Given the material abundance made possible by the replicator, how would it be possible to maintain a system based on money, profit, and class power?

It doesn’t get much more dystopian than this: what if all distributed manufacturing technologies are enclosed by the logic of netarchical capitalism?

This is no fantasy. In their 2017 report, 3D printing: a threat to global trade, Dutch multinational ING Group analyzes the potential impact of distributed manufacturing technologies. The text below, written by Peter Frase and originally published in his blog, paints a bleak picture of how the same patterns of capitalist enclosure we’ve seen in the Internet extend to physical manufacturing. Frase develops these themes further in his book Four Futures.

Peter Frase: In the process of trying to pull together some thoughts on intellectual property, zero marginal-cost goods, immaterial labor, and the incipient transition to a rentier form of capitalism, I’ve been working out a thought experiment: a possible future society I call anti-Star Trek. Consider this a stab at a theory of posterity.

One of the intriguing things about the world of Star Trek, as Gene Roddenberry presented it in The Next Generation and subsequent series, is that it appears to be, in essence, a communist society. There is no money, everyone has access to whatever resources they need, and no-one is required to work. Liberated from the need to engage in wage labor for survival, people are free to get in spaceships and go flying around the galaxy for edification and adventure. Aliens who still believe in hoarding money and material acquisitions, like the Ferengi, are viewed as barbaric anachronisms.

The technical condition of possibility for this society is comprised of of two basic components. The first is the replicator, a technology that can make instant copies of any object with no input of human labor. The second is an apparently unlimited supply of free energy, due to anti-matter reactions or dilithium crystals or whatever. It is, in sum, a society that has overcome scarcity.

Anti-Star Trek takes these same technological premises: replicators, free energy, and a post-scarcity economy. But it casts them in a different set of social relations. Anti-Star Trek is an attempt to answer the following question:

• Given the material abundance made possible by the replicator, how would it be possible to maintain a system based on money, profit, and class power?

Economists like to say that capitalist market economies work optimally when they are used to allocate scarce goods. So how to maintain capitalism in a world where scarcity can be largely overcome? What follows is some steps toward an answer to this question.

Like industrial capitalism, the economy of anti-Star Trek rests on a specific state-enforced regime of property relations. However, the kind of property that is central to anti-Star Trek is not physical but intellectual property, as codified legally in the patent and copyright system. While contemporary defenders of intellectual property like to speak of it as though it is broadly analogous to other kinds of property, it is actually based on a quite different principle. As the (libertarian) economists Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine point out:

Intellectual property law is not about your right to control your copy of your idea – this is a right that . . . does not need a great deal of protection. What intellectual property law is really about is about your right to control my copy of your idea. This is not a right ordinarily or automatically granted to the owners of other types of property. If I produce a cup of coffee, I have the right to choose whether or not to sell it to you or drink it myself. But my property right is not an automatic right both to sell you the cup of coffee and to tell you how to drink it.

This is the quality of intellectual property law that provides an economic foundation for anti-Star Trek: the ability to tell others how to use copies of an idea that you “own”. In order to get access to a replicator, you have to buy one from a company that licenses you the right to use a replicator. (Someone can’t give you a replicator or make one with their replicator, because that would violate their license). What’s more, every time you make something with the replicator, you also need to pay a licensing fee to whoever owns the rights to that particular thing. So if the Captain Jean-Luc Picard of anti-Star Trek wanted “tea, Earl Grey, hot”, he would have to pay the company that has copyrighted the replicator pattern for hot Earl Grey tea. (Presumably some other company owns the rights to cold tea.)

This solves the problem of how to maintain for-profit capitalist enterprise, at least on the surface. Anyone who tries to supply their needs from their replicator without paying the copyright cartels would become an outlaw, like today’s online file-sharers. But if everyone is constantly being forced to pay out money in licensing fees, then they need some way of earning money, and this brings up a new problem. With replicators around, there’s no need for human labor in any kind of physical production. So what kind of jobs would exist in this economy? Here are a few possibilities.

1. The creative class. There will be a need for people to come up with new things to replicate, or new variations on old things, which can then be copyrighted and used as the basis for future licensing revenue. But this is never going to be a very large source of jobs, because the labor required to create a pattern that can be infinitely replicated is orders of magnitude less than the labor required in a physical production process in which the same object is made over and over again. What’s more, we can see in today’s world that lots of people will create and innovate on their own, without being paid for it. The capitalists of anti-Star Trek would probably find it more economical to simply pick through the ranks of unpaid creators, find new ideas that seem promising, and then buy out the creators and turn the idea into the firm’s intellectual property.
2. Lawyers. In a world where the economy is based on intellectual property, companies will constantly be suing each other for alleged infringements of each others’ copyrights and patents. This will provide employment for some significant fraction of the population, but again it’s hard to see this being enough to sustain an entire economy. Particularly because of a theme that will arise again in the next couple of points: just about anything can, in principle, be automated. It’s easy to imagine big intellectual property firms coming up with procedures for mass-filing lawsuits that rely on fewer and fewer human lawyers. On the other hand, perhaps an equilibrium will arise where every individual needs to keep a lawyer on retainer, because they can’t afford the cost of auto-lawyer software but they must still fight off lawsuits from firms attempting to win big damages for alleged infringment.
3. Marketers. As time goes on, the list of possible things you can replicate will only continue to grow, but people’s money to buy licenses–and their time to enjoy the things they replicate–will not grow fast enough to keep up. The biggest threat to any given company’s profits will not be the cost of labor or raw materials–since they don’t need much or any of those–but rather the prospect that the licenses they own will lose out in popularity to those of competitors. So there will be an unending and cut-throat competition to market one company’s intellectual properties as superior to the competition’s: Coke over Pepsi, Ford over Toyota, and so on. This should keep a small army employed in advertizing and marketing. But once again, beware the spectre of automation: advances in data mining, machine learning and artificial intelligence may lessen the amount of human labor required even in these fields.
4. Guard labor. The term “Guard Labor” is used by the economists Bowles and Jayadev to refer to:
   

   The efforts of the monitors, guards, and military personnel . . . directed not toward production, but toward the enforcement of claims arising from exchanges and the pursuit or prevention of unilateral transfers of property ownership.

   In other words, guard labor is the labor required in any society with great inequalities of wealth and power, in order to keep the poor and powerless from taking a share back from the rich and powerful. Since the whole point of anti-Star Trek is to maintain such inequalities even when they appear economically superfluous, there will obviously still be a great need for guard labor. And the additional burden of enforcing intellectual property restrictions will increase demand for such labor, since it requires careful monitoring of what was once considered private behavior. Once again, however, automation looms: robot police, anyone?

These, it seems to me, would be the main source of employment in the world of anti-Star Trek. It seems implausible, however, that this would be sufficient–the society would probably be subject to a persistent trend toward under-employment. This is particularly true given that all the sectors except (arguably) the first would be subject to pressures toward labor-saving technological innovation. What’s more, there is also another way for private companies to avoid employing workers for some of these tasks: turn them into activities that people will find pleasurable, and will thus do for free on their own time. Firms like Google are already experimenting with such strategies. The computer scientist Luis von Ahn has specialized in developing “games with a purpose”: applications that present themselves to end users as enjoyable diversions, but which also perform a useful computational task. One of von Ahn’s games asked users to identify objects in photos, and the data was then fed back into a database that was used for searching images. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how this line of research could lead toward the world of Orson Scott Card’s novel Ender’s Game, in which children remotely fight an interstellar war through what they think are video games.

Thus it seems that the main problem confronting the society of anti-Star Trek is the problem of effective demand: that is, how to ensure that people are able to earn enough money to be able to pay the licensing fees on which private profit depends. Of course, this isn’t so different from the problem that confronted industrial capitalism, but it becomes more severe as human labor is increasingly squeezed out of the system, and human beings become superfluous as elements of production, even as they remain necessary as consumers.

Ultimately, even capitalist self-interest will require some redistribution of wealth downward in order to support demand. Society reaches a state in which, as the late André Gorz put it, “the distribution of means of payment must correspond to the volume of wealth socially produced and not to the volume of work performed”. This is particularly true–indeed, it is necessarily true–of a world based on intellectual property rents rather than on value based on labor-time.

But here the class of rentier-capitalists will confront a collective action problem. In principle, it would be possible to sustain the system by taxing the profits of profitable firms and redistributing the money back to consumers–possibly as a no-strings attached guaranteed income, and possibly in return for performing some kind of meaningless make-work. But even if redistribution is desirable from the standpoint of the class as a whole, any individual company or rich person will be tempted to free-ride on the payments of others, and will therefore resist efforts to impose a redistributive tax. Of course, the government could also simply print money to give to the working class, but the resulting inflation would just be an indirect form of redistribution and would also be resisted. Finally, there is the option of funding consumption through consumer indebtedness–but this merely delays the demand crisis rather than resolving it, as residents of the present know all too well.

This all sets the stage for ongoing stagnation and crisis in the world of anti-Star Trek. And then, of course, there are the masses. Would the power of ideology be strong enough to induce people to accept the state of affairs I’ve described? Or would people start to ask why the wealth of knowledge and culture was being enclosed within restrictive laws, when “another world is possible” beyond the regime of artificial scarcity?

Originally published in Peter Frase’s blog. Republished with the author’s full permission.

Photo by JD Hancock

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In Four Futures Peter Frase poses, as a thought experiment, an “anti-Star Trek”: a world that shares the same technologies as Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s post-scarcity communist society, but in which those technologies of abundance are enclosed with “intellectual property” barriers so that capitalists can continue to live off the rents of artificial scarcity.

“…[I]magine that unlike Star Trek, we don’t all have access to our own replicators. And that in order to get access to a replicator, you would have to buy one from a company that licenses the right to use it. You can’t get someone to give you a replicator or make one with their replicator, because that would violate their license and get them in legal trouble.

What’s more, every time you make something with the replicator, you also need to pay a licensing fee to whoever owns the rights to that particular thing. Captain Jean-Luc Picard customarily walks to the replicator and requests “tea, Earl Grey, hot.” But his anti-Star Trek counterpart would have to pay the company that has copyrighted the replicator pattern for hot Earl Grey tea.”

In such a world, earning the money to pay for the things will be a problem, since there is no need for labor to actually make anything. What remaining work there is will be a small pool of intensely competed-for jobs designing stuff, some amount of guard labor enforcing “intellectual property” against piracy and protecting the accumulated property of the rich, and an odd assortment of work in household service or hand-crafting luxury goods for those in the propertied classes who value the status symbolism entailed in such things.

This is the world of The Diamond Age. In Stephenson’s medium-term future, Star Trek’s matter-energy replicators are a reality (well, the food replication is considerably well below Star Trek standards). A world of plentiful sustenance for all, without money, is technologically feasible. But there the similarity ends.

The story is set at some indefinite point in the mid-21st century—presumably somewhere around the 2060s or so, given that a quite old lady reminisces about being a thrasher in the ’90s.

The world in this future is governed by the international order that emerged from a period of chaos—the Interregnum—following the collapse of most major nation-states that occurred when encrypted currencies starved them of tax revenue. The basic unit of organization is the phyle—a deterritorialized, networked opt-in community with associated support platforms, which is based on some shared point of affinity like ethnicity, ideology or religion.

The first phyle to emerge from the Interregnum was the First Distributed Republic, apparently an entirely pragmatic, non-ideological platform whose chief purpose—like the lodges in Poul Anderson’s Northwestern Federation (Orion Shall Rise)—was to keep the lights on and the trash picked up. By the time of the story, there are many scores of phyles. The largest and richest are the neo-Victorians (recruited largely from the Anglosphere) and the Nipponese, both governed by an intensively work-oriented and capitalistic ethos and making money through nanotech and other forms of engineering and design. The others—Mormons, Israelis, Parsis, Boers, Ashanti, Hindustani, Sendero Luminoso, etc., etc.—range widely in size. CryptNet is a phyle governed by a pirate ideology, and classified somewhere between subversive and terrorist by the mainstream phyles and their international order.

Depending on their size and wealth, the various phyles maintain territorial enclaves ranging in size from city-states to clusters of a few buildings in cities around the world, with the largest and most widely proliferated belonging to the neo-Victorians and Nipponese for obvious reasons.

Given the existence of technologies of abundance, the profitability of neo-Victorian and Nipponese industry obviously depends on patents and copyrights. And the post-scarcity potential of matter-energy replicators—“matter compilers”—is limited by the Feed. Feeds are long-distance pipelines of various volumes transferring feed stocks of assorted atoms to supply mater compilers. A Feed, in turn, is supplied by a Source—a facility which uses nanotech membranes and other nano-filtering mechanisms to sort out the various elements from seawater and air and store them in separate holding tanks. The major Sources are located in, and operated by, enclaves of the most technically advanced phyles.

The combination of “intellectual property” and the dependence of matter compilers on the Feed severely hobbles the potential for abundance. Some basic minimum of essential life support—fabricated staple foods, clothing, blankets—is available for free from public matter compilers. Everything else has a price, often steep. The “thetes”—a large underclass of people, perhaps a majority of the Earth’s population, unaffiliated with any phyle—stay alive through a combination of casual labor for members of the rich phyles and access to free stuff from the MCs. A considerable burden of high-interest debt, enforced in the last resort by workhouses for defaulters, is apparently the norm among this population.

This system of artificial scarcity is maintained through an international regime called the Common Economic Protocol (CEP). The CEP is enforced by the joint military forces of Protocol Enforcement. Constable Moore, himself Scottish, is a retired Brigadier who served with the Second Brigade of the Third Division of the First Protocol Enforcement Expeditionary Force—largely recruited from the American, British, Ulster Protestant and Uitlander lumpenproletariat, and other thetes of the Anglosphere. Mention is also made of a Nipponese division. The primary purpose of Protocol Enforcement is to enforce “intellectual property” law and secure the Feeds against attack from disgruntled local populations in the territories they pass through.

Although David De Ugarte‘s adoption of the term “phyle” for neo-Venetian platforms like the Las Indias Group was obviously an homage to The Diamond Age, the capitalist phyles in the story are nothing like De Ugarte’s vision of networked platforms incubating cooperative enterprises for commons-based peer production. The neo-Victorians, the only phyle whose internal workings are described in much detail, adhere to a social regime based—as their name suggests—on intense social hierarchy and strict sexual mores. The majority of their members are salaried laborers in the engineering firms like Machine-Phase Systems Limited and Imperial Tectonics Limited that produce most of the phyle’s income. The phyle itself is a giant corporation governed by “Equity Lords” with ownership stakes of various sizes (earl-level, duke-level, and so forth).

The main geographic setting of the story is the southern coast of China—the coastal city-states and the neo-Victorian clave of New Atlantis—along with the regional successor states of the Chinese interior. The relationship Stephenson depicts between the capitalist phyles, Protocol Enforcement and the various Chinese states is reminiscent—deliberately so, obviously—of the era of the Open Door and gunboat diplomacy, with the Rape of Nanking thrown in for good measure.

At the time of the story, the disemployment of hundreds of millions of peasants in the Chinese interior by newly developed synthetic rice from the MCs has resulted in a radical uprising—the Fists of Righteous Harmony—obviously based on the Boxer Rebellion. Peasant armies are marching southward, preparing to invade the coastal city-states and phyles, and burning Feeds along the way. Protocol Enforcement is fighting a losing war against them and gradually retreating southward.

Meanwhile, a coalition of CryptNet, other dissident phyles, and local mini-states allied with the Fists is at work developing a genuine post-scarcity alternative to the Feed, which will destroy the material foundation of the CEP’s global order. This rival technology—the Seed—will use self-assembling nanotech to compile food, tools and goods of all kinds from ambient matter on-site, independently of Feed lines.

The various subplots of the novel involve, directly or indirectly, the complex intrigues between New Atlantis and Protocol Enforcement, which are trying to thwart completion of the Seed, and the coalition struggling to complete it. Central to the latter coalition is the Celestial Kingdom, a city-state in the Greater Shanghai area governed by a caste of Mandarins with a Confucian ideology. Their leadership sees the Seed, a producer-centered technology amenable to village economy, as a way to restore the dignity of the peasantry and create an independent society with an organic social order independent of the CEP’s international order.

The attitude of the capitalist phyles and Protocol Enforcement towards the Seed is, understandably, one of revulsion. John Hackworth, an artifex (senior engineer) in one of the New Atlantan nanotech firms, describes it from his point of view:

“CryptNet’s true desire is the Seed—a technology that, in their diabolical scheme, will one day supplant the Feed, upon which our society and many others are founded. Protocol, to us, has brought prosperity and Peace—to CryptNet, however, it is a contemptible system of oppression. They believe that information has an almost mystical power of free flow and self-replication, as water seeks its own level or sparks fly upward…. It is their view that one day, instead of Feeds terminating in matter compilers, we will have Seeds that, sown on the earth, will sprout up into houses, hamburgers, spaceships, and books—that the Seed will develop inevitably from the Feed, and that upoin it will be founded a more highly evolved society….

Of course, it can’t be allowed—the Feed is not a system of control and oppression, as CryptNet would maintain. It is the only way order can be maintained in modern society—if everyone possessed a Seed, anyone could produce weapons whose destrucive power rivalled that of… nuclear weapons. This is why Protocol Enforcement takes such a dim view of CryptNet’s activities.”

The real reason for his horror—of course—is that the Seed would “dissolve the foundations of New Atlantis and Nippon and all of the societies that had grown up around the concept of a centralized, hierarchical Feed.” More specifically it would, by enabling people to meet all their needs for free and without limit or permission, destroy the wealth of those who lived by claiming ownership over the right to use ideas.

The Mandarins of the Celestial Kingdom, on the other hand, envisioned a high-tech neo-Confucian order in a China “freed from the yoke of the foreign Feed,” in “the coming Age of the Seed.”

“Peasants tended their fields and paddies, and even in times of drought and flood, the earth brought forth a rich harvest: food, of course, but many unfamiliar plants too, fruits that could be made into medicines, bamboo a thousand times stronger than natural varieties, trees that produced synthetic rubber and pellets of clean safe fuel. In an orderly procession the suntanned farmers brought their proceeds to great markets in clean cities free of cholera and strife, where all of the young people were respectful and dutiful scholars and all of the elders were honored and cared for.”

The book ends, as the victorious Fists surge through the coastal claves, with the destruction of the near-complete design for the Seed. The clear implication is that, absent any alternative to the Feed, the Fists’ uprising will collapse and the hegemony of the CEP will reassert itself over China. At the same time there is also a hint—but perhaps this is just my wishful thinking—that the setback to development of the Seed is only a temporary postponement.

Photo by torbakhopper

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An interesting situation has developed with the proposed Star Trek ‘fan film’ Axanar which may highlight how we find ourselves in a transition period between two eras: the old era which relies on ‘Intellectual Property’ (IP), heavyweight corporate power and lawyers; against a new agile era based on crowdfunding and free access to information.

hollywoodreporter.com explains the situation:

“For decades, Paramount and CBS have tolerated and even encouraged fans of the Star Trek franchise to use their imagination at will, but on Tuesday the entertainment companies went to their battle stations and launched a legal missile at a production company touting the first independent Star Trek film.

Axanar, the subject of a lawsuit filed on Friday in California federal court, is no ordinary Star Trek film. The forthcoming feature film (preceded by a short film) is the source of more than $1 million in crowdfunding on Kickstarter and Indiegogo. The producers, led by Alec Peters, aim to make a studio-quality film. As the pitch to investors put it, “While some may call it a ‘fan film’ as we are not licensed by CBS, Axanar has professionals working in front and behind the camera, with a fully-professional crew — many of whom have worked on Star Trek itself — who ensure Axanar will be the quality of Star Trek that all fans want to see.”

Paramount and CBS see a violation of their intellectual property.

“The Axanar Works infringe Plaintiffs’ works by using innumerable copyrighted elements of Star Trek, including its settings, characters, species, and themes,” states the complaint.

Axanar has become one of the biggest film projects in Kickstarter history and has been nearing warp speed with the reported help of Star Trek actor George Takei. The film mines subject area referenced in the late 1960s Gene Roddenberry television series and appears to be a prequel.”

As mentioned, CBS/Paramount has previously turned a blind eye to fan films using the Star Trek mythology as long as they do not make any profit either from the film itself or from related merchandise.

The current state of affairs was complicated enough anyway, with the rights to the franchise being split between two separate corporations, and as explained here:

“A major stumbling block: “Star Trek’s” licensing and merchandising rights are spread over two media conglomerates with competing goals. The rights to the original television series from the 1960s remained with CBS after it split off from Paramount’s corporate parent Viacom in 2006, while the studio retained the rights to the film series. CBS also held onto the ability to create future “Star Trek” TV shows.

Paramount must license the “Star Trek” characters from CBS Consumer Products for film merchandising.”

So Axanar is entering an already fairly complicated universe with its proposed new movie. What seems to have awoken the CBS/Paramount interest in this film is the large amount of money raised from the crowdfunding campaigns, plus the fact that they have their own new ‘official’ ST film coming out in 2016.

So one question is: can a production still be described as ‘amateur’ or ‘fan’ when it has a budget of over $1 million, and is paying industry professionals to make it, even when it has stated that the film itself is a non-profit operation?

Granted, a million dollars is nothing compared to what the next ‘official’ Star Trek film will cost, but this brings us to the crux of the thing here: the cost of making ‘professional quality’ films has dropped enormously in recent years due to the increase in power of cheap personal computers and ‘prosumer’ CGI software. Add to this the power of the internet to publicise and raise the money via crowdfunding, and this looks like a very much more equal fight than could have been imagined a decade or so ago. This is not so much one David versus Goliath as a million distributed young Davids against one ageing Goliath.

So what do the big studios have in their favour? If everything else is more or less equal, it basically boils down to two letters: IP. These two letters hold the key to enormous corporate and state power. CBS/Paramount holds the ‘intellectual property’ rights and therefore can force the upstart production out of existence using the power of the US courts which will surely back its bid to reassert its sole right to exploit its ‘property’: that is, the collection of ideas and characters originated by Gene Roddenberry in the 1960s which have been added to constantly since then and now make up the Star Trek mythological universe.

Therefore unless the producers of Axanar can come to some sort of agreement with the rights holders, that will be the end of the story. But should it be? Or should they soon be able to do whatever they want with these ideas? As unpleasantfacts.com notes:

“This whole mess would be largely avoided if the Star Trek intellectual property was in the public domain. They’d still probably be making bad Star Trek movies, it just wouldn’t be as offensive when there were other options. Big studios wouldn’t be the only game in town when it comes to characters and a universe that has been part of people’s lives for many years.

If the 1909 Copyright act was still in effect, Star Trek would be in the public domain after 56 years. The original series first aired in 1966, so by 2022 the basics of the original Star Trek universe free to anyone who might be able to do it justice. Under current law, it is in the hands of the current rights holders until at least 2061 and likely longer since copyrights get extended when Mickey Mouse gets close to the public domain due to Disney’s lobbyists.”

Corporate capture of the legislative powers pretty much everywhere in the world means that franchises such as Star Trek are pretty much never going to enter the public domain, at least while this seriously broken system of copyright exists. As always, corporations proclaim themselves staunchly in favour of a free market until they themselves enjoy a monopoly.

In contrast, it doesn’t appear that the majority of the ‘IP’ related to Sherlock Holmes being in the public domain (although naturally even that is complicated) has harmed efforts to produce successful films and television series using the iconic detective as their main character – what has harmed them, if anything, is them simply not being very good.

Given that hardcore Star Trek fans are apparently disenchanted with the recent CBS/Paramount films and are putting their money where their mouth is by backing the new Axanar project, it may be that the lawsuit is revealing a previously unexperienced level of concern over fan-backed competition to their franchise. Imagine the embarrassment if the crowdsourced film got more views on YouTube than the mainstream one did at the cinema, with maybe one two-hundredth of the budget. Also if Axanar goes ahead, we can’t discount that the infamous ‘Streisand Effect‘ will in effect be granting free publicity to the project from now on.

Overall it does look likely that the corporate behemoths will win this battle, although Alec Peters, producer of Axanar, sounds hopeful that some sort of agreement can be reached. This does however point to a new front in the overall war between those who believe that long-running mythologies such as Star Trek should be effectively ‘open sourced’ into the public domain and who now have the power to create ‘professional quality’ retellings of them, and those who believe that ‘Intellectual Property’ is sacred and – at least for now – have the backing of the state to enforce it.

Connect with the author on twitter @guyjames23

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