‘‘Walkaway is an ‘optimistic disaster novel.’ It’s about people who, in a crisis, come together, rather than turning on each other. Its villains aren’t the people next door, who’ve secretly been waiting for civilization’s breakdown as an excuse to come and eat you, but the super-rich who are convinced that without the state and its police, the poors are coming to eat them.
‘‘In Walkaway, the economy has comprehensively broken down, and so has the planet. Climate refugees drift in huge, unstoppable numbers from place to place, seeking refuge. The world has no jobs for most people, because when robots do all the work, the forces of capital require a few foremen to boss the robots, and a few unemployed people mooching around the factory gates to threaten the supervisors with if they demand higher wages. Everyone else is surplus to requirements.
‘‘Awareness of self-deception is a tactic that’s deployed very usefully by a lot of people now. It’s at the core of things like cognitive behavioral therapy – the idea that you must become an empiricist of your emotions because your recollections of emotions are always tainted, so you have to write down your experiences and go back to see what actually happened. Do you remember the term Endless September? It’s from when AOL came on to the net, and suddenly new people were getting online all the time, who didn’t know how things worked. The onboarding process to your utopian project is always difficult. It’s a thing Burning Man is struggling with, and it’s a thing fandom is struggling with right now. We were just talking about what it’s like to go to a big media convention, a San Diego Comic-Con or something, and to what extent that’s a new culture, or it’s continuous with the old culture, or it’s preserving the best things or bringing in the worst things, or it’s overwhelming the old, or whatever. It’s a real problem, and there is a shibboleth, which is, ‘I don’t object to all these newcomers, but they’re coming in such numbers that they’re overwhelming our ability to assimilate them.’ This is what every xenophobe who voted for Brexit said, but you hear that lament in science fiction too, and you hear it even about such things as gender parity in the workplace.”
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‘‘For me, I live by the aphorism, ‘fail better, fail faster.’ To double your success rate, triple your failure rate. What the walkaways figured out how to do is reduce the cost of failure, to make it cheaper to experiment with new ways of succeeding. One of the great bugaboos of the rationalist movement is loss aversion. There is another name for it, ‘the entitlement effect’: basically, people value something they have more than they would pay for it before they got it. How much is your IKEA furniture worth before and after you assemble it? People grossly overestimate the value of their furniture after they’ve assembled it, because having infused it with their labor and ownership, they feel an attachment to it that is not economically rational. Sunk cost is another great fallacy. You can offer somebody enough money to buy the furniture again, and pay somebody to assemble it, and they’ll turn you down, because now that they have it, they don’t want to lose it. That was the wisdom of Obama with Obamacare. He understood that Obamacare is not sustainable, that basically letting insurance companies set the price without any real limits means that the insurance companies will eventually price it out of the government’s ability to pay, but he also understood that once you give 22 million people healthcare, when the insurance companies blew it up, the people would then demand some other healthcare system be found. The idea of just going without healthcare, which was a thing that people were willing to put up with for decades, is something they’ll never go back to. Any politician who proposes that when Obamacare blows up that we replace it with nothing, as opposed to single payer – where it’s going to end up – that politician is dead in the water. ”
