The Ministry for the Future

54

Mary hunkered down in the wan light of winter Zurich, meeting daily with her team to plot their next moves. The whole baker’s dozen gathered in the mornings to share the news and plan the day, the week, the decade. It was like a war room now, yes, and their work felt like war work. Not war, however; there was no opponent, or if there was, it consisted of fellow citizens with a lot of money and/or passion. If it was war, they were outgunned and on the defensive; but really it was mostly just discursive struggle, a war of words and ideas and laws, which only had brutal death-dealing consequences as a derivative effect that could be denied by aggressors on both sides. It was a civil war, perhaps, a body politic punching itself over and over. In any case, war or not, it had that same besieged awful feeling of existential danger, of stark emergency that never went away. The large number of people living rough in Zurich, busking for change, looking for work, or worse, not looking for work; that never got ordinary. It was not a Zuri thing.

Nevertheless, Mary’s life settled into a routine that was, she had to admit, almost pleasant. Or at least absorbing. Busy; possibly productive. There were worse things than having a project in hand that felt crucial. She stayed in Zurich. When its winter gloom got to be too much for her, she took a Sunday train up to one of the nearby Alpine towns, popping up through the low cloud layer that banked on the north side of the Alps and made winter life in Zurich so sunless and gloomy. There had been eight hours of sunlight in the first fifty days of this year, they told her, scattered over several days; it was like them to quantify a thing like that. But on a Sunday she would take a break and train up into brilliant snowy light. The ski resorts were too crowded, and Mary was not a skier; but there were many Alpine towns that had no skiing to speak of, being surrounded by sheer cliffs: Engelberg, Kandersteg, Adelboden, some others. In these towns she could walk on cleared snow trails, or snowshoe them, or just sit on a terrace, soaking in the chill brilliant light, the small crystalline sun in its big white sky. Then back down into the gloom.

In Zurich she met with her team and with outside helpers and antagonists. The fossil fuels industry’s lawyers were getting more and more interested to learn how much they could extort from the system if they chose to sequester their asset. This was by no means a trivial topic, indeed it was a crucial matter, and Mary entered into it with great interest. To a certain extent it felt to her like she was negotiating to buy off terrorists who had explosive vests strapped around their waists, and were saying to her and to the world at large, pay us or we blow up the world. But this was not exactly right. First, if no one would buy their product, their explosives wouldn’t go off, and they couldn’t blow up the world. So their threat was hollowing by the day, which explained why they were talking to her at all; their leverage as terrorists, with the biosphere as their hostage, was lessening. And as the Ministry for the Future was one place where they might be able to negotiate a settlement, they were coming to Zurich to bargain.

Then also, they were not terrorists. It was an analogy, maybe a bad one, or at least a partial one. Civilization needed electricity, and it was citizens who had powered themselves on these fossil fuels for the last couple of centuries. The owners of these fuels were sometimes private individuals who had gotten fantastically rich, but many times they were nation-states that had claimed ownership of the fuels found within their boundaries as assets of the state and its citizenry. These petro-states controlled about three-quarters of the fossil fuels that had to stay in the ground, and they too were seeking compensation for the losses they would incur by not selling and burning their fuels.

So it was a mixed bag in that respect. ExxonMobil was big, yes, and held more in assets than many nations in the world; but China, Russia, Australia, the Arab states, Venezuela, Canada, Mexico, the US—these were bigger in carbon assets than ExxonMobil and the other private companies. And they all wanted compensation, even though all of them had agreed in the Paris Agreement to decarbonize. Pay us for not ruining the world! It was extortion, a protection racket squeezing its victims; but the victims were the national populations, so in effect they were putting the squeeze on themselves. Or their elected politicians were putting the squeeze on them. So the situation was bizarre, both hard to define and constantly changing.

So meetings kept happening. Mary kept on pushing the idea of creating the money to pay for decarbonization and all the necessary mitigation work. As the weeks passed and the global economy went from recession to depression, Dick almost convinced her that taxation might be a good enough tool to do the job all by itself. What counted, he said, was differentials in cost and benefit. So in that sense, meaning in effect the bottom line in accounting books, taxes were both stick and carrot. On the bottom line, whether a person’s or a company’s or a nation’s, there was no difference between stick and carrot. They were both incentives. And if nations levied taxes they got the money themselves, rather than having their central banks print new money; they took in rather than shelled out. So if you did something that was stiffly taxed, and progressively taxed the more you did it, that tax was a stick to beat you away from that activity; then, if you didn’t do that activity, you thereby dodged the tax and didn’t have to pay it, and your bottom line showed that lack of payment as a plus in the ledger. So avoiding the action that got taxed created a carrot.

Mary saw Dick’s point, but at the end of every discussion, didn’t actually agree with him. Maybe it was just psychological rather than economic, but people liked to be paid for doing things more than they liked avoiding having to pay for something. There was a mental difference between carrots and sticks, no matter if the numbers were the same in a ledger. With the one you got fed, with the other you got hit. They simply were not the same. She would make this point to Dick over and over, and he would respond with his crazy economist’s smile, his acknowledgment of economics’ fundamentally alien nature, the way it was a view from Mars, or a helpful but clueless AI. Which last was more or less the case.

Also, in terms of making a carrot: the oil industry had equipment and an expertise that could be adapted from pumping oil to pumping water. And pumping water was much easier. This was good, because if they were going to try to pump some of the ocean’s water up onto Antarctica, the pumping effort was going to be prodigious. Even if they confined their efforts to draining the water from under the big glaciers, a lot of pumps would be needed.

So the oil industry needed to stop pumping oil, for the most part, but they could be hired to pump water. Or to pump captured carbon dioxide down into their emptied oil wells. Direct air capture of atmospheric CO₂ was looking more and more like an important part of the overall solution, but if it scaled up to the size of the problem, it was going to produce an enormous amount of dry ice, which had to go somewhere; pumping it underground was the obvious storage location. In some ways, these reverse pumping actions were easier and cheaper than pumping up oil; in other ways they were a bit harder and more expensive. But in any case they made use of an already-existing technology which was very extensive and powerful. If the industry could be paid to do something with its tech to help in the current situation, all the better.

The fossil fuel lawyers and executives looked interested when this was proposed to them. The privately owned companies saw a chance of escaping with a viable post-oil business. The state-owned companies looked interested at the idea of compensation for their stranded assets, which they had already borrowed against, in the usual way of the rampant reckless financialization which was the hallmark of their time. Paid to pump water from the ocean up to some catchment basin? Paid to pump CO₂ into the ground? Paid how much? And who would front the start-up expenses?

You will, Mary told them.

And why? When we don’t have it?

Because we’ll sue you if you don’t. And you do have it. You can pay the upfront costs of the transition, and if you invest in that, we’ll pay you in a guaranteed currency that is backed by all the central banks of the world to increase in value over time. As an aspect written into the currency itself. A sure bet no matter what happens.

Unless civilization crashes.

Yes. You can short civilization if you want. Not a bad bet really. But no one to pay you if you win. Whereas if you go long on civilization, and civilization (therefore) survives, you win big. So the smart move is to go long.

Go long. She found herself saying that a lot. Bob Wharton called it the Hail Mary pass. It was a little strange to be saying “go long” to middle-aged men, so sleek and smooth in their wealth; sexually satisfied, said their aura, such that saying to them “go long” might be enough to trigger what she had once heard described as a hard-on in the heart. Well, if she was enticing them to expand confidently into the world, to make an intervention into the body of great mother Gaia, so huge and vivid and dangerous, then fine. So what. Mary had no illusions that she herself, a harried middle-aged female bureaucrat in a limp toothless international organization, represented for these men any kind of stand-in for the Earth mother; but she was a woman, perhaps even the fine remains of a woman, as the pirates of Penzance had said about Ruth so hard of hearing. She could push that a little, and she did. Little sadistic lashings of what was really just Irish contempt for any form of pretense, of which there was a lot in these meetings. These men were often quite disgusting, in other words, but there was a higher purpose to be pursued.

Then one day Janus Athena came into her office. This person was the opposite of all that bankerly masculine erotic charge; the project for J-A was to efface gender, to exist in that very narrow in-between, the zone of actual gender unknowability. Which itself was a new gender, presumably. Mary wouldn’t even have believed that zone existed if it weren’t for Janus Athena standing before her every day, completely unknowable in that aspect of self, or to put it better, neither masculine nor feminine as any kind of dominant. This could only be the result of an extensive and canny effort.

Mary regarded her mysterious AI expert with her usual curiosity. She wanted to say, J-A, what gender were you assigned at birth, if any?

But this would be to break the social rules which either J-A or Mary, or society at large, had imposed on her. It would be to intrude or to interfere with J-A’s project. Probably J-A got asked this pretty often, one way or another, but Mary wasn’t going to. Acceptance of the other and their project; this was crucial.

“What have you got for me, Janus Athena?”

“The AI group is making open source instruments that mimic the functions of all the big social media sites.”

“So people can shift over to this new set?”

“Yes. And it will protect their data for them using quantum encryption.”

“Then China probably won’t let their people use them.”

“Maybe not. China is under huge pressure to change, so, unclear how that will play out. For everyone else, using these sites means they’ll control their data, rather than it being used and mined. That privacy can then be a resource to them. They can sell their personal data if they want. That plus the security of encryption, and the public ownership of these sites as a commons, should be enough to entice every user on the planet to shift. Publicize it, make it easy, set a date, be ready to handle the influx, boom.”

“How many do you think will shift?”

“Maybe half. After a few years, everybody.”

“So, the decapitation of Facebook.”

“And all the rest like it.”

“Replaced by a system owned by its users, in effect.”

“Yes. Open source. A distributed ledger. The Global Internet Cooperative Union. GICU.”

“Is that a good name?”

“Is Facebook a good name?”

“Better than GICU.”

“Okay, think of a better one. Then if it works, it will serve as the operating platform for ICU.”

“Which means,” Mary prompted, playing along.

“International Credit Union. A people’s bank. The team has set that up too. Lots of bank mirroring, and credit unions are already a thing. This won’t be quite like a credit union, because it would be an open network of people who make a distributed issuance of credit, issuing carbon coin fractions to each other on proof of good action on carbon. People deposit their savings and create new value in a customer- and employee-owned distributed ledger. Their bank, as one function of their YourLock account. It invests mindfully as a group mind, a kind of planetary mind, that has to always be funding biosphere-friendly activities. Also, a place to go if everyone removes their deposits from current private banks at the same time. Those banks are so over-leveraged that they will immediately crash. Then individuals have to have a safe harbor. For-profit banks will go running to central banks to ask for bail-out, and legislatures will panic and agree to let central banks create however many trillions the central banks recommend. That’s been the template so far. So, for any planned attack on private banks, best to have a safe harbor ready. Then you can tell the legislatures to approve central banks’ bail-out QE, but only on condition of buying equity in them.”

“Nationalizing the banks, you mean.”

“Yes, but that puts it too simply. Central banks take possession of private banks, having saved them from bankruptcy or death. Good as far as it goes, but legislatures also need to take possession of their own central banks, by increasing political control of them. It’s a double action. You need both.”

“Will it work?”

“Is it working now?”

Mary sighed. “Point taken. Can you get the future into the names somehow? Since we’re the Ministry for the Future?”

“The internet interface name could be, I don’t know: Children, Own Your Data. COYD?”

“That’s terrible.”

“Some people are not good at names.”

“I’ve noticed.” As for instance, the names Janus and Athena had nothing to do with each other. But that was neither here nor there. “Let’s make the name a game. Get the whole gang down to a dinner at Tres Kilos and see what they come up with.”

“As long as you’re picking up the tab. Pitchers there are ridiculously expensive.”

“Right.”

“And so, what about these projects?”

“Oh yes,” Mary said. “Let’s try it. Something has to be done. We’re still losing.”

That night at Tres Kilos, over dinner and a couple pitchers, they came up with some ideas for names for the Facebook replacement, which Mary scrawled down on her napkin: DataFort, EPluribusUnum, WeDontChat, OnlyConnect, A Secure and Lucrative One-Stop Replacement for Your Many Stupid Social Media Pages, TotalEncryption, FortressFamily, FamilyFortress, HouseholdersUnion, Skynet, SpaceHook, WeAretheWorldWeArethePeople, PourquoiPas, Get Paid To Waste Time!

“Maybe we’re still looking,” Mary concluded as she read the list on her napkin. “Although I do kind of like WeDontChat.”