The future as seen from the 1920s. Image: Max Saunders, via The Conversation.

‘In 2030 we ended the climate crisis’. Here’s how. A striking image of the future, and our path to it in The Correspondent.

If companies are serious about the environment, there’s no excuse. They can start by putting their best people on it. Related: Siemens’ extended special pleading about the Adani Carmichael project is how not to do it.

The free market paradigm is over. It has been killed off by the inter-connected nature of digital engagement, says Diane Coyle. [May require registration]

Machine learning is basically conservative. It looks for things that are just like the things it’s already learned. Cory Doctorow has a sharp essay in LARB

Back in the 1920s, people started getting intrigued by the future. The Conversation on a whole generation of idiosyncratic optimists.

The films listed for the Best International Feature Film Oscar are usually overlooked. But they can be a useful guide on what’s being made worldwide. Vox published a guide.

The Coventry Carol survived from the middle ages through a series of accidents. As this BBC Soul Music podcast explains, it is a song about loss. (30 mins)

“The whole world’s at sixes and sevens, and why the house hasn’t fallen down about our ears long ago is a miracle to me.” (Thornton Wilder)

The release of The Big Short, which I saw last week, gives me a moment to connect it with another film that bookends the long financial crisis that started in the 1980s. I watched Trading Places again recently 30 years after it was released, and with the benefit of hindsight it seems like a harbinger for the “gilded age” and its less gilded aftermath.

Pygmalion-plus

At the time it seemed funny but slightly old-fashioned, reusing what looked like a classic plot device from the heyday of 1940s film, with shadows of Pygmalion and the Mark Twain story The Prince and the Pauper. It’s an all-star vehicle: Dan Ackroyd, Eddie Murphy (before he became a caricature), the fine character actors Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche, Jamie lee Curtis and Denholm Elliott, all directed by John Landis.

The story (spoilers): the absurdly wealthy commodity traders Duke and Duke decide for a bet to see if they can take Eddie Murphy off the streets and turn him into a commodities dealer, while also—not so Pygmalion—turning their preppy office manager (Ackroyd) into a desperate criminal.

Harbinger of a boom

From a creative point of view, the plot hums along and the script, by Timothy Harris and Herschel Weingrod, is so full of good things that it’s something of a master class. The Duke brother who has bet on nurture rather than nature wins it, but in the hearing of Murphy, which drives the plot towards a happy ending in which their cruelty is punished (and I won’t say more about that here in case you decide to watch the film again).

So why does it now seem like a harbinger for the long financialised global boom, and the increases in inequality that went with it?

Three or four scenes do it for me.

❯ When the Duke brothers are explaining to Murphy how their business works, taking a commission for clients whether they’re selling or buying, he says, “You’re just like bookies.” This is an echo of Keynes’ remark that the Stock Exchange was like a casino, and a pervasive idea in The Big Short: the people who are “shorting” the market, in other words betting that it’s going to fall, wonder repeatedly who is on the other side of their bet. (Towards the end, they find out).

❯ When Ackroyd is pawning his $7,000 watch after he has lost his house, fiancée and credit cards, he has a wonderful exchange with the pawn broker:

WINTHROP: This is the sports watch of the ’80s. $6,955 retail.
PAWNBROKER: Got a receipt?
WINTHROP: Look, it tells the time simultaneously in Monte Carlo, Beverly Hills, London, Paris, Rome and Gstaad.
PAWNBROKER: In Philadelphia, it’s worth 50 bucks.

❯ Third, of course, the plot is built around the insider dealing of the Duke brothers – they’re paying someone to feed them the details of the American orange forecasts before the rest of the market knows them. By 1989, when Wall Street comes out, everyone knows that insider dealing is illegal, and the corrupting of the Bud Fox character is shown through the way he moves through grey to dark.

❯ And, throughout, the film reeks of the entitlement of the rich, from the way in which Winthrop Lewis III—early on, before he realises his humbling—talks to the police officer who is booking him (“you are making a career decision here”) to the obnovious preppies who are his circle of friends, to the desperate way in which one of the Dukes tries to get the trading market reopened, just for him, at the end of the film.

The bad guys lose

Trading Places is a comedy, and it follows the rules of comedy. The good guys win, the bad guys lose, and their crimes are appropriately punished.

That, of course, is where it gets disconnected from what actually happened. Just before the film’s climax (more spoilers), Denholm Elliot, the butler, and Jamie Lee Curtis, the whore-with-a-heart-of-gold, each entrust their life savings to Ackroyd and Murphy, now teamed up, to play the orange juice futures market. They win, big.

But perhaps there is another reading of this: that the film plugged directly into one of the founding myths of neoliberalism, that everyone would get to participate in some kind of “people’s capitalism.” In the UK, this myth reached its apogee in the ’80s, during the first great wave of state sell-offs, in which huge swathes of value were transferred from the state to the financial sector under cover of this myth. It is best exemplified by the “Tell Sid” campaign for the British Gas privatisation. How much value was thus gifted to the financial sector undercover of this voter-friendly rhetoric? It’s impossible to tell. But if you have any doubts that the policy was largely for the benefit of the financial sector, this extraordinary Treasury document (pdf)—it reads like a sales pitch for Britan’s privatising skills—should put them to rest.

The interests of Wall Street

As for The Big Short, it captures well—certainly at a visceral level—the way in which the financial services sector in the US has become a form of crony capitalism propped up by the state.

It leaves hanging the question of how that came to happen. Or, to be more explicit, of when and how politicians decided that they should represent the interests of Wall Street rather than their constituents. In the States, the obscenities of its electoral financing system provide some of the answer. It got so it cost too much to run unless you were beholden to the oligarchy, at least until Sanders and Trump came along with their essentially political challenge to some of these financial assumptions.

In the UK, where oligarchy comes a little cheaper, the Conservatives are significantly dependent on the good wishes, and finance, of hedge funds, and are also socially connected as well. For New Labour, it came through some kind of fatal combination of Blair’s desire to belong, and Mandelson’s, and Brown’s misguided belief that the financial sector could help him square the Treasury’s books at no real cost. Money for nothing that will be paid for, expensively, for at least another generation.

But there’s more to be said on this whole question of political capture, perhaps in another post.

The banks have won

Unlike in Trading Places, the financiers ended up enriching themselves with our savings, and at our expense, something that is clear in both the film and the book of The Big Short. The anthropologist Joris Luyendijk reviewed the film in The Guardian.

The banks have won. Not a single “top banker” has been jailed and few, if any, have had to return undeserved bonuses. Measures taken since 2008 are being watered down before our eyes and, most dangerous of all, the deeper causes of the crash remain essentially intact. The Occupy movement should call a reunion so we can have a ceremony to bury all remaining hope.

Even before the financial crisis, the scriptwriters of Trading Places, Harris and Weingrod, returned to a related subject, this time as producers, in a far darker film, Falling Down. In Falling Down, an apparently comfortably-off middle class American gets trapped in a spiral of descent. The first time as farce, the second time as tragedy. There is no happy ending.

The image at the top of this post is from Vintage Movie Posters, and is used with thanks.

Readers will know that I come back to the subject of space from time to time. Having seen Duncan Jones’ science fiction film Moon this weekend, it’s as good reason as any for a return visit – while trying to avoid any spoilers. As a film, it should be said, there’s a lot to like; an intriguing story, well told, and the production design is dazzling. It pays its respects to other space films, but is, unmistakably, a film of the ‘noughties’. As a piece of futures (it’s set in the mid-2020s) the on-board computer, with more than a nod to HAL and Dark Star, is like the human resources department of a global company – sometimes solicitous and caring, sometimes trying to enforce the bottom line – and the task the workers are engaged in is to harvest energy.

Since this blog is about futures rather than film, however, I’m going to concentrate on the apparent social and economic world of the film, not the movie itself. Sam Bell is reaching the end of a three year contract as a technician, working on his own, on a moon base set up to extract helium. When we (he) visit the “harvesters” working the surface, it’s like nothing so much as a large open-cast mine, dirty and dangerous. The dirty moonsuit he dons when he leaves the base for the first time – shades of Outland – differs from the clean world of 2001, or come to that, the first moon landing.

It takes three days to get home. The communications technology appears to be unreliable. Why someone would volunteer for such conditions is unclear, although there are hints that the job of “astronaut” still has some cachet. Sam seems to be hallucinating a bit after three years on his own. There’s a sharp contrast between the cleanly stencilled base furniture and the unruly plants, pictures, and post-it notes which have accumulated.

Corporate worlds

The base computer, ‘GERTY’, which (like HAL) appears to be the name of its maker, is solicitous and attentive, as when Sam scalds himself early on. As the story continues, it’s clear that it also has its loyalties to Lunar Industries Inc, which owns the base. Having studied some industrial sociology, I was delighted to see Sam indulge in some old-fashioned industrial sabotage to circumvent a restriction imposed by the computer. There’s a fine corporate moment later, when Sam appears to be about to leave the base for home, when a corporate videogram pops up to thank him for helping to keep Lunar Industries as the leading global provider of clean energy.

In fact, without giving too much away, the corporate model turns out to be more sinister and quite a lot more cost-effective. Overall, it seems to be a plausible and coherent view of a future in which the Moon is harvested to deal with energy shortages on Earth, even if some of the the technical details are left blank (How does the helium reach earth? It’s not a doctorate, it’s a film).

With one caveat: in this plausible and coherent future, it is much more likely that the technicians pulling shifts on the moon will be Chinese, not American. China has a more ambitious space programme than the United States, and China is already buying farmland and other production resources outside of its boundaries. Lunar Industries will most likely be a Chinese company as well.

Finally, without giving away any of the plot, the film turns into a smart reflection on identity and memory. And (in terms of film trends) I liked the fact that the lunar landscape shots owe much more to models than to CGI.