One does not simply walk out of Omelas.
As I write this, I have my first cold with sore throat since November of 2019 and though it’s mild, I have to say, I didn’t miss this. I’m testing negative and not particularly ill. Zicam may be snake oil (there’s some decent research to suggest that zinc might help a little) but I’ve been sucking it down: possibly that’s helping.
Anyway, this is a follow-up to my previous newsletter on exploitation and learned helplessness.
There’s a thread going around twitter that questions whether it’s ethical to portray AI positively in science fiction when real life AI (aka machine learning) is so very problematic right now. And it does feel like AI is suddenly everywhere in the public consciousness. News stories blossom on trend and everybody is talking about it.
It’s not a bad thread, as a starting point. (I’m not going to link it because I try not to drop any internets on anybody) but I admit my first thought upon reading it was “Oh, you just noticed Omelas, but you haven’t yet figured out how big Omelas is.”
Everything is morally questionable, y’all. There is no ethical consumption. The cultural permeation of the concept of consumption itself renders the world unethical.
And the question of whether any disruptive tool (which is all machine learning is right now: it’s not strong AI of the science fictional variety) is ethical in that sense—well, it gets back into buggy whips. Were automobiles ethical? There’s still a fair amount of debate about that, but it didn’t stop them from shaping our society.
And they have had benefits along with their drawbacks—along with mass media, they have made us less insular, for example. As with may things in the world, it’s complicated. The idea that “disruption is an unqualified good” is the 21st century equivalent of STOCKHOLDER VALUE in the 80s, and honestly all this stuff makes me tired.
It’s almost like all this stuff is complicated, and the human tendency to choose up sides and wear armbands and assign moral values to things that are essentially complex problems with a lot of synergistic implications and marks in the plus and minus column is reductionist. (I’m not suggesting that the original twitter thread was reductionist, by the way—it definitely had some insight into “this is complex.”)
I was talking with some writer friends about the use of tropes of propaganda in fiction and whether there’s any ethical problem in, for example, using some such tropes that often show up in fascist narratives (the bad guys are super-powerful and also kind of very bad at everything and despicable on every level) in fiction. One of the things we noticed was that those tropes also turn up as an effective critique of imperialism (in which the real-world bad guys are often super-powerful and also often kind of numbskulls).
I opined that using propaganda to support a moral cause is honestly just fine. And then I mentioned “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” as an example of positive propaganda.
Max Gladstone pushed back on Omelas being propaganda and forced me to reconsider a too-glib statement. Then, as the discussion moved into what makes art propaganda or not propaganda, I said, “Omelas never says "You ought to do this," It just says DID YOU NOTICE YOUR SOCIETY IS FOUNDED ON EXPLOITATION?””
My chief critique of Omelas (it is my favorite short story, fwiw) is that it posits a solution that doesn't actually exist. But Ursula was subtle enough that maybe that was the point.
You can't walk away
So maybe fucking fix it. Even if what you’re fixing is tiny and incremental and feels futile.
In the same chat conversation (yes, writers hang out in little writer chatrooms and distract ourselves from work by talking about art), Jodi Meadows pointed out that multi-level marketing is another scam based on exploitation, and it occurred to me that MLM (an acronym that, like CBT, gives me a double-take every time I see it!) presents a small enough microcosm of the Omelas Problem that you can actually get your mind around it.
You can see how any given Ponzi scheme works: the fact that wealth extraction on a cultural scale is also a Ponzi scheme gets hidden because it’s just too big to notice. It’s the parable of the fish and the water.
Anyway, yeah. You can walk away from multi-level marketing. You can decide not to portray machine learning positively in your work because it is (as currently practiced) reliant on yet another unpaid appropriation of artist’s labor and exploitation of workers.
You can’t walk away from Omelas. Omelas is everywhere. It’s so pervasive, so unremarkable, you can’t even see it until you teach yourself how. (Reading a lot of Sara Paretsky sure helped me notice.) And maybe you can only fix it a little at a time, in whatever way is most convenient to your hand.
I think, when we talk about imperialism in the modern world, there’s a tendency to neglect the fact that imperial exploitation began at home. The profound poverty and oppression of the British and American working classes in the Victorian era is incredible when you pause to consider it. That engine of cancerous growth consumed everyone except a very select few at the top. And it reached out-metastasized—and used those resources to consume people across the globe, in turn.
And then collapsed, because the thing about cancer is that it consumes everything it can touch and then the host dies.
This is not sustainable. Omelas is, among other things, the focus on growth above everything.
Forgetting to discuss that exploitation begins at home and relies on internal hierarchies to survive perpetuates the myth that anybody with sufficient grit and determination can lift themselves from the swamp and become part of the ruling class. It also perpetuates the Model Minority myth, and supports oppression (and climate denialism, for that matter) because it encourages people to step on each other’s heads to get above the water, ignoring the fact that if the water keeps rising everybody is going to eventually drown.
Fuck you, I got mine! is the mantra of exploitation.
One of the reasons I love The Great Gatsby, for all its flaws, is that it exists in part to deconstruct that Horatio Alger/Great Expectations/A Tree Grows In Brooklyn narrative that Special People Can Rise Above Their Origins.
I come from a poor working class background, and as somebody who did, in fact, manage to change social classes through work and luck, I am here to tell you: everybody deserves a decent life. Everybody deserves to be safe, healthy, and fed. Everybody deserves a warm place to sleep and decent dental care.
Not just the Special People.