Nothing But Flowers
When it comes to planning our future, most socialists borrow too much from capitalists.
In the mid-1990s, as Silicon Valley lurched from its countercultural origins to the height of the dotcom boom, media critics Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron coined the term ‘Californian Ideology’ to describe the ethos emerging from its core. Californian Ideology, they argued, is a belief that technology can constantly be applied to solve problems in virtually all sectors of the economy without need to consider questions of politics, equity, and basic efficacy. It combines technological determinism, neoliberal economics, and countercultural libertarianism to downplay the role of politics in charting the course of the future, while elevating that of technology and innovation. To oppose technological fixes is to oppose progress itself.
For most, the term “Californian Ideology” will evoke the monomaniacal ambitions of Elon Musk or the technocratic hacks at the Breakthrough Institute. Yet this view is not confined to tech executives and neoliberal environmentalists. Whether they know it or not, mainstream leftists promote the notion that techno-fixes will save us from the climate crisis and deliver a future of abundance—if only they’re controlled by socialists.
The reality is that the technologies promised to herald a smart, sustainable future — whether capitalist or socialist — have a lot of problems conveniently ignored by their boosters. Make no mistake: Silicon Valley won’t save us, but neither will growth-driven socialism.
Communist billionaire futures
The most outlandish example of the belief that technology will deliver us from what we’ve done to the planet is found in Aaron Bastani’s 2019 book Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Bastani argues that under his vision of “luxury communism,” everyone would live like billionaires do today.
Given the unfathomable environmental footprint of a billionaire, that plan may seem like cause for concern. Not to worry, Bastani has an answer: a massive and rapid deployment of renewables, mostly solar, to provide the several-orders-in-magnitude increase of energy consumption that seven billion billionaire lifestyles would entail. Bastani reminds us that “in just ninety minutes the Earth is hit with the equivalent energy all of humanity uses in an entire year,” as if harnessing it all were a trivial question. That solar power will then be used to power autonomous electric vehicles as “the fulcrum of the transition to renewables in its earliest stages and the leading edge of the clean, autonomous economy.” Apparently, even in a communist techno-future, we’re all still taking cars everywhere.
The sci-fi of luxury communism brings to mind a critique of Musk’s misguided ideas about transportation made by transport planner Jarrett Walker. Elite projection, Walker wrote, “is the belief, among relatively fortunate and influential people, that what those people find convenient or attractive is good for the society as a whole.” As a self-professed “champagne socialist,” Bastani falls into this category. He fails to question the underlying assumptions of tech executives: his utopia, like theirs, is the propagation of the billionaire lifestyle. But if people had the democratic ability to remake society and decide their own path forward, would they really choose the dreams of a bloviating narcissist like Musk?
Bastani dangles the same kind of future, laundering the visions of tech executives into a snake-oil socialism. In response to concerns that Earth does not contain the minerals required for seven billion billionaires, for example, Bastani assures us that asteroid mining to supply the minerals for his planned technologies — green and otherwise — could be ready as soon as 2030. This is both ludicrous and irrelevant: we already know that emissions need to be cut in half by the end of the decade if we’re to avoid 1.5ºC of warming. In the meantime, the electric vehicle-fuelled “green extractivism” in the Global South won’t pause for the fantastical future of asteroid mining.
A misguided obsession with growth
Fully-automated luxury communists make for an easy target. But plenty of leftists with far less grand ideas nevertheless fall into the same trap. Chief among them is Leigh Phillips, a perennial degrowth critic known for his book Austerity Ecology. Phillips doesn’t present the same kind of big technological solutions as Bastani; rather, he simply believes that economic growth is inextricably linked to living standards. The degrowth movement, then, would impose extreme austerity by making people in Western countries live on as little as $5,500 a year: “an end to growth declares an end to technological development, an end to science, an end to progress, an end to the open-ended search for freedom—an end to history.”
Phillips’ concept of degrowth is a strawman—far more extreme than many of its supporters actually advocate. There might be fringe groups that advocate returning to subsistence living, but few degrowth boosters argue anything of the sort. As Andrea Grainger explains, evidence shows the link between GDP and well-being is tenuous. While economic development is still necessary in the Global South, above a certain level of material wealth the additional benefits to happiness and quality of life diminish rapidly.
The issues with Phillips assertion go beyond his questionable link to living standards. Phillips emphasizes maintaining high levels of growth and “decoupling” emissions from development. He provides the example of the 1987 Montreal Protocol—an international agreement which banned ozone-depleting substances—to prove that state interventions in the market can effectively mitigate environmental problems. But the pace and scale of the transformation required to address climate change is many times that of replacing some refrigerator chemicals. We need to reduce emissions at a rate unseen in modern times, and requiring large amounts of economic growth at the same time will make that task impossible.
Despite the clear differences, Phillips’ argument falls into a trap similar to Bastani. In 1978, Murray Bookchin castigated futurists for imagining “the present as it exists today, projected, one hundred years from now.” In view of the fully-automated luxury communism of Bastani and the growth-centered socialism of Phillips, Bookchin’s criticism rings true. Phillips’ critique of degrowth prescribes a materially-intensive cycle of development long into the future, missing an opportunity to rethink the conditions of our existence and reorganize our societies. Our current lifestyles and modes of production were constructed to serve the capitalist class and their accumulation of capital and power. Can socialists really only imagine an extension of our present conditions further into the future?
A critical approach for an ecosocialist future
A socialist society will require rethinking the material basis of our economy: how production is organized, and the role of technology within it. It will also require recognizing that the consumerist symbols of private wealth under capitalism do not reflect socialist values.
This is not to say that we should necessarily pursue a degrowth strategy. Rather, the metrics we use should directly account for quality of life instead of trying to indirectly capture them through economic output. They should also involve a more critical appraisal of technology’s undesirable effects.
All of the technologies we surround ourselves with, and the billions of additional devices that companies expect to roll out in the coming years, produce a ton of data. This data is necessary for the machine learning models that are supposed to revolutionize computing in the future and decouple growth from emissions via monitoring. Yet this data is also increasingly used to monitor and predict our behavior. The data centers where it’s all stored and processed, meanwhile, are incredibly energy intensive. They continue to be largely powered by fossil fuels, and new ones are constantly added to keep up with rapidly rising demand.
As socialists, we shouldn’t simply accept this as a given, but be ready to critically examine whether these technologies fit into a society that centers human flourishing and environmental sustainability. To that end, leftist technologists such as Ben Tarnoff have called for a 21st-century Luddism to “destroy machinery hurtful to the common good and build machinery helpful to it.” Instead of doggedly pursuing growth as Bastani or Phillips would have it, we need to ask who is actually served from pursuing those goals. Bookchin described “the language of electronics” as being “the language of manipulation.” The left is not immune from it, nor are Bastani and Phillips’ misguided visions the extent of it.
For centuries, the direction of society has been guided by capitalist imperatives. As we reckon with the material world these imperatives have made, we will have to concern ourselves not merely with ecological repair, but also with how to achieve human flourishing where growth has failed. Does this mean sprawling suburbs that divide us and require us to have personal automobiles for transport? Will we still have shopping malls surrounded by asphalt moats and filled with plastic treasures? Would dozens of new smartphones still be released on an annual basis, creating mountains of e-waste shipped straight to the Global South?
As we seize power, socialists will have to make these decisions. Just as during the Paris Commune and the Spanish Revolution, societies truly built by and for the working class will look much different than the dreams of the capitalists.
Paris Marx is a freelance writer, host of left-wing tech podcast Tech Won't Save Us, and editor of Radical Urbanist.
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