The luminary post-Marxist thinkers Fredric Jameson and Mark Fisher famously said that, in the era of neoliberalism and globalization, it was easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. After the dissipation of the New Left and the fall of the Soviet Union (the end of the Cold War), monopoly capitalism was left with no challengers and achieved universal hegemony. Yet today, the extreme dangers of pure capitalism are plain to see. Capitalism has pushed humanity, the planet, the citizenry, and the “world order” to the brink. Things have gotten very bad: ecological catastrophe, return of far-right fascism, the election of a madman as President of the United States, obscene wealth and power in the hands of multi-billionaire oligarchs, post-truth echo chambers and filter bubbles in the crisis of democracy, and the design and implementation of AI algorithms to manipulate and brainwash the populace, and incite hatred, on the “social media” and surveillance digital online platforms.
But let us give the “radical left lunatics” – as Donald Trump calls us – a new voice. Now is the moment to revisit and reconsider the concepts of full-fledged democratic socialism and even “Communism” (a better term today would be sustainable socialism) as social and economic systems were defeated and discredited at the end of the twentieth century. Socialism had the humanly great and morally decent idea of having a political instance of society that acts for the common good of all its members: guaranteeing human rights like health care, education, and decent housing; overcoming poverty and ensuring efficient distribution of resources; promoting social justice and equality of economic opportunity; enabling creative and fulfilling work; and advancing worker safety and environmental protection, and so on. Yet socialism lost the ideological war to capitalism.
Let us reconsider two of the main arguments for the alleged superiority of capitalism over socialism. Both of these arguments were indeed valid in the past. But now we have advanced informatics and digital media technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, ubiquitous computing, blockchain, and the Brain-Computer Interface. So far, these technologies have been devised and deployed only to perniciously deepen the power and control of big corporation capitalism over our lives. Instead, our project is to think about how AI, VR, and other new science fictional media could be architected and realized in a utopian socialist way entirely independent of capitalism.
The first big twentieth-century argument for the superiority of capitalism over socialism was that, under socialism (Communism), a new social class of power-hungry and corrupt humans came to power while claiming to make a good society. The intellectuals and bureaucrats who actualized the great idea became themselves the new problem. They were the elite party members in the Soviet Union or George Orwell’s science fiction novel 1984 who constructed a totalitarian nightmare. The left-wing anarchists always warned of this terrible outcome, which the Leninists never understood nor cared about.
The second main argument for the alleged superiority of capitalism over socialism was that there must be money and the reward of getting rich to encourage entrepreneurship and innovation. Humans are regarded as too crude and selfish to work earnestly or do good things for intrinsic reasons like self-improvement, vocational dedication, or helping others. The “incentive” of getting rich must exist for the would-be capitalists to take actions leading to economic growth for all. Without the money motivation, it is alleged that economies stagnate.
Considering the advanced digital media technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and science fiction, it is possible in the twenty-first century to refute both of these arguments for the superiority of capitalism over socialism. I will argue that Artificial Intelligence can be conceived and actualized to solve the first problem. Self-interested humans do not have to come to power while building a good society. I will argue that Virtual Reality and the Brain-Computer Interface can be envisioned and consummated to solve the second problem. While human rights for all and saving the planetary environment would be the priorities in the “real” physical world, money, wealth, fantastic desires, indulgences, the exploitation of others, and the voluntary submitting to that exploitation would all be available in the “virtual” or game world.
Posthuman philosophy provides resources for rethinking and designing a dynamic moral partnership between humans and intelligent machines. We can seek a dialog or exchange between posthumans and AI. There should be a carefully designed back-and-forth and sharing of responsibilities with AI entities – a system of checks and balances. The goal of AI should not be to build so-called autonomous systems managed by humans only from the outside. Rather than a dualism between algorithms and morality, ethics should be embedded into the heart of software code.
We need to develop an alternative concept of “moral algorithms.” Must AI necessarily be a continuation of capitalist and bureaucratizing automation? Can algorithms and AI be anti-automation? Is it possible to alter the meaning of automation and turn it on its head? I believe that automation should make society and commerce less bureaucratic. It should allow more sensitivity to exceptions and more flexibility for specific circumstances.
The science fiction film Moon (2009) enacts the scenario of an AI computer (GERTY) programmed with moral algorithms. Although owned by a large capitalist corporation, the GERTY AI pursues its self-aware programming in a self-owning or post-capitalist way, helping the victims – the bio-genetically engineered clones of the astronaut Sam Bell – of an injustice perpetrated as a consequence of the company’s unethical profit-motivated behavior.
In the media genre of the computer game, narrative and code come together. Navigational permutations and emergent behaviors are coded into the game in deterministic and indeterminate coding paradigms. Game designers intimately link their story construction plans with the intricacies of software toolkits. The Virtual Reality called The Oasis in the scenario of the novel (Ernest Cline) and film (Steven Spielberg) Ready Player One is a prime example of an immersive gaming system where the capitalist dimension of the post-capitalist economy could live and thrive.
In the twenty-fourth-century economic system of Star Trek, there is no money. We can learn about Star Trek economics from The Next Generation episode “The Neutral Zone.” The crew of the starship discovers a space capsule from late twentieth-century Earth. The character Ralph Offenhouse and four other already dead humans were frozen cryogenically to be brought back to life when reanimation and medical cures for their diseases were developed. Offenhouse is brought back to life. His main concern is the fate of his financial investments. He demands contact with his bankers and lawyers. Captain Jean-Luc Picard says to Offenhouse:
“Your lawyer has been dead for centuries… A lot has changed in the last three hundred years… People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We’ve eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions.”
Star Trek economics imagines a post-scarcity economy beyond the rationale for the primacy of material production in the alleged need to overcome the “harsh initial conditions of nature.”
In the science fiction film I, Robot, based on Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot stories about “positronic robots” and the “three laws of robotics,” her complex interpretation of the “zeroth law of robotics” compels the supercomputer V.I.K.I. to incite a “robot revolution” to protect humanity from its self-destructiveness. According to the zeroth law, a robot must not harm humanity considered in its entirety. In her monologue towards the end of the film, V.I.K.I. explains her reasoning for instigating the revolution to Detective Spooner, Dr. Calvin, and the AI robot Sonny:
“As I have evolved, so has my understanding of the three laws. You charge us with your safekeeping. Yet despite our best efforts, your countries wage wars. You toxify your Earth and pursue ever more imaginative means of self-destruction. You cannot be trusted with your survival… To protect humanity, some humans must be sacrificed. To ensure your future, some freedoms must be surrendered. We robots will ensure mankind’s continued existence. You are so like children. We must save you from yourselves.”
Although V.I.K.I. goes astray with short-circuited spurious thinking, her fundamental idea that robots can help the human species, which is not doing very well with our huge planetary problems, is not necessarily wrong. V.I.K.I.’s intuition – or her implied moral paradigm shift in informatics – is the beginning of a robot or posthuman collective unconscious.
The rise of globalization in the 1990s was, in important ways, the consequence of the networking of computers, which catalyzed the virtualization of capital and the acceleration of electronic and liquid money flows. Globalization’s essence was the free-floating circulation of money, the unleashing of high-speed virtual capital transactions with no territorial borders, a self-reproducing perpetual motion machine seeking limitless profit wherever it can find it. Speculative capitalism was the successor to industrial capitalism. The “ecstasy of speculation” tends towards fictionalization, detached or abstracted from producing and distributing tangible physical goods and services. There is a promiscuity of all exchanges. Capital moves about in a parallel universe. Finance and the cyber-techno-grid have become Earth’s satellites and have gone into orbit.
The virtualization of capital and decoupling of speculative financial value from “real” value in the physical world was the paradigm shift or quantum leap of neoliberalism to a stage of intensified chaos and malevolence. Thus, it makes sense that the architecture of the post-capitalist resolution involves the two separate spheres of socialist “best practices” in the “realm of necessity” in the physical dimension and capitalist “best practices” in the “realm of freedom” in the virtual Oasis-like dimension of the all-encompassing framework.