Your Undivided Attention - How Science Fiction Can Shape Our Reality — with Kim Stanley Robinson

Episode Date: February 10, 2022

The meta-crisis is so vast: climate change, exponential technology, addiction, polarization, and more. How do we grasp it, let alone take steps to address it? One of the thinking tools we have at our disposal is science fiction. To the extent that we co-evolve with our stories, science fiction can prepare us for the impending future — and empower us to shape it.This week on Your Undivided Attention, we're thrilled to have one of the greatest living science-fiction writers — Kim Stanley Robinson. His most recent novel is The Ministry for the Future, a sweeping epic that reaches into the very near future, and imagines what it would take to unite humanity and avoid a mass extinction. Whether or not you've read the book, this episode has insights for you. And if this episode makes you want to read the book, our conversation won't spoil it for you.Clarification: in the episode, Robinson refers to philosopher Antonio Gramsci's "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will." This phrase was originally said by novelist and playwright Romain Rolland. Gramsci made the phrase the motto of his newspaper, because he appreciated its integration of radical intellectualism with revolutionary activism.RECOMMENDED MEDIA The Ministry For The FutureRobinson's latest novel and the subject of our conversation — which reaches into the near future, and imagines what it would take to unite humanity and avoid a mass extinctionA Deeper Dive Into the Meta CrisisCHT's blog post about the meta-crisis, which includes the fall of sense-making and the rise of decentralized technology-enabled power Half Earth ProjectThe project based on E. O. Wilson's proposal to conserve half the land and sea — in order to safeguard the bulk of biodiversity, including ourselvesClimateAction.techGlobal tech worker community mobilizing the technology industry to face the climate crisisRECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES18 – The Stubborn Optimist’s Guide to Saving the Planet: https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/18-the-stubborn-optimists-guide-to-saving-the-planetBonus – The Stubborn Optimist’s Guide Revisited: https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/bonus-the-stubborn-optimists-guide-revisited29 – A Renegade Solution to Extractive Economics: https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/29-a-renegade-solution-to-extractive-economicsYour Undivided Attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Follow us on Twitter: @HumaneTech_  

Is Facebook destroying the lungs of the planet? Okay, that might sound like a stretch, but let's back up for a second. Brazil's president, Yaira Bolsonaro, would likely not have been elected if it hadn't been for Facebook and WhatsApp, bombarding people with misinformation and incendiary news prior to his election in 2018. And since being elected, Bolsonaro has enacted policies that are destroying the Amazon, so it can no longer act as a carbon sink. And this has had irreversible consequences for how humanity navigates the threat of climate change.

Under Bolsonaro's tenure, the rainforest lost more trees to deforestation this year than in any year since 2006. So it's two hops from Facebook to Brazil's election to policies that send the Amazon and our planet towards irreversible tipping points. How many engineers at Facebook or WhatsApp are thinking about that

when they make design decisions about how their platforms spread viral information. The climate crisis is so vast, how do we grasp it, let alone take steps to address it? One of the best thinking tools that we have is science fiction. How can science fiction prepare us for the impending future and enable us to change it? I'm Tristan Harris. And I'm Azaraskin. And this is your undivided attention, the podcast from the Center for Humane Technology. And as of this episode, your undivided attention is proud to be part of the TED Audio Collective.

Today on the show, we're thrilled to have with us one of the greatest living science fiction writers, Kim Stanley Robinson. His most recent novel is The Ministry for the Future, a sweeping epic that reaches into the very near future and imagines what it would take to unite humanity and avoid a mass extinction. And I want to say that the Ministry for the Future is definitely one of the most powerful books that I have read in the last year. years. You don't have to have read the Ministry for the Future in order to enjoy this episode. And if this episode makes you want to read it, our conversation won't spoil it for you. Stan Robinson, thank you so much for coming on to your undivided attention. Is and I are really genuinely honored to have you. Your book has had a profound influence on us and a network

of friends and community that recommended it. I just remember how many people over the year 2021 one, we're telling me that I needed to read your book. And I think it's something that we really wanted everyone who listens to your undivided attention to pay attention to because I think it does something that is so hard to do, which is what we're faced with these hyper-object scale problems that are beyond our ability to really sink our teeth into. And I feel like the medium of climate science fiction is just so unique in being able to bring us into a reality that we're already living in.

And I think your opening paragraphs of the book that start with a wet bulb temperature heat event that turns cities into morgues, I'd love for you to maybe just open with what inspired you to write this book and to start with such a gripping opening that you did. Sure. And thank you, Tristan and Aza. It's really good to be with you. It was maybe in 2018 that I began to read about this wet bulb 35 temperature. And I think it was a case of the scientific and medical communities having the different parts of information at hand. And yet no one had put it together to state it in the way that they began to that

essentially the human body cannot live in combinations of heat and humidity that are too high. And for me, what I thought was, I need to put this out there in a science fiction story. That needs to be the first scene. I was terrified. We've had wet bulb 34s. One of them was outside of Chicago. So this is a really broadband problem. And you're talking about latitude lines from north to south.

And possibly two-thirds of humanity lives in areas that could have a wet-bulb 35 temperature, including southeastern United States, and then everywhere south of that all the way down to Buenos Aires. So it's a very dark novel in its expectations of how fast things would go. I think the thing that originally attracted so many people to your book is the premise of it, which is an optimistic one. And maybe you want to talk a little bit about what the premise of the book was and the sort of difference between climate utopianism versus dystopianism. Yeah. And thank you for that. That's a good. lying to pursue here. I'm a utopian science fiction writer. It is a project, and I've been working

away at it from different kinds of angles for almost 35 years now. So when I came to this novel, again, I wanted to write utopian science fiction, and so the danger is present. We could still get to a good place by human actions over the next whatever, 10. to 30 years, the possibility is there both socially and technologically for us to finesse this situation. So utopia, for me, had shifted to what you might consider quite a low bar. If we dodge a mass extinction event in the next 30 years, that is a utopian future because it beats the other ones by a long shot. And it's possible. So the novel, I gave myself this challenge was, okay best case scenario let's show civilization squeaking by in the next say 30 years that's about

what the novel covers and getting to a better place where carbon in the atmosphere is going down and everything is looking a little better than it did before and never detached from the reader's sense that this could happen that it was physically and even maybe socially possible for it to happen So that's the definition of the utopian novel in our time. We dodged the mass extinction event. And so the fact that there could be much, much worse histories playing out over the next 30 years is quite true. It could go to full-on mass extinction event and fall of civilization. That dystopian future is just as possible as the best-case scenario that I wrote up.

It's just that I chose to write up the best-case scenario. And I now know, because it's been a year and a half since the book came out, and I know by my lived experience that there was a hunger for this story. People wanted it. I mean, the key thing that you're doing in your book is actually saying with the premise of we do eventually reverse, you know, and do carbon draw down and avoid a mass extinction event, What are the steps that humanity takes and what are the things, given what we know about human nature, our capacity for denial, our capacity to say it's not going to happen to us, our capacity to say it's not that bad, or it's only going to affect those people over there. Given how persistent our stubbornness, what are the kind of events that it takes to knock us out of that slumber? I want to do a few things here because I want to take our listeners to sort of decompose the hyper object. And when we use that first, Just for listeners who are not aware, it comes from the philosopher Timothy Morton who talked

about climate change and many of our other massive scale global problems as hyper objects. Hyper objects are problems that are so complex, so diffuse, so massive, that they're hard for us to take in. I mean, where is climate change? Is it, you know, it's there when you turn on the key and the ignition to your car. It's there when you start your lawnmower. And so one of the, I think the most beautiful thing that you've done. Stan, is take a thing that everybody already knows. I mean, who hasn't heard about climate change

or sea level rise or, you know, refugee migration. And what's said about your book is that you take the present more seriously than we do, that it's key virtue is it allows us to take our present more seriously than we otherwise would. That was definitely my experience of it. So, Stan, maybe just to take our listeners, your book is titled Ministry for the Future, what is the Ministry for the future? Well, it is an invention of my book, but what I've discovered is that there are many, many people on this planet who feel like they have been working in ministries for the future for a long time. And so that's one of the reasons that they have appreciated and even loved this book. But the way I structured it in my novel is this. The Paris Agreement

has been formed under the Congress of the Parties, and that's all UN-led, the IPCC. also. These are organizations that have been spun out by the UN as they see what needs to be done in coordinating international efforts. So the UN tries to see what it can do. And the Paris Agreement is a major event in world history. All the nations signed on to it, partly because it was a very weak structure. But the Paris Agreement in 2015 said, we will all agree to work on climate change And not only that, but we'll agree to meet every year and try to up our promises and improve our situation relative to the crisis. And one of the articles in it says, the Congress of the parties can set up standing committees to deal with problems in between the time when the meetings happen. What I did was seized on that as my excuse.

They set up a standing committee to deal with the problem that we aren't coping quickly enough with the climate crisis. and then I let it loose. What would a small UN committee tasked with representing the people of the future and the animals that can't speak in court? What would they do? And I gave them kind of a hefty budget. Some people have laughed that I had given him so much money. That was just a coincidence or an accident. It wouldn't be enough to do the job.

No agency can do this job. But they would try to do something. And then I imagined what that might be. So that's my ministry for the future. The Ministry for the Future, the book, opens with a horrific scene. Over the course of one weekend, 20 million people in India die in a massive heat wave. Here's an excerpt. Four more people died that night.

In the morning, the sun rose again like the blazing furnace of heat that it was, blasting the rooftop and its sad cargo of wrapped bodies. Every rooftop, and looking down at the town, every sidewalk to now was a morgue. The town was a morgue, and it was as hot as ever, maybe hotter. The thermometer now read 42 degrees, humidity, 16%. What does it mean when science fiction starts to mirror our present-day newscasts? In the last 24 hours, dozens of ambulances were dispatched to deal with patients suffering from the heat.

Police in British Columbia say they are overwhelmed after receiving, at least 75 sudden death calls. A stretch that not only broke temperature records, but also claimed the lives of at least 595 people. We just went from India as a morgue in science fiction to British Columbia as a morgue in real life. If that doesn't stun us, then it shows just how desensitized we are.

The powerful thing about science fiction is that it can resensitize us to reality. Science fiction can also help us imagine a new reality. What are the precipitating events that Kim Stanley Robinson imagines to move humanity in a new direction? I don't think there's going to be one precipitating event. Even my heat death disaster in India that starts the novel, which I have to admit is a stunning and horrific scene, doesn't change anything following it. It becomes like mass shootings in the U.S. People elsewhere say,

well, that happens in India. That happens in the tropics. That happens to crowded places filled with brown people. That won't happen to us. So we're very good at deflecting these kinds of thoughts. It will always happen to someone else until it happens to you. And then you'll be enormously surprised and coping as best you can. So the change is going to come from a drumbeat of news and a change in the story that we tell ourselves, a change in the structure of feeling. And also the fear that something bad that really you can't dodge. And I would say a food panic. If we, if people like what happened with the pandemic where suddenly you couldn't get toilet paper in American grocery stores, and there was a bit of hoarding of things that lasted. If there was a food panic, the supply

change would be wrecked, the stores would be empty, people would begin to get hungry. And I think there is a general sense of fear and dread. But what do you do about that? Very simply, we have to pay ourselves for doing good decarbonization work and real human ecological work rather than for extractive, destructive work. So you have to move from profit to some kind of non-profit, government-led, what can be called carbon quantitative easing. So everybody knows what quantitative easing, I think. And for those of you who aren't familiar with quantitative easing, which is the basis of Robinson's notion of carbon quantitative easing. quantitative easing. It's when the central bank, in our case the Federal Reserve, uses its financial

tools to stimulate the economy. So carbon quantitative easing would be that the central banks in their first creation of new money would direct it specifically to decarbonization tasks. This could be paid from nation states all the way down to individuals. If you could prove that you had brought down a ton of CO2 by one means or another, the means wouldn't matter. Then you would get paid for in what could of not a cryptocurrency, but a currency that is backed by all the central banks. So it might not be U.S. dollars, but it could be instantly transferred into U.S. dollars at a reliable and hopefully high enough rate that you get paid more for decarbonizing than the expense that you put out to do so.

Eon Wilson died last month, I think it was, a great American intellectual. He will be remembered in history at a level of like Ben Franklin or William James, a major American public intellectual, starting out as an ant scientist, which is remarkable but beautiful, and an ecologist. And his half-earth plan that we leave half of the earth's surface and the oceans to the wild animals is for our own good. It's a survival strategy for humans. And the last thing I would bring up is in my novel, there is this notion,

that decarbonization can happen in all kinds of ways that could be called geoengineering, emergency measures that are taken deliberately by human beings to decarbonize and cool the planet. And in this case, you can possibly slow down some of the Antarctic glaciers by removing the melt water from underneath them. That's highly speculative, and yet it's not just my idea. There's a good paper on it in Nature magazine that was published even before. I wrote my book. I wasn't aware of it. I was happy to see it after the fact. This is a big project, but it's one of the things that my book discusses as we are going to have to change everything. The project of civilization is going to be to save our ass and that we have to pay ourselves to do that.

One of the most powerful parts of reading the book for me is that when I stopped reading the book, I felt like I was still living within it. That is, like, I would open up the news and you had talked about the heat event in India, and here we are in reading about British Columbia where 600 people die in exactly this heat event. And it started to shift the way that I perceived reality because I was still living within the book.

That is, even though I knew at an intellectual level, all of the different sort of stats and points and interpolations of where we are going the nature of the hyper object which is climate change and the fast pace of news meant I didn't get to live in that reality and what the book did for me was it changed my felt sense my lived experience

and so I'd love for you to talk about a little bit of that kind of theory of change and changing people's internal barometer of what is possible yes i'm fascinated by all that stuff and i appreciate your response to the reading of that book and what i want to say is this is what the novel is for always and in general that meaning is constructed we construct our sense of meaning out of the world some people do it by way of religion which is a kind of a story some people take account of the findings of the sciences like

psychology or the social sciences to find what meaning there is, philosophy. These are all stories. And then the novel is a kind of a story that performed two science fictional gifts in that it gives you time travel to another time and a place and then suddenly you're living there and it gives you telepathy in that you're inside other people's heads. And that's rare. And you're following the stream of consciousness to someone else and you're believing it. So I wouldn't say, I wouldn't privilege it over all the other story forms. It's just that it's my story form. So, yes, it changes your structure of feeling because your sense of meaning when you look at the daily in rush of quote news or your own sensory experiences, your own interactions with other humans,

how do you slot them into a system of significance, how do you give them meaning? The beauty of the novel is that it's given you the 10,000 lives, and each one of them, of course, is a highly moral document. There's no denying that the writer of a novel is loading the dice, telling a story with a moral to it, even when they pretend not to, they do. And science fiction has that extra touch, which I love. You cast a story into the future, and you have thereby displayed your theory of history. How does change happen? What do we do now? to make a better future, that reveals your worldview, your ideology, your political stance, your theory of history.

Science fiction is always just laying that right on on a table as long as you decode the story. And one of the joys of reading science fiction is, of course, you're always decoding. Like, what is he saying about right now that this story is representing by its future cast? It's a game that we play that teaches us interesting things for the real world. I think it's definitely worth slowing down and defining structure of feeling. And the reason why I say that is so often when we're faced with problems that feel so large and so insurmountable, where does that feeling come from that things can't be changed? And it's often that we're looking internally at some barometer and sort of running an experiment.

Like, would human beings really fly less and see their family less? Would human beings really live off of like 2,000 watts of energy? like, oh, it's completely implausible that we would shift our systems. I can't even imagine what a different version of capitalism might look like. We just say that's impossible and don't go down that path. Yeah, thank you for this, Asa, because it's good. A structure of feeling comes out of Raymond Williams, a Marxist literary critic from England, very good one, many concepts useful out of Raymond Williams.

And this one, one of my faves, because... It's essentially like zeitgeist or worldview or what Marx's called the general intellect. What everybody agrees is normal. And it's a social thing. To a certain extent, it's a generational thing. You guys are younger than me and have a different generational experience. Say that you feel that you're in the precariet. And which is to say your situation is precarious.

You lose your job. You lose your health insurance. you get a illness that you didn't expect, and your life can be ruined. So this structure of feeling of being precarious is part of the capitalist realism. Things will never change. The powerful have power. They've got the money. They've got the guns.

They can buy the politicians. And therefore, there will never be a reduction in, there will never be progressive taxation again. Why should I even try? I'm going to check out. I'm going to stay on Twitter all day. They're not completely disengaged because, it's highly political, but it's not organized into let's change things. It's more a registering of dismay.

But if you think of the structure of feeling as being malleable to the moment and what we do matters to the next moment, then capitalist realism has to always be remembered as illusory feeling that people have, that this political economy that we're in now is really the only one, and it's so strong that we'll never get out of it. That's wrong on several levels, and there's one basic one I want to bring up. What can't happen won't happen.

So the capitalist system, as it exists now, cannot go on without wrecking the biosphere and causing civilization to spiral into catastrophes and crisis. So the system we're in now can't go on, therefore it won't go on. How will it change? Well, that's a matter of what we do now. now. I wanted to share just one anecdote that really made me think of your book. And this is

casting back to Francis Hogan, the Facebook whistleblower. So place your mind, there has been five or so weeks of Wall Street Journal articles with increasingly bad disclosures of what Facebook knew when they knew it and what they decided to do. She comes out on 60 minutes on a Sunday, and she's going to be testifying for Congress, I believe, on Tuesday. And that Monday, Facebook and WhatsApp go down. Facebook employees are locked out of the building. Their badges stop working. No one knows what's happening.

This is the worst outage for Facebook across all their properties. And the question is, who did it? And my mind immediately went to Ministry of the Future. Like, we are living in this fiction. So I just wanted to share that story for the power of it. Well, I get a lot of emails whenever anything happens now. They are saying, oh, wow, this is like something out of ministry for the future. And I'm pleased by that, although also alarmed, but it's a good response

because it means that people are trying to fit individual random incidents that look random into a coherent story of what's going on. So they're trying to construct history on the fly. And I wonder if Facebook blew up Facebook that day as a distraction. This is a pitched battle, and it's on all fronts. I think actually one of the more important parts of your book is the role of eco-terrorism and the role of violent destruction of property. You have drones used to start breaking down planes, drones used to break pipelines.

And could you talk a little bit about the role of eco-terrorism? in stoking the change that ultimately changes humanity's course for the better? Yes. It occurred to me when I was writing the book that there were going to be people suffering from climate damage who are going to be angry. If you see your village flattened, if you see your families killed, and you're a survivor, you're going to be angry. And you might want not just justice, but revenge. And we've seen that there's violence in this world. And I wanted the novel to feel realistic. I myself am a suburban middle-class Californian house husband, and I had to think also what would I be willing to do? I was queasy enough about this topic to try to put it into the

novel without looking like I was advocating one action over another. What the novel clearly advocates is a carbon coin and some judicious and well-placed geoengineering. and social changes, justice itself as a technology. So I would like to claim that Ministry for the Future is advocating non-violent civil resistance and legislative change as the best way forward on this. But the world is not in total agreement with me and stranger things are going to happen

than what I've advocated for in the book. As we go into the next few years, right in the next five years, there's going to be a discrepancy between what we need to do on decarbonization and what actually happens. And it's become more and more evident

that the fossil fuel industries are not going to go down without a fight. But also, these fossil fuel industries are usually owned by nation states. 75% of the fossil fuels on this planet are owned by their nation states' governments, the petro states. And the United States is a petro state,

but we prefer to go through private businesses. Many other countries do not and directly own their fossil fuels. How are we going to compensate them? This is a problem for the carbon coin. But to get back to the point of violence and resistance, as we see the discrepancy, we're burning more fossil fuels than we ought to, and by 2030, that will have made things grotesquely difficult for the generations that follow to claw back. We might pass planetary boundaries, that you simply, human powers, technology fails. We don't have the physical power to claw back from those, so it has to happen. What will middle class, or the precariat, or ordinary citizens do or agree is the right thing to do,

which would be the support of the rest of the community? And as a science fiction writer, I like to say, nobody can predict the future. It's impossible. That's not what science fiction is about. But thinking just as an ordinary citizen, I think, We are coming into a crux period in the next five years where more and more people are going to be asking these questions, and we might be seeing more civil disobedience.

Whether there will be a violent edge to that, well, it seems quite likely. So this is part of the discussion that we're in. How do you solve your own imagination gap? That is to say, when I stare at problems like this, and I think a lot of our listeners stare at problems that are hyper objects. What Ministry for the Future does is that it gives a plausible path to how we sort of squeak by. What is your process for galvanizing that imagination gap

to crafting a set of steps that get us from here to there? That's a good question. One thing I think that I do, and I've always done this as a novelist, is that nobody thinks of themselves as a villain. Most sane people have a self-justification system in place, an ideology of action that says that what they're doing is not so bad. This includes people working hard to burn more fossil fuels as their career. They're creating energy for a populace that needs energy

because we all need energy as something keeping us alive. They have their systems of justification. So one thing I do is try to imagine the other side system of justification and see if I could destabilize that by a story. Another thing I've been doing is trying to imagine, and the ministry of the future tries to imagine, is are there present-day tools, legislatures, central banks, the already existing nation-state global capitalist system,

can it be wielded and reformed within itself to become just, and sustainable over the long haul and stabilized. Well, some people would say, oh, Stan, no, impossible. You're such a liberal. You're such a hippie. You're such a law and order guy. We've got to break the system and build an entirely new one. And I'm just thinking, A, not enough people will buy onto that.

B, it doesn't work because when you break things, you've got to rebuild them. And we only have eight years before we're cast into a course that will be very hard to claw back from. Only eight years before we're cast into a course that would be hard to claw back from. That sounds terrifying. But Robinson's book is actually full of potential solutions in ideas and sources of inspiration. And in that spirit, I wanted to give you a tour of some of the solutions that he explores in Ministry for the Future. Everything from pumping seawater to the Antarctic ice shelf to slow sea level rise, to switching the global currency of the world to carbon coin.

a reward for sequestering carbon. To solar geoengineering and what happens when nations start seeding the atmosphere with metals to reflect sunlight and cool the planet. To building and launching new solar-powered airships. The rise of new religions that help people cope with this new climate reality. How Black Wings of the Ministry for the Future destroy oil pipelines and airplanes to employ a more rapid transition. To therapeutic practices for millions dealing with climate grief.

To transitioning corporations to worker cooperatives with greater incentives to take care of workers in the environment. To job guarantees, clean desalinization, replacing container ships with sailing ships, to universal passports for climate refugees. And all of this told through narratives of different people affected by the climate reality all over the world. When we have a sense of what's possible, we can now have an opportunity to create it. I mean, we mentioned a few different themes here. The importance of changing the structure of feeling, of changing the sense of what is possible, the Overton window, Samuel Overton's concept of what is socially acceptable within the political zeitgeist, something that felt like, oh, we could never do that to suddenly, well, we can do that, you know, is there like a historical precedent for the kind of major societal turns or flipping of the infrastructure or incentives? That's kind of what the reality we're trying to instantiate here for listeners.

Sure. And I do have an analogy, although it's more unprecedented than ever, the situation we're in now. But the analogy would be to World War II. And, of course, you know, your country's being bombed. Your building or the building next door blown up, that gets your attention. And you believe you're in a crisis when that's happening. But in World War II, the British Treasury seized the Bank of England. It said, look, we're taking over here in terms of where money gets dispersed in the first place,

and it has to be put to the war effort. So, okay, the analogy to World War II, right after World War II, the structural feeling was such that the U.S. government, led by Dwight Eisenhower and a Republican Congress, had a progressive tax rate such as the richest people in the country when their income hit $400,000, which would be the equivalent now of about $4 million, they were taxed 93% above that. Okay, 1952, 93, 93% tax rate once you got above it. So in other words, you hit a certain level of success and the government takes the rest. How did that happen? The structure of feeling changed. What was different in 53 was that the people who had gone through World War II had seen a spasm of worldwide destruction

and death, 100 million people died, many more displaced, lives ruined, a spasm in history such that it got their attention, and the wealthy were somewhat blamed for it. Ordinary people felt like the rich people didn't go out and fight on the front lines. They continued to make profits on the side. There was a continuous fight between government and business as to who was going to still make profits out of the war effort, because businesses were still running. It's just they were building planes and tanks. We are in a crisis such that the deaths at the end of a bad climate change century would way outnumber World War II.

And this is a shocking thought that is hard to take into your mind. And it's happening in slow motion and it's not a bomb on your head. It might be a hurricane blowing your house down, but it's hard to grasp. But once people grasp it, then, okay, progressive taxation helps a lot. lot. Regulations help a lot. You simply can't do that. And so I revert to government and law as being malleable forms. And if you make democracy real by believing in it and enacting it, and you get a legislative working majority, and you simply steamroll the minority that will always think you're some kind of horrific socialist, demon, Satanist. I mean, there's a lot of complaint about

how we're all polarized, blah, blah, well, as things were more polarized in 1861, polarization in American politics has always been intense and maybe worldwide everywhere. You just have to win the political battle. And since 75% of the populace would be better served by a progressive leftist program than a regressive rightist program,

if you could convince them of that, you'd win the elections, you'd change the legislation, legislation. The laws would change for the better. Now, I'm by no means sanguine that all this will come to pass as one would wish, as I would wish, as we might wish. It's a wicked political fight. That's what it comes down to. And hear the stories that you tell the people in the middle. To me, this is where the battlefront is. And maybe this is because I'm a suburban American and I see it around me. You've got to fight for the middle. You've got to win the political majority. It doesn't matter if it's 52% if you can hold it and win and go on and then change

the laws in a smart way. It could do it. Stan, what's one thing that since you've written the book and looking at all the examples of things that are unfolding? What's something that gives you hope that maybe our listeners might not be aware of? One thing I wasn't aware of is how huge the effort to do good already is in this contested political sphere and because we're not yet doing enough one can make the quick assumption that will never do enough that it won't be enough and that we are already doomed to failure but what i saw was that maybe that's not true and even when you're not doing enough, you might be on a trajectory towards doing enough because the intensity of the effort of people working on it already is already there. That gives me a lot of hope because

in a way I'm just a reporter. I conceive of novels as being a way of organizing the stories of one's time. And even a science fiction writer does that. So I've just organized the stories and looking around at the stories, it gives me hope to think that the situation is just changing fast to a sense that the story of humanity in the 21st century is, can we cope with climate change and get to a just and sustainable civilization? That's the whole story now. So there's a sense of hope in that there is a cause that a lot of people are joining to fight to good fight. And I also want to say, you know, hope is biological. You can make it as a political choice. So you got Gramsci, pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. So things do

look dire, and you hold on to hope and to optimism as a political club to beat your enemies with. Say, no, the situation can get better, and therefore I'm going to fight for it, and therefore you are wrong. And at the biological level, hunger, that's a kind of a hope. I'm hungry. I hope I get some food in me because my cells need ATP right now. So if you redefine hope as something biological. It doesn't go away just because you're feeling discouraged. You can imagine that you're hopeful at the cellular level and that it's stubborn and it doesn't go away. It's just always there. It's the understory. It's the hunger. You eat your breakfast. You've actually acted on a hope that you had to stay alive. And once you redefine it like that, you can begin to fan the flames

and what seems kind of little and weak can begin to look really stubborn and persistent. Is there, when you think about our audience of technologists at technology companies, people who work at the Facebooks, the Twitters, the Instagrams of the world, policymakers in Washington who think about how technology can be a better force in our society, is there any action that you would like to leave any of our listeners with more specifically? One thing that is a little counterintuitive in our day and age, but it's worked for me, is try doing your work outside. Spend more time outside in general. It will change you. It will be lower carbon burn. And you can actually, if many people are working at stations or working at home, as long as there's shade on your computer screen,

you can work outside more than you think you can. And it changes everything for you. It's healthier. It's more cheerful. So try going outside more. Kim Stanley Robinson is an American writer of science fiction. He's published numerous short stories and 22 novels. Most recently, the subject of our conversation, the Ministry for the Future.

He's had many accolades and perhaps the most exciting one, being that in 2001, an asteroid, was named in his honor. Robinson lives and works outside in Davis, California. Your undivided attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology, a nonprofit organization working to catalyze a humane future. Our executive producer is Stephanie Lep. Our senior producer is Julius Scott. Engineering on this episode by Jeff Sudakin. Dan Kedmi is our editor at large,

original music and sound design by Ryan and Hayes Holiday, and a special thanks to the whole Center for Humane Technology team for making this podcast possible. You can find show notes, transcripts, and much more at HumaneTech.com. A very special thanks goes to our generous lead supporters, including the Omidyar Network, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, and the Evolve Foundation.

among many others. And if you made it all the way here, let me just give one more thank you to you for giving us your undivided attention.