Futures Imperfect

Paul Graham Raven

Column/Vector “Community” Special Issue 300

The longer I’ve sat with the assignment to write a column themed on community, the more daunting it has come to seem. This is, ironically, a personal problem: put very simply—and thus avoiding autobiographical sidequests—community is not something with which I am very well acquainted, and what acquaintance I have with it is tainted with distrust. Community has always shown itself to me as being concerned with who’s out as much as who’s in, if not perhaps more so; I thus tend to position community, from which one may be expelled, in contrast to the admittedly more abstract notion of society, of which one is a member by default (though one may of course be an unwilling and/or disenfranchised member of society).

Those who work with language face a perpetual dilemma in what we sometimes still call the ‘information age ’: on the one hand, words have meanings; on the other hand, meanings change with usage, and this process of semantic alteration (or evacuation) seems only to accelerate. In this particular case, I am rather stuck with “community,” but I can surface my discontent by suggesting a fresh distinction between community considered as a noun—a thing which one has or does not have—and community as a verb—a thing which one does, or in which one partakes.

(Readers who detect a Heraclitean distinction between being and becoming, respectively, are not imagining things; those whose philosophy tends more to the vernacular may prefer to think in terms of product and process.)

To be clear, I’m not out to position one or the other of these terms as being “the bad community;” indeed, that’s exactly the sort of monochromatic thinking that I’m trying to get away from in this piece. But I do want to highlight the way in which community-as-noun tends ineluctibly toward in-group-out-group dynamics, while community-as-verb puts the focus instead upon choices and compromises made in the face of constraints whose very commonality might conjure up the spectre of society which Margaret Thatcher once so successfully banished. More plainly, it seems to me that by paying more attention to what we are obliged to do, in the process of making, unmaking and remaking community through our actions, we might better recognise the greater societal ideal that community reproduces at a smaller and more limited scale.

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I’m going to start with the novel Everything for Everyone by M E O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi. I’m more than a little late to this particular party, but now understand how this obscure novel from an anarchist press has had such impressive word-of-mouth reach. It’s a very good book—a landmark title, in fact, both in terms of the utopia as a literary form, and of its specific utopian politics. However, while it represents a vanguard with regard to the former, I feel it may represent the end of an era to the latter. 

Put another way, Everything for Everyone (E4E hereafter) is flawed, as all works of art invariably are—but those flaws are all the more disappointing, aesthetically and politically, given the power and timeliness of the whole. It feels reasonable to suggest that one metric of success for a utopia might be the extent to which it depicts its most central social reconfigurations as having been normalised. In many dimensions, E4E achieves this goal, but it fails in the dimension which we can reasonably infer to be the dearest to its authors’ hearts—and by way of that failure, I would argue, highlights the onrushing dead-end of a fundamentally identitarian leftism.

As the subtitle suggests, E4E recounts the establishment, via gradual and cumulative (and at times very violent) revolution, of what is repeatedly referred to as “the New York commune,” and does so through the medium of oral history interview transcripts, which have been recorded by two characters who bear the same names as the book’s authors. The city of New York is the focus, with some side-trips into other parts of the former United States, but thanks to the backstories of some of the interviewees we also learn about the path of the revolution (or perhaps of many different revolutions?) elsewhere, notably China and—heartbreakingly, in the context of real-world events since the publication of this book—the occupied territories of Palestine. Europe is notable by its absence, which I take to be a deliberate and not unreasonable decision, given the political orientation of the project as a whole; we do hear a little about Australia, though only by way of its being mentioned as the last bastion of an otherwise conquered capitalist-patriarchal hegemony.

The dominant aspect of the commune is that of pluralism around gender and sexuality. Or, rather, it isn’t—or perhaps it’s not supposed to be? But it feels like the dominant theme is gender and sexuality, despite an almost total reconfiguration of the social, economic and political fabric of the place, because gender and sexuality is what most of the interviewee characters spend a great deal of time talking about: they are at great pains to tell us how totally normal and acceptable it is to be non-cis and non-het in this world, but the exhausting regularity of this claim starts quickly to undermine it. It’s rather like hearing your friend tell you for the tenth time over the same evening out that they haven’t thought about their ex at all, or hearing Keir Starmer announce yet again that he has decisively laid to rest the ghost of Corbynism in the Labour party; in all such cases, one cannot help but feel that the character doth protest too much.

Sociologically speaking, the ‘normal’ is precisely that which is not discussed, and this is where E4E fails as a utopia: if you want to normalise something in a work of worldbuilding, you show it as being normal and everyday, and you do so in as offhand a way as possible, while still making it clear enough to let the reader catch it. This, as I understand it, is a big part of what Samuel R. Delany (1981) meant when he talked about “reading protocols:” the experienced reader of sf has an eye for this stuff, so someone writing for such an audience can be a little less on-the-nose with the local norms.

It is tempting to blame the formal strategy that makes E4E such a landmark. The interview transcript as a form has very little narratological bandwidth on the “show” side, but a whole lot of “tell”—and if you’ve only got an hour with someone you’ve not met before, it’s hard to capture the fullness of a convincing character (even from real live humans) unless you push quite deliberately for biographical facts and clear statements of identity and affiliation. In this sense, at least, the interviews feel plausibly true to life—and given O’Brien’s work for the New York City Trans Oral History project, it is fairly easy to imagine why.

But the formalist defence doesn’t hold, because we can find much of a more subtle and “show-”based worldbuilding approach throughout E4E—in accounts of the functioning of the communes themselves, for example, and in the very casual and off-hand introduction of a military brain-implant technology as a crucial element of the global socioeconomic and cultural framework—and the book is long enough that the same effect could easily have been achieved with regard to gender and sexuality.

I’m increasingly of the opinion that we’ve made much more of a monster of the intentional fallacy than we ever needed to, but nonetheless, I would prefer to avoid bringing the non-fictional O’Brien and Abdelhadi into the spotlight because I think the book deserves to be treated on its own terms rather than in the terms of its authors and their fields of work and interest. I expect they would prefer that, too—but their insertion of themselves into the story (albeit as pre-revolutionary academic fossils, asking questions about the brave new world which they saw take form around them) means that they’re perhaps even more directly implicated in the politics of their fictional future than are most authors of utopia. Which is to say: while the emphasis on gender is at times eye-rollingly tedious, it’s also understandable. It’s a colossal part of who they are in the present, as researchers, activists, writers, people. (My own fiction, such as it is, burgeons with obsessive attention to the infrastructural; it would be more surprising if it didn’t! And I’ve been reviewed enough to know that such matters are far from being of universal interest, to put it mildly.)

Nonetheless, I like to think I’m a generous enough reader to make allowances in situations where a thematic isn’t as important for me as it is for the author(s). My issue here is not a simple recoil from “too much gender stuff”; for the avoidance of doubt, let me state unambiguously that I am in favour of the full emancipation of all genders and sexualities, and would very much like to live in a world in which it had occurred. The point is that I don’t think such a world would look like this; I am unconvinced by this aspect of what is otherwise quite often a very convincing utopia.

The theme of family abolition, for instance, is much more effectively portrayed as a hegemonic success: it’s mentioned directly a few times, certainly, but what’s far more effective in terms of normalisation is that we are repeatedly shown post-nuclear family relations, and only ever shown pre-revolutionary family relations as being unusual, obsolete, or even actively loathsome to members of this society. (In one of the early chapters, for instance, the interviewee responds with disgust and contempt to the interviewer’s positive depiction of “that couple shit.”)

Rather naively, perhaps, I had long assumed that the “abolition” in family abolition was to be an abolishment of the enforcement of the default, rather than a wholesale eradication of the default itself. E4E certainly provides plenty of plausibly monstrous patriarchies from which people were keen to escape. But I nonetheless found myself thinking often of the many friends I have whose nuclear and/or blood family are their strongest and most dear exemplars of community, in a time when such can be hard to find; likewise, while monogamous “couple shit” doesn’t net many longread thinkpieces, it seems enduringly popular nonetheless. I was left with the sense that the missing bathwater of E4E may have had a number of healthy and well cared-for babies in it.

The resulting set-up is undeniably a communism of sorts, but it’s an intensely identitarian communism, in which everyone seems to have sought out the people most like themselves to live with. By way of example, the young trans character of the penultimate interview—who, as a teenager just setting out on their “sojourn”, has grown up entirely after the revolution—not only identifies primarily with their transness (which seems a little odd in a world where, we’re told, approximately 40% of people are now non-cis) but also spends a huge amount of their social time in exclusively trans social groups. Which, to be clear, seems like a fine and reasonable thing to do, when considered in the context of the world in which we currently live: stick with your people, right? But it massively contradicts the repeated claim that gender and sexual diversity have been normalised in this future; they are very clearly normal, in the sense of being statistically commonplace, but they are far from normalised, in the afore-mentioned sense of being a tacit part of the discursive furniture.

This seems sad to me. I would like to think that a utopian future would be one in which those differences no longer mattered, rather than one in which they have apparently become definitive and all-consuming. In Doppelganger, Naomi Klein puts forward an understanding of contemporary leftism as defining itself almost exclusively in terms of its opposition to “them” on the right, which results in a sort of uncanny mirroring: a position which is, in its own way, just as reactionary, and offers no alternative to a politics of exclusion and aggrievement other than an alternative set of exclusions and grievances. This dynamic is far from being unique to the United States, though I think it fair to suggest that it’s particularly stark there—and so there is a sense, too, that E4E is a particularly USian utopia. (Other contributing factors include: an uncritical import of the transhumanist memeplex, a handwavey rehabilitation of space colonisation, and the casual assumption—admittedly hard to refute—that any revolution in that country will necessarily involve extensive, bloody combat between heavily-armed factions.) 

This is why I think E4E may also stand as a marker in the timeline of identitarian politics, by merit of its having extrapolated the paradigm to its illogical conclusion: if you’re trying to imagine life after patriarchy and capitalism, and you end up with a fun-house mirror image of the gated communities of neoliberalism, something has gone wrong. To be blunt, E4E feels like a future that would much rather I wasn’t in it—and perhaps you could say that it would do me good, as a white mostly-straight cis-male Anglo, to know how that feels. I write “feels like” quite deliberately: I do not see people like me in this story. And, to be clear, there’s no reason I should! Not all books need to be for (or to represent) people like me. But to find yourself feeling left out of a utopian vision is an uncomfortable thing: non-white folks, non-cishet folks, have all experienced that many times over. If you knew me well, however, you’d know that I’ve known exactly how that feels for my entire life (albeit for very different reasons), and you’d also know that this is why I’ve become increasingly sceptical of the idea of community in recent times.

Community, it seems to me, has become a group-discount affinity-driven rebranding of libertarian self-reliance for the era of social media—an ersatz replacement for society, spat forth by a system which knows instinctively that the formation of any society worthy of the label would spell its doom. The tension between community-as-product and the loosely implied wider society of E4E’s utopian future is the paradox at the heart of this brilliant, frustrating book, just as it is the paradox at the heart of identity-based politics.

I heartily recommend the former, but dare to hope we are done with the latter.

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Community-as-process, meanwhile, was recently brought to life for me by Citizen Sleeper, an indie-studio science fiction video game which, despite garnering a slew of awards in the last few years, seems mostly to have gone unnoticed by the more literary end of sf fandom and scholarship.

The set-up of Citizen Sleeper (CS hereafter) is pretty tropey stuff. You play the titular sleeper, from the moment of your waking up in a salvage workshop on an annular space-station known as Erlin’s Eye (or just The Eye to locals). You’re not the first of your like to arrive there: runaway indentured workers who sold their original bodies to the Essen-Arp corporation in exchange for a place in the off-world colonies they were being hired to construct. You’re still rare enough to be an outcast, however, thanks to your artificial replacement body. It’s effective enough, but some way off the local baseline and, as you soon discover, prone to breaking down if not treated with the drugs that Essen-Arp assumed would discourage you from doing a runner with what they consider to be their property. That’s what you went and did anyway, because the job was hell and you were basically disposable: more effective than a full robot, more cheaply replaced when damaged in the line of duty. So you slipped into a freight pod and got yourself flung across the cold depths of space to The Eye, where you now need to decide what you want to do with your life—or, indeed, whether what you have should even be called by that name—all while hustling along on the local scene as best you can.

By comparison to the reported retrospective first-person interviews of E4E, the second-person perspective of this (unusually literary and lo-fi) sci-fi RPG makes the player directly feel the choices and compromises involved in finding and keeping community—choices which must be made sense of in the moment, by you, without any benefit of hindsight (at least on your first play-through). Here you will encounter tensions between, for instance, maintaining a hold on your squatted apartment, or helping out a guy with a babbling toddler so he can secure a place on the colony ship that’s supposed to be leaving the station soon. It may very well turn out you can’t do both, and joining or supporting one faction or individual will quite likely involve rejecting or offending another, which in turn may mean that getting your drugs or an affordable meal becomes harder a few cycles down the line. 

Decisions and stakes of this scale might seem pretty trivial when set against a big, noble project like the communisation of New York and beyond. However, I suspect that such choices are also much more relatable to an audience which hasn’t spent decades immersed in radical political theory, but which probably has spent a number of years making decisions of exactly that more mundane magnitude. Maybe years after the events of the game, your character will look back on them and see there an arc of inevitability, an expression of who they were destined to be, their eventual identity always-already implicit in their past actions… but right now, they’re just trying to stay afloat and stay true in chaotic times, just like everyone else. 

(Well, OK: not everyone else on the Eye has a synthetic body that spontaneously starts falling apart unless dosed with the appropriate designer chemicals! But as advocates often point out, disability is the one minority of which any of us might very suddenly—and maybe even irrevocably—find ourselves a member. CS doesn’t belabour that comparison with the plight of your character, or indeed make it explicit at all, and I think it’s all the more powerful for that decision. This is partly an instrumentalist argument, in that I suspect that playing on the widespread fear of injury, or of loss of access to medicines and treatments that afford independence, is more likely to result in an empathetic response than emphasising the label of ‘disability. It is also an aesthetic argument, in that I increasingly feel that games, and art in general, are diminished when they become primarily vehicles for a message.)

What I find particularly compelling about CS, however, is the way it achieves a thematic unification of its ludic and narrative dimensions. When it comes to mechanics, the closest comparison I have available to me is the timers-and-tokens dynamic of crafting games like Weather Factory’s excellent Cultist Simulator or Book of Hours: your character has a constantly declining amount of bodily condition, which must be topped up with the aforementioned hard-to-find cocktail of chemicals; your condition dictates the number of D6 action dice you have rolled for you at the start of each cycle/turn/day-equivalent; you spend down those dice on doing various forms of work, the difficulty and risk of which is related (in part) to your skills; working may get you credits, or stuff, or a mix of the two. Every cycle, you click your way around the map of The Eye, selecting the locations and actions you’re going to do, and waiting to see what the outcome will be. Some options are always available, some are more periodic; who you know counts for a lot, but so does what you’ve done for them. Meanwhile, you’ve debts to pay off (and collectors to placate), and tasks outside of work aimed at getting yourself some sort of life—or maybe a ticket to somewhere else, if that’s more your speed.

Which is to say: CS is not at all a hard game in the button-mashing ludic sense of that adjective, but it is hard in the way that life at the bottom of the stack of late-late neoliberal capitalism is hard—which is, again, less about the difficulty of any individual task (which may in fact be almost insultingly easy) and more about the difficulty of scheduling half a dozen such tasks in parallel without dropping any commitments or missing any repayments; more abstractly, it’s the difficulty of trying to keep your longer-term existential goals in view through the numbing fog of tedious repetitions and rise-and-grind hoop-jumping. Which is also to say, while such a real-life routine may not be exactly difficult, it’s still exhausting, because the lack of difficulty combines with the lack of compensation to produce a life largely devoid of stimulus. 

The big difference from reality—and the thing that makes CS a pleasure that you’ll find yourself returning to—is that it does provide you with stimulus beyond the light dopamine cycle of gamification: you are rewarded for (some of) your efforts with connections to new friends, and with the stories those friends share with you. Indeed, the mechanics of CS are so uncanny a model of precariat life that one could easily imagine a different version of the game, played for Charlie Brooker-grade black humour: mostly unchanged in the ludic sense, but just a few notches more satirical in the storytelling. What keeps CS from becoming that game is the writing—and despite my relative inexperience of the field, I’m nonetheless going to go right ahead and say that the writing here, from a literary point of view, is so far out in front of even some of the biggest RPG titles on the market that it almost seems impossible. 

Once you think about it, though, it makes a lot of sense: for starters, the complete aesthetic control afforded to what is in essence a one-person studio, in which said person just happens to have a postgraduate qualification in experimental writing from Goldsmiths, may have something to do with it! So might the fact that the story is not subservient to the mechanics of the game, as it might more necessarily be in a big franchise title laden not only with expectations around canonicity and value-for-money “replayability,” but also hemmed in by a Greek chorus of always-online adolescents for whom the label “incel” appears to be the only community to which they aspire unironically, eternally ready to pontificate on the “wokeness” and/or project-managerial ineptitude of professionals who they’d likely never dare approach if actually confronted by them in the same physical space. In a title like CS, meanwhile—made for the people who inhabit the flared (and expanding) edges of gaming’s demographic bell-curve—the story can come to the fore a bit more, precisely because it’s “indie” enough to avoid the made-by-committee constraints internalised by a big-studio project: by going its own way, worldbuilding-wise, it can attract those with a taste for originality and nuance. Perhaps, in this way, an audience may be built more organically, structured around various narrative and ludic ‘invitations in’ to identify with, or feel for, or feel through the game’s world. 

(All of which is to say, I suppose, that big-ticket “triple-A” games are also simulations of late-late neoliberal capitalism, and of the experience of trying to maintain a sense of self in the face of a relentless hegemonising force… but that they are predominantly experienced in this way by their makers, rather than by their players. And so it goes.)

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I find myself drawn to the idea that there’s something in the medium of video games that has allowed CS to portray community-as-process in a more relatable and welcoming way than the interviews-as-novel of E4E… but I suspect that, in being so drawn, I’m falling for the claims of empathy through interactivity which have become a popular (if increasingly hard to credit) promotional riff in the industry—one which, somewhat ironically perhaps, mirrors the inflated claims made not so long ago for the impact of climate fiction.

Besides, there’s probably more evidence for an argument that draws entirely on the stories themselves. So how about this: E4E is a landmark of radical utopian fiction, taking the polyphonic approach to the utmost and thus providing a depth of detail and perspective which is rare indeed: it feels like a world, not a manifesto. But it also exemplifies the old saw wherein a work of sf is actually about the time in which it is written, rather than the time in which it is ostensibly set. As a cry for defiance and mutual aid from various identity-based groups currently suffering the epochal stupidities of USian politics in the early C21st, it should stand for decades to come as a document of the dreams of sorely subjected people. As a propositional future, however—as a blueprint for the preferable—it already feels like a relic of the pandemic period: closed in, cabin-fevered.

CS, meanwhile, not only represents an all-thrown-together social fabric in which muddling through with people radically different to yourself is both necessary and redemptive for both parties, but in so doing also invites you to (re)experience the nigh-universal subjection that justifies—no, necessitates—such small, non-judgemental solidarities and, ultimately, makes of them a form of resistance very different to the one that grows from the barrel of a gun. CS is also a product of its moment of production, of course, but to me it feels transcendant of it: a canny use (or maybe just a lucky choice) of the estrangement afforded by the skiffy setting. Its utopian horizon is clearly visible from the vantage of the present, no matter where we may be stood, no matter who or what we may take ourselves to be—and that’s a rare achievement, regardless of medium, that may stand the test of time.

DR. PAUL GRAHAM RAVEN IS A WRITER, RESEARCHER AND CRITICAL FUTURES CONSULTANT, WHOSE WORK IS CONCERNED WITH HOW THE STORIES WE TELL ABOUT TIMES TO COME CAN SHAPE THE LIVES WE END UP LIVING. PAUL IS ALSO AN AUTHOR AND CRITIC OF SCIENCE FICTION, AN OCCASIONAL JOURNALIST AND ESSAYIST, AND A COLLABORATOR WITH DESIGNERS AND ARTISTS. HE CURRENTLY LIVES IN MALMÖ WITH A CAT, SOME GUITARS, AND TOO MANY BOOKS. YOU CAN FIND OUT MORE ABOUT HIM AT PAULGRAHAMRAVEN.COM, OR SUBSCRIBE TO THE RESEARCH JOURNAL OF HIS FUTURES PRACTICE AT WORLDBUILDING.AGENCY