It’s always fun to look at the history of “the future” as an idea. In the 1950’s the future was made out of atomic gadgets. By the 90’s the future seemed to be made entirely out of neon and odd fitting blazers. And really ever since Jules Verne first started popularizing sci-fi machinery with books like 20, 000 Leagues Under the Sea and The War of the Worlds, pretty much every generation has taken a crack at projecting their own aesthetic to some futurized pinnacle, where the unimaginable leaps that human understanding will one day make are blended into the ostentatious trappings of what is ordinary to our characters. They’ll be wearing silver suits made of some miracle material that’s yet to be discovered, or their lives will revolve around a beam that accomplishes grueling chores with the push of a button. For each generation these futures change with what each crop of culture believes they’ve inherited and in that way they’re often a more accurate aspirational reading of those generations than the newspaper clippings of those times could ever hope to be. The culture of the fifties saw themselves as the inheritors of a universe of power that was accessible through every atom and their future is a fantastic place full of space ships, tractor beams and adventures in far off worlds. Fast forward to more economically turbulent times and the future is a post apocalyptic wasteland, full of zombies and other rock bottom phantoms symbolizing humanity’s decline.
How the future looks when everyone is signing contracts.
How the future looks when everyone you know got laid off.
What all generational imaginations of the future have in common though is a sense of inevitability. Whatever they imagine the future to be, that world was always in the fine print of the deal that sits in front of us today. If they’re optimistic and the future is full of gadgets and beams, well of course it is, look at this technologically brilliant world we’ve built for ourselves. The story is a little pat on the back that says the best is yet to come. If they’re pessimistic and the future is full of zombies and overlords, well of course it is. We’re a bunch of arrogant jerks. Did we really think we could get away with it forever? The story becomes a way of wagging our fingers at our fellow man and telling us whose fault it’s going to be when the whole thing blows up in our face. But whether they’re optimistic or pessimistic the real fantasy in these future settings is delivered to us before we crack the cover. The real fantasy is that we can skip that big pain in the ass that takes place in the middle of the story, because it’s just going to end up at this future place anyway.
The point of this series of articles, is to suggest that we more than we should be optimistic or pessimistic about what society is inevitably going to do, we should stop skipping the second act of our stories, because we don’t have as good of a reason to believe that they’re inevitably going to do quite as many things as we’d really like to think. It’s possible to open up this moment in time as much as it was when the first tool was invented or the first word truly spoken. We have now what they had then, agreements about what the world around us can come to mean, and that makes our future as pregnant with bizarre possibilities as the future we’ve arrived in was for any caveman looking strangely into the first stone to become a hammer.
If we’re somewhere in what he sees there, then imagine what we can see from here.
In this piece specifically we’re going to look at one of the biggest boogey men that appears in the totalitarian dystopia fantasies of the future; money. Now, let’s get a couple of things clear. Nobody is trying to say that there are not plenty of people in the world that would eat a live baby in front of its mother for the right amount of money, or that the anonymous nature of money doesn’t create an opportunity for violence. What we’re going to look at here is where those very real problems with money can finally project to in the future. There’s a specific, rich-guy, evil-empire vision of the future that’s been growing steadily since the fall of the Soviet Union, who used to get top billing as the evil empire. After their dogmatic loyalty to the doomed tenants of communism finally collapsed under the weight of its sheer impossibility, the unbridled self interest of the world’s mega rich slid into that wickedness vacuum. In place of the bullheaded political fanatics of the cold war era, we have a new villain, the anonymous multinational corporation and the shell company octopi they use to subvert whatever democratic processes we like to believe we have.
Since the days of NAFTA and the World Trade Organization, we’ve been dealing with the monster of economic globalization as a boogey man made of clandestined multinationals who penetrate all national boundaries to make all cultural expressions of democracy a moot point. And there’s certainly lots of evidence of that. American manufacturing jobs were exported to countries where slave wages could be paid and by and large they haven’t come back. Our drop in prosperity and their new slavery were accomplished in the same stroke, making it look a lot like countries don’t have too much to say about what these big multinationals want to do to them. Maybe the most quintessential example is the second Iraq war. The total absence of any legitimate political purpose left us with only economic explanations for what really caused us to invade. The president’s cabinet was made of former Haliburton cheerleaders, and the whole thing seemed like it had barely bothered to finish airbrushing an american flag over their company logo. Post cold war, countries seemed to have been reduced to mere formalities. They were babysitters, who simply took care of whatever didn’t turn enough of a profit for some multinational to care about themselves, and as soon as they did care, well it was time send the sitter home. Global warming? Yeah, they’d rather not. Dwindling middle class? You mean cheap and obedient labor pool? What’s the problem there? And so our visions of the future turned to the bottom of the holes this process seemed to be shoving us down, where all we could see were zombies and wastelands. There were no more countries, only some nationless and clandestined class of multinational super elites who could have anyone making under 200k delivered to their hotel room on a platter as soon as the check cleared.
“I can buy and sell your ass buddy.”
And while there’s certainly no dismissing the sharp rise in influence the super rich have had over political power since the fall of the Soviet Union, at this moment in history, it’s starting to look like we’ve hit a ceiling on that plot line. The war in Ukraine is maybe the easiest place to see that ceiling. The Soviet Union didn’t switch from some gigantic state apparatus into a six thousand mile wide stretch of mom and pop businesses. Instead national industries were privatized by simply handing them off to a series of rich guys who had powerful friends, a group affectionately referred to today as the Russian oligarchs. They basically went from the worst form of communism to the worst form of capitalism in a very small amount of time. Unsurprisingly the War in Ukraine is basically the War in Iraq if it wore track pants all the time and drove a car with letters you can’t read where the gears should be. Which is to say, it’s the Russian federation’s version of a front war fought entirely for the interests of the rich kids who were handed the keys to their oil industry. Russia needs Ukraine so it can keep total control of its lucrative pipelines and so it can open key ports, especially in Crimea, that will enable it to ship oil and again, line the pockets of a handful of jerks.
But while that seems to fit perfectly well into the same old song and dance at first, there’s the uncomfortable fact that the US and NATO are very much not going along for the ride as simple puppets of oil company interests. Putin has invaded Ukraine in the name of thinly veiled oil company interests, they’re just different oil companies, or rather, different national oil markets, which is to say finally, different nations. If all nations are simple relics that can be freely traded by the infinitely more savvy captains of the unified class of the mega rich, then how do we explain this clash of nations that is costing everyone a lot more money than it seems to be making them? After all Russia tried to control Ukraine through a puppet regime that served Russian oil interests, and the Ukrainian people simply wouldn’t have it. They took their own government back through revolution and it’s that government that’s been invaded by Russia. And far from being the text book cake walk the oligarchs surely thought this war would be, Russia is dug in for a long, hard, expensive and ultimately embarrassing fight, no matter how the war turns out.
A breakdown on the Ukrainian revolution and Russia invading Ukraine because of hydrocarbon dependence.
And that’s far from the only crack in the classic story of the profit driven war machine that brushes national identity aside. There’s the bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline for example, which is a massively expensive pipeline infrastructure project that stretches between Germany and the Russian federation. Nobody has taken credit for it, and it doesn’t seem to be neatly in the interest of any one country on either side of the conflict. That leaves us with the very real possibility that the pipeline was bombed by a rival gas company in order to drive up prices, which is certainly the least complicated explanation. At the same time, the US and other European countries have put hard sanctions on Russian gas. This has in turn caused Saudi Arabia to reduce their oil exports, because the way the math works out they can make more money if gas is scarce then they can by selling as much of it as possible at a lower price.
So while the Russian soldiers currently being used as cannon fodder likely don’t see it that way, the war in Ukraine largely represents a breakdown in the construct of the clandestined, international economic unity that terrorizes all peasants equally with total impunity. For a long time now, and hitting a crescendo in the second Iraq war, we’ve been singing the same song; Oh woe the oil industry, woe the beast of capitalism feeding on the misery of warfare. But with no other world system left to oppose it, capitalism everywhere now, more or less, and it is suffering under warfare. Again if capitalism was really calling the shots, it would have a vested interest in some kind of peace. The biggest effects of the war in Ukraine, the Nord Stream bombing, the Saudi restriction of oil supply is to drive up inflation, which is what it looks like for everyone to get poorer.
A breakdown on the possible causes of the Nord Stream bombing.
Especially in modern times it’s becoming increasingly possible to read inflation as a kind of metric of mistrust. In the here and now, it’s on the rise in direct proportion to the break down in cooperation among nations. The traditional economic objection to this reading is to say that no, inflation is purely a question of a mismatch between demand and supply. Where demand outpaces supply, prices go up, that’s all. But as technology leaves us with fewer and fewer excuses for naturally occurring shortages, don’t we have to ask what accounts for this mismatch? Without a natural source, the only reason for supply not to meet demand is a refusal to cooperate between suppliers and demanders. And that refusal to cooperate is politically defined, which is to say, if someone has the muscle to be a bastard about it, they can be. That’s what the Russians are doing. It’s why the Saudis are holding back. It’s what was going on in the head of whoever kicked the bomb out of the boat above the Nord Stream pipeline.
And it seems like what this amounts to is a renegotiation of capitalism’s place on the world stage and its role in geopolitical peace. It sort of returns us to this original problem that connects the anonymous quality of money to the opportunity for violence. We normally look at this opportunity for violence as something that money introduced into the world. That’s the point of the evil multinational corporation villain. The idea is that the great, green goblin of money continually births and feeds whole new arenas of anonymous violence. But really money is a tool we invented to manage this anonymity amongst our different groups. Weapons are another way of managing that anonymity and the two of them have never been very clear with each other about who gets first billing. We’d like to think that we have that relationship all figured out now. That’s what’s made the oil company puppetry of political leaders such an oppressive illustration. The suggestion is not just that these rich people have invaded our political system, but that all political systems are doomed to become the instruments of the rich. It’s not just that it is this way, but that of course it always was this way and so will inevitably balloon into some dystopian future nightmare. Between Covid, the war in Ukraine, Brexit and a dozen other clashes between exercises of national sovereignty and economic goals, it’s not at all clear right now how the string pulling relationship between governments and multinational corporations is going to reimagine itself. What is clear though, is that this reimagination is happening in a big way. Puppets don’t shut down their puppeteers very often. Totally unrestrained self interest is making everyone poorer and nations are having to step up and do something about it. What the results will be and what it means about the future is not at all clear yet, but that’s the point. It wasn’t always some way. We’re making it the way it is and we don’t really know what we’re doing quite as much as we’d like to believe. That means we don’t get to check out of the second act. The things we do matter, they’re part of the shifting shape of what we finally mean on this planet. It’s a great time to be alive.
Some Ukrainians that look like they should be having lower back pain and teaching shop, fighting a war to change how money shows up in our lives.
Princess Fantastic 