The Ministry for the Future

Author — Kim Stanley Robinson
Finished — 2025-06-01
Started — 2025-03-17

I’ve been meaning to read some KSR since college, when my roommate recommended the Mars trilogy. It took reading his Wolfe- and Proust-adjacent A Story to get me to pick a novel of his and go for it.

I sure do appreciate a story grounded in a scientific understanding of how things actually work. It was a gravely curious exercise to compare KSR’s 2020s Earth, deteriorating on account of climate change, to ours, deteriorating on account of pandemic and social fabric rot. Ultimately I was mortified by what appears to be an argument that “If we are gonna get anything done, first some activists are gonna have to go systematically assassinate the 1,000 worst capitalists.” And everything in the book about expecting people to see a better system and just happily adopt it because it’s obviously better, especially the bit where the population of Earth switches away from existing social media to a Mastodon-alike because it’s “free and open”, gave me Gell-Mann nervousness about the rest of the book that I don’t have intimate professional knowledge of.

Ultimately, I appreciate the utility of a novel that attempts to present a credible account of how the world may end up in the near future, to motivate people to take some part in shaping how it does actually end up.

My highlights and notes follow, including spoilers.

But already more of the sun’s energy stays in the Earth system than leaves it by about 0.7 of a watt per square meter of the Earth’s surface

And a wet-bulb temperature of 35 will kill humans, even if unclothed and sitting in the shade; the combination of heat and humidity prevents sweating from dissipating heat, and death by hyperthermia soon results

“And thus capital punishment.” “Which everyone agrees is barbaric. Because if killing is wrong, two wrongs don’t make a right. And violence begets violence. So you try to find some equivalent, and nothing is equivalent. So the scales are never balanced. Particularly if one nation murders another nation for three centuries, takes all its goods and then says Oh, sorry—bad idea. We’ll stop and all is well. But all is not well

But it seems to us that an ideology is a necessary feature of cognition, and if anyone were to lack one, which we doubt, they would be badly disabled. There is a real situation, that can’t be denied, but it is too big for any individual to know in full, and so we must create our understanding by way of an act of the imagination. So we all have an ideology, and this is a good thing. So much information pours into the mind, ranging from sensory experience to discursive and mediated inputs of all kinds, that some kind of personal organizing system is necessary to make sense of things in ways that allow one to decide and to act. Worldview, philosophy, religion, these are all synonyms for ideology as defined above; and so is science, although it’s the different one, the special one, by way of its perpetual cross-checking with reality tests of all kinds, and its continuous sharpening of focus

Evolution itself will of course eventually refill all these emptied ecological niches with new species. The pre-existing plenitude of speciation will be restored in less than twenty million years

It happens so often that one form of PTSD therapy goes like this—you don’t have to worry so much, because if it stays this bad you can always kill yourself. And for some sufferers this thought is a real comfort, sometimes even the anchor point of a way back to sanity. You can always end this misery by killing yourself; so give it another day and see how it goes.

One person had one-eight-billionth of the power that humanity had. This assumed everyone had an equal amount of power, which wasn’t true, but it was serviceable for this kind of thinking. One-eight-billionth wasn’t a very big fraction, but then again there were poisons that worked in the parts-per-billion range, so it wasn’t entirely unprecedented for such a small agent to change things.

The Gini coefficient, devised by the Italian sociologist Corrado Gini in 1912, is a measure of income or wealth disparity in a population.

monocausotaxophilia, the love of single ideas that explain everything

This means that fully one-quarter of humanity, enough to equal the entire human population of the year 1960, is immiserated in ways that the poorest people of the feudal era or the Upper Paleolithic were not.

ease of representation (you think an explanation you can understand is more likely to be true than one you can’t).

“If you took your job seriously, you’d be looking into how to make change happen faster. Some things might be against the law, but in that case the law is wrong. I think the principle was set at Nuremberg—you’re wrong to obey orders that are wrong

Perhaps periodization makes it easier to remember that no matter how massively entrenched the order of things seems in your time, there is no chance at all that they are going to be the same as they are now after a century has passed, or even ten years. And if on the other hand things feel chaotic to the point of dissolution, it is also impossible that some kind of new order will not emerge eventually, and probably sooner rather than later

would almost certainly push Earth over an irreversible tipping point into jungle planet mode, completely ice-free; at which point sea level would be 110 meters higher than at present, with global average temperatures at least 5 or 6 degrees Celsius higher and probably more, rendering great stretches of the Earth uninhabitable by humans. At that point civilization would be over. Some remainder of humanity might adapt to the new biosphere, but they would be a post-traumatic remnant, in a post-mass-extinction world.

And yet we do sometimes see demonstrations, sometimes quite large ones. Demonstrations are parties. People party and then go home. Nothing changes

the dogs bark the caravan moves on

Cape Town, South Africa, where there’s a permanent gate at the airport that says ANTARCTICA (I love that)

The idea was that the total global energy generated by people, when divided by the number of people on Earth, came to about 2,000 watts per person. So the people in the society had decided to live on that much energy and see how it felt

You already explained this man

Americanization, of soft power imperialism combined with economic dominance, in that the US still had seventy percent of the capital assets of the world secured in its banks and companies, even though it had only five percent of the world’s population.

But their own problems absorbed most of their attention most of the time; they were a world apart, to some extent. So many places had been like that for most of human time, and were like that still—everyone living in the past of their own region’s psyche to one extent or another, because they all lived in their languages, and if your native language was anything but English, you were estranged to one degree or other from the global village

Nothing was quite like that. But nothing was quite like anything

Probably it was stupid to try to put any kind of label on these events, any kind of explanation. Syndromes, psychology in general: bollocks. It was just that one time, every time.

For everyone else, using these sites means they’ll control their data, rather than it being used and mined. That privacy can then be a resource to them. They can sell their personal data if they want. That plus the security of encryption, and the public ownership of these sites as a commons, should be enough to entice every user on the planet to shift. Publicize it, make it easy, set a date, be ready to handle the influx, boom

Good luck buddy. This gives me Gell-Mann worries about the rest of the ideas.

The crash in insect numbers put every ecological system on terrestrial Earth in danger of collapse. Collapse—meaning most of the species currently on Earth dead and gone. The surviving species subsequent to this event would be free to spread in all the empty ecological niches, spread and evolve and speciate, so that in twenty million years, maybe less, maybe only two million years, a differently constituted array of species would fully re-occupy the biosphere.

So we closed down for a week, and rebuilt one outlet to emerge under pressure and snake back and forth like a windshield wiper, see how that went. And when we tried it again, water came out of the pipe and flowed downhill and froze along the way, and finally pooled pretty well away from the outlet, where it mounded and the new water shifted and flowed around it and slid down yet again. And we got better and better at mapping where it might ultimately pool, and staying out of those pools while it happened.

Like something out of DF

the instrumental and subordinate nature of capital

a culture that is mostly loved by those who perform it

And what was occurring to me over and over again as all this was happening was, Hey: I hate LA. I was born here and I know it well, and have even read or been told some of its history in school, and I really do hate it. The truth is, after World War Two this place went from a sleepy little spread of villages to the ten million people here now, and during that time the developers were getting rich making ticky-tack suburban neighborhoods, that and putting in the freeways, which cut the plain into a hundred giant squares, and all of it crap. No plan, nothing good, no parks, no organization, no plan of any kind. Just buy some orange grove and subdivide it and tear out the trees and build a bunch of plywood houses, and then do it again, over and over. It happened in a snap of the fingers, and it was never anything but stupid. And that’s what we’ve been living in ever since! And more than a few of us trying to live out a remake of the movie La La Land. It was double stupid

Then people began to share the news that you could transfer everything going on in the rest of your internet life into a single account on YourLock, which was organized as a co-op owned by its users, after which you had secured your data in a quantum-encrypted cage and could use it as a negotiable asset in the global data economy, agreeing to sell your data or not to data-mining operations out there who quickly saw the new lay of the land and began to offer people micro-payments for their data, mainly health information, consumption patterns, and finance. The royalties for being oneself in the world machine were not insignificant, a kind of lifetime annuity, small but useful. And so people began to make the shift, and one day that tipping point arrived where a non-linear shear occurred, like an earthquake, and suddenly everyone had a YourLock account and would henceforth be conducting their internet life by way of it. A whole new internet ecology, the much-hyped but previously vaporwaresque Internet 3.0.

Fat chance buddy

As with a move from bank to credit union, instead of the company using the consumer, the consumer used the company, and owned it too. What did the company per se get out of it? Nothing, because a company was nothing. It was just an organization devised to help its employee-owners, nothing more. Like any other company, in the end. If you thought that was what they were.

She reminded them of the meetings she had had with them over the past few years, in which she had urged them to create a new currency of their own collaboration, based on carbon sequestration, and exchangeable on currency exchanges; money like other money, but backed by the central banks working together, and securitized by the creation of really long-term bonds, bonds with a century pay-out at a guaranteed rate of return large enough to tempt anyone interested in fiscal stability. In essence, as she had been saying, creating a way to invest in survival, to go long on civilization, as opposed to the many ingenious ways that finance had found to short civilization, thus in the process shifting most of the surplus value created in the last four decades to the richest two percent of the population, making those few so rich that they could imagine surviving the crash of civilization, they and their descendants living on into some poorly imagined gated-community post-apocalypse in which servants and food and fuel and games would still be available to them.

as ridiculous as retreating to Mars

climate change caused by carbon dioxide and methane released to the atmosphere; knock-on effects very close to releasing vastly larger quantities of CO2 and methane, now cached in the Arctic permafrost and the ocean’s continental shelves; oceans unable to uptake more CO2 and heat; rate of extinctions already as high as at any time in Earth’s history, in terms of actual speed of extinctions per century, thus set now to match the Permian in terms of total percentage of species gone from the land, which was ninety percent; subsequent to that coming extinction, inevitable famine, dislocation, and war—possibly nuclear war—leading to the destruction of civilization; impossibility of insuring against such an eventuality, or clawing back from it. Irreversible and unfixable catastrophe

creating derivative complications of all kinds

Would have been nice to get all the finance stuff explained

Narcissism is generally regarded as the result of a stunted imagination, and a form of fear. For the narcissist, the other is too fearful to register, and thus the individual death of the narcissist represents the end of everything real; as a result, death for the narcissist becomes even more fearful and disastrous than it is for people who accept the reality of the other and the continuance of the world beyond their individual end.

It could still be a coincidence, she said. That’s what coincidences are.

Capitalism: after a long and vigorous life, now incurable, living in pain. In a coma; become a zombie; without a plan; without any hope of returning to health. So you put it out of its misery.

A just civilization of eight billion, in balance with the biosphere’s production of the things we need; how would that look? What laws would create it? And how can we get there fast enough to avoid a mass extinction event? The rentier class will not help in that project. They are not interested in that project. Indeed that project will be forwarded in the face of their vigorous resistance. Over their dead bodies, some of them will say. In which case, euthanasia may be just the thing.

The rentier class.” Keynes meant by this the people who made money simply by owning something that others needed, and charging for the use of it: this is rent in its economic meaning. Rent goes to people who are not creators of value, but predators on the creation and exchange of value.

“So you think you’re getting real refugees.” He gave her a look. “No one would leave home if they didn’t have to.”

Is this true? Maybe

He almost smiled, which was his smile.

non-battery energy storage by way of water levels or salt temperatures or flywheels or air pressure

The delegates who had pushed hardest for the inclusion of these articles had given their all, they had spent years of their lives working for them. On the subway rides during summit meetings they compared notes on divorces, bankruptcies, broken career paths, stress-related illnesses, and all the other personal costs accrued by throwing themselves so hard into this cause.

Modern Monetary Theory was in some ways a re-introduction of Keynesian economics into the climate crisis. Its foundational axiom was that the economy works for humans, not humans for the economy; this implied that full employment should be the policy goal of the governments that made and enforced the economic laws. So a job guarantee (JG) was central to MMT’s ideas of good governance. Anyone who wanted a job could get one from the government, “the employer of last resort,” and all these public workers were to be paid a living wage, which would have the effect of raising the private wage floor also to that level, in order to remain competitive for workers.

if governments offered full employment then they were in effect setting the wage floor, and if that caused inflation and governments then stemmed that inflation with price controls, then government would be in effect setting both wages and prices, thus taking complete control of the economy, and at that point they might as well dispense with money entirely and go to the Red Plenty solution of computer-assisted production of everything needed; in other words, to communism.

It was quite a month, then quite a year; a year that became one of those years that people talk about later, a date used as shorthand for a whole period. A tectonic shift in history, an earthquake in the head.

Cf. the times we actually got

we’ve run 83 nuclear-powered ships for 5,700 reactor-years, and 134 million miles of travel, all without nuclear accidents of any kind

In the jungle of each mind a wandering went on ceaselessly, finding a clearing here, a pool there, all in the murky light of one’s sputtering thoughts, half awake, half asleep.

Don’t be an idiot or I’ll divorce you and then I’ll kill you, and then I’ll tell everyone why.

The Zurich plan, the Mondragón system, Albert and Hahnel’s participatory economics, communism, the Public Trust plan, the What’s Good Is What’s Good for the Land plan, the various post-capitalisms, and so on and so forth; there are lots of versions of a Plan B, but they all share basic features. It’s not rocket science. The necessities are not for sale and not for profit.

The passage took eight days. The whole experience struck Mary as marvelous. She had thought she would get seasick: she didn’t.

Lots of “actually the new way was nice and pleasant” conveniently

But also now a crowded bus ride, a hassle. And now, on most of the planes Mary flew on, people closed their window shutters and flew as if in a subway car, never looking down at all. Incurious about the planet floating ten kilometers below.

They had created and paid out trillions of carbon coins, and yet had seen no signs of inflation, or deflation, for those who held that theory; no noticeable price change.

Oh good

And high-frequency trading, Mary asked, wasn’t it simply rent, parasiting on productive exchanges?

So, but back to all the new innovations in our social systems we’ve been seeing recently. It really does seem like an unusual time. You were saying you think these changes are good things? Yes. Strike while the iron is hot. Put the crisis to use. Change as much as you can as fast as you can. Really? Why not? Won’t so many changes at once lead to chaos? It was chaos before. This is coping with chaos.

Convulsion theory

Indeed it can never be emphasized enough how important the Paris Agreement had been; weak though it might have been at its start, it was perhaps like the moment the tide turns: first barely perceptible, then unstoppable. The greatest turning point in human history, what some called the first big spark of planetary mind. The birth of a good Anthropocene.

“They often slip away when no one’s around. Seems like some of them want it to be that way. A kind of privacy, you know.”

Wild animals’ lives and deaths are being noted by people. They mean something, they are part of a meaning. Not since the Paleolithic have animals meant so much to humans, been regarded so closely and fondly by we their cousins.

People speak now of an optimum number of humans; some say two billion, others four; no one really knows.

The blue plate of the ocean. Sea and sky, clouds. Pink at dawn, orange at sunset. Winds pushing and pulling them, the sun, the waves. The glorious glide, crest to trough, trough to crest, long rollers of mid-ocean. How had they forgotten this? She recalled her last flight from London to San Francisco, passing over Greenland at midday, no clouds below them, the great ice expanse as alien as Callisto or Titan, and everyone with their window shades pulled down so they could watch their movies. She had looked out her window and then around at her fellow passengers, feeling they were doomed. They were too stupid to live. Darwin Prize, grand winner. The road to dusty death.

Art told Mary the story of the flooding of the Mediterranean; it had been a dry low plain between Europe and Africa, then as an ice age had ended and sea level rose, the Atlantic had spilled through this strait into what had been flat playas. Two years of flow, he said, at a thousand times the rate of the Amazon, moving at forty meters a second, and carving a channel a thousand feet deep, until the Med was filled and the two bodies of water equalized in elevation.

Now he was talking about the end of the last ice age, fifteen thousand years ago, when enormous lakes of meltwater on top of the great ice sheet had broken through ice dams and poured down into the ocean in stupendous floods, changing the climate of the whole world. Then the Mediterranean had risen high enough to flood through the hills of the Bosporus, filling the Black Sea’s area in just a few years’ time, flooding land that had been occupied by humans, giving rise to the legend of Noah’s flood.

a new Earth religion

Oh yeah what happened to the religion angle

every living thing on Earth shares a crucial 938 base pairs of DNA

Thinking of someone gone kept them just that tiny bit alive, maybe

Hofstadter