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Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr

Dec 8 • 27 tweets • 9 min read

#KimStanleyRobinson's #MinistryForTheFuture was groundbreaking, depicting a detailed, plausible transition from a world barreling towards a civilization-ending climate catastrophe to a world that meets the challenge as humanity decides to save itself:

pluralistic.net/2020/12/03/min… 1/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2022/12/08/one… 2/

Robinson's book is important: it not only disproves the (variously attributed) #CapitalistRealism aphorism that "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism" - it also imagines the means by which that ending was brought about. 3/

It's a tale of what I've called #TheSwerve: the day we stop listening to the first class passengers at the front of the bus that's barreling towards a cliff, rush the driver and *yank* the wheel before we go over the edge:

locusmag.com/2022/07/cory-d… 4/

@CrookedTimber

Since the book's publication, it has been the subject of intense foment, such as the *excellent* @CrookedTimber seminar on the book's strengths, flaws, and future:

pluralistic.net/2021/05/12/sem… 5/

@nesta_uk

The latest *Ministry*-inspired project comes from @nesta_uk and @prospect_uk: #MinisterForTheFuture is a series of policy proposals to someone holding that office, for inequality, food, demographics, mental health, automation, pandemics, and more:

prospectmagazine.co.uk/specialreports… 6/

I also contributed a piece: "Enticing monopolies to unwind themselves," which addresses the existential risk of monopolies: 7/

prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/entic… 8/

When monopolies reign, it is all but impossible to make good policy, because the monopolists can outbid all comers and turn every truth-seeking exercise into an auction that they win: 9/

That is, after all, the story of the climate emergency itself: a handful of giant firms colluding to distort science, delay action - and risk billions of lives to make trillions of dollars. 10/

Monopolies create superdense concentrations of power that, like a black hole, warp the normal rules:

pluralistic.net/2022/12/05/eld…

The best time to tackle monopolies would have been 40 years ago, when all over the world, regulators stopped enforcing anti-monopoly law. 11/

The second best time is now. Lucky for us, antitrust regulators have the bit between their teeth and have vowed to halt the march towards market concentration, blocking mergers rather than waving them through:

pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/pos… 12/

They've also promised to tackle existing monopolies, unwinding predatory acquisitions and anticompetitive mergers that produced concentration in so many industries, which now rule over their regulators, hurting us in a million ways with impunity:

openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly… 13/

But while breaking up monopolies is important work, it's also *slow* work. It took 69 years to break up AT&T!

doctorow.medium.com/podcasting-jam… 14/

Blocking future monopolies without ending existing ones is a huge risk. Any monopoly in an industrial supply chain can destroy the smaller firms it buys from and sells to. 15/

Think of how Big Pharma's mergers let it gouge hospitals on drug prices, leading to regional hospital monopolies that had the bargaining power to push back. 16/

But then those hospitals turned around and started screwing insurers, who *also* formed regional monopolies in order to defend themselves from price-gouging. 17/

In the end, monopoly leads to monopoly, with workers and consumers at either end of the supply chain, unorganized and vulnerable, which is why health workers make less money under worse conditions and patients spend more money for worse care. 18/

It's not enough to prevent future monopolies - we also have to break up the ones that are all around us. 19/

How can we make that happen without waiting 69 years while the monopolists use their vast cash reserves and influence to delay the reckoning? That's where my proposal comes in.

prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/entic… 20/

I am old enough to remember when corporate raiders took over companies in order to break them up and sell them for parts, rather than merging them into monopolies. Rapacious, remorseless finance assholes once stalked the corporate world, shattering firms with impunity. 21/

What if we brought those monsters out of retirement for one more job?

My proposal is simple: a two-year capital gains tax holiday on profits from unwinding any 21st century merger involving a firm with more than £10b in market cap: 22/

"Watch them do in months what decades of courtroom grinding couldn’t hope to accomplish."

This is a very *Ministry For the Future* kind of idea. 23/

Oone of the novel's subplots involves bribing oil companies to leave oil in the ground by buying up all their stranded assets, and swallowing the galling proposition of giving still more money to the people who wrecked the planet. 24/

I'm ambivalent about my proposal for the same reason I was ambivalent about Robsinson's stranded-assets thought-experiment. But the last time I talked with Robinson, he shrugged and said, "We'll just take it all back with a wealth tax."

25/

The whole "Minister" package is a fascinating one, and there is something extremely refreshing about imagining a post-Swerve future, where high officials are bent on actually addressing our most urgent problems, backed by an unstoppable political will. 26/