Cory Doctorow’s ’Fully Automated Luxury Communist Civilization’ - Reason.com
▻http://reason.com/archives/2017/07/12/cory-doctorows-fully-automated
But I also think that prediction is way overrated. I like what Dante did to the fortune tellers. He put them in a pit of molten shit up to their nipples with their heads twisted around backwards, weeping into their own ass cracks for having pretended that the future was knowable. If the future is knowable then it’s inevitable. And if it’s inevitable, why are we even bothering? Why get out of bed if the future is going to happen no matter what we do? Except I guess you’re foreordained to.
I’m not a fatalist. The reason I’m an activist is because I think that the future, at least in part, is up for grabs. I think that there are great forces that produce some outcomes that are deterministic or semi-deterministic. And there are other elements that are up for grabs.
But I think Uber is normal and dystopian for a lot of people, too. All the dysfunctions of Uber’s reputation economics, where it’s one-sided—I can tank your business by giving you an unfair review. You have this weird, mannered kabuki in some Ubers where people are super obsequious to try and get you to five-star them
Google runs this data center in Belgium in a place where two-thirds of the time it’s so cool that they don’t need the air conditioning, and the other third of the time they just turn [the data center] off. And their file system is so good at migrating data away from places that are shutting down and into places that are running that it doesn’t really matter.
A lot of places that do aluminum smelting, because it’s so energy intensive, they use aluminum smelting as a kind of battery. They say: We need to smelt so many tons of this this year, and when we have lots of solar or lots of wind or lots of tidal power, and we don’t have anything to use it for, we smelt the aluminum then, and not at the moment when other people are trying to turn on their lights or run their air conditioning or run their Google data centers.
That kind of coordination—where at the moment that something is needed, and at the moment where it’s cheap to do it, it’s done—is characteristic of the efficient-market hypothesis. It’s characteristic of planned economy theory. It’s the thing that everyone is shooting for.
The thing that free and open-source software has given us is the ability to coordinate ourselves very efficiently without having to put up with a lot of hierarchy. To be able to take things that we’ve done together, where we’ve reached a breaking point, and split them in two and have each of us pursue it in our own direction, without having to pay too high a cost or even have a lot of acrimony.
That’s the free software world I’m trying to imagine. What would it be like to build skyscrapers the way we make encyclopedias in the 21st century?