Chapo Trap House - 560 - Future Histories feat. Kim Stanley Robinson (9/20/21)

Episode Date: September 21, 2021

Will and Matt talk to Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Mars Trilogy, 2312 and last year’s Ministry for the Future. They discuss reckoning with climate change, science fiction literature as an attempt to conceive of our own future’s history, and what kinds of beliefs humans might need to survive that future.

Okay. Joining us now is the author, Kim Stanley Robinson. And, Kim, before we get into discussing climate change and the fate of human civilization, I have to ask you, because the last time I interviewed you, you mentioned that you were on your porch doing some bird watching. And I just want to check in. Have you seen any good birds this summer? Yeah, I sure have. Most of this summer I spent out on the coast of Maine at my wife's family place. So we spent the summer with loons, ospreys, bald eagles, pretty exotic. And now I'm back to Davis with my white crown sparrows. So, you know, it's back to the local birds. And for the sake of good zoom contact, I've kind of moved indoors alas. But yeah, that's

my birding life. It's been great. Always good to just check in on what the birds are up to. And, you know, bald eagles are becoming more and more common the further down the east coast you go. Yeah, they have gone through a big recovery. On Mount Desert Island, they're actually somewhat of the villain of the piece because they often pick off baby loons. And loons only have one or two babies per season. So it's a question which one of these charismatic megafauna you cheer for in that situation because the bald eagles are very beautiful. And despite their crazy ridiculous voices, which are not in keeping with their visual magnificence, but

they're quite the loon killers. So it's a it's a weird situation on the island. If only there are some sort of ministry for the future that could adjudicate these issues for us. But I know, Kim, I want to get into the new novel and this piece you wrote for the Financial Times about climate change. And it's a topic that I, you know, we've mostly avoided bringing talking on the show because I don't think despair is particularly entertaining. But what I liked about your piece in the Financial Times, much like your novels, is I think you do a very good job of speaking clearly about the dire severity of what we face without

succumbing to or indulging in a kind of apocalyptic reverie. And you end the piece with the quote that's often sent around. I forget who it's originally attributed to, but I remember Gizek saying it, but you say, you know, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. But when it comes to climate change, we are essentially talking about one or the other, right? No, no, that's not right. No, the whole end of the world imaginary is a little bit misstated, devastating impacts to human civilization, a mass extinction event. These are possible bad outcomes given where we are now. And I think it's just shorthand. What they mean

end of the world is end of the world that we know, end of the middle class American world, end of the familiar world, end of the biosphere that existed, you know, from approximately from the end of the Ice Age till now. So it's a little bit of shorthand or telegraph or like a bumper sticker on a car. But in a longer conversation, you don't have to indulge in that. I know Gizek and Fred Jamison, my teacher, what they're trying to do is point out the weaknesses in apocalyptic thinking that, oh, yeah, let's imagine the end of the world because we can't figure out the next political economy. And it's a kind of laziness, it's a kind of comfort food, like things might be bad now, but since it's going to be worse

later, then now we can glory in how we are in our current moment as bad as it is. It's not as bad as our poor suffering descendants are going to have. So the slogan is designed to attack the weakness of our sliding into apocalyptic thinking when really there's good constructive work that could be done. And the end of capitalism is not inconceivable at all. It's just more a matter of how would you get from here to there? And that's where I think everybody begins to fall apart. We know the world situation right now. And then you can imagine all kinds of better alternatives. But how would you get from here to there? And so it's an absence of a plausible future history that I think is the problem in our

imaginary. And in many of your books, they take place not just in a near future, but often centuries into the future where human civilization has undergone catastrophic environmental, social, and political developments, but nonetheless has spread into the solar system and is in many ways flourishing. So when you're creating or just trying to envision these fictional futures, what are some of the alternate systems of political economy that you think is conceivably developed by human beings as we face the increasing stresses of technology and environmental destruction? Well, let me unpack that. Going through your question as it came to me, science fiction

can be roughly divided into different subgenres depending on how far out in the future you go. So very common is space opera set millions of years in the future, where it's a kind of a fantasy space where we're zipping around the galaxy. Everybody is really with that kind of science fiction and often it's regarded as the main kind or the even the only kind because of Star Wars and Star Trek. Then there's near future science fiction, which is really like day after tomorrow. It's the present world pushed in a couple of regards to make it more futuristic or to show where we're headed in the immediate future. That also I think is pretty well known to people because a lot of the bestselling science fiction

writers of our time do near future science fiction almost exclusively and they're good. They're interesting. Then there's that this going in between human history like a century out two centuries out. Well, there's nowhere near as much science fiction being written there because it's hard and strange and unfamiliar and I've tried it a few times because I call it future history and it's an interesting zone because whatever happens in the near future good or bad and a lot of both seems possible. Humans are still going to be around a couple centuries from now and what they're doing is interesting to contemplate now because it suggests things we should be doing now to get to a good future rather than a bad.

So okay, with that introduction, I come to my science fiction. I'm sure you were referring to 2312 or New York 2140. These books are set out there and 2312 is set 300 years in the future in the solar system where it's been inhabited by human beings that are proliferating and sort of speciating like dogs turning into various kinds of humans. All kinds of powers are being deployed and yet Earth is still a mess. So there are a couple things going on in 2312 and in all science fiction like that. On the one hand, the future is really going to be strange and almost unimaginably different from where we are right now. But secondly, science fiction is always a metaphor for how things feel right now. So okay, there's

a developed Western world, people who are doing relatively well compared to especially the poorest 2 billion people on the planet. And so we're already into this subspeciation that HD Wells in the time machine, the Elois and the Morlocks, the privileged 1%, the suffering working people of the world, the impoverished, the emissary are already like different species on the underneath the same kind of skin and bone configurations with the same DNA, but with their social realities have made them into different beings. So 2312 is also about that. It's about the year 2012. It's about inequality. It's about development and then the people and cultures being left behind in an almost the middle ages in terms of how

they live and subsist. That's strange and unsustainable. So it's important, I think, to read science fiction, mine in particular, but every all science fiction as both prophecy and as metaphor for how things feel right now in order to get the full aesthetic and political impacts of the genre. I mean, one of the things I remember from 2312, one of the things I found interesting is that in this future history, capitalism still exists, but it's something that's been sort of shuffled to the margins of human civilization and culture. It's kind of the contemporary equivalent of online sports betting. Yes. And thank you for bringing that up because that was the crux of your question, which

I kind of forgot. What today we have as indications, as precursors, are emergent phenomenon of a better political economy than capitalism. And also, in 2312 and elsewhere, I'm very influenced by this idea of Raymond Williams, that there's emergent aspects in any given moment of history and there's residual aspects. And capitalism wants to be a totality. It wants to subsume and take in and turn into a profit-making machine, everything else on earth. So if there ever is a post-capitalism, capitalism will be the residual of that culture. The way feudalism is the residual in our culture. And you see aspects of feudalism all over. In fact, really, you could say that capitalism is feudalism liquidified. And so the next

stage is going to have a strong, tied, tugging backwards, back into capitalism, back in towards feudalism. What would that look like? And could there be a post-capitalism that was effective as such that was more socialized, that was more just, that still had a capitalist residual element to it? And indeed, online sports betting or, okay, the margin, that's a technical term in economics as well. You could call it the alpha if you were into current financial speculations. Say you've got, everybody has food, water, shelter, clothing, electricity, healthcare, and education as a social right. Then some people might start playing a game on the margins, you know, the iPhone 28 versus the iPhone 27. This kind of game on the margins

for the toys, for the luxuries, a particularly good travel experience where you're allowed or encouraged to swim across the Pacific or take a sailboat and sail it yourself. Luxury facilities, could they be profit making for small enterprises? And also, can we also extract the word and concept profit, which is intimately tied to exploitation and injustice, and say, well, you can make your living at it, and you can make money at it, but once you get past your necessities in terms of how much you've made from this activity, then progressive taxation could mean that there's a cap on how much you could make. Is that really profit anymore, or is that just making a living? If you have to account to your suppliers, to

the environment, to your vendors, to your stakeholders, as well as shareholders, and you still come up with more money at the end of the process than at the beginning, is that still profit? So these are the questions that come up when you get into this zone. And I tried to explore that in 203.12. And finally, I'm getting to answer your original question, which is Mondragon, Spain, as a town where it's a system of nested co-ops. Kerala, India is a state in southwestern India, where a communist government and a liberal government trade administrations on a four-year basis and have micro-politics, micro-administrations, to the point where there are literally thousands of village governments in the state of Kerala

alone. So it's to try to make it a true democracy. I mean, almost a direct democracy, but organize the panchayats and other little small organizations. Around the world, I've hunted out what seems to be emergent post-capitalism out of the left tradition. As an American leftist, it seems to me that's the sensible way to go about it, because that's where I see more justice, more social benefits spread through all, less exploitation. So that's how I've been working. And like in 203.12, I said the whole solar system is run on a Mondragon model, and then there are pockets of capitalism left on Mars and on Earth as being the older economies. Well, this is just a way of talking about where we're at now on Earth.

And one of the elements in 203.12 is this idea of incredibly powerful quantum computers that are able to functionally run what is essentially a planned economy for an interplanetary economy of billions and billions of people. It's vastly more complex than we can imagine now. But as a science fiction author, you're only taking things that are extant now and projecting them into the future a couple hundred years. So how did you come across this idea of quantum computers as being essential for actually running a functioning planned economy? Well, thank you for that. It comes out of what is now in certain parts of the discursive landscape being called the Red Plenty problem. This comes from a novel by Francis Spufford

called Red Plenty, a beautiful novel about the Soviets at the end of the Soviet period, say the 70s, 60s, 70s, 80s, trying their damnedest to invent computers fast enough to run their own planned economy, which they can tell is overwhelmed by the necessity for more information than they can gather or process so that they don't know how to plan an economy. And they're hoping computers might help them. They're in a race with IBM. All of that falls apart. It loses. It doesn't happen. And the Red Plenty discussion online becomes, could there be a planned economy if you had computers powerful enough? And so you have physical questions. If you've got 8 billion people, then you need 16 billion shoes. And maybe people should

have two pairs, so then you need 32 billion shoes. And do you need more? Well, maybe not. So the impulse is to begin to interrogate what are people's needs. Could you plan to provide for those needs? And then, as I said previously, afterwards, you could go onto the margin for further games and toys. And then quantum computers come into that because they're on the verge of happening. They might be extremely powerful, but they might only be extremely powerful for certain strange algorithms that are not really helpful for economic thinking. On the other hand, they may become as powerful as classical computers except way faster. This is an open question in computing right now. So there are two questions going on here.

Might quantum computers become stupendously fast classical computer equivalents and do anything a real computer, a classical computer can do. And then the second question is, could that power be applied to a human economy, an economic system such that waste, exploitation, supposed negative externalities that are always actually internalized later, could you make it work better with an AI assist? So there's multiple questions buried there. And in 2312, putting stuff out 300 years in the future, that personally blows my mind. I mean, when you think 300 years into the past and imagine people in whatever that year would be, 1720, trying to imagine 2021, well, they're going to have a hard time doing that. And now trying

to imagine 300 years in the future, essentially the brain explodes, the imagination explodes. You can't do it. If you're going to do it, you have to be a little shocking and surprising and try to suggest some things that are maybe not even on the table right now, or you assume that things that are on the table right now actually come to be in ways that are highly questionable. The idea that we're inhabiting most of the bodies in the solar system 300 years from now, I mean, that's awfully fast. It's a little bit shocking. But since history seems to be accelerating since technology is seems to be growing in its powers and leaps and bounds, I needed to be shocking in that book. So what's interesting is that it's

the political economy. It's again, imagining the end of capitalism, that is the great stopper where the mind reels at the idea that we could get to a planned economy that would actually work as opposed to the various disasters of the 19th and 20th centuries. Well, I mean, to return to the present, which I suppose is really the same as the future for the purposes of this conversation. You mentioned it earlier in our conversation here, but you quote it in the Financial Times piece, the cultural theorist Raymond Williams, and he states that each moment in history has its own structure of feeling which changes as new things happen. As a writer, I mean, you essentially are writing about 2021, but

if you were writing about 2020, this current present moment as if it were the future or some kind of speculative scenario, how would you describe the structure of feeling that governs our current present moment? Well, it's clearly a time of shock and dismay, a fraught time. And this Gramsci is very good on this, that the old order is insupportable and can't last and is already dying, and yet the new, a new system hasn't yet come into being or isn't even properly imagined, an interregnum, some kind of a period of transition. And in that, the sense of uncertainty, some, it's almost comforting to imagine apocalypse. Well, we're in the final days, soon an end

will come. And it's easy to imagine that because everybody's going to come to their own personal end with their death. And so I don't need to try to imagine the next stage because it will be post my death and post everything. The thing is that especially for young people today, that's not actually the case. They're going to, with luck, live on to the end of this century. And gigantic changes are going to happen in this century. So the structure of feeling right now is of, I compare it sometimes to the 1930s. In the 1930s, everybody could see that they were sliding back into a gigantic world war, that things were misaligned and poorly designed, and that there was going to come another war and

the sense of despair, of helplessness, these are feelings I think that are very familiar right now. I guess one of the things that is a little bit of a comfort comparing ourselves to the 30s is that we're all in the same boat this time around. There isn't any conflict between nations that is anywhere near as important as the problem of civilization and the biosphere, the mismatch, the carbon burn, the coming climate crisis is a global crisis. And every nation state, every culture is stuck in the same little lifeboat together, which is planet Earth. So it's conceivable that people will hang together through this crisis and it won't be a war of all against all, it won't be a world war of humans against humans, which

we've seen how destructive those are, and another one would be even worse. It will be more a struggle to get our act together and pay ourselves to do the right work rather than go down with the ship in the old system of capitalism. So the necessity of some kind of post capitalism that is in better alignment with the biospheric necessities, this necessity is so overwhelming that it's possible that we might pull it together. And so like any other structure of feeling, there's fear, there's hope. And the two are expressed in the culture by utopian thinking by dystopian thinking. So there are genres for fear, there are genres for hope. And you see the genres of fear all over the place, zombie movies,

the various kinds of apocalyptic thinking. And really zombies are a very powerful image for how we're walking dead. Our system is dead, we're still walking around and our limbs are falling off. And although you might still be alive, zombies are going to kill you for your blood, etc. This is such a simple cultural metaphor for how we feel right now. I'm surprised that there isn't a very popular TV show. I joke about this with my kids all the time. Vampires versus zombies. So the vampires are the 1%. They suck your blood. And then you are walking around like a dead person because your blood's been sucked by a powerful alien force of people that don't care. They're heartless, they're soulless, you can't even see them

in a mirror. But on the other hand, they're living off of us. And then zombies. So vampires versus zombies. Why isn't it the most popular show in our social media today? Maybe it's too scary. Maybe it would blow up in our faces and be the story of our times that people would be too shocked. Maybe we're a vampire culture in the American middle class such that we couldn't see ourselves in the mirror like that. So the vampires versus zombies doesn't exist as a TV show because we can't see that. But to me, the great science fiction slash fantasy slash horror stories of our time are very simple metaphors for how things feel right now. So that's the structure of feeling today. Vampires versus zombies.

To talk about your latest novel for a second, Ministry for the Future. Could you describe a little bit, what is the sort of fictional concept of the Ministry for the Future? In your novel, how does it come about and how does it work? Well, thank you for that. The Paris Agreement allows for the Congress of Parties or the Convention of Parties to get together. All the nations on earth, except for a couple, have signed on to the Paris Agreement and formed standing subcommittees. It's in the Paris Agreement. I recommend everybody read it. It's only 16 pages long. It's a very interesting reading. It's not a dry legal document. It's actually a rather stupendous

constitution for going forward. So, okay, I imagine that the Paris Agreement parties having very little success of keeping to their commitments in one of the big stock taking meetings, a global stock take, which is, I think, due in 2023. Conclude that they aren't doing well enough. They established this subcommittee. It gets nicknamed the Ministry for the Future, but it's charged with defending the generations of the future humans and also all of the living creatures that can't speak for themselves in court. So it's a big assignment and also technically and legally very hard to enact because, on the one hand, it steps on the toes of every other bureaucratic body on earth. Because if you advocate for the people of

the future, then present people are vastly outnumbered, one hopes, by the humans to come. And in any direct, not confrontation, but in any decision making as to how to allocate resources, we always ought to be doing things for the people of the future, not for ourselves. It's rather awkward, really. And then, on the other hand, if you're speaking for the other living creatures on the planet in courts, you're also stepping on the toes of the rights of human beings in those same situations, some of whom are starving or at least emissary to need all the resources they can get. So it's a very awkward assignment for my ministry for the future, and they began to undertake it in every way that they can. I was, again,

looking at rather small present-day phenomena, like Ecuador having its forest being a citizen of the country, like the rights being given to rivers, the rights being given to other natural entities and to wild creatures themselves, and also the children's trust, these legal bodies, these NGOs that are defending the rights of children in court to try to get different kinds of rulings and legal actions on the part of currently existing adult governments. Well, these are all rather embryonic, small beginnings to what the Ministry for the Future tries to expand on. And it's just like going to Mondragon and Corralá, these teeny little entities in the current political economy, to go to the children's trust and to various

constitutional protections for wild creatures and for future generations. I mean, they exist. They're small. They need to grow. If they do grow, it'll get interesting. So that's how I came to the Ministry for the Future. In the Financial Times piece, though, you write about how, you know, in a world governed by competing nation states, but one that is still, you know, we're still the same species and we're still sharing the same biosphere, but we're governed by competition among these different governing bodies and institutions, which creates, as you describe, a sort of a prisoner's dilemma situation in regards to any efforts to address climate change in

particular. Who is going to be the first one to make a virtuous act? And by making a virtuous first step, are you going to get screwed over by everyone else who doesn't do that or makes the opposite choice? Yeah. Well, this is the great problem of the prisoner's dilemma. You have to trust the other. And we're not hugely great at trusting the other. On the other hand, there are 8 billion people alive on this planet. And that is a technological and sociological, a social achievement that we often overlook because there's so much friction and disagreement involved. On the other hand, we're in a global economy. And as we saw during the pandemic, we rely

on the things happening on the other side of the world. Strangers we've never met are keeping us alive. So there's a fine balance to be kept in our awareness of cooperation and altruism versus a cutthroat competition. And so capitalist realism, the structure of feeling that says there is no alternative and capitalism is the natural way, will insist on it being a cutthroat nature, red and tooth and claw competitive world. Meanwhile, social reproduction, which capitalism predates on in vampiristic ways. In other words, the world can't even get by without people taking care of their kids for free, without people taking care of their grandparents for P for strangers for free. It's called social reproduction.

It's a good term for the enormous amount of work that gets done that doesn't get paid for. And indeed, it would be weird to get paid for it because it's just human work taking care of each other. I guess the problem becomes how do you integrate all that? And how do you trust other people enough to make the first move in a nation state system? So you're, I mean, you've got representatives that are charged with defending the citizens of that nation against all the other nations. And it is indeed a 178 nation game of prisoners, the prisoners dilemma. What one can say here as a kind of encouragement is the nations that are first off the block to decarbonizing technologies and industries are going to be

leading the way because it's absolutely necessary for us to decarbonize. That's not an option. If we continue to burn carbon, then we really are into a very black future in which civilization is is destroyed and everything that we assume is normal in middle class America and across the developed world will be a shattered to the point of really even food goes away at that point. So that that is a dark history that I seldom try even to imagine it's too dark, but it's there, it's possible. So on the other, so we have to decarbonize and we're going to. So then the nations that are jump on it first, it's a virtuous action, but it's also enlightened self interest on the national level, because those are the

nations that will do best in the new political economy that's following this one. So that's just I guess the best encouragement you can make in what is really a very awkward situation, a global crisis, but a nation state system and also a capitalist economy. Well, these are horribly awkward fits. It isn't you could imagine. Well, if we had a world government and we had something like an HD Wells enlightened scientific meritocratic socialism kind of government that is also controlling the whole world with individual cultures just in charge of their language and their festivals. Oh, that would be great. We might be able to solve climate change, but we're not in that world. We're in this world where we have to do it

by way of negotiation and agreement. And so it's it's scary. Well, yeah, I mean, I mean, then it runs into like, you know, what is the dominant paradigm of the world we live in now, which is the market, which is sort of antithetical to long term future planning, because it's a system in which the cost of doing business and the cost of our survival into the next century or so are at odds with one another. And in your financial times piece, I mean, it's like, you know, not exactly a novel concept, but like it's a pretty simple and powerful one. It just comes down to basically paying every country or every entity in the world not to put carbon into the atmosphere, like to make sure that Petro States don't

go bankrupt by just basically backstopping the cost of what they would lose, not pumping oil out of the ground or burning it. Yeah, I mean, there is an economic fix involved here that is very important. Say that we have to decarbonize, but we're in a carbon economy and that a dozen of the most powerful nations on earth have absolutely rely on their carbon income for burning fossil fuels. That seems to me the situation. So okay, you can do some kind of self righteous thing and try to pretend that you yourself don't burn a whole lot of carbon in order to live a middle class life in Americans like 30 times as much as the poorest people in India. Well, but if you give up on that self righteousness and say,

look, it's just a problem of transition, though, those fossil fuels are are going to be stranded assets, but they were assets. Nations relied on them for income for paying their citizens. And they relied on them for building their own infrastructures. And that has to go forward. Some parts of the fossil fuel industry can be transferred over to decarbonization work. It's strangely similar, pulling oil out of the ground and pumping CO2 back into the ground to some extent uses the same expertise and even the same machinery. And on the other hand, people are going to have to be paid off. Now there's a concept of the haircut that you've got a stranded asset, you got to get rid of it, you take up what you can get. It's

not going to be 100%. There's also the problem, the issue of amortization. In other words, you were going to get that money over the next century. So you don't need to be paid at all right now up front, you can get it over the next century at a discounted rate, quite a severe haircut probably. But at least you aren't going broke. Everybody's in the same boat. You make a reconsideration of the global economy that I read in Nature Magazine recently that we have to not burn 89% of the recognized coal reserves, 58% of the natural gas, 59% of the oil has to stay unburned. On the other hand, it doesn't have to stay unpaid for for those nations and people who were relying on it. And again, you get back

to carbon quantitative easing that you make up new money to pay to decarbonize and that any decarbonizing including not burning carbon in the first place is a way to make a living and to make some money and keep the economy from crashing. So yes, I believe that there is I mean, some people will no doubt be shocked at the idea that we need to pay our way out of it in a way that sounds just as capitalist as the way that we got into it. On the other hand, we use money. Now, but let's go back to you talked about the market. The market is a sham and a fool. There it is not a place where two people come into a bizarre together. And one says, I'll give you X and you give me Y. The market is actually an algorithm

that people are enacting in order to extract value where there maybe was none to begin with. This is called financialization. So I'm saying in my financial timespiece, I was hoping you would quote the last line, not the Zizek line. The invisible hand never picks up the check. Therefore, we must govern ourselves. So what I'm saying is the market as a supposed monarch of our system that makes the right decisions has been shown to be a delusion and a lie. What we need is to govern ourselves. So government seizes finance in the same way it did in World War II, except this time in a peaceful cause. It seizes finances and directs it to the necessary actions. In this case, human good escaping catastrophe

rather than just waging a war against another nation. That kind of seizure of finance by government needs to happen. You can call it Keynesianism. You can call it modern monetary theory. You can call it socialism. It doesn't matter what you call it. It's still a necessary moment in history where we have to direct finance to dodging a mass extinction event. Well, I mean, the other quote for your piece that I wanted to bring up is that you write that finance is a technology. It's civilization's software. And it's the operating system we run on. But in saying that, these things are only the product of human decisions, which means that different decisions would vastly affect the way in which the operating system

works, right? Yes, indeed. It's also important to say that finance is a power dynamic. It's the way that the few exert power over the many, exploit their work and the value of their work accrues upwards in a pyramid system to, let's just say, the top 10%. The 1% is kind of a super rich group of individuals that's small enough that they could be almost discounted. Their power is often exaggerated. They are rich, but they're also just individuals. And there's so few of them that if we decided to decapitate the financial system by way of progressive taxation, a working majority in all the big democracies of the world could do that. And

the 1% could do nothing against it if democracy were to work such that legislatures tried to legislate for the advantages of the majority of people rather than for the 1%. And that's a big if. That's a political battle. But these political battles about power result in different financial systems. So it's always important to join at the hip as absolutely nondistinguishable from each other, politics and economics. They are the same thing. And what I mean is that by politics you could make a new economic system that would be more just, more sustainable over the long haul. And more equitable, both equity and equality depend upon a seizure of the current system of finance that we have. Part of the current structure of feeling of

capitalist realism is, oh, of course it makes sense that there are billionaires. Of course it makes sense that 5% of humans on earth are walking around like gods. And then there was like 25% of humans who were emissary to the point of not having a fully human life. Of course that's normal because that's the way economics works. But no, most capitalism is the first, the imagining that that's unnatural and even crazy and rather ugly morally. And a better system could be enacted. And as you said in the beginning of your question, it's a software for running civilization, but also justice and power are very much involved with that software.

Matt, you've read the novel, you've read Ministry for the Future. Anything you want to hop in your way? Yeah, I was taken by the pains you go through in the book to show that one of the things that will hopefully break people out of the paralysis that we currently seem to be regarding this because we can only imagine anything that is going to be a change from our current conditions of life to be a change for the worse. You show in the book several times that it will be the process of like struggling to adapt to this new reality that will give people for the first real time an opportunity to live in ways that are radically different,

but also more rewarding than the ways that they have sort of accepted as the only ways they can. I'm struck specifically by one of the segments in the book about a young woman in LA trying to be an actress when the entire city is completely flooded, spoiler alert, by a massive storm and at the end of that moment coming to the realization that the work of rebuilding will be meaningful in a way nothing else that you're allowed basically to do in a market society can be. Yes. Well, thank you for that. It was very important to me in Ministry for the Future to try to sketch out that kind of a future. And it's an interesting problem because it's

not going to be a fast solution nor is it going to be a single kind of silver bullet fix. And it's going to look like we're failing for maybe decades and it'll often be reported as a failure and the apocalyptic imagination will kick into gear. I wanted to sketch out a best case scenario that you could still believe in. So a lot of bad things are going to happen. They're already baked in and we're seeing it this summer. The climate disasters have been quite astounding and shocking. I guess I would say I've seen some of them myself being here in California and I'm shocked and dismayed and one can easily give in to despair. But a best case scenario also includes the work of civilization squeaking out of this.

It's kind of a full employment program as my book makes clear. There's more good work to be done than there are even people to do it. And so that whole story being told about how robotics and robots and automation is going to get rid of all meaningful human work is really a kind of a dystopian category error of a mistake about the future. Certain kinds of mechanical assemblage will be done by robots because that was robotic work to begin with. Certain kinds of human work might be replaced by automated processes that we've also developed and that's other workers developing that. But the amount of sheer human work left to do to squeak out of this century without a mass extinction event is huge and it will

be meaningful work. This is something I often say to younger audiences and I'm really glad that you brought it up. There's a difference between doing service work in a capitalist economy at the minimum wage that won't make you enough to have a decent life and meaningful work that is helping the decarbonization project of building a better post-capital civilization that's imbalanced with the biosphere. That kind of work, if it can make you a living, that is a rather wonderful turn of events in the way things have been going. And since the, I mean almost every generation is younger than me now, the younger generations born in the latter part of the 20th century and also the millennials born at the start of

this century, they're going to be living through all this. There needs to be a goal, there needs to be hope, there needs to be a project described of how it can be done. So even though my novel is just a utopian novel where every, for every good event I try to present a bad event because it's going to feel like that. But also an awful lot of things go right in my novel. Well, that's okay. Someone needs to tell that story. And I think that the response to my novel is not having anything to do with the literary values of it as variable and bizarre as they are. It has to do with that story being a story people really want and they haven't been seeing it. And I'm quite sure that's why the novel has gotten the

response that it has. I mean, I always think about the difference between work, doing work and having a job because most jobs are people hate and they're not necessary and at worst they're actively harming everyone around them. But it's not natural for human beings not to work. We need to work, but that work has to be for the benefit of other people for us to have meaning in doing it. Yes, I think that's right. Here I revert to my teacher Fred Jamison who began his career studying Sartre and the existentialists. It's a very existential statement. You need a project

that life does not inherently have meaning. Human life is somewhat of a blank slate. You want to help other humans. That's a kind of a given. It follows very quickly. But then a project in existentialism is something that your work is oriented towards that creates the meaning of life itself. So it takes on, you could say religious aspects, it takes on a kind of a the importance of meaning in one's life cannot be overstated. It's really a crux. People talk about deaths of despair that despair is different than depression. Despair is an absence of meaning. And so a project based life, everybody needs to find a project. Well, now civilization

has a project. Can we dodge a mass extinction event and get into a balance with the biosphere without civilization crashing with many human deaths? I mean, one hesitates to even estimate. That's the project. So everybody can sign on to that. I mean, this is not a time without meaning. In a way, I made that comparison to the 1930s. That was a war where people were going to be killing other people for questionable purposes that might have to do with nationalism, capitalism. It all looks so stupid. And indeed, the first existentialist kept talking about absurdity. The world is absurd. Well, no, absurdity is another kind of meaning, a bad one. It's actually just flatly meaningless. But now we have meaning.

We we're accidentally in an emergency. Not too much blame should be heaped on to the whole fossil fuel moment in civilization. We didn't know we were going to change the climate and torch the atmosphere. It came about as a byproduct. Now people still wanting to do it. Okay, they're a little culpable and should be demonstrated with if not thrown in jail. But on the other hand, the project has been created. It's all consuming. You can sign on to it by some kind of job that actually contributes to it. And there's going to be a lot of them. So this problem, David Graber, very, very great theorist, his his book Bullshit Jobs is very good on this, that there should be meaningful work, that there's

a difference between bullshit jobs and real work. Well, I mean, as long as we have you here, I mean, just to change gears slightly, I have to ask you your opinion on this, because as far as I'm concerned, you are you are Mr. Mars in my book. So I have to I think of you and I think of your books every time I see Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Richard Branson or something like digging around with a rocket, or talking about how we're going to colonize Mars. So I just like, like, you must be aware of this, like, what is your take? Like, what is your perception about billionaires and their increasing interest in the solar system? Well, it's a hobby of theirs, not entirely harmful. A space science is an earth science.

I'm a big supporter of NASA and space science in general. I'm interested in the solar system. It's a beautiful solar system. I'm interested in Mars. And thank you for that. I feel like one of the chief living Martians of our time, because of my long immersion in writing that big long novel. Mars is irrelevant now. The climate crisis has overwhelmed it. It's only useful to us as a place to study to get better at planetology, because we're in the business of earth management or earth finessing. We're in a planetary system that we need to negotiate a settlement with. And the more we know about how planets work, the better off we're going to be. So Mars is interesting as such. And so is Venus. The idea of going and living

there, well, this is maybe putting the cart before the horse and getting ahead of it. If we get into a right balance with the biosphere of earth as a human civilization, Mars exists as a kind of reward for that, a study zone. You could make Mars maybe into the Yukon territories in 10,000 years. But not if earth is destroyed, its biosphere destroyed and its human civilization collapses, then the whole Martian alternative goes away. So being super interested in it right now is a bad temporal displacement or a harmless hobby, depending on who's talking when. And I think my Mars trilogy makes that perfectly clear. It isn't as if I've deceived people. And there is indeed a rich billionaire named William Fort in the Mars trilogy who

forms a company called Praxis that tries to do practical things in the way that Praxis recommends as a political work that is also useful to humanity as Praxis, I think. He becomes a great ally to the Martians. Yes, yes. And I think what I would love for all of our billionaires to do and really, it's so easy to play heroes and villains here. They're neither heroes nor villains. It's interesting and disturbing that they're all guys. And their hobbies are irrelevant compared to their real work, some of which has been fantastically good for the biosphere. I'm thinking of Musk here, but Bezos is not to be dismissed lightly either. It's a mistake of our culture to get hooked into the celebrity

soap opera. So they're celebrities and we have soap operas about them. Big deal. I mean, it's like they're about as important as Princess Diana at the level of social media and the culture of celebrities. You make them into heroes, you make them into villains. Well, in the current version of neoliberal capitalism, people who get to the first general store on the internet, people who get to the first bank on the internet, people who get to the first search engine on the internet, they are going to become billionaires by accident, by structurally. Someone was going to take all those roles on. And so these individuals are neither, they're not, it's not that they're smarter. It's not that they're luckier. It's

not that they're more villainous or more grasping. They just occupy the right structure in the neoliberal economy at the right time. And so they're somewhat irrelevant. This is what I'm going to say at the end of the game here is that you can pay attention to celebrities all you want. The real work isn't there. And if you look at the real work, some people who have accrued billions, first of all, it's as nothing compared to the trillions that governments generate. So the people are way richer than the billionaires. And then the other part to say is, let's focus on the real work. And the billionaires that are doing real work, making solar panels, making electric cars, making boosters that can get us to the

moon and into low earth orbit where useful things can be done for scientific purposes and for communication and for connecting us all together, their real work is also running a newspaper and letting the newspaper be a center left newspaper rather than a hard right newspaper. These are valuable contributions to the real work. And that's where I think we should keep the focus. Matt, do you have any final questions? So one thing that is a thread through the Ministry for the Future is, and you spoke about it a little earlier, the process by which the struggle to build a new structure

to price in all those externalities that are currently not part of the equation, to make us as a people, as humans, feel for others in a way that transcends our narrow conceptions of ourselves is also a religious movement. And I'm just interested in your idea of what shape you think a renewed sort of ecumenical religiosity is going to have to take to give a cultural vocabulary for the work that needs to be done. Well, thank you for that. It's a good question. I've thought about it a lot and I think it's a hard question. So say there's eight billion of us. Quite a few billion are intensely absorbed in their religious feeling. That's their existential project. It defines their

existential project, their religion as such. And I guess they would say that existentialism is a kind of a weird, delimited religion. Whereas existentialism would say that religion is a kind of a weird, overblown existentialist project. I wonder if that dichotomy or disagreement can be finessed in an idea of one planet, one species on one planet. It can be very anthropocentric, but then it can go biocentric, that life itself is sacred. And this to me looks like the oldest religion. You go back to Africa, when humans left Africa 120,000 years ago, they walked out through Arabia and then quickly they were everywhere else on earth, relatively quickly. And they left with a religion that sometimes gets called

shamanism. But it was some kind of an earth religion, often an earth mother religion, kind of a matriarchy. The biosphere as our mother. Well, okay, this is gender, this is problematic. Certainly in the current postmodern American context, it can be immediately attacked. And I wonder if that too can be finessed somehow. Let's take the gender out of it, but keep in mind the idea of parent, home, body. The biospheres are extended body, so it's taking care of ourselves. We share it with everybody else and we rely on everybody else. So it's a one person, one culture, one planet. What's funny is that we are already in globalization as one political economy of extraction and profit by capitalism, neoliberal capitalism

is also what they call globalization. Well, what if you reverse the valences there and say, yes, it is a global system. And therefore we all have to take care of each other and take care of the biosphere and the planet. That one planet religion, it can be spiritualized so quickly. It's a mystical feeling. Almost everybody, I think, feels it if they're not actively suffering and sometimes even if they are, because some religions rely on a process of self-enforced suffering in order to get to an altered state of consciousness where you suddenly see the larger picture. So it's that religion that I'm thinking about, the one planet, the oldest religion. Many religions talk about this. All humans are brothers and

sisters. And John Muir used to talk about our horizontal brothers and sisters. So then that the other living creatures get pulled into it too as part of a giant family. Can that spread given all of the countervailing forces? So it's an open question. I think we should leave it there for today. Kim Stanley Robinson, I want to thank you so much for your time and joining us today. And I want to thank you for all of your novels. And if our listeners out there are interested, I cannot highly recommend enough the Red Mars Trilogy, 2312, Aurora, and the latest Ministry for the Future. Thank you, Will. Thank you, Matt. It's been a pleasure.

Thank you. Thanks so much. Thank you.