Beyond Galt's Gulch, there's Macrolife

Macrolife, by George Zebrowski, is utterly mind-boggling science fiction. Its scope is certainly epic, spanning one hundred billion years, so I suppose it qualifies as space opera. Maybe Space Opera Plus. And I think it offers exciting ideas for radical libertarians, freedom-seeking secessionists, and anarcho-transhumanists to mull over.

First published thirty years ago, the book is a heady mix. It’s a novel, yes, but it’s also a future history, a polemic, and a call to action. More than anything else, it’s a far-reaching meditation on the ultimate survival of humankind. You don’t dash through this book and then toss it aside. After I finished reading Macrolife, I didn’t slip it back on a shelf. It sits bedside, where I plan to take a sip from time to time.

The novel’s premise is compelling. Its author contends that our species must reach out to the stars in order to endure. Zebrowski writes in an afterword to this latest edition (2006):

“[E]ven in the near term, across the next millennium, our failure to become a space-faring world may well be suicidal when we consider what we can do for our world from the high ground of the solar system: energy and resources, planetary management, and most important the ability to prevent the world-ending catastrophe of an asteroid strike. This last threat will happen; it is not a question of if but when. Today we are utterly helpless before such a danger and would know of it only when it was already happening.”

But Zebrowski argues that merely vacating Earth and populating other planets — or “dirtworlds” — is only a short-term solution. Limited resources, he says, assure the consistent failure of planet-based civilizations. Likewise, the proposed “space cylinder” habitats of Gerard O’Neill, which assume construction from scratch, lack long-term vision. With a nod to futurist Dandridge M. Cole, Zebrowski suggests that hollowed-out asteroids serve us as nomadic “societal containers,” or macrolife, “a mobile … organism comprised of human and human-derived intelligences. It’s an organism because it reproduces, with its human and other elements, moves and reacts on the scale of the Galaxy.” These “mobile utopias” will be larger inside “than the surface of a planet. And larger still within its minds.” In the Big Picture, macrolife is an open-ended, expanding union of organic, cybernetic, and machine intelligences, spreading itself through the galaxies.

Macrolife suggests futures beyond this planet, beyond Old World cultures, beyond governments, beyond authoritarian institutions. It’s utopian but acknowledges the dangers of utopianism. It’s worth reading, worth study, and worth serious discussion.

Must listening

Fer crissakes, listen to Rick Kleffel interview Cory Doctorow about standing firm, not being afraid, state surveillance, and his sci-fi "juvenile" Little Brother, which I think may be the best "libertarian" novel since Suprynowicz's The Black Arrow. Download the MP3 file (or listen to it) right here.

Fool your friends with this fake camera

Speaking of surveillance cameras — which I was earlier today — why not spook your friends with this nifty free downloadable papercraft CCTV camera, courtesy of Nude Magazine? Mount one at your front door or, as Cory Doctorow suggested at Boing Boing, in your bathroom.

"Smile! You're on Candid Camera!"

Paul Strong Jr. has launched a public art project to protest Seattle’s recent installation of “security” cameras in some of its parks — The Camerahead Project.

The project parodies the security-surveillance police-state by deploying its own agents, “a highly trained elite group of cybernetically enhanced observers using the latest and greatest in modern surveillance technology. Each Camerahead agent has been hand selected and specially modified for their unique ability to monitor the public with a complete disregard for anyone’s personal privacy.”

The lurid world of George Orwell

The copy on the back cover of this 1954 Signet paperback edition of Orwell’s 1984 reads:

Which One Will YOU Be In the Year 1984?

There won’t be much choice, of course, if this book’s predictions turn out to be true. But you’ll probably become one of the following four types:

Proletarian — Considered inferior and kept in total ignorance, you’ll be fed lies from the Ministry of Truth, eliminated upon signs of promise of ability!

Police Guard — Chosen for lack of intelligence but superior brawn, you’ll be suspicious of everyone and be ready to give your life for Big Brother, the leader you’ve never even seen!

Party Member: Male — Face-less, mind-less, a flesh-and-blood robot with a push-button brain, you’re denied love by law, taught hate by the flick of a switch!

Party Member: Female — A member of the Anti-Sex League from birth, your duty will be to smother all human emotion, and your children might not be your husband’s!

Unbelievable? You’ll feel differently after you’ve read this best-selling book of forbidden love and terror in a world many of us may live to see!

And how about that front cover illustration? Who’da thought Julia was so, well, HOT?

Why I am NOT an anarcho-capitalist

My friend Wendy McElroy does a terrific job explaining why she doesn't embrace the "anarcho-capitalist" label. Must reading for libertarian leftists.

The product of tyranny, the price of freedom

What does "freedom" mean?

Notice, as we rocket into another tiresome political campaign season, that even more than usual, the crucial word freedom is fiercely massaged, corrupted, despoiled, and degraded by the parasitic ruling class of bureaucrats, politicos, subsidized businessmen, privileged labor leaders, militarists, state historians, power-worshiping "intellectuals," and their media lapdogs. Each tells us we can be made “free” only by slavish devotion to their particular self-serving agenda.

More than ever, we radical libertarians must recapture our language. We must keep clear what we mean by “freedom” and not surrender to statist, watered-down redefinitions.

This brief essay by El Ray first appeared in the May 1964 issue of Liberal Innovator. It was later republished in a collection of Rayo’s writings, Vonu: The Search for Personal Freedom, edited by Jon Fisher and published by Loompanics Unlimited in 1983.

Is “freedom” a useful concept? Can a social environment be meaningfully described in terms of “freedom”?

Spokesmen for the political-economic status quo assert that man is, in large measure, a “slave” of his environment and his personal limitations and thus is never really free. This implies that acts or threats of violence inflicted on one man by other men are no more oppressive than are the misfortunes and restrictions inflicted on man by his physical environment; that, for example, a state edict to pay taxes or be imprisoned is not fundamentally different from the biological need to obtain food or starve.

If this view were correct, then freedom would be a sociological myth and all arguments for freedom would be empty phrases. A meaningful concept of freedom can not include immunity from natural phenomena. A man is obviously never “free” from the principles of gravity nor “free” from the necessity of sustaining his own life (so long as he chooses to live).

What is the significant difference between constraints imposed on a man by other human beings and the requirements of physical reality?

Man’s physical environment is mechanistic; it is not volitional. Man’s ability to function within his environment is limited only by his intelligence and knowledge and by intrinsic physical properties of the environment. Man may choose to increase his knowledge and devise ingenious ways to overcome apparent environmental constraints. And the environment continues to function in a potentially predictable manner, devoid of conscious intent. Man possesses and may use intelligence to alter his environment but his physical environment has no intelligent purpose to oppose man.

In contrast, constraints imposed on a man by other men can be the result of conscious, calculated, volitional intent. Purposeful attempts by a victim of force to regain his freedom can be opposed and negated by the purposeful counteractions of the coercers. Men bent on the forceful imposition of their demands can be a vastly more serious threat, a vastly more severe restriction on human action than are the non-reasoning forces of nature.

For this reason “freedom,” defined as the absence of physical force initiated by intelligent beings, is a meaningful concept. “Freedom” is a vital component of human effectiveness and fulfillment.