Indian arms.

For a coming superpower, which India surely is, sitting out the new space race is not an option. With the US and China eyeing Moon bases, international competition over milestone achievements is a signifier for Indian capability in the space exploration market. As argued before, like military spending monies for space programmes is wasteful but endemic to a class system that puts class relations before the conventional understanding of economic development. But with so many states in the process of building the infrastructure for regular human spaceflight and the colonisation of the Moon, it makes sense for India and the commercial entities spun out of its space programme to be there to profit from what comes decades down the line. Assuming we don't blow ourselves up/drown in rising seas/etc. and there is no significant break with capitalism, it's reasonable to forecast Moon, Venus, and Mars colonies and stations by the end of the century. India's position and, most importantly, the power and wealth of its ruling class would benefit handsomely from playing this pioneering role.

Fossil Fools

100 new gas and oil drilling licences. Just as southern Europe has baked under temperatures not seen for thousands of years. In the world according to the Tory imaginary, if climate change and global heating are a thing it means very little for these chilly, rainy isles. Actually, it might makes things a touch more pleasant. And besides, how can our carbon emissions matter when big pollutors like China, the United States, and others are throwing gigatons of the stuff into the atmosphere? Managing a straight face early on Monday, Rishi Sunak said more oil and gas exploration in the North Sea is consistent with the UK's commitment to Net Zero. Borrowing arguments from Liz Truss's leadership campaign, more fossil fuels means lower energy bills here and more energy security. No more dependence on nasty despots. And British oil and gas extraction is nicer because we save on those emissions from having to import from far flung destinations. Lastly, Sunak re-announced that £20bn was getting thrown at carbon capture and storage technologies.

Quite apart from the idiocy of explicitly associating the Tory party with the vast scale of social murder, ecocide, and destruction climate breakdown is starting to wreak, going hard on fossil fuel extraction makes little sense at first glance. Sunak's announcement wouldn't do the share prices of the two UK-based oil giants much harm as per tradition, but there doesn't seem to be much in this for anyone. After 40 years of sucking it up from under the sea bed, chances of finding billions more barrels of oil and cubic metres of gas are vanishingly slight. Gas production is at the level last seen in the mid-1980s and you'd have to go back to the late 70s to see oil pumping at a rate this low. With very little left, is is far more costly to extract than throwing up wind turbines and plastering roofs with solar panels. As the UK has an (undeserved) reputation for being a global leader on environmental matters, what is to be gained from frittering away this useful bit of soft power? Sadly, it aids the PR machines of BP and Shell as they go about the world prospecting away. If the UK thinks its okay to start drilling again, then what's to stop countries who discover fresh oil and gas reserves from exploiting them - with the handy assistance of the aforementioned companies, of course. It weakens the global push and moral force against fossil fuels and therefore emissions, and that suits the oil giants just fine.

This is where carbon capture and storage comes in. As a technology it is unproven. Doling research monies out to CCS is not bad in and of itself. As part of a decarbonisation effort it is worth thinking about what difference it can make to current CO2 levels, but it absolutely should not be PR for yet more exploration and exploitation in the manner Sunak employed it today. But that is exactly what the technology has been so far - political technology with no tangible results, apart greenwashing oil companies' business-as-usual.

As per the habits of the Tories, it's the politics that are driving the economics. After their motorists' manifesto, they're exploiting an opportunity Labour gifted them. After back-pedalling on the green new deal, Keir Starmer panicked and said Labour would honour existing exploration licences once it entered government. Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth. Because of cowardice, ineptitude, and the unwillingness/inability to field a political argument the Tories have sprung a political trap on Starmer and now, if he sticks to his promise, "green" Labour could oversee a greater expansion of North Sea drilling than anything seen during the Tory years. And, undoubtedly, once in opposition the Conservatives will make great hay of Labour missing its decarbonisation targets. Some nice point scoring for Sunak there, but as part of the mass appeal the Tories are hoping promises about energy security and lower bills (which won't be the consequence of more North Sea drilling) gives them another wedge to drive between Labour and its support.

Rest assured, tit's not going to work. After the Uxbridge by-election, the Tories think going heavy on cars, oil, and rubbishing what a former leader dubbed "the green crap" will see their electoral parts-per-million climb faster than atmospheric carbon. They are very badly mistaken. The overwhelming message taken by millions of people from their crazed doubling down on fossil fuels is that the Tories don't care about the planet, that they're reckless or in denial, and they represent an existential threat to our civilisation. Not exactly the perception a party wanting to win a general election should be inviting.

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Tony Blair Vs the NHS

It's the 75th birthday of the NHS, so what better time for another rare intervention from Tony Blair. This morning his institute published a paper about the future of the NHS. In line with current Labour thinking that what public services need is reform, not funds (which, in turn, are informed by Tony Blair Thought of two decades ago), the report offers a number of technical and seemingly technical fixes to improve the health service. But the overall thrust is clear: bureaucratic centralisation is the chief opponent of efficient delivery, not lack of cash.

It shouldn't need saying that this corner of the internet rarely receives Blair's missives with open arms, but it would be churlish to file the report in the desktop recycling bin just because of its provenance. The report, authored by a health policy wonk and an academic, does make some good points. Yes, there does need to be an injection of capital so the NHS can fully utilise new technologies. Who would be against that? The report says this can be utilised to cut waste and introduce less labour intensive treatment. There should be local autonomy for what are termed 'integrated care systems' to treat and improve health outcomes in their areas, backed by the stability of multi-year budgets and incentives to innovate - which include keeping and reinvesting any savings made. A digitised 'Personal Health Account' - a souped-up NHS app enabling access to services and putting patients in charge of their own health data, which can be linked to secondary apps and wearable technology, would revolutionise and personalise our relationship to the NHS. Rolling health services out from GP surgeries and hospitals, which would reduce demand on those services through an expansion of provision is another floated suggestion. And making more use of personal-use genomic medicines, making sequencing available on a mass scale and integrating genetic susceptibilities it into one's personal data is another ambitious goal. If we absent social relationships for a moment, this is what a 21st century health service should look like.

But social relations aren't about to go away, and how the report frames this technologically enabled vision raises a lot of political questions. Firstly, the report says it wants to move the NHS away from a patch-them-up-and-let-them-go model of treatment to one more reflective of complex health needs. This is nothing new. In fact, the first NHS reorganisation in the mid-1970s was premised exactly on these terms. Of moving from treating disease to addressing the long-term health problems of a population that was living longer. Indeed, that is the main business of the NHS today. Therefore, the report's argument that we "must move from a health-care model set up to treat episodic sickness to one that prioritises continuously improving individual and population health" is an extension of what the NHS already does in part to the whole. A useful straw man if you want to exaggerate the case for reform though.

Then there are the rocket boosters these proposals have put under the so-called patient choice agenda. This is not an innocent idea of simply allowing patients more choice in their treatment, but was under Thatcher, Major, and Blair designed to introduce and bed down marketised relationships between different parts of the NHS. In the New Labour years, the idea was to allow patients complete choice of where they were treated. NHS organisations would compete with each other for patients, allegedly driving up standards and increasing efficiency. This was swept away by the Tories in 2012 for thoroughgoing marketisation, semi-privatisation, and outright scamming in which "any willing provider" was in with a shout of scooping up NHS money. What happened over Covid procurement and the missing billions was this writ large. The Blair Institute are proposing is something a bit more subtle. Through the use of personal health technologies, they want to bed down principles of individual responsibility for health - which can be monitored via the app. This builds on the individualist (and individuating) thrust of public health strategies in the Blair years, and one that attempts to evacuate politics from health altogether. I.e. You have the power to choose healthy outcomes informed by constantly updated metrics, and therefore what happens to you is (largely) in your hands. It's consistent with the modes of governance Blair enforced across the public sector, and one that proved (politically) effective quite recently. If you get ill, it's going to either be a case of 'pathogenic life factors' or bad luck. Never air quality, food quality, environmental despoliation, unhealthy work practices.

And then we have the private provider argument, because of course we do. There's the useless argument about "spare capacity" in private health that gets mentioned every five minutes by Wes Streeting. As an aside, Streeting often defends this saying he wants the NHS to get to the place where it can out-compete the private sector. Yeah, right. I'm sure the private health interests funding his operation do so because they want to be put out of business. The Blair Institute goes there, but they flag up more opportunities for private sector involvement. Remember the localised integrated care systems? "Freedom" of ICS chiefs would inevitably mean contracting in for-profit providers to meet targets, just as they did 20 years ago. Indeed, these organisations should "empower" patients to make "informed choices" about choosing between GPs and "secondary providers". On the dispersal of health services, the report is explicit that "high-volume, low complexity" services should routinely be hived off to "multiple providers". Again, it's all about patient choice. The patient data revolution the report envisages allows for more public private partnerships, and larger market for data add-ons to the key NHS app as well as "innovation". Undoubtedly encouraged by a generous system of state grants and inducements.

This, again, carries on where Blair left off in 2007. While there were plenty of New Labour true believers in marketised policies as drivers of best outcomes (the Tories, despite their well earned 'stupid party' monicker, are never daft enough to really believe this twaddle), the politics of this made sense because NHS outsourcing, PPPs, and Private Finance Initiatives tied - at least for a while - sections of British capital to what you might call the Blair Rich Project. By pouring state money into private pockets, this was one means by which New Labour was able to cultivate patronage and crony networks that helped ensure, for a brief window, that it was the favoured party of (most of) capital. It's entirely a matter of coincidence that ex-health ministers and certain MPs later enjoyed handsome consultancies and board positions advising private health and outsourcing giants. It didn't last, and when Labour was dumped out of office the Tories ramped up the openings through the total marketisation of the NHS. Here, the Blair Institute's programme for change is more than just about the future of the NHS. It is directly advising the incoming Labour government about how to use NHS reform to win over a section of British business, with the obvious consequence of diluting the popular pressures that will bear down on the party after such a long period of Tory rule.

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Patients and Profits

In his famous address to the Albanian people, Enver Hoxha said "This year will be harder than last year. However, it will be easier than next year." Stirring words and ones Keir Starmer might have quoted while discussing the recurring winter crises in his much-trailed NHS speech earlier on Monday. As health is one of his "five missions", what was said here is almost guaranteed to go into Labour's next manifesto.

Starmer spoke about the scourge of health inequalities and the reversal of life expectancy under the Tories. He identified the "three big killers" and what Labour wants to do about them: reduce cardiovascular disease by a quarter, diagnose 75% of cancers while they're still stage one, and drive down the incidence of suicide among younger people. Also repeated was what he called the biggest expansion of NHS training in the organisation's history, funded by the removal of the non dom tax status. And the latest idea got an airing: the sharing of waiting lists so patients could opt to be treated at hospitals with shorter waiting lists. This would be underpinned by a more collaborative culture across the NHS, which was coming into being before Matt Hancock kyboshed it. This might help manage he backlog crisis around the edges, but is hardly a major policy announcement.

Indeed, that was not the point of the speech. Starmer wanted to hammer home the message that what the NHS needs more than money is reform. He identified the "three shifts" that would structure the remodelling of the NHS. The first would be moving care out of hospitals and into the community. What he called the 'neighbourhood health service'. This would entail improving GP access and make it more sustainable. This means moving away from the practice model and its gradual replacement by salaried GPs who would be deployed to serve all communities. In other words, a possible end to the GP shortages that particularly afflict inner city working class areas. Appointments would be "modernised" with an end to the 8am rush, and a pledge to bring back the family doctor. Clearing hospital backlogs by integrating health and social care would be a priority with joined up care in the community and a commitment to reverse the crisis in the care industry with a foundational fair pay agreement.

The second shift is movement away from treating sickness to prevention. This is a return to one of the objectives of the New Labour years with its keen emphasis on public health strategies. Starmer argued this had cost, or rather savings implications by taking weight off the NHS as well as heading problems off at the pass. He promised a revolution in mental health treatment, which would include 8,500 new community-based mental health professionals, dedicated support in schools, and four week maximum wait guarantee. The other new announcement, which was the placing of vaping, junk food, sugary snack advertising after the watershed and banning their marketing at children was lumped in here.

The third shift was technology, and specifically the rolling out of a digital service on a par with all the other digital services we take for granted. He condemned the wasted opportunity of the NHS Covid app and suggested he would like to see similar apps developed further to transform our relation to the NHS. Looking forward to using them to book appointments and making appropriate self-referrals, while ensuring patients had control over their data. This would enable us to make better choices and access faster care. He also spoke breathlessly of using Artificial Intelligence for the scanning of results, which are quicker and more accurate than doctors sifting through x-rays by hand. He wanted an agile NHS, one that had incentives to innovate but greater planning about the introduction of technologies.

In all, taken at face value this is the sort of thing you might expect a would-be Labour Prime Minister to be saying about the NHS. The main thing is a public service that works, and one crucial to Starmer's programme of repairing the popular legitimacy of the state. But there were a couple of questions for which there were no satisfactory answers. One got aired four or five times by reporters: what about the money? We know the Tories' refusal to pay the market rate for medical staff has the happy consequence of pushing the NHS toward becoming residualised. Strikes disrupt the service, people leave, everything gets worse and more opt for private treatment, leaving the queues and the exhausted, demoralised staff to those who are unable to pay. A boon for private health, certainly. Starmer said very little about pay, except for an approving aside on the New Labour years and how much nurses pay improved then. It's not that the Labour leader, Wes Streeting and the rest don't know pay need addressing, it's that they prefer a politically easy life. By being non-committal, the implacable Tory press can't use whatever figure to tie Labour up in knots over its spending plans and add to the narrative that the NHS is an unfillable money pit. Instead, that can is kicked down the road nearer to the election and all we hear between now and then are the new targets, the sexy technologies, and the overall direction of change.

The second issue is privatisation, which didn't get an airing today (apart from a vague gesture toward partnerships). That probably has something to do with how ill-received it was last time. And the small matter that using private providers to treat NHS patients is not really spare capacity as such. As is well known the likes of Streeting have received plenty of cash from for-profit health interests, but that doesn't mean the continued residualisation of the NHS is on the cards. During the Blair and Brown years, Labour became the preferred party of some sections of British capital because parts of the state were put out to tender and profits made from delivering government contracts. In line with Starmer's technocratic bent, these firms, in all likelihood, will be invited, or "partnered" into a reformed NHS providing some of the services the ambitious renovation demands. All under the likely guise of offering their "expertise". There is more than one way to skin a cat, and there is more than one way of making sure state money ends up in private coffers. Outright privatisation won't happen, but a new set of contracting-out relationships that provide firms guaranteed incomes and guaranteed profits will.

In all, Starmer will be happy with the reception his speech received. It is Labour-enough sounding to settle activist jitters of those worried his moves to the right include abandoning traditional Labour ground. It will have frustrated the Tories and their press because there are few angles from which this can be attacked from the right. Reading between the lines health unions can cut through the Starmerist cypher and glimpse the prospect of better pay deals, an end to the recruitment crisis, and less pressure, and those ever-so-philanthropic private health interests can see where they fit into the picture.

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When Imagination Fails

There are things that annoy me about Greg Bear's Eon.

From the point of view of 1985, the year it was published, Eon has some interesting and imaginative leaps. A hollowed out asteroid from an alternate human future turning up in Earth orbit. The thinking about the architecture of its interior and how cities might make the best use of lower gravity and a cylindrical-shaped environment. A chamber that, thanks to some physics jiggery-pokery, stretches into infinity. How a singularity might be tamed, worked, and used for transportation. The use of fancy divining rods that find the location of and can sink wells into other universes along "The Way". The use of holographics for interior decoration, body adornment, and communication (speech 1,300 years hence has largely been replaced by ... emojis). The transcendence of the basic human form and the option to take on any physical shape one wishes. The storage of personalities and their depositing in the memory banks of their home, Axis City. A leap into entirely post-human reproduction where personalities are fashioned by "parents" in the digital environment and upon maturation can acquire physical bodies. And more mind-boggingly weird physics where The Way existed prior to its moment of creation.

Of Eon, all of this and more won it plaudits then and since for spinning out so many ideas and concepts that could be hinges on which to hang more limited science fiction novels. Some of these tropes have been done to death since, others have attracted less attention. But what interests me about Eon are not the flights of fancy but Bear's failures of imagination.

What might the society of the far future look like? Despite being a mature post-human civilisation capable of building its own pocket universe, getting beyond a presidential republic resembling a mix of the US system sitting atop a Belgian/Netherlands-style consociational system is not within the wit of our descendents. And that means capitalism is in the mix, too. This society can master the mysteries of physical laws and manipulate them as they see fit, but wage labour persists and Axis City squats on The Way in a manner akin to the City of London. It is a regulator of cross-gate traffic, managing the commerce that flits across The Way and serves buyers and sellers in different dimensions - for which it receives commissions to sustain itself. All this infinite land with infinite possibilities, and the only reality Bear could conceive for advanced humans is a society immediately familiar to Adam Smith.

The character of politics of the future are, if anything, even worse. There are plenty of expository moments as per hard SF custom and practice, and we get glimpses about how social problems are dealt with. Crime is treated as a personality disorder. Criminals and deviants are not treated with empathy or understanding, but become the objects of engineering and programming. The forms of social domination attendant in capitalist society exert a silent presence as problem people are categorised, individually pathologised, and altered to fit. Even more bizarrely we're led to believe people 1,300 years from now have stubborn affections for national identities that largely perished in the fires of nuclear war. Flashing flags in one's array of emoticons is apparently the done thing in post-human circles. And call it a daft in-joke or plain ignorance about how politics works, one of the main factions among Axis City's inhabitants are the Naderites. They tend toward the aesthetics and style of the early 21st century - when the nuclear bombs fell - and with varying degrees of commitment eschew the post-human accoutrements of their contemporaries. Their name derives from US consumer champion, environmentalist, and some time presidential candidate Ralph Nader. We're led to believe his activism and example became the basis of a post-war political creed that was suspicious of technology and promoted a Bill and Ted-style be excellent to each other ethic. This is utterly nonsensical, betrays zero materialist understanding of how even liberal democratic politics works, but is consistent with the dismal politics of Bear's setting. In his capitalist utopia, the only real politics there's room for are around consumption, consumer rights, and consumer identities.

Eon is an interesting read, and still worthwhile almost 40 years after publication. The passage of time might have dimmed the hard science imaginary shown of here. But what truly dates it is Bear's failure to show any respect for, let alone awareness of the realities described, explained, and imagined by the social and political sciences.

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Artificial Intelligence Is Not Artificial

Taking an impromptu break from writing, in case you hadn't noticed. Here is a short and accessible discussion on the class politics of artificial intelligence and the con job being perpetrated on us by the tech bros.

Still Room for Hope

Kim Stanley Robinson's latest foray into "cli-fi", the sub-genre of near-term science fiction has earned itself the plaudits. From the UK paperback edition we learn it was one of Barack Obama's favourite books of the year. Who'd have thunk a centrist pin up would endorse a thinly-veiled Marxian critique of capitalism in the age of climate breakdown, and one for that matter with Negrian characteristics? For sure, The Ministry For the Future is an important work, and it's testament to Robinson's skills as a writer that some pretty radical politics are presented as commonsensical solutions to this century's most pressing problem.

That said, while Ministry is a novel, it would be more accurate to describe it as a manifesto. The plot, such as it is, is thin. Beginning with an extreme heat event that kills 20 million Indians a few years hence, a chain of events unfurl in which the world undergoes a combination of ecological modernisation, geo-engineering to prevent ice cap melt, and social revolution. Mary Murphy as head of the Ministry for the Future, a UN agency established by the Paris Climate Accords to look after the interests of the not-yet-born, is the main viewpoint through which the story proceeds. And variously the action moves from meetings with central bankers and other assorted important people to those either on the sharp end of climate disasters or at the forefront of mitigation efforts. Peppered along the way are quick, accessible dives into science, economics, and social theory.

On top of its timeliness, Ministry interests for two reasons. There is its theory of social change. As a work of sociological imagining, Robinson describes the decades-long transition from neoliberal, extractive capitalism to something else. Mostly, governments and financial institutions are tools for stripping back capital's supremacy, and are forced by popular pressure and by what Hardt and Negri refer to as 'exodus'. I.e. People cooperating and forming their own circuits of social reproduction independently of capital. This is illustrated by the repatriation of data to individual users, requiring social media platforms to hand over fees if they want access to it as per current business models, cooperatisation of swathes of industry, and the emergence of tough regulatory regimes for international finance that ties capital down and to social obligations. At the heart of this project is the introduction of the Carbon coin, which is issued in its trillions to states and multinationals for keeping their fossil fuel reserves in the ground, and is awarded to anyone and everyone who draws carbon from the atmosphere, either by traditional means (tree planting) or employing capture technologies. Also of interest is the use Robinson imagines for block chain. It effectively provides a ledger for the carbon coin, so its transactional history can be tracked. What might have Orwellian implications in the context of an authoritarian state forms a system of open surveillance, which over times works to exclude all other forms of money that remains dark. Hence speculation and tax havens become a thing of the past, and eventually limits on maximum wealth are introduced. But none of this happens because of a light bulb moment. Violence via ecoterrorism plays its part by targeting polluters, such as executive members of fossil fuel firms, and Robinson writes of attacks against air liners and container ships using legacy fuels, and sabotage on coal-fired power stations. Each encourage the take up of greener alternatives, which in turn spurs innovation that renders fossil fuelled combustion engines obsolete and expensive. Throughout the transition, Robinson never indulges a year zero moment. There are protests and revolutions, but there is no clean sweep of the Leninist imaginary. Everything is messy, everything is a struggle.

In his critique, Francis Fukuyama - he of the end of history fame - argued that Robinson's projection is unrealistic. It's too optimistic because, when all is said and done, the right political decisions are always made. Yes, but this misconstrues the point of the book. As a fictionalised manifesto, Robinson is pointing us toward a future which will be difficult but is by no means bleak. It requires we draw on our collective talents and make a concerted effort as a species to undo the climate, environmental, and species extinction impacts of the last 300-400 years. In other words, by positing the best possible outcome of our mitigation efforts, what Robinson is demonstrating is how it is possible, that we can make a better future. It is well within our powers to achieve it. Mindful of Fredric Jameson's famous "it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism", Ministry - like much else of Robinson's science fiction, from his Mars Trilogy to his previous novel, Red Moon, the problem the end of capitalism is dealt with and more open, alternative futures are imagined. Here, by explicitly tying action on climate change to action on capitalist relations of production, Robinson is making the point that a sustainable society is not possible on the foundation of extractive, exploitative economics.

There is a lot to The Ministry of the Future, and it adds another weapon to our armoury. Dystopian fiction is exhausted, nihilistic, and ultimately conservative. This is its opposite. In the face of looming catastrophe, Robinson reminds us that there is still room for hope.

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A Marxist Analysis of Christmas

Or, to be more accurate, our friend ChatGPT's Marxist account of Christmas. Interestingly, it writes "please note that this is a theoretical exercise and the views expressed in this analysis do not necessarily reflect my own personal beliefs." Nce touch. The analysis is very bare bones, but it will do as Christmas Day stocking filler!

According to Marxist theory, Christmas is a cultural and economic phenomenon that is shaped by the underlying economic and social structures of a given society. In a capitalist society, these structures are characterized by the exploitation of the working class by the ruling class, which owns and controls the means of production. In this context, Christmas can be seen as a way for the ruling class to maintain its power and control over the working class by promoting consumerism and distracting people from the reality of their exploitation.

One way in which this occurs is through the creation of the "Christmas spirit," which is a culturally constructed idea that promotes feelings of goodwill and generosity. This spirit is often associated with the giving of gifts and the celebration of family and community. However, the emphasis on gift-giving serves to encourage consumerism and the buying of material goods, which benefits the ruling class by increasing their profits. In addition, the focus on family and community can serve to reinforce traditional gender roles and ideas of the nuclear family, which can serve to maintain the dominant social order.

Another aspect of the capitalist exploitation of Christmas is the way in which it is marketed and commercialized. The holiday is heavily promoted by businesses, which use it as an opportunity to sell their products and increase their profits. This often involves the use of advertising and media campaigns that create a sense of urgency and encourage people to buy more and spend more money. The holiday has also been appropriated by capitalist interests, with the image of Santa Claus being used to sell everything from toys to Coca-Cola.

In addition to promoting consumerism, the capitalist exploitation of Christmas can also have negative effects on workers. Many workers, particularly those in the retail and service sectors, are required to work long hours and weekends during the holiday season. This can lead to increased stress and exploitation, as employers take advantage of the increased demand for their products and services to extract more labor from their employees.

Furthermore, the emphasis on consumerism and material goods can create a false sense of happiness and fulfillment, leading people to believe that they can find happiness through the acquisition of material possessions. This can distract people from the real sources of their unhappiness, such as exploitation and social inequality, and prevent them from organizing and fighting against these conditions.

In contrast to the capitalist exploitation of Christmas, a Marxist perspective would argue that the holiday should be used as an opportunity to promote solidarity and resistance to exploitation. This could involve alternative gift-giving practices that prioritize the needs of the community over consumerism, as well as organizing efforts to improve the working conditions of those who are exploited during the holiday season.

In conclusion, a Marxist analysis of Christmas would view it as a cultural and economic phenomenon that is shaped by the underlying economic and social structures of a given society. In a capitalist society, the holiday is used to promote consumerism and distract people from the reality of their exploitation, leading to negative effects on workers and reinforcing the dominant social order. In contrast, a Marxist perspective would argue that the holiday should be used as an opportunity to promote solidarity and resistance to exploitation.

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An AI's Defence of Socialism

ChatGPT is the chatbot of the moment. Getting praise from across the tech spectrum for its conversational abilities, its article and essay writing abilities are starting to get newsrooms and academia nervous. Why employ staff writers when an AI can churn out fire-brigade-called-to-house stories? Why bother cramming for an assignment when the chatbot can write your essay for you? Having had a play with its essay writing function the work churned out isn't bad. Appropriate referencing and stylistic flair are not there yet, but surely it's only a matter of time before I can ask an AI to write a book in my style about whatever topic. Or that a computer could pen Marx's never completed volumes four, five, and six of Capital. That would be interesting.

I've generated three essays. Here's the first - a (sort of) rejoinder to CapX's defence of capitalism. You can play around with ChatGPT here.

Socialism is a political and economic ideology that aims to establish a more equal and fair society by redistributing wealth and resources more evenly among its members. It advocates for the collective ownership and control of the means of production, rather than their private ownership by individuals or corporations.

There are several reasons to defend socialism. First and foremost, it addresses the issue of economic inequality. In capitalist societies, wealth is highly concentrated in the hands of a few individuals and corporations, while the majority of people struggle to make ends meet. This unequal distribution of wealth leads to numerous social and economic problems, such as poverty, lack of access to education and healthcare, and political disenfranchisement. Socialism aims to reduce these problems by redistributing wealth and resources more evenly among all members of society, ensuring that everyone has access to the necessities of life.

Another reason to defend socialism is that it promotes economic security and stability. Under capitalism, economic booms and busts are a regular occurrence, with workers often bearing the brunt of the instability. Socialism, on the other hand, seeks to smooth out these ups and downs by emphasizing planning and cooperation over competition. This can lead to more stable and predictable economic conditions, which benefits both workers and businesses.

Socialism also promotes social cohesion and community. In capitalist societies, people are often isolated and individualistic, as they are primarily motivated by their own self-interest. Socialism, however, emphasizes the importance of community and collective well-being. This can lead to a more cohesive and supportive society, where people are more likely to help one another and work together for the common good.

Finally, socialism can be seen as a more democratic and participatory economic system. Under capitalism, the ownership and control of the means of production is concentrated in the hands of a few individuals and corporations, who wield a disproportionate amount of power and influence. Socialism, on the other hand, seeks to democratize the economy by giving workers and communities a greater say in how resources are allocated and used. This can lead to a more democratic and participatory society, where ordinary people have a greater voice in the decisions that affect their lives.

In conclusion, socialism is a political and economic ideology that offers a number of benefits over capitalism. It promotes greater economic equality, stability, social cohesion, and democracy, and is therefore a viable and worthwhile alternative to capitalism.

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