[ExI] The Flight of the Lawn Chair Man, Part II

[Damien Broderick]

At 04:29 PM 7/10/2008 +0930, Emlyn wrote:

>We've got this default culture that's all about
>money and ownership, increasing our wealth, status, more peanuts!
>Then, there's this interesting counterculture bursting out of the
>tech/science communities, saying that you can't subject information to
>the same rules as physical property, that our common intellectual
>wealth is based on the ability to share and build on information
>discovered by others, that the concept of IP just breaks things and
>makes us all poorer. And you have these really quite astounding
>realizations of these values, most prominent being the FOSS movement,
>which seems like the most positive product of collective frustration
>one could imagine.

This is argued out in fictional terms in Kim Stanley Robinson's 
magisterial RED MARS, GREEN MARS, BLUE MARS trilogy. A sample:

`When we first arrived, and for twenty years after that, Mars was 
like Antarctica but even purer. We were outside the world, we didn't 
even own things - some clothes, a lectern [that is, hand-held 
computer], and that was it! ...This arrangement resembles the 
prehistoric way to live, and it therefore feels right to us, because 
our brains recognize it from three million years of practicing it. In 
essence our brains grew to their current configuration in response to 
the realities of that life. So as a result people grow *powerfully 
attached* to that kind of life, when they get the chance to live it. 
It allows you to concentrate your attention on the real work, which 
means everything that is done to stay alive, or make things, or 
satisfy one's curiosity, or play. That is utopia, John, especially 
for primitives and scientists, which is to say everybody. So a 
scientific research station is actually a little model of prehistoric 
utopia, carved out of the transnational money economy by clever 
primates who want to live well.'

As I commented in READING BY STARLIGHT:

"...he shows us in detail the building of a utopia in the wastes of a 
dead world, and its corrupting by the old order. In the early years 
of colonisation by the `first hundred' scientists and technologists, 
a programme of careful exploitation is begun by a largely capitalist 
Earth of the 2020s. Ironically, these representatives of the home 
planet live in a kind of monastic, socialist order, outside the realm 
of economics. It is a human ecology based on the design of scientific 
research settlements. When it breaks down in a polyphony of special 
interests and imported xenophobias, the Russian anarchist Arkady 
offers a rich explanation that recalls something of [critic Fredric] 
Jameson's redemptive [marxist] impulse [namely, the citation 
above]... This intriguing analysis explains why scientists work 
cheerfully on devastating weapons systems, why many men and women 
find their happiest billet in the peace-time armed services, indeed 
why war-time is remembered so fondly by those who have not actually 
been maimed (and some who have). It also captures one of the lures of 
sf's typical sociological foregrounds: a happy band of brothers (and, 
latterly, sisters) outside the circuit of realpolitik and economics, 
paid by the Culture or the Galactic Survey `to boldly go where nobody 
has been before', and have intellectual fun there."

Damien Broderick