Charles Stross vs. Space Libertarianism

[lpetrich]

Space Cadets - Charlie's Diary About these space cadets,

There is an ideology that they are attached to; it's the ideology of westward frontier expansion, the Myth of the West, the westward expansion of the United States between 1804 (the start of the Lewis and Clark expedition) and 1880 (the closing of the American western frontier). Leaving aside the matter of the dispossession and murder of the indigenous peoples, I tend to feel some sympathy for the grandchildren of this legend: it's a potent metaphor for freedom from social constraint combined with the opportunity to strike it rich by the sweat of one's brow, and they've grown up in the shadow of this legend in a progressively more regulated and complex society.

My problem, however, is that there is no equivalence between outer space and the American west.

It's a much more hostile environment, and it requires much more advanced technology to inhabit and travel in. There is no breathable air anywhere else in the Solar System, not even on Mars or Venus. There is no surface liquid water, either.

I postulate that the organization required for such exploration is utterly anathema to the ideology of the space cadets, because the political roots of the space colonization movement in the United States rise from taproots of nostalgia for the open frontier that give rise to a false consciousness of the problem of space colonization. In particular, the fetishization of autonomy, self-reliance, and progress through mechanical engineering — echoing the desire to escape the suffocating social conditions back east by simply running away — utterly undermine the program itself and are incompatible with life in a space colony (which is likely to be at a minimum somewhat more constrained than life in one of the more bureaucratically obsessive-compulsive European social democracies, and at worst will tend towards the state of North Korea in Space).

In other words: space colonization is implicitly incompatible with both libertarian ideology and the myth of the American frontier.

Even worse for libertarians, the settlers of the US West had lots of government help, like armies to fight off the original inhabitants and subsidies for building railroad lines to connect them with the East. The railroads themselves were big businesses, making them as non-individualist as governments (a big blind spot for many libertarians, I may add).

However, Charles Stross did not mention an obvious analog: boats and ships, especially in the past. They can be days or weeks or months or years at sea. Their crewpeople have to live near each other and tolerate each other's presence and have to work together and not sabotage each other or otherwise cause trouble for each other.

Libertarians may protest at this point "We are not against *voluntary* collectivism", but this is after loudly denouncing collectivism in general.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

The writers of the "Expanse" novels touched on this more than a bit. Apparently in their fictional history there WAS a burst of libertarian ideology and rugged individualism among the early deep space settlers. Those individualists died rather gruesome deaths in large numbers because of it, and a sort of natural selection pressure strongly favored collectivist thought as well as people who were predisposed to be comfortable living that way. The point being: when you live on a space station with 30 other people and you all have to work together to make sure it's running properly, then even routine maintenance can be a life or death issue, as can the sharing of resources, earnings, food and water. People who hoard what they have or turn a blind eye to others' problems are liabilities in those situations; if their actions don't result in their own deaths, they might result in the deaths of their peers, OR they might wind up getting thrown out of an airlock for being an asshole.

The point of Belter society is that there's nothing voluntary about their collectivism, but it also isn't really mandatory. If you don't work collectively, everyone dies. If you a group of you choose not to work collectively, you all die. If YOU choose not to work collectively with the rest of your group, you probably die because nobody else wants to help you, or you get thrown out of an airlock for taking up valuable oxygen with your nonsense.

It gets worse when you consider the historical development of capitalism and the way small economies actually self-regulate in families and tribes. Down to its most fundamental, currency isn't actually a medium of exchange, but a way of keeping track of credit and debt; hard currency is ultimately a proxy for soft currency in the sense that you "owe someone a favor" or "owe it to everyone else" for whatever reason, either because you're understood to be part of a shared effort (taxation) or because they did something special for you (debt). In a situation with informal/intangible currency, a certain amount of compulsion is implied by social imperatives: you pay your debts, period, whether you agreed to receive the gift you're paying for or not. Whether you want to or not. Whether you think the debt is fair or not. Failure to do so means you are expelled from the group, because the group understands that this whole enterprise will come completely unglued if people do not feel obligated to pay their debts. In Belter Society, "expulsion" usually involves an airlock, because giving you a ship to find a new place to live would be a cost to the rest of the group, and you're the asshole who doesn't pay your debts, why should we give you anything at all?