Everything for Everyone
The Philanthropy Book Club (PBC) met a week ago to discuss this work of speculative fiction, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 by Abdelhadi and O'Brien. We set two meeting times in an effort to accomodate global time zones, but one group had only three people so we merged that discussion with the second one.
This was our first time reading fiction together. One of the funniest observations (INMO) was one person's admission (joined by others) that we'd read right past the future dates in the book's title and saw them as dates in the past. Ah, the tricks of the brain.
There was general agreement among those in the group that the futures described in the book - ample and free food, housing options for everyone (even introverts), readily available and affordable medical care, communal child raising and quality child care, and technological advances in gestation - were appealing. While there was less universal interest in music and dancing as a form of organizing, this was largely due to the more quiet nature of our group participants and no shade on the role of art in protest. As our group lacked any billionaire representation, there was little to no concern expressed about the fate of that population (in the book, they've been relocated to Mars). Philanthropy is everywhere in the book - as mutual aid, shared resources, co-housing, voluntary child care, medical services, and education. Philanthropy as foundations and endowments and professional staff and 5% payout rules is nowhere in the book.
Since the book takes places 30 years hence, we were a bit daunted by the book's "historical" references to war, trauma, pandemics, and everything up to nuclear fallout during the years between now and this imagined future. There was hope - but not belief - that the egalitarian society described could be attained without war and widespread devastation. We let the authors off the hook for their trick of "hand waving" at this past; some were quite sure we were well into the period of devastation and were holding on to hope that better worlds could emerge.
We briefly discussed the degree to which any of us are currently working toward such futures. Some of the club's readers have been in planning sessions that generate imagined futures and others were interested in doing so. There was also interest in the role that technology plays in the book - a background feature rather than a "main character," is how one reader described it. The tech of greatest interest to our group was biological not digital. In this future, anyone of any sex or gender identity can get pregnant. There was a lot of interest in what this might mean for families and family structures and how this tech innovation intersected with basic needs such as housing.
The title of this book can be easily confused with Nathan Schneider's new work, "Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy," a scholarly look at creating different futures. The title is also confusingly close to Adam Becker's new work, "More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity" although the books could not be more different in substance. Schneider is interested in open and collective ownership of goods and services, something which could be part of the imagined futures. Becker, on the other hand, does a wonderful job of laying out the logical fallacies, inherent hubris, and eugenics-based thinking at the root of both effective altruism and AI maximalism. Becker uses the work of scholars such as Timnit Gebru and Deborah Raj to tell a story full of creepy details and old boy networks. These three books could be read together - start with Becker's, and get the data that supports your spidey sense about all that's wrong with EA and AI; then read Schneider, who offers numerous examples of what different and better looks like now, and top it off with your pick from the fictional futures laid out by Abdelhadi and O'Brien. Or go the other way - start with fiction and work your way back to how we might get there.
We in the PBC are going to stick with fiction. The next book we'll read is "How Beautiful We Were: A Novel" by Imbolo Mbue. Dates to be announced for sometime in mid or late June.