[Original Novel] Metal Fever 2: The Erasure of Asherah, Part 14

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It took about fifteen minutes, after which we both came away with something we wanted. It’s beautiful when economics can be that simple and pure. The kind of economics which needs no name, as it’s simply what occurs anywhere there’s more than one person, and each has something of interest to the other.

These booths, stolen goods notwithstanding, are a cleaner and more efficient expression of economic forces than anything found in the government’s latest five year plan. Just people guessing at what others need, supplying it, and sinking or swimming based on the level of demand which actually exists for it.

The way capitalism fills every viable niche in the market resembles greatly the way that evolution fills every viable niche in the ecosystem. If the environment favors swimming, it will eventually be populated by skilled swimmers. If it favors climbing, then skilled climbers will appear, demographically replace poor climbers over countless generations, and eventually be all that remains.

Likewise, if the market suddenly favors one material or technology over the other, those businesses which offer it will pull ahead of those which don’t. If that selective pressure persists, eventually every business will have either adapted to the change or perished.

This effect was of course noticed long before I was born, described as the "invisible hand" of the market. Mistakenly anthropomorphizing an unintelligent process because it produces outcomes that would require superhuman intelligence to engineer, something many religious people still do with respect to biological diversity and origins.

If you were to ask, for instance, "what would the cheapest hamburger any significant number of people would be willing to eat look like", capitalism has an answer for that. Or "what is the highest end sportscar that would still attract enough buyers to turn a profit", it has an answer for that too.

This is why, for instance, cars targeting the same application and income bracket often look very samey. There's only a relatively narrow range of right answers to that equation. Evolution also often converges on multiple samey solutions for a given environment. That’s why dolphins so closely resemble sharks even though one is a mammal and the other’s a fish.

Historically, the most commonly proposed alternative to capitalism has been a planned economy. Rather than setting up capitalism and letting it go, procedurally filling niches as they appear, prices fluctuating dynamically according to what the market will bear, it is instead undertaken to do all of that manually by a central authority consisting of between a dozen and a hundred humans.

The economic equivalent of intelligent design, you could say. It doesn't work terribly well unless those in control of the planned economy are in possession of both superhuman intelligence, which is easy to come by these days, and exhaustive economic expertise...which isn’t. This results in frequent shortages, as levels of demand for various products are incorrectly predicted, resources are mismanaged, and so on.

At this point someone usually says "But evolution is horribly brutal. Civilization's purpose surely must be to elevate us up out of that primal condition, affording us with a degree of comfort, safety, fulfillment and opportunity not available to wild animals.” Indeed, nobody wants to live that way. These last few days were an ample reminder of why that is.

Nowhere is it more evident than in Shenzen and other special economic zones that a heavily capitalist society is unbearably brutal...for mostly the same reasons that a classical state of nature is.

Under those conditions, the strongest simply dominate the rest, warlords sending armies of malnourished serfs to fight and die in defense of their master's property. These days it just takes the form of corporate espionage and assassinations, and the serfs live in capsules instead of huts.

So, governments regulate it. Regulation is like the rim of a pool table which prevents the balls from going over the edge. The ancap view is that it's possible to play an absolutely perfect game where the rim isn't needed...but how often does that actually occur?

The modern hybrid economy represents a fusion between deliberate design and optimizing process. Sort of like how we correct flaws in our own biology by surgically integrating a technological alternative. The rest of the body is still biological and a result of evolution, but evolution sometimes makes mistakes.

The most ideal outcome possible can be achieved by letting evolution do its thing...most of the time...but stepping in with an engineered solution whenever evolution produces an unwanted anomaly. Blindness, missing limbs or deafness for example.

This principle is why the economies of nearly every developed nation in the world employ a hybrid approach, predominantly capitalistic but with socialist elements that smooth over capitalism's rough edges.

For example, were there no safety net of any kind, millions would perish from exposure to the elements each winter simply due to being homeless at an inopportune time of year. The boom/bust cycle inherent to capitalism ensures that, when the bust rolls around, there will always be a new wave of freshly homeless.

But that isn't a death sentence because, in recognition that only 8% of homeless remain that way for longer than three years, every developed country provides for the survival of the temporarily disadvantaged.

Healthcare is another example. Without such providence, any unexpected injury could result in your starvation. Can't physically get to work? No family to support you? Starve to death. Can't do the job you're trained for because of an injury or automation, and can't afford to retrain? Starve to death. This form of capitalism is riddled with dead ends, black pits with death waiting at the bottom that are much too easy to fall into...no matter vigilant you are.

We can never totally eliminate all of these pitfalls. We can't coat the world in Nerf foam so nobody ever stubs a toe, prevent milk from spilling and ensure that you never see or hear anything that offends you. That's beyond the scope of a reasonable benefits system.

But a happy medium exists between the two. Between the pool table with no rim, and Nerf world. The only legitimate debate remaining these days is what the appropriate balance is. In the US, that balance is now more or less the same in every state because of the second civil war. In China, it’s different in every city.

A patchwork economic quilt. Different paradigms coexisting within the same national organism, carefully sewn together, all of it somehow working in harmony. That’s the true meaning of cybernetics, after all.

It doesn’t just refer to surgical integration of robotic prosthetics. In a more general sense, it means the study of how different paradigms can be fused such that they work more effectively together than either does on its own. Biology and technology. Capitalism and socialism. Chocolate and peanut butter.

My contemplation was interrupted by a call from Dad. No video, just voice. “Where are you, boy?” I told him about the flight, the gas storm and how I was biding my time in a net cafe until the apartment was ready.

“So you made it to Shenzen?” He sounded frantic and out of breath. I asked him if anything’s wrong. “Everything’s wrong! They found your body!” My...body? I looked around for any sign I was being followed. “Your old body! Your fullmetal body!”

Oh. Ohhhhh shiiiiiit. There I go leaving behind bread crumbs again. “They took Alejandro back to the mainland for questioning. The rest of us are stuck here, the stead is on lockdown until they have what they want.” ...Problem being, that’s me. The more of the big picture that came into focus, the less I liked what I saw.

I heard familiar muffled shouting in the background of the transmission. “If you don’t hear from me in a week’s time” he concluded before ending the call, “meet me at these coordinates.” I saved the attachment, what looked to be GPS coords for a coastal safehouse near the Northern most tip of South America.

When I pulled it up in Google Earth after settling back into my cubicle, there didn’t seem to be any buildings on that spot. But then, there wouldn’t be if it’s a hideout. Not ones that are visible from orbit, at the very least. Under the jungle canopy, maybe? Or an underground bunker.

I fought the temptation to call him back several times throughout the afternoon. He’d taken a big enough risk calling me the once. For that matter, he wouldn’t have mentioned I was in Shenzen if they didn’t already know.

That’s right, Alejandro. He knew where I was headed, so now the enforcers do as well. I wonder what else he told them? Alejandro is a remarkably skilled surgeon, but never struck me as the sort of guy who could weather much torture.

My stomach growled, this time more insistently. “Just eat some of this, you piece of shit!” I commanded, pinching my belly fat. As I did so I grazed the edge of a port I didn’t even know I had, protruding from my hip.

It turned out to be for fat removal. Like most people with leg prosthetics, this guy apparently had some trouble burning as many calories after his legs were replaced. Now it’s become my problem, and the sedentary nature of my lifestyle ever since moving here hasn’t much helped.

After the suction finished, my skin hung noticeably looser around my trimmed-down midsection. “Would you like to donate your extracted cellulite to InterNourish?” the lipo kiosk asked. Interwho? I ran a quick search in my interface. Apparently it’s a company that turns surplus cellulite suctioned from first worlders into dehydrated emergency rations for starving villagers in impoverished countries.

A little inset video played, showing a dark skinned man in a tattered “Coca-Cola” t-shirt eagerly taking a bite out of the flaky rectangular yellow bar, row after row of dingy favelas stacked up behind him. There’s no fuckin’ way he knows what that’s made out of....is there? I’d have to be McDonald’s hungry to eat one of those.

“Then again…” I thought, picking at the styrofoam bowl of instant katsuo udon cradled in my left hand. I wonder what all this sodium and MSG is doing to my body. “My” body? What an easy mindset to slip into. But it’s not my body, is it? Never was. I’ll just throw it away when I don’t want it anymore, like the fat.

An excerpt from a press interview with the CEO of InterNourish now played. “Like many of you, I could never stand to sit by and watch children in under-developed countries go hungry. At first I thought, why not feed them to one another until there’s just one big fat kid left, then roll him into the sea?”

Quick cut to audience members slowly nodding, rubbing their chins thoughtfully. Then back to the sharply dressed CEO. “But then I thought, should we really run the risk that he could float to mainland America and resume feasting? Having already developed an insatiable hunger for human flesh?

As you know, I found a better way. An evolution, not a revolution. These fine people already survive by suckling sweet, lucrative carbon credits from developed nations. Even before that, they lived off our largesse as the single biggest spender on international aid.”

The audience clapped. Zoom in on one man with a red, white and blue baseball cap wiping a single tear from his eye. “So I thought, why not literally feed them our fat? They want to be included in the developed world’s basic income program. Well, what is basic income except the poor suckling the lard of surplus value from the bulging gut of this nation’s moneyed elite?”

The audience grew quiet, confused and uncomfortable. “And now a word from our newest partner in the fight against world hunger: Speed Foam!” Velocity Valerie seductively sauntered onscreen, then pointed and winked. “Speed Foam, yeah! When it’s gotta be fast, and taste good to the last, make it Speed Foam! When you’re fresh out of time, down to your last dime, grab some Speed Foam!” Oh, so it’s a snack or something? The jingle continued.

“When you’re down on your luck, and your handle is stuck, use some Speed Foam!” Handle? What does the handle go to? Your home? Car door? “When you need a quick fix, but nothing else sticks, try some Speed Foam!” Oh, alright, it’s a glue. But then why did she say it tastes good?

I kept waiting for answers but the jingle trailed off and Valerie exited to the left. I shook the liposuction kiosk in frustration. A few other cafe dwellers glanced up at me, then back down at their monitors. “Valerie you piece of shit!” I hissed. “NONE of that tells me what Speed Foam is!”

The next few days passed uneventfully, blurring together since there’s no indication of day or night in the cubicle except for the time readout in the lower right of the screen. I explored about as much of Shenzen as I cared to in that time.

More than once, I passed indoor parks. Some of them under enormous, sprawling transparent tents made from a material similar to vinyl. The billboards advertising the park claimed that interior air quality was guaranteed against gas storms.

The ideal place to bring a date, where you can ignore the ocean’s dying gasps. Where you can put the moves on some cutie, with a high degree of assurance that the sudden, eye watering stench of rotten eggs won’t ruin the mood.

Indeed, every time I rode by there were several couples inside. The landscaping was intended to look natural presumably, but it was so over the top idyllic that it wrapped back around to looking artificial. Like the rolling green hills from Disney movies. “Realer than real”.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 15!}