The Probability Broach, chapter 5
In a phone booth in a strange futuristic city, Win Bear has found a number for his doppelganger. Driven by curiosity, he dials it.
To his frustration, he gets a busy signal. However, the phone booth is able to draw him a map to the address he was trying to call. It turns out the other Win Bear’s house is only a few blocks away.
When I emerged, traffic was still heavy, and fast. Looking for a break, I glanced back the way I’d come only minutes ago. A flashing arrow at the curb spelled out PEDESTRIANS and pointed to an escalator that flowed down into a broad, well-lit area lined with shops, then became a moving walkway. Halfway through the trip, I passed a tunnel labeled, paradoxically, OVERLAND TRAIL. Here and there cheerful three-dimensional posters advertised food, entertainment—and tobacco. Prohibition was over! There seemed to be a lot of ads for various intimidating firearms, and something calling itself SECURITECH—WHILE YOU SLEEP. Was that a burglar alarm or a sleeping pill?
Nope, sorry. Not excessive enough.
L. Neil Smith at least acknowledges that there should be ads in his ultra-capitalist confederacy. However, they ought to be a lot more common than “here and there”. Every street corner should look like this:
In a laissez-faire society without zoning laws or regulations, every vertical surface should be covered with neon signs and digital billboards jostling each other for space. Everything else should be plastered with strata of posters, fliers and handbills. Every business would have an incentive to make their ads bigger, brighter, gaudier and more obnoxious than all the rest, to stand out from their competitors.
Every beautiful landscape and natural wonder should be despoiled with hideous advertisements (which did indeed happen in a less civilized era).
This world shouldn’t be as Smith describes it: a calm, laid-back place with verdant parkland, peaceful residential areas, and charmingly understated commercial districts. This world should look like Las Vegas on steroids.
Forcibly reminded of certain biological facts, I stopped off at a door with appropriate markings, a model of understatement as it turned out. More than the usual monument to the ceramic arts, the rest room was an updated Roman bath: swimming pool, snack bar, even sleep cubicles for rent. I thought of Colfax Avenue hookers who’d love the setup, then noticed that such services—your choice, organic or mechanical—were available at a modest fee.
Sexbots in ancap utopia! Are you even a little surprised?
Perhaps out of some residual sense of propriety, this is the only thing Smith says in this book about sex work, so I won’t dwell on it. I’m not against sex work in principle – as I’ve said before, I believe we own our own bodies, and we should be able to decide what to do with them.
However, it’s essential to acknowledge how exploitative the industry often is, and how much potential for abuse exists. More than almost any other profession, if it’s going to exist, there has to be rigorous oversight and strong worker protections. A world where sex work exists with no legal protections is going to resemble the worst caricatures put about by those who’d like to ban it altogether.
Definitely feeling more like myself, whoever that was (another twinge of curiosity about this “Edward W. Bear”), I ambled along in the afternoon sun, absently aware that the almost-silent vehicles swooshing along beside me in the street produced no noticeable exhaust. Down in the curbing there wasn’t a scrap of garbage.
Now that isn’t even slightly believable.
In an anarcho-capitalist world, by definition, any trash pickup would be a private service you’d have to pay for. On the other hand, there’d be no laws against littering or dumping, because there are no laws against anything. So why not just throw your garbage out the window into the street? Why not dump your business’ trash in the nearest park, or discharge your factory’s effluent into the river? If your car breaks down, why not abandon it on the roadside? Once it leaves your hands, it’s not your problem anymore!
To quote an excerpt from my novel Commonwealth, here’s what would actually happen in a world like the one Smith wants:
MuniSan Incorporated, the private company that had been the city Department of Sanitation, had raised its rates because of shareholder pressure for higher profits. In response, many New Yorkers had canceled their garbage pickup. Instead, they dumped their trash on the street, where it was no one’s responsibility.
It had been a brutally hot summer, and black garbage bags piled up in sweltering heaps. They swelled and split in the sun like overripe fruit, disgorging decaying refuse. Flies and cockroaches swarmed over the stinking mounds; mosquitoes bred in the dirty water that pooled beneath them.
…As the garbage piled up, it clogged storm drains and treatment plants—plastic bags, soggy cardboard, chunks of styrofoam, dirty diapers, congealed lumps of grease and fat, sanitary pads, used condoms, dead animals, tangles of hair. Sewage backed up into the municipal water system, infiltrating the pipes that ran to apartments where people swiped their credit cards to fill glasses and pitchers from the tap.
Cholera and dysentery crept back into New York City. They appeared in the reclamation zones first, but spread slowly into wealthy neighborhoods. Following them came other waterborne diseases: typhoid fever, rotavirus, leptospirosis, norovirus, giardiasis.
…Meanwhile, other diseases reappeared, spread by rats, flies and mosquitoes: first bubonic plague, then malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, chikungunya, West Nile virus, Zika fever, St. Louis encephalitis. In the feverish heat of the summer, a thousand pathogens found fertile soil, grew and swelled. An old darkness, once banished by public hygiene laws, woke from its long sleep and stretched subtle fingers into the crevices of the city.
…TV opinion segments and letters to the editor cried for someone to do something, but it was unclear who or what. Cleaning up one’s own street would be useless when the problem was citywide, and no individual could afford to pay for the whole city to be cleaned up. So everyone reasoned, and therefore no one solved the problem.
As I emphasized in this passage, public hygiene is a Prisoner’s Dilemma problem. It can’t be solved unless everyone cooperates (after all, a single person can litter and vandalize an otherwise-beautiful landscape that’s seen by thousands). However, there’s always a selfish incentive to skip doing your part and leave a mess behind for other people to clean up. And in an anarcho-libertarian society, there are only selfish incentives.
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I live in a fairly small state, and to the north of us is a state with slightly cheaper real estate, so a lot of people live in one state and commute to work in another. That “cheaper” state might have slightly cheaper real estate, but residents have to contract individually with a private company for things like trash pickup. As a result, a dismaying number of people bring their trash to work and dispose of it there. More than one office I’ve worked in has had to have explicit rules against people bringing their household trash to work and clogging up the company trash cans with it.
What you have described here is precisely the reason why it is not the case that real anarchists (i.e. not ancaps) do not desire a society just like ours except the government and police don’t exist. Because that would lead to something like that horror you quoted from your own dystopia. That ancaps such as Smith seem to actually do so says a lot about them.
But dayum, how do the heroes of your book solve THAT problem? (If you can’t say it without spoilers, I understand.)
You can read the full novel on my Patreon if you’re interested. Without giving too many spoilers, I’ll just say it’s about a secret conspiracy to save the world. 🙂
Win apparently doesn’t say how much the pay toilet (an already-known and widely unpopular feature of urban life in the ’70s) charged him to collect his fertilizer – it can’t have been much, if he’d used up all his local money in that phone booth.
Maybe the more public-spirited citizens of this fearless new world use their guns and daggers on litterbugs?
I thought of Colfax Avenue hookers who’d love the setup, then noticed that such services—your choice, organic or mechanical—were available at a modest fee.
WTF does “a modest fee” mean? (And how the hell does he know what’s “modest” when he just popped into that reality and clearly hasn’t had time to compare prices and wages?) Are the sex-workers able to make a living wage by charging “a modest fee?”
And what are the “mechanical” options? Replicants? (Asking for a friend.) Somehow I don’t think one could make a convincing replicant that could look, act, sound and smell as sexy as a human, without each model being more expensive than even the priciest high-class call-girl. And the owner-operator of such a business would have to have MANY different shapes, colors and sizes of sexbots to get the broadest customer-base.
…this is the only thing Smith says in this book about sex work…
That’s not surprising. Libertarians occasionally pay lip-service to sex work by promising to make it legal and stop police harassment of sex-workers. Beyond that, however, they really have no clue about what sex work entails, and don’t give a shit either; and plenty of libertarians are fascists and bigots who hate women, sex, and sex work just as much as those evil bullying cops.
I’m guessing fleshlight.
From context, I initially assumed he meant android sexbots… but come to think of it, we never see any other kind of robot in his North American Confederacy, so I have no idea what he had in mind.
Robots in a libertarian “society?” I’m guessing robot slaves that the buyer can order about and abuse with total impunity, both in and out of bed, just like the good ol’ plantation days…
I used to read L. Neil Smith religiously during my libertarian-phase. Smith likely would claim that the reason his utopia was so clean is that its residents have such a deep respect for the property rights of others and they wouldn’t dream of littering. (That, and throwing garbage on someone lawn would likely get you justifiably shot by the owner.) According to him and other right-wingers I’ve heard, publicly funded accommodations like bathrooms and sidewalks are filthy precisely because they held in common and take them for granted.
Now that you mention it, it occurs to me that the sidewalks in the NAC must be someone’s private property. But there’s no mention of being charged a toll to walk on them or anything like that.
I guess Smith wants us to believe some property owners are just that nice, that they’ll pay to maintain the sidewalks out of their own pockets. Or, more likely, it’s more cargo cult libertarianism, unconsciously assuming that the infrastructure everyone depends on just appears out of thin air.
Tying into the libertarian idea of society, Ron DeSantis has just given the go-ahead for cars to hit protesters.
Since Florida is a stand-your-ground state where anyone who feels threatened is authorized to open fire, does this mean there will be gunfights in the street when protesters open fire on the cars trying to run them over?
i had to change planes in vegas once. cigarette smoke and gambling inside the airport made it extremely nasty to me. maybe having the legalized prostitutes passing out handbills would have made it slightly less ugly. didn’t see them. i half recall something about them being required to stay outside city limits in the desert, on some dusk til dawn shit. i don’t know from nevadia.
Of course in this teenaged Libertarian fantasy, sex workers would be practically free, and no need to sully yourself with a real woman when you could have a sexbot.
My company has sent people to conferences in Vegas every year. I was forced to go twice; not a fan. Ridiculous excesses in everything (smoking, drugs, alcohol, gambling, sex, cheap food), and the water waste of fountains and pools and splash pads and golf courses and millions of partiers in a desert that gets 4 inches of rain a year.