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Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Joan Didion’s essay collection from the mid-1960s, is, for many readers, the signet definition by which her writing is defined. That’s both good and bad.

The good is that her writing powers are fully on display in these essays. The title essay, recapping her reporting on the Haight-Ashbury drug scene, shows her as a dispassionate observer of the counterculture and its cost in human wreckage, from a time when many were idealizing as a liberating revolution. “On Morality”, a reprint of an American Scholar article, illustrates her ability to find a greater truth in the smallest and most personal of details: her dispassionate reporting, we feel, applies even to her most intimate self-examination. And her prose is flawless.

The bad is that to label or categorize Ms. Didion from writing from her early 30’s is to miss the evolution of her views over the decades. She has a way of exposing the soft belly of America, the excesses and absurdities that identify us. In “Slouching Toward Bethlehem” it’s the five-year-old daughter of a drug-using hippy mother; in The White Album, she reports on Linda Kasbian, one of Charles Mansion’s followers who was involved in the Tate-LaBianca murders, and Black Panther Huey Newton. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion turns her spotlight inward, a reflection on marriage, loss, and mourning following the death of her husband John Dunne and the illness (and subsequent death of her daughter Quintana.)

Ultimately, when thinking of her writing, it’s a line from the Yeats poem the collection of essays is named after I keep coming back to: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” The Didion’s long and distinguished career seems to revolve around that common theme, of how much of our culture and the reporting on it, or even of our own self-image, is askew, a false narrative. Of disillusionment, in other words. It’s an honest but dismaying perspective, and not always easy to read.

… I dwell so upon this because the most disturbing aspect of “morality” seems to me to be the frequency with which the word now appears; in the press, on television, in the most perfunctory kinds of conversation. Questions of straightforward power (or survival) politics, questions of quite indifferent public policy, questions of almost anything: they are all assigned these factitious moral burdens. There is something facile going on, some self-indulgence at work. Of course we would all like to “believe” in something, like to assuage our private guilts in public causes, like to lose our tiresome selves; like, perhaps, to transform the white flag of defeat at home into the brave white banner of battle away from home. And of course it is all right to do that; that is how, immemorially, things have gotten done. But I think it is all right only so long as we do not delude ourselves about what we are doing, and why. It is all right only so long as we remember that all the ad hoc committees, all the picket lines, all the brave signatures in The New York Times, all the tools of agitprop straight across the spectrum, do not confer upon anyone any ipso facto virtue. It is all right only so long as we recognize that the end may or may not be expedient, may or may not be a good idea, but in any case has nothing to do with “morality.” Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.

“On Morality”, Joan Didion, Slouching Toward Babylon, 1965

A friend and fellow BSFS Writer’s Circle partner, Chris Rose, recently tweeted the following regarding the state of capitalism:

This is the first article I’ve read in a while that really turned me around about something. Well worth your time to read and to ruminate on:https://t.co/Gn0jivtmWU

— Christopher Mark Rose (@CChrisrose) February 21, 2018

His subsequent post referring to the full text of RFK’s speech, by the way, is brilliant.

An interesting read, but it’s not a new idea. Peter Drucker wrote about the end of capitalism back in the 90’s, and of course, Das Kaptal came out in 1867.
More recently, there’s been a lot talk of the death of capitalism: for example,
http://theconversation.com/basic-income-after-automation-thats-not-how-capitalism-works-65023
And also:

Will capitalism survive the robot revolution?

Thinking about this led me to post the following reply:

‘Not just capitalism, I think. The possibility of true abundance undermines the valuation of ‘worth’, which presupposes a great deal. Marx goes down in flames, too. And 3D printers (gen one replicators) haven’t even begun to reach their potential yet.’

And Chris replied back:

‘But there’s a long way from here to post-scarcity for everyone. 3D printing is, in Marx’s phrasing, a means of production. What makes you think everyone will have access, let alone equal access?’

I posted an answer, explaining why 3D printing is different, but it was immediately obvious that 140 characters didn’t do the discussion justice. So I’ll turn my thoughts into this long blog post instead. They say a good blog post should be about 500 words, no more; but hey.

Before getting to 3D printers, let me talk about Marx, as I understand him. Marx’s idea is that human labor is the source of economic value; nasty evil capitalists pay labor less than it’s worth and thus achieve their own prosperity from the worker’s suffering by reason of greed. Problem is, Marx’s ideas of how to cure capitalism’s problems are at least as equally flawed. The problem as I see it- and I do see capitalism as flawed-  is the definition of ‘economic value’. Note that this is different than the ‘social value’ Chris’s article mentions. Marx’s problem is that to him labor, not 3D printers, is a means of production. Suppose that’s not true?

A more and more nuanced view of capitalism’s downfall is Jeremy Rifkin’s Zero Marginal Cost idea:

Home

Which leads to this question: if, in a capitalist economy, production equals consumption, isn’t marginal utility bound to the marginal cost of production? If one is worthless, isn’t the other?

There’s a related problem that suggests itself.  Capitalism is joined at the hip to the government through taxation. Consider a government without taxation, if you can. Before you say ‘income tax’, recall that real income derives from employment. Taxation is, as Heinlein said, the ruin and downfall of governments; it leads to folly like taxing government workers- the folly we’ll probably repeat by taxing GBI at some point. Guaranteed basic income will be paid from real taxes, or it will just be inflation. It’s why GBI probably won’t work.

Anyway, on to 3D printers.

My answer to Christs post was twofold. First, 3D printing is an exponential technology. Second, designs are downloads, thus digital.

An exponential technology is any technology that expands at an exponential rate. Moore’s Law is the now-classic example. Additive manufacturing (3D printing) is another such technology. The reason’s simple: 3D printers can print 3D printers; see the Reprap project. So, take your first 3D printer and print another one. Now you have two. Have them each print another. Now you have four. Then eight, sixteen… until you’re hip deep in 3D printers. Exponential technologies seem to start slow- but appearances can be deceiving. Other such technologies are all around us, as Ray Kurzweil points out: AI, robotics, synthetic biology, to name a few.

The second aspect of 3D printers is that they, or the ‘access to them’ Chris talks about, are an amalgam of several parts, 3D printers are not just the devices themselves, but also the plans for the thing you wish to make, whatever it is. A 3D printed object can be can be anything from a cake icing to concrete, from a pancreas to a plastic Lego to a pistol. Downloading designs from libraries of such designs- and there are now many such libraries- means that 3D printing is another technology being digitized. We know what happens to costs when that happens.

What’s left is material costs, and that will remain. But many materials are essentially free or at least very cheap today. It’s why we’re buried in trash. PLA is made from corn starch; ABS, while more costly to make, is recyclable; just melt and re-extrude it. So are most metals- just separate and powder them. Recycling today means ‘take it to a recycling center and don’t worry about it, and particularly ignore the fact that it’s often just buried.’ If the economy goes to hell, that’s likely to change.

I agree with Chris that its’ a long road to post-scarcity, but the road has been mapped. And there are many intermediate steps to a printed chicken in every printed pot:

• The neighbor who’s a hobbyist maker, who branches out into cottage industrialist. You can see these everywhere today, particularly at cons.
• The mail order maker who will print your gizmo and ship it to you. Also everywhere today.
• William Gibson, in The Peripheral, has your friendly neighborhood 3D printer located down at the corner 7-11.

There are of course many roadblocks, and, as usual, most of them involve money. There’s a real effort to commercialize consumer 3D printers; consider MakerBot. But in my opinion, the economics are themselves proof of the pace at which this technology grows. The prices keep falling, and the printer companies struggle to make a profit.

A bigger issue is that today, consumer 3D printing is mostly dumbed down to plastic, mostly PLA and ABS. This is a huge drawback.  Plastic’s of limited value. The biggest recent 3D printing advances are in fact in metal printing, and particularly,  Desktop Metal’s new system. Order of magnitude cost reductions and speed improvements, and huge versatility. But because of power restrictions, not suitable for home use. This will get fixed, though. However well-intended, safety restrictions are just that- imposed limits. Home 3D printers that can print with sub-millimeter accuracy a wide range of metals and alloys will change everything. Ask any shop owner.

Other exponential technologies will lead to abundance also, especially AI and robotics. I don’t see that reaching to home use directly any too soon- your farmbot or shopbot aren’t there yet. Well, there are ShopBots… But AI will certainly reach into the home in a big way, and Rosie and Andrew Martin are coming. Meanwhile, AI will find its way into your 3D printer and your ShopBot.

For now and the immediate future, this stuff is the domain of the handyman. The clumsy need not apply. But then again, that’s always been true, hasn’t it?

You have different metrics for different writers. I’m an old man, I try to write, and I read a lot. Those combined make me a bit odd about how I read. I know workmanship when I see it, and I appreciate it. But for some authors, the bar is higher; you expect more.

My expectations for Guy Gavriel Kay’s fiction are the highest: Does he bring tears to my eyes?

Evoking an emotional response, causing catharsis: Kay does it better than anybody. The Lions of Al-Rassan, with two good, heroic figures, Rodrigo and Ammar, battling to the death, Ysabel, with an eternal love triangle which must find resolution, The Last Light of the Sun, and Torkell’s sacrifice for his son. Kay does it with vivid characters, set in great empires at the cusp of great changes, borrowed from and bearing the ponderous weight of history, but also redrawn as fantasy.

Children of Earth and Sky is set in the same world as Sailing to Sarantium and other of his novels, but later, contrasting the trading city-states of Seressa (Venice) and Duprava (Dupravnik, Croatia) to the Osmanli (Ottoman) empire, which is ruled from Asharia (formerly Sarantium (Byzantine Constantnople), now fallen to the Asharites.

The characters of this novel are principally from Seressa and Duprava but also from Senjan, a coastal city of warriors. Their personal lives are driven by their nationalities. There is love, loyalty, but also war, spying and murder, all spun around the lives of people who are thrown together from the pressure of states struggling with one another.

Bringing this cast together caused the book to start slowly, and I was convened early on that Children of Earth and Sky wouldn’t succeed in moving me as other of Kay’s novels had. But some reader patience was rewarded: once the forces propelling the book gained momentum, it moved with both inevitability and surprise to a very satisfying ending.

Highly recommended work from ‘the leading fantasist of our age.’

It’s been a rough year. Good things happened too (technology’s accelerator pedal keeps getting pushed further all the time), but the draining election, Syria, terrorists, the meltdown of journalism, and the roaring white noise of all that together has been rough.

And a lot of good music went silent. Prince, David Bowie, Neville Marriner, Shirley Jones, and a bunch more. And, of course Leonard Cohen.

I knew of him as a poet before I knew him as a singer/songwriter. I don’t know how many Americans can say that; he was Canadian and has what I think is a distinctly Canadian voice. Somehow back about my high school years I came to possess The Spice Box of Earth, or perhaps it possessed me. I loved those poems, all of them, the ones that sang to me, the ones that confused me. I suppose I thought they were cool, avant garde, certainly cooler than my oil patch Texas existence. They followed me into the Army, and directed me to folk music houses and coffee shops and New Age science fiction. You could taste the Montreal art scene, the Canadian Paris, in his work. I remember searching for Flowers for Hitler. How did I even know such a book existed, in those pre-Internet midwest desert days?
I didn’t know him as a songwriter until “Suzanne”, of course. When I spoke of being directed to folk music houses, that song and Judy Collins’ crystal-clear voice is what I remember. Then he went silent, at least to my deaf ears, until Stranger Music. I thought he’d gone back to poetry. Silly boy, looking at distinctions that never existed. His songs were poems, his poems were songs. The music was always there.

In the 90’s, as the Internet took off, his work started popping up more and more. I remember finding his music largely in covers and in ripped singles- that’s how I encountered “Bird on the Wire”. Leonard wasn’t the best singer; to be completely honest, he sang like Rex Harrison sang- he spoke his songs to the music. But what songs!

The net changes everything, and certainly music, in a certain particular way. Google knows this better than anybody; its search algorithms find and bring to the front the web pages many others link to- the hubs, the centers of little universes of discourse. Leonard Cohen’s poems and music was such a hub- nothing little about it, though.

The other thing I find fascinating about his work is that it was never quite finished. He seemed to play with songs forever; they say “Hallelujah” has dozens of verses. Dorian Lynskey, writing in The Guardian, said it well: “What gave his work its uncommon gravitas wasn’t that he knew the answers, but that he never stopped looking.”

I said earlier that the music went silent. That’s silly. We’re already immortal. We can see Lincoln in a photograph, see Gable or Monroe on the screen, or listen to Leonard whispering truths to us now just as when he was with us. As for the answers… he’d have told us we need to find our own. All he did was point the way.

Today, December 21st, is the winter solstice, the shortest day (and the longest night) of the year. It’s been a rough year, and the urge to hit the snooze button, to hunker down and just get through it all- the solstice, the year- is strong.
But Yule, in the old ways, the pagan ways, isn’t bleak at all. It’s no accident that we Christians celebrate the most profound of holidays in this season.
It’s the shortest day of the year, yes, but that’s one of those ‘cup half empty/cup half full’ things. The days are done getting shorter. From here on out, better, or at least longer, days are coming. In my younger or jogging days, I’d run on the rail trail that passes through town, (sometimes) even in winter. There was a young peach tree next to the trail, and I was amazed when I found that in mid-February I could smell peaches. The tree was warm to the touch, and you could hear the sap running.
Get out from under that blanket or throw, and celebrate the season. Winter light is pale, but it’s no less beautiful than the glare of a summer sun. Thomas Paine was right: it’s dearness that gives things their value. Let Yule be our reminder of that truth.