The dynamics of the Walkaway economy
I have noticed that most utopians (and dystopians) tend to present their future societies in fully developed form, and pay little attention to how the society we know transformed into the one they depict. This is understandable: coming up with a vision is hard enough without having to figure out the path to get there. However, it can trigger in the reader a sense of “nah, that’s not going to happen”. This is true especially for positive utopias: probably if we lived in one we would not be incentivized to break it, but we cannot see how to get from here to there. The utopia is a Nash equilibrium, but so is the world we live in. The utopia is a superior equilibrium, but we are stuck in this one.
Walkaway is an exception. A near future SF novel, it starts in a society we can completely recognize, give or take the robustness and commodification of some existing technologies (renewable energy production, self driving vehicles, 3D printing). We see the walkaway economy emerging in the course of the novel. Another exception is Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy; making a note of that here for future work in the reading group.
There are two steps to morphing a mainly default economy into a mainly walkaway economy: achieving critical mass and what happens at the tipping point.
1. Achieving critical mass in the walkaway economy
The walkaway economy would be a privately optimal choice (at least for some of us) if it were already there and we could just join it. When Iceweasel, Etcetera and Seth walk away, they find the Belt & Braces up and running and ready to take them in. Their necessities are met, and they can afford the luxury of figuring out where to go next. This is great, but how did it happen? The clearest explanation, I propose, is Jimmy’s story in Chapter 4. I recommend reading it all, it is also moving from a literary point of view (you’ll find it in section XVII, location 6055 on Kindle).
“What made you walk away, Jimmy?”
“It was debt at first.” […] “Mom and Dad were all over the idea of me going to uni. They’d both gotten degrees and swore it had been worth it, though they would owe money until they died, and neither one had ever held a job for more than a couple years. I once overheard them talking about how fucked it would be if I didn’t get a good job because neither of them had a pension and they’d need me to feed them once they were too old to get another job after the next layoff.
“The pressure was crazy. On the boards, people were saying, hey you assholes, you keep bitching about how everything is fucked up and shit, and there you are, getting ready to play along with it like good debt-slaves. Everyone knows there’s an alternative.”“That’d be us,” Etcetera said.
“That’d be you."
A particularly sinister thing is that Jimmy’s school is pushing students hard to choose expensive education options that push them into debt. The school has an app, supposed to give advice to students about their optimal choice of career, and:
They could only keep their charter if they ran a certain percentage of students through it and they followed its advice. So once you got your career picked by the thing, that was it. Every teacher and administrator knew their paychecks depended on you doing what it told you.
I can totally see this. A consortium of powerful private universities providing funding for schools, then threatening to withdraw it if they don’t send paying customers their way. Or, even better, lobbying for regulation that requires schools to provide a certain number of students to the “universities of excellence”. Apps like the one described already exist.
Debt has been the main mechanism pushing people out of society for five thousand years. In Debt: The First 5,000 Years David Graeber describes the macrocycle that underpinned the societies of Babylonian city-states: people would get in debt in years of bad crop. So they would borrow money, putting up as collateral their fields, then their houses, then their children, then their wives, then themselves. And then many would flee before the creditor could claim them as property, joining gangs of armed nomadic pastoralists that threatened society. At this point, the king would declare all private debt null and void (“blank slates”), debtors would be reunited with their families and return to their homes, and a new cycle would start.
2. Going mainstream: the tipping point in the walkaway economy
The process of growth of the walkaway society is nonlinear. Like most diffusion processes, it seems roughly logistic: a long period of slow growth, then a dramatic acceleration when almost everyone adopts it, then a slow process of decay of the last remaining default strongholds. The period of dramatic acceleration seems to be pushed by three factors.
- The walkaway society (with its underpinning economy) has reached an attractive scale. This is shown in Chapter 6. Walkaways are reclaiming cities drowned by climate change or extreme pollution, turning them into viable habitats for people “for whom society has no use”. They are very well organized: they have solarpunk transport systems like slow trains, zeppelins, and ultra-ultralight bicycles. They have house AIs and consciousness upload.
- Default society is becoming ever more harsh, with more extreme inequality and fewer opportunities for the rest of us. Nadie:
“There isn’t going to be default world and walkaway world trading people forever. When you have big rich people, and everyone else poor as poor, the result is … unstable.”
- Slow growth has reached the point where almost everyone has close friends or relatives in walkaway. At this point, network effects kick in, making it much easier for people to walk away than it had been for Jimmy. We see this happening in real time at the confrontation between default security and the freed inmates at Kingston prison, in Chapter 6:
It turned on graph theory: once you hit a critical mass of walkaways, the six-degrees thing meant every single rent-a-cop on the line was no more than two handshakes—or family Christmas dinners—away from a walkaway who would shame and sweet-talk them into putting down their weapons.
“The six-degrees thing” refers to Stanley Milgram’s small world experiment, a landmark result in network science. Political scientist Michael Chwe has a more formal treatment of how social network structure influences the possibility of successful collective action in this paper (recommended).