Shittopia

The Future of an Economy Turning Into Shit

What does the future of the economy look like? I want to tell you a little story, about bots, movie tickets, plumbing, and the point of life, to shed a little light on it.

By now, you’ve heard about the genocidal lunatic running amok on Twitter. No, not Trump. Tay, Microsoft’s chat bot.

Maybe you haven’t heard. It’s part of a much bigger plan. Microsoft’s new grand vision for world domination is bots everywhere…a bot on every screen…bots in every home….bots talking to other bots. What will these bots do? Satisfy your every whim. They’ll order your movie tickets, buy your groceries, read you books, and what not. Or so the thinking goes.

I know. Microsoft’s first attempt turned out to be a genocidal racist killer, so come on dude. But let’s pretend Bot-topia actually happens. That we are surrounded by bots, peering out at us helpfully from every orifice of our gleaming digital lives. “What would you like to do today?”, they ask eagerly, one after the next.

It sounds great, right? Let’s de-jargonize the dream. A personal assistant, an eager concierge, a robo butler for every man, woman, and child. What could be better than that? Digi-servants for the masses!

There’s just one tiny problem with all the above. And it’s not that bots are genocidal maniacs. Instead, it’s a metaphor for an economy going badly wrong.

Umair Takes His Kid Sister to the Movies

Not so long ago, my kid sis begged me to see a 3-D Hollywood CGI-laden blockbuster. Being an obedient big bro, I said: sure. What I didn’t know then was the economics of our little jaunt.

Pro Forma Invoice to Umair from Hollywood, Big Food, and Mega-Finance
Tickets to Cheesy Blockbuster You Walked Away Rolling Your Eyes From $50
Popcorn Greased With More Salt Than Satan’s Tears $10
Carbonated Water Flavorbombed with Poison Syrup $10
Nachos That Looked and Tasted Suspiciously Shit-On-Cardboard $15
Credit Card Tribute to Banks for the Privilege of All the Above $2

Subtotal $87

It cost us about a hundred bucks to see this mind-crushing turkey that we can barely remember and walked out of facepalming ourselves for being brain-dead enough to want to see in the first place. Now we stay home watching Swedish murder shows online. Our outing was two Christmases ago. Shocker: we haven’t been back since.

Think of an economy this way. It’s a set of pipes. Those pipes should deliver stuff that benefits us. Water, money, healthcare, relationships, sanity, and so on. What they do deliver, instead, mostly, are stuff like crappy Hollywood flicks and tasteless nachos. That’s the point — not just that I went to see a crappy flick. More about that in a second.

Imagine that I have a magical robot butler, not just a bot, but a bot in physical form, if you will. Lil Jeevez. Lil Jeevez is more or less blind. He can’t see very well. He’s got the intelligence of a four year old, maybe. He can and will do you what you ask, down to the letter. So you’d better be careful what you ask for.

Lil Jeevez, I say, exhausted after a long, satisfyingly productive day of sending pointless tweets. Draw me a bath! Sir, yes sir, he replies, dashing to the tub. Ten minutes later, he ushers me in, smiling proudly, proclaiming: your bath, sahhh. I don’t even look. I shrug off my clothes, leap in with eyes closed, savoring the relaxation to come. Plomp, thwack, splat!! Jesus! I’m up to goddamned neck in…shit.

The problem was this. Lil Jeevez made it easier, more convenient, more efficient, for me to have a bath. But what was flowing out of the taps wasn’t water. It was shit.

Remember what an economy is? The problem in ours is that the stuff flowing through the pipes isn’t the right stuff. The beneficial stuff. The worthy stuff. Mostly, it’s…shit. That makes our lives a little worse, a little more desperate, a little emptier. Just like the blockbuster me and my kid sis were suckered into paying a hundred bucks for. That’s a tiny example of a big problem. Education that doesn’t educate, healthcare that doesn’t take care of you, finance that won’t finance you, jobs that crush you instead of propelling you. And so on. That’s what’s really flowing through the pipes of the economy.

That little tortured metaphor is precisely the problem with Bot-topia. Everyone has a personal assistant, their very own concierge. Wow! Suddenly, everyone’s Bono, Kim K, J-Lo. Or maybe not. The issue is this. When the economy’s only making shit in the first place, delivering and distributing that shit slightly more efficiently isn’t changing anything, helping anyone, or improving it in any real way.

It’s not the plumbing, stupid. It’s the stuff in the pipes. Bottopia’s more like Shittopia. And Shittopia gets us closer to understanding the real problem.

Alterno-Umair’s Impossible Quest for a Life

I’m alterno-Umair, a loser of modernity. Like the average millennial, I have no savings, no career, no home, no future…and I don’t have a shred of a clue what to do about it. Aha! I realize. But I do have…a bot.

Lil Jeevez, I cry. You’re great at helping me find stuff I don’t want with money I don’t have to live a life I don’t need. Dude. Let’s get real. What I really need is a job, healthcare, education, opportunities, a girlfriend, a life. Help me, Lil Jeevez!

How can I help, Umair, he replies, with a maddening calm.

Goddamit, I shout, find me a…a…job!!

Does not compute, he says, smiling calmly. 404, solution not found. Please be more specific.

What are my chances of having a career like my parents had? I plead.

You’re in the 90th percentile of intelligence, he replies, happily. But there are no current career opportunities that match your racial, ethnic, demographic, psychographic, and age profile.

None? I ask, sweating, panicked, desperate.

Well, he says. There are five. But they are volunteer opportunities that require a down-payment. Would you like me to arrange financing for you? He smiles.

No, dammit, I cry, silently weeping…then at least…help me land a girlfriend to share my soul-crushing misery!!

I can swipe right for you, he assures me, as many times as you like.

You useless piece of shit!!!, I weep, furiously throwing my last pack of ramen at him.

Perhaps you see my point. The bots can help us buy stuff. Maybe. But even then, it’s stuff that most of us aren’t going to be able to afford…want…need. Yes, the bots can help me find tons of…movie tickets, restaurant bookings, designer cocktails, high-end escorts. O wow — if I was Kanye. That’s not stuff that benefits me. Remember my hundred dollar movie outing? It’s not much good to people trapped in a stagnant economy.

What bots, algorithms, programs, maybe even corporations, governments, and institutions as we know them, can’t do is what stagnating economies and declining societies need done. Making economies not full of life-ruining shit. Making the planet greener, the middle class resurgent, improving the lot of the struggling, saving the young from being eaten alive by the ultra wealthy, and so on.

But no one’s making, doing, creating that stuff. Or at least not enough of us, with enough backing, fast enough, at any rate. Whether it’s the awful movie I paid a hundred bucks for, toxic financial instruments, actually polluted water, soul-crushing jobs, and so forth…it’s all a variety of the same thing. Shit that we have to clean up after…that we throw at each other…that we spend billions of person-hours on finding cleverer ways to trick other people into believing isn’t shit, but gold, platinum, pure sex, gleaming VIP memberships. What it isn’t is stuff that truly benefits us. We’re making bots, algorithms, corporations, governments, yesterday’s broken institutions, over and over again — instead of the stuff that we truly, desperately need.

We’re plumbers, tweaking the pipes and bolts of a broken system, and hoping that it will start delivering miracles, instead of shit. But the miracles that we want and need ask us to be more than plumbers. Creators, architects, artists, renegades, dreamers, rebels, defiant captains of a better future.

And that’s the problem inside the problem.

Hence, the little story of my bath-time. Jeevez was smart enough to turn the taps on for me. But he wasn’t smart enough — and never will be — to create an economy whose pipes aren’t exploding with shit. Creating a truly prosperous takes the human stuff in us: creativity, ethics, wisdom, imagination, truth, grace, love. All the stuff that’s deeply inefficient, unproductive.

The bots are smart enough to plug a leak, to patch up the pipes, maybe even to weld new pipes together. They can make the gigantic system of shit way more efficient. The pressure goes up, now you can take a high pressure shower! They can even make it more productive. Now you can enjoy ten liters of shit a day! But the problem is still the same. No one’s changing the stuff in the system…which is the toxic waste of social decline and economic stagnation.

And that’s no good to me. I don’t need more useless shit piped straight at me pressurized to 1000 PSI so I can shower in it so hard it cracks my skull. I need the stuff of a good life. A job, career, education, relationships, and so on. Someone needs to change not just the plumbing of the system — but the point. The system’s broken not just in that it delivers shit to me too slowly — but that all it delivers to me is shit.

So while Bottopia can speed the delivery of shit to the point that it instanteously materializes before my very eyes…that’s probably only going to drive me slowly insane with rage. Hence, the rise of demagogues left and right around the globe.

Welcome to Shittopia, Bienvenue a Shittopie, Wilkommen auf ShitBurg

So by now maybe you see. None of this is about the bots. And it’s surely not about Microsoft. I don’t mean to disparage them. Some of my best friends are bots, and I know plenty of people in Seattle working on awesome things.

It’s about the logic behind, underneath, beyond the bots.

That logic is this. If we can just reduce the friction in the system, give everyone the Same Old Dream a little faster, cheaper, harder…hey!! Presto!! We’ve changed the world. Right? Wrong.

All we’ve really done is created…Shittopia.

Shittopia is a place where everyone has instant, on-demand access…courtesy of drones, robo-butlers, personal virtual assistants…to all the stuff of yesterday’s shining dream. So basically everything that’s produced for pennies, and sold at a massive profit. You know: the stuff in all the big box stores and luxury boutiques of the world. Sound great, right? Wrong.

They can’t afford it in the first place. But the real problem isn’t that it’s unattainable. It’s that it’s pointless.

That stuff is the shit in the pipes, the toxic waste of a dead system. Yet if that’s all that we can have, then our immovable destiny is merely to be servants to the super rich, butlers who have robo butlers to the ultra wealthy…at best…and mostly unemployed failures driving Ubers in between our Taskrabbit gigs at worst. We need to build institutions, leaders, mindsets, capable of making stuff that isn’t shit. That in simple economic terms can’t be produced by bots, algorithms, managers, and probably corporations, governments, and markets— at least in the system as it is now. Education, healthcare, transport, opportunities, and so on. That’s the stuff that should be flowing through the pipes of a working economy…because without it, what good are the pipes to us in the first place? We can’t afford, don’t want, hardly need, the stuff they deliver.

The flipside is also true. Every moment that we’re making stuff that doesn’t benefit us, instead of the stuff that we do truly need, are moments that we’re spinning our wheels, wasting our lives, plunging headlong into the abyss of social decline and economic stagnation. How do you think we got here? Praising, rewarding, and encouraging the delivery of shit as a miracle is economic stagnation and social decline in one gleaming convenient package.

And yet, that’s precisely not the thinking of most of our leaders. They’re Shittopians. They don’t really understand the world anymore. They think that if they give us free season tickets to Shittopia, we’ll all be dazed, awestruck, and fall right back in love with them. It’s simply not true. What we really need, like Alterno-Umair, isn’t a consumerist Instagram fantasy of pecs, yachts, and boobs. But a life.

So. Here we are. Up to our ears in shit. Shocked, spluttering, outraged. Hey! We expected to be bathing in milk and honey. But how could we be? What’s running through the economy’s pipes is the toxic excremental waste of social decline and economic stagnation. So when we turned on the tap, what the tub filled up with was inevitable.

Therefore, as far as I can see, we have three choices.

One, drown.

Two, pretend. The shit is milk and honey, and luxuriate in the tub. Invite everyone else in. Hey, everything’s a social construction, right? Sure, Wittgenstein. Go ahead and have fun at that hot-tub pool-party of shit.

Three, get the eff out of the tub. Clean ourselves up. Stop trying to plumb the pipes. And try to build systems that aren’t gigantic shit machines in the first place. Dream, imagine, dare, rebel, defy, create, imagine, forgive, love. It will demand nothing less of us, reveal our truest selves to us, and maybe, just maybe, spark the little miracles in us. Wait. That’s the good news.

Umair
London
April 2016