Stealing Worlds: Combining Drivers
Extracurriculars
This week I want to write a few things about a recent science fiction book you have probably not heard of: Karl Schroeder’s Stealing Worlds. Schroeder is not only an author, but also a professional futurist in Canada - so the expectations should be high that his work will reflect a systematic approach to the enumeration of future scenarios. I enjoyed the book quite a bit because it does this masterfully, is pretty well written, and includes a shout-out to bouldering as an all-purpose fitness hobby (which is worth a few extra points).
I promise I would have had and written this thought even if it wasn't mentioned in a review on the back of the book: lots of science fiction books use future technology mostly as a metaphor for some aspect of modern society, or they project forward one or two trends of interest and keep the rest of the world basically static, but Schroeder takes many trends and weak signals and then projects or amplifies those forward and explores their intersections, and then writes a story in the world that emerges. Here’s a list of the main elements that make up the world of the book (I think you can read this without feeling like anything massive was spoiled):
Massive unemployment caused by the rise of AI, with huge swaths of the population reliant on gig work to survive
Climate change causing oppressive heat, coastal flooding, and refugee flows
Cheap alternative energy and extraction bans causing a collapse of oil companies, leading to a partial collapse of society
3D scanning enabling replication of objects via 3D printing
Ubiquitous tracking and surveillance in person and online, including tying of Universal Basic Income to biometric registration
Augmented reality games building on the success of Pokémon Go to create entire game worlds overlaid on reality, especially using open spaces and abandoned industrial spaces, providing comprehensive side economies that interact with the “real economy” in unexpected ways
Cryptocurrency and smart contracts providing an alternative, publicly verifiable location-based economy, based on immutable personal keys and including being backed by things like ecosystem services, allowing for built-in Universal Basic Income without government involvement, etc
Distributed Autonomous Organizations (in the book they’re called Distributed Autonomous Corporations) that are run by AI and based on smart contracts, potentially operating on behalf of natural resources
Near-field communication tags encoding data locally, and ubiquitous sensors (including drones) gathering data from the environment and keeping the real and virtual worlds in sync
Cities existing as semi-autonomous entities within hostile state governments, making road travel dangerous
Right-wing militias looking for provocation to spring into action
These are all reasonable projections from the present day1, and the way they all interweave into a shockingly strange but plausible world is truly remarkable. I’m amazed at the level of craft that must have gone into this. I loved that it had a real cultural context - Pizzagate, Bitcoin, Flint water pollution, etc, make much better reference points than making up thinly veiled alternatives. This carefully constructed world then serves as the backdrop for an interesting personal story.
It’s not a perfect book: it was often hard for me to picture what was going on2, there was more foul language than I’m looking for, and the book ends with an expository Congressional hearing that serves an “explain everything to clear up confusing plot points” role. Still, reading this raised a lot of ideas and new thoughts for me. These deeper themes show how the drivers and trends mentioned above, when considered together, create interesting cultural synergies that speak to deeper layers of Inayatullah’s Causal Layered Analysis.
NFTs tied to the physical world represent, at a fundamental level, the power to name parts of reality. This is a power with deep significance in Abrahamic religion, European folklore, etc (and presumably beyond, but my knowledge gets fuzzy pretty quickly beyond those boundaries).
Augmented reality is interesting because it serves as a way for code to be connected to place. This hyper-localism is an opportunity to reverse some of the homogenization of popular culture caused by mass media. The connections between entities form an alternate map of reality
.People constantly choosing entertainment and games over the core work of civilization (building, working, raising a family) is a sign that civilization has lost its appeal for a large proportion of the population. A full solution involves deep cultural change, but part of the solution can be making it so playing the games overlays with building the future.
Elements of the Anthropocene such as climate change, watershed pollution, etc, mean that all “nature” is managed by humans to some extent, for better and worse. Even if we create systems to decenter humanity and elevate other elements of the natural world, the systems that create that valuation is a human construct.
The least plausible piece is definitely the part about crypto being useful and NFTs expanding beyond crypto bros trading ugly drawings of chimpanzees.
I would classify myself as having mild aphantasia, so this isn’t a problem that’s limited just to this book. This, however, was especially difficult, partly due to describing things that don’t exist, which puts a greater burden on the writer.