You Will Own Nothing And Be Happy [TE]
Estimated reading time: 16 minutes, 3 seconds. Contains 3213 words
Welcome back to the Trenchant Edges, the newsletter that I promise you still exists.
I’m your host Stephen and today we’re just going to pick at a scab that annoys the shit out of me. Just to get back in the swing of things.
I’m not fan of the anti-New World Order crowd as it’s a far right bastard of the now defunct anti-globalization movement. OK that’s not really true, as the anti NWO stuff is from like, the 50s and 60s and the anti-globalization movement would only pick up in the 90s.
But clowning on John Birchers never gets old.
I want to talk a bit about the origin of the phrase, “You’ll own nothing and be happy” because nobody reads primary sources and the original documents are… a lot weirder than the Alex Joneses of the world would have you believe.
The World Economic Forum
It’s very strange living in the 2020s as someone who’s paid attention to international relations since the Bush years. For me, The constellation of America-backed NGOs that enforce much of the global financial order (for now, lol) are kind of old hat.
Yes, the IMF keeps poor nations in debt to enforce austerity so western corporations can extract resources on favorable terms.
Obviously.
Since the rise of the MAGA movement we’ve seen a lot more nativist driven anti-UN and “Rules Based International Order” rhetoric from the right. It’s frustrating because they’ve latched onto the idea that these institutions are hampering US dominance when they’re literally the mechanisms that have kept the US flying high and mighty since the end of WW2.
But this paranoia is almost as old as those institutions. We’re not going to go into it but basically many Americans, particularly business owners, think international relations is, frankly, too effeminate and to be blunt too gay for manly American capitalist hero kings to bother with.
If you hold a copy of The Art of the Deal up to your ear, you can hear Tom of Finland laughing.
So we have to kind of address the nature of the World Economic Forum. It’s not really the kind of place conspiracists want it to be. Which is kind of weird because there is actually kind of an organization that does a lot of the policy level stuff they’re afraid of.
That’s the World Trade Organization. They create trade policy that member nations need to abide by which directly removes sovereignty (in the way Birchers understand it) from nations.
It’s a big club and there are rules. And it’s younger than you might think. The WTO is another of those international institutions that uphold what they used to call the Washington Consensus. Started in 1995. Their rules bind members and violations can provoke sanctions!
The World Economy Forum is a bit different.
It’s not a rules-making body. It has no power at all, actually.
That doesn’t mean it’s benign. Just that it isn’t some kind of world government. The WEF is built different. It’s mostly a big party for bringing together people with influence to try and convince them of whatever new ideas it’s vomiting into their mouths.
So, on one hand it’s a propaganda organization seeking to establish influence among the people who own what let’s call the means of production and government policy makers. They’re very specific about wanting to expand private-public partnerships, where governments give private citizens a giant piles of money to do stuff.
On the other hand, there’s a level where the conspiracy theorists are right: These are rich assholes who want you poorer and less able to politically organize so they can extract more from everyone.
But it’s not evil in a supervillain way. It’s evil in the business way. You know, the way that works.
They’re trying to brand themselves as the solution to capitalism so people don’t do crazy things like seizing the means of production.
They’re manufacturing consent for even more pitiless oligarchs of the future.
But they can’t force anything. Influence, not control.
Which brings us back to November 2016. The US presidential election had just ended in a Donald Trump victory. The WEF was beginning it’s big push to advertise its 8 predictions for 2030.
The way this works is they’re trying to show themselves to be the smart money, future looking, prosocial capitalists so people don’t mind getting robbed. And to get enough rich assholes on board that they can actually do it.
So they posted a video to facebook. It was the style at the time, because facebook was lying to everyone about video views.
I say video, it was really more of a slideshow. Here’s the text:
1. You'll own nothing and be happy. Whatever you want you'll rent and it'll be delivered by drone.
2. The US won't be the world's leading superpower. A handful of countries will dominate.
3. You won't die waiting for an organ donor list. We won't transplant organs, we'll print new ones instead.
4. You'll eat much less meat. An occasional treat, not a staple. For the good of the environment and our health.
5. A billion people will be displaced by climate change. Polluters will have to pay to emit carbon dioxide.
6. There will be a global price on carbon. This will help make fossil fuels history.
7. You could be preparing to go to Mars. Scientists will have worked out how to keep you healthy in space. The start of a journey to find alien life?
8. Western values will have been tested to the breaking point. Checks and balances that underpin our democracies must not be forgotten.
#1 obviously gets almost all the attention, but the rest are interesting on their own.
It’s interesting to see the loss of US hegemony so prominently placed. From what I remember people were anxious about China’s rise, but things were overall riding pretty high except in conservative circles where everything was a sign of decline. Such as it always is.
3 is an audacious but possible technology. 4 is probably true, maybe not by 2030 but land and water costs will probably make commercial beef and maybe other meats uneconomical sooner than most Americans would like. Also, eating lots of veggies is good for you.
5 seems plausible. I wonder how far along we are? A bit of googling suggests the number will be much smaller: Something on the order of 20 million climate refugees a year. Which is still a huge number. This estimate from last year predicts it’ll take closer to 2050 to hit over a billion climate refugees.
Fuck if I know if that’s real.
6 seems laughably unlikely. 7 Seems unlikely and an obvious ploy to draw in Elon Musk.
And 8 very much seems equally silly and prescient given our current political situation.
As far as predictions go, it’s a list of mostly safe bets phrased audaciously. Solid propaganda work.
But enough preamble. Let’s amble.
You’ll Own Nothing and Be Happy
Six days before that video was posted, Ida Auken, a member of the Denmark Parliament, released an article with a title we haven’t gotten away from in the near-decade since its release. It was published on their website, which has been taken down, and on medium.com which hasn’t.
It’s under a thousand words.
Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better
The comments are fascinating. Almost universally negative. But for a document that’s provoked an entire wing of reactionary thought there are only 53 of them. Maybe 6 of them weren’t negative.
My favorites were the people asking, “Is this satire?”
And it’s not.
It’s simpler than that.
It’s looking at trends long established by 2016 and extending them another 15 years.
It’s not good at that. But as we’ll see there’s nothing here that wasn’t firmly a growing trend years earlier. The only innovations are 1. The framing of it being good and 2. Trying to make it a coherent story.
But let’s get a quick overview of the story itself.
The most important thing about it is it’s a vision of a smart city. With a pile of breakaway technologies that work impossibly well.
Direct quotes in, well, direct quotes.
The author doesn’t own anything in “our” city.
Specifically mentioned: No car, no house, no appliances, or clothes
All products are now services in the city.
Access to transportation, clean energy , accommodation, food, etc is free.
Transportation is self driving or flying cars.
“In our city we don’t pay any rent, because someone else is using our free space whenever we do not need it. My living room is used for business meetings when I am not there.”
You can cook for yourself, but your appliances have to be delivered. Note the examples are specialty tools and it’s unclear if homes have ovens.
“When products are turned into services, no one has an interest in things with a short life span. Everything is designed for durability, repairability and recyclability. The materials are flowing more quickly in our economy and can be transformed to new products pretty easily.”
The only pollution comes from energy production?
“Shopping? I can’t really remember what that is. For most of us, it has been turned into choosing things to use. Sometimes I find this fun, and sometimes I just want the algorithm to do it for me. It knows my taste better than I do by now.”
Work is near-entirely automated
Non-ominous: “They live different kinds of lives outside of the city”
uhhhhhhhh
“My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way.”
uhhhhhhhh
“Once in awhile I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. No where I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.”
What the fuck
This is better than the alternative which was horrible.
OK, so let’s get to the top here: This isn’t a good story and the society it describes is terrifying. Let’s really take a moment and look at one of the paragraphs:
“They live different kinds of lives outside of the city”
For a while, everything was turned into entertainment and people did not want to bother themselves with difficult issues. It was only at the last minute that we found out how to use all these new technologies for better purposes than just killing time.
My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way. Those who decided that it became too much, all this technology. Those who felt obsolete and useless when robots and AI took over big parts of our jobs. Those who got upset with the political system and turned against it. They live different kind of lives outside of the city. Some have formed little self-supplying communities. Others just stayed in the empty and abandoned houses in small 19th century villages.
What the hell!?
Just purely on a rhetorical level, what the fuck even is this?
It’s basically, “Oh, we’re the Eloi from The Time Machine and we sure hope those barbarian Morlocks don’t really fuck us up.”
They live different kinds of lives outside the city is one of the most teen dystopia ass lines I’ve ever read. Did they forget the love triangle?
This whole piece is ominous as shit but adding in fearmongering about rural people who are somehow living only in 19th century villages is such an insane move. And calling them those we lost on the way just… damn.
Fuck this essay.
You can tell nobody has read it because of how few comments, but honestly the anti-NWO crowd would be so much angrier if they actually knew what was in it.
I couldn’t even really have a problem with that. Yeah, this vision of the future sucks shit.
So What The Fuck Is That Anyway?
When looking at a piece of advertising, you need to know what is being sold.
In most advertising that’s easy to figure out but in propaganda it’s obscured. Why? Because it’s harder to argue or refute implicit messages than explicit ones. They need to be unpacked to be criticized. So if you get people to accept ideas that carry unsaid assumptions they’ll have a much harder time even noticing they accepted something as a fact.
And often if you tell them they’ve accepted an implied belief, they’ll deny it. And become more resistant to even look for it in the future.
This piece is about selling the WEF itself as a taste/culture maker and about selling the many odious parts of the global capitalist economy.
Let’s talk a bit about the process of getting this article made.
Ida Auken is a former Minister of Environment and has been a member of the Danish parliament since 2007. She’s been working with the WEF since the early 2010s and in 2016 she was asked to write an essay as a thought experiment on 2030.
She was given the title: “Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.”
I find that interesting, don’t you?
In an interview with Jon Ronson, she somewhat apologized for the essay saying something to the effect of: Politicians shouldn’t pretend to be Isaac Asimov.
Her background is she was as socialist who became a social democrat who’s always been big on the environment and a focus on the circular economy.
That’s one of the main ideas her story is about.
Ronson’s interview betrays a shocking lack of awareness for the background of the movement he was discussing. It’s kind of weird, like, the man definitely knows enough about Alex Jones to know the anti-NWO movement goes back to the 1950s and the origins of the John Birch Society.
He doesn’t talk about any of that. Instead he kind of treats everything as a silly accident conspiracy theorists half invented.
So, the feeling here is that Auken is kind of a dupe. Someone fed her a provocative title and she did her best with it. It’s certainly, uh, interesting that she did this.
From our point of view the actual “thought experiment” almost doesn’t matter. It’s the tagline from the title they gave her that made the conspiracy headlines years later.
But let’s go back to the thought experiment because the content of it is… telling.
The post 2008 recession recovery had already raised the cost of living in many places around the world. Mix that with the long tail of the Snowden reports from 2013 about US government spying, the slow growth of “Software as a service” as a business (Salesforce was selling subscription CRMs in 1999), and growing concern over climate change.
Unlike in the US, the EU actually did move to protect citizens privacy with GDPR in 2016 (it would take effect in 2018), so the anxiety around privacy was still very fresh at the time.
And Auken herself is a strong advocate for the circular economy, attempting to get capitalists to build products that last and can be easily repaired/recycled/reused so she imagines it’s just perfected.
Of course, maybe Auken and I are selling her short. This would be a spectacular opening paragraph in a YA teen dystopia.
“They live different kinds of lives outside of the city”
For a while, everything was turned into entertainment and people did not want to bother themselves with difficult issues. It was only at the last minute that we found out how to use all these new technologies for better purposes than just killing time.
My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way. Those who decided that it became too much, all this technology. Those who felt obsolete and useless when robots and AI took over big parts of our jobs. Those who got upset with the political system and turned against it. They live different kind of lives outside of the city. Some have formed little self-supplying communities. Others just stayed in the empty and abandoned houses in small 19th century villages.
Once in awhile I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. No where I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.
Add in one potential boyfriend from the city and one of those we lost and you’re just about ready for a publishing deal in 2013 or 2014.
And yeah I quoted it again. It’s so nuts.
I half want to ask her what the fuck was going on with that. But I’m afraid she’d tell me.
OK, I’m losing control of this essay.
Let’s take a breath and refocus.
But I Digress
Ok, so this “thought experiment” is capitalist propaganda commissioned by an organization of very wealthy and influential individuals to sell their insight into the future and cover over some very real anxieties.
In that sense it’s not really surprising that people obsessed with those anxieties would find the language they used to try to soothe those anxieties alarming. Especially in spaces where international cooperation has been demonized since the 50s.
They would run into this same issue with the Great Reset during covid. Catnip to the paranoid right winger.
And it’s not like the WEF isn’t a group of dangerous bastards. It’s just that they’re they’re the same dangerous bastards running the world we already live in. Their goal is keeping the extraction machine running as long as possible so they can throw big parties forever.
But all this being predictable leads us to another question: did the WEF try to make this backlash happen?
“being poor and surveilled all the time is good actually” isn’t exactly subtle, tbh.
Auken’s “thought experiment” is vapid and silly in a lot of ways. But the problems it handwaves away certainly aren’t. They’re some of the biggest technological and political problems anyone has.
They present a content consumer enjoying the fruits of a post-scarcity society. And avoid talking about any of the structures that make that happen.
She says there are no appliances. So, every oven and refrigerator anyone might want to use in a day needs to be stored somewhere accessible and in a way they can easily be transported.
I just got a new refrigerator and it took the movers about an hour to bring it in and set everything up. How much infrastructure would it take to make that work versus just… having appliances at your house?
Of course this is the silliest and most extreme example. We should probably assume she meant that specialized appliances would be delivered. Like pasta or crepe makers.
But she said no appliances.
Every thread in the essay is like this.
That’s what makes it so dystopian feeling. Nothing in the character’s life in the thought experiment goes to any agency or control over their life. It’s perfect neoliberal subject brain.
Gross.
I should probably go into a history of the anti-NWO milieu that led to this blowing up when it did but we’ve gone on too long here.
The TLDR is this matched fearmongering that America’s fascist vanguard in the John Birch Society has been doing since the 1950s. Alex Jones is literally one of their kids and he was
Wrapping Up
OK, that was fun!
Sort of.
I’ve been knee deep in Dawn of Everything citations and I needed to work on something else to get my brain working again.
Should have something for you about that soon.
See you soon.
-Stephen
P.S. Yes, I can see you while you read this.
P.P.S. I’m sorry for doing the Teen YA dystopia bit twice. Kinda.
Now I just need to send this to my climate change denying cousin, who quotes ‘that line’ on a semi-regular basis and bashes on about us inevitably inheriting China’s social credit system etc