AI, Comparative Advantage and Natality

Beyond the banality of stochastic parrots and their "hallucinations", AI exists as a socio-political thought-exercise: a what-if. As has been the way since the emergence of sociology and its creative cousin Science Fiction, this encompasses both dystopian hell and utopian heaven. Perhaps the most obvious combination of the two is the idea that AI will take all the jobs, delivering either something akin to The Matrix, where humanity is reduced to its utility as fuel, or to a world of leisure and ease in which we can all pursue our talents and interests: "to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic." We have now reached the stage where official projections for growth routinely factor in AI as a magic ingredient. But beyond the glorified press releases of business consultancies predicting that AI will "impact" half of all jobs (consider what an accurate prediction of the impact of electricity would have been), there hasn't been much discussion of the mechanisms. In other words, how in practice will AI spread though the economy and how will employment patterns respond?

This is odd insofar as we have no shortage of historical data on the way previous technologies were deployed and how they reconfigured society. We all understand how the combustion engine substituted for horses and how that resulted in grooms being replaced by mechanics, and more recently we have seen how the technology of logistics has allowed employment in developed economies to shift from the primary and secondary sectors to the tertiary. The optimistic take on AI is that we'll see something similar: old jobs being replaced by new ones and aggregate wealth increasing, which translates to higher wages and greater purchasing power. If there is a fly in this ointment, it relates to the relative narrowing of wages between different parts of the world as industry reconfigures optimally. The middle class expands in the Far East while its peers in the American Mid-West stagnate, but at a global level there is aggregate growth. AI probably won't have a differential impact around geography, as raw material extraction and manufacturing does, but it will have an impact around cognitive differentials, which is why the more pessimistic prediction is for a decline in whitecollar employment.

Noah Smith is to be found on the optimistic side of the debate (as usual), but while his just-so stories of neoliberal progress can grind your teeth, he has made a useful contribution by trying to explain how the mechanism might work during the transition. He starts by outlining the negative view: "humans will have nothing left to do, and we will become obsolete like horses. Human wages will drop below subsistence level, and the only way they’ll survive is on welfare, paid by the rich people who own all the AIs that do all the valuable work. But even long before we get to that final dystopia, this line of thinking predicts that human wages will drop quite a lot, since AI will squeeze human workers into a rapidly shrinking set of useful tasks." In answering this, Smith's core point is that AI is not limitless. It will be constrained by computing power and energy - i.e. material resources. This will raise the opportunity cost of using it for low-value tasks that could be done by humans. Relative opportunity cost means that it will still make sense for humans to do jobs and be well-paid for them while AI concentrates on the really important stuff.

One of the features of economics (which proves that it is a social science rather than a hard science) is that many of its theories cannot be proven. This is not simply about the crisis of replicability, which typically affects microeconomics, but the difficulty of conducting real-world empirical trials at the macroeconomic level (hence the delusion that micro-foundations can be used to extrapolate macro policy). However, there are a few theories that are demonstrably true because the global economy provides a reliable test environment. One obvious example is the gravity theory of trade, which posits that it is cheaper to trade with near neighbours than far-off countries due to relative transportation costs. Despite the best efforts of Brexiteers to claim that technology has abolished distance, this clearly still holds true. The relevant theory for Smith's intuition about AI is comparative advantage, which is also demonstrably true for reasons to do with differential endowments - e.g. it makes more sense to grow bananas in the Caribbean and oats in Scotland than vice versa, and likewise someone with a high IQ and someone with lots of muscle power will gravitate to different jobs best suited to their abilities. So AI can concentrate on curing cancer rather than trying to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. 

One issue with Smith's model is that AI will produce greater rates of growth in those areas that it addresses. This is partly due to the compounding effect of the technology itself, but also because the movement of humanity into services that cannot be cheaply automated will necessarily intensify the unbalanced growth between the two sectors. William Baumol noted the effect by which low-productivity sector wages rose because of the competition for labour by high-productivity sectors. But if the AI sector isn't competing with the human sector for labour, there is no reason to think that wages will be bidded up. In other words, AI may not make humans redundant but it may lead to further wage stagnation because of that unbalanced growth. The best argument against this is that some of the fruits of AI must be recycled into wages simply to keep the system from collapsing (Smith envisages this in the perjorative terms of "welfare", i.e. UBI, though this is functionally no different to in-work benefits or a minimum wage), but that then emphasises the issue of distribution which comparative advantage does not circumvent. That gal with the high IQ is likely earning more than the guy with the muscles because there are more people with the latter than the former so basic supply and demand leads to different wages.

So perhaps the dystopia of AI is not that we all lose our jobs but that the economy becomes even more unequal in its outcomes. The jobs that AI won't do will include both grunt work and highly-valued work, but at the aggregate level of the economy we may end with many more of the former relative to the latter than was previously the case. Another way of thinking about this is to note that wages (returns to labour) have declined while asset wealth (returns to capital) has increased since the 1970s without the input of AI. We've had plenty of wage stagnation, particularly since 2008. If there is a more fundamental and powerful force at work (let's call it neoliberalism) the question then becomes how will that force accommodate AI? It's a reasonable assumption that it will reinforce or even exacerbate the existing trend towards wealth inequality and wage stagnation. In theory AI could disrupt this trend, but then any number of technological breakthroughs since the 70s that were characterised as disruptive turned out to actually reinforce neoliberal political economy (that is in the real world version, rather than the textbook fantasy, e.g. the growth of monopoly), so there's little reason to think this episode will be any different. 

The error is to assume that AI will carry all before it, reconfiguring society in its own image, hence the hysterical colouring of much commentary, but technologies are moulded by society as much as they do the moulding. Marx noted that "The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist", but the reality, as Karl Polanyi countered, is that society also gave us the Factory Acts. If AI really were disruptive of the fundamentals of the economic system, the counter-movement would focus on the protection of the key factors of production, such as land, labour and capital, but to date the focus has been on the enforcement of propriety around generative deepfakes and the threat to the traditional media's interpretation of truth. If this carries an echo of the counter-movement of the nineteenth century, it is more of Christian revivalism than social progressivism. What this suggests is that AI won't be anywhere near as impactful as either the optimists or pessimists predict, but it also suggests that its greatest impact may be to exacerbate and accelerate existing trends.

One of those trends, which can be directly linked to the way that neoliberalism has expanded the logic of the market into the sphere of the family, is falling birth rates. As Steve Randy Waldman notes, natality is one area where comparative advantage has to cede to human emotion. Though much of child-rearing is handed over to specialists, most obviously teachers, it remains essentially a form of "cottage production" that struggles under the neoliberal logic of competition: "The relationship between wealth and natality is nuanced. When wealth is certain, its increase is likely pronatal, as people can bank on greater resources to cover the burdens of childrearing. But when wealth is uncertain, when it is delivered via tournaments that deliver outsize rewards to winners, then increases in 'expected' (meaning average) wealth likely translate to decreases in natality. The bigger the prize, the greater the cost of anything that will reduce your chance of winning." There should be no surprise that the current iteration of the Californian Ideology emphasises both the dramatic potential of AI and the necessity of pronatalism.

My guess is that AI won't become a general purpose technology (GPT) on a par with electricity or the Internet. This is because it will be too expensive, and that in turn is because there is no upper limit to its ambition, even if there are hard limits in the form of silicon and energy. You only need so much power and bandwith for most tasks, so GPTs like electricity and datacoms only need to be good enough. We already have good-enough AI, but it's fruits are underwhelming. Consequently, AI resources will increasingly be focused in specialist areas where its potential is greatest, e.g. more medical imaging rather than chasing the dream of fully autonomous vehicles. Noah Smith is right in his emphasis on comparative advantage, but as a neoliberal he assumes that the invisible hand of the market will optimally decide on how to allocate those scarce AI resources, rather than it being a political decision that will be taken to reinforce neoliberalism itself. Wealth inequality will continue to grow, even if AI companies replace oil corporations and technology manufacturers on the stock exchange, and the symptoms of that inequality, notably falling birth rates, will continue to elicit angst and ineffective amelioration.

The Mandate of Heaven

Just as the Chinese concept of the Mandate of Heaven was used to justify both the authority of the emperor and the right of the people to overthrow him, so the concept of totalitarianism has been employed both to advocate democracy and to excuse authoritarian restraints upon it. In a review of Kai Strittmatter's We Have Been Harmonised, which looks at the way technology is being used for social control in China, John Naughton draws a distinction between networked authoritarianism and networked totalitarianism: "An authoritarian regime is relatively limited in its objectives: there may be elections, but they are generally carefully managed; individual freedoms are subordinate to the state; there is no constitutional accountability and no rule of law in any meaningful sense. Totalitarianism, in contrast, prohibits opposition parties, restricts opposition to the state and exercises an extremely high degree of control over public and private life." If Putin's Russia is the pre-eminent authoritarian regime in this definition, then Xi Jinping's China is the pre-eminent totalitarian one (North Korea is eliminated on the technicality of not being "networked").

But it's not at all clear that there is a meaningful distinction to be made between authoritarianism and totalitarianism beyond the specific - and for most people largely irrelevant - point about legal political parties. Viewed from the perspective of a worker or peasant, there was little to no practical difference between the two during the twentieth century, the chances of being shot or starved to death notwithstanding. A dividing line can be drawn around Nazi Germany, the Stalin-era Soviet Union and Mao-era China on the basis of body-counts, but the theory of totalitarianism developed by Hannah Arendt and others was essentially about social control rather than murderous practice, and there are plenty of authoritarians with bloody hands. A cynic might suggest that an authoritarian regime in the twentieth century was simply one that the middle-classes were prepared to tolerate in the interests of restricting democracy and preserving private property. Despite its investment in the technology of social control and the privileged position of the CCP, China may just be another authoritarian regime.

That's certainly one way of reading Tyler Cowen's claim that democracy is not coming to China anytime soon: "If you belong to the Chinese upper class or even middle class along the eastern coast, you may end up asking yourself the following question: Who is more likely to protect my basic economic interests, the current Chinese Communist Party, or a democratic representative of Chinese rural interests? … One recent study has shown that Communist Party members are more likely to have progressive views on issues of gender equality, political pluralism and openness to international exchange than do the Chinese public at large. Again, if you are an elite among the Chinese citizenry, it is not a sure thing that you will do better with democracy than under the Communist Party." That democracy jeopardises vested interests is hardly an insight, but it's still a surprise to see an advocate of free markets admit that it isn't the inevitable product of economic reform.

Unlike Cowen, Naughton isn't prepared to concede that authoritarianism might in fact be the natural outcome of capitalism when unconstrained by organised labour -  in other words, that the emergence of democracy in Western Europe and North America was highly contingent - but this means identifying an additional factor that can explain China's peculiar path. That factor is digital technology: "We thought that if the Chinese wanted to modernise, they would have to have capitalism. And if they had capitalism, they would have to have democracy. And if they wanted to have the internet (and they did), they would have to have openness, which would eventually lead to democracy. All of which turned out to be baloney. Essentially, the CCP decided that they could have their cake and eat it – and they have succeeded. They have embraced digital technology and used its intrinsic affordance of comprehensive surveillance to construct a successful, powerful, growing, networked totalitarian state with global ambitions."

The implication is that the mass surveillance enabled by the Internet has allowed the CCP to prevent capitalism's magic from fostering democracy and a free press. This dovetails with the now dominant belief in the media that the Internet may be a threat to established democracies as well, although paradoxically as much through its lack of restraint (incivility) as through the abuse of bad actors (fake news). Behind this spectre of a disruptive and antisocial technology lies the Cold War-era image of a totalitarian society in which everyone is closely monitored and fearful. One of the revelations of the 1990s was that the USSR had not been anywhere near as totalitarian as the propaganda maintained (revisionist historians had been making this point since the 1970s, but it only came to public consciousness after 1989). The Brezhnev years, now nostalgically recalled by many ex-Soviet citizens because of their stability and modest sufficiency, were marked less by Orwellian fear than Hancockian boredom. What most people were hankering for were better commodities, not a free press. The irony is that the arrival of those commodities has led to more pervasive surveillance in the form of the commercial Internet.

The West has long created imaginary "others" at the level of society as a way of speculating on changes that might be adopted domestically, both benign and malign, from political systems to sexual habits. Though we nowadays think of the Orientalist tradition as a justification for imperialism, it was marked in its earliest phases by an admiring assessment of the strengths of the Ottoman state, an approach that has its modern echoes in newspaper articles praising the achievements of Singapore or indeed China. Much of the positive style of this speculation shifted towards the realm of science fiction in the twentieth century, though its "real world" application lived on in the romantic appreciation of national liberation movements. The negative style was dominated by its political utility, notably in the 1940s literature of totalitarianism and the 1950s to 1980s literature of the Cold War.

Much of the Western speculation about China's "Great Firewall" and the emerging technology of "hyper-surveillance" seeks to recreate that imagined environment of paranoia and intrusiveness, but it is questionable whether there is any more substance to it today than there ever was. The world depicted in 1984 was no more credible, either technologically or socially, than the one depicted by The Martian Chronicles, though its likely that Ray Bradbury was more conscious of the fact that he was really writing about the Mid-West than George Orwell was conscious that he was writing about Eton. Likewise, the tales of China's social-credit system, CCTV networks and facial-recognition software sound scary until you remember that the same technology is already being used extensively or trialled in the West. In terms of remote and automated surveillance at street level, Beijing and London are pretty similar.

Naughton recognises one oddity of our current geopolitical focus: "China’s modernisation means that bipolarity has returned and a formidable alternative to our system has materialised. Yet we remain obsessed with Russia – which is a nuisance rather than an existential threat – and not with China." Perhaps the truth is that we don't want to let go of the dystopia of the USSR. In an age of limited communication and restricted travel, it had the advantage of being obscure and impenetrable, like the mysterious Orient of old. In contrast, modern China is relatively open, highly-visible and for all practical purposes little different to other East Asian states. It's clearly not as "free" as Japan (though that is a de facto one-party state, incidentally), but it's also not as satisfyingly totalitarian as the imaginary Soviet Union of the 1970s.

To make up for this, we have to imagine that the Chinese use of surveillance technology is both more technically advanced and socially pervasive than it is in the West. The Cold War paradigm is no longer appropriate, but the trope of the cunning oriental never goes out of fashion, so there is a ready market for tales of nefarious practice and totalising ambition, as Huawei has found to its cost. Rebecca MacKinnon, who coined the term "networked authoritarianism", has made the point that it is a model of social control that is dependent more on legal coercion, commercial cooperation and warrantless surveillance than on traditional censorship or blunt service denial. In other words, it is about the intersection of the state and the market - they are complementary rather than antagonistic. One reason for the emergence of the term "networked totalitarianism" is that MacKinnon's characterisation applies equally well to Western countries, particularly after the various surveillance scandals of the last decade. We need something stronger to put the Chinese into a class of their own.

A decade ago Yevgeny Morozov noted how US technology could be employed by authoritarian regimes: "Can the Internet empower dissidents and pro-democracy activists? Yes. But it can also strengthen existing dictatorships and facilitate the control of their populations. Washington's utopian plan to liberate the world one tweet at a time could also turn American innovation into a tool for the world's subjugation." Today, the belief is that China may be closer to realising the potential of AI for social control than the West, but this is as much an expression of envy as of fear and at times seems more informed by the speculative fiction of Isaac Asimov's "psychohistory" than by any technical reality. Once more, China is being held up as an example for the West, or more accurately for authoritarian tendencies within Western political establishments: "Even some foreign observers, watching from afar, may be tempted to wonder if such data-driven governance offers a viable alternative to the increasingly dysfunctional-looking electoral model." When people start talking about a totalitarian "threat", the restraint of democracy never seems to be far away.

More Human Than Human

Some have wondered if Blade Runner 2049 has a "woman problem", on the grounds that it objectifies the female form (it does, but it's far from gratuitous), or that it lacks female characters with real agency (it doesn't, though it raises a wry smile to remember that the Bechdel Test arrived shortly after the Voight-Kampff Test of the 1982 film). Perhaps a better question might be, Is this a film that addresses female concerns? I think the answer is yes, though the results are ambiguous. The notional theme of the series is what it means to be human, but the new generation of empathetic replicants are so close to human that the distinction is irrelevant, hence their otherwise pointless sex drives (do not dwell on the incongruities - this is SciFi). Though these androids are presented as a mirror image of humanity, and the new film makes clear references to the artificial divisions of race and class, the fundamental dichotomy is that of gender, hence the central importance of childbirth and the control of the means of reproduction. The "problematic" is a woman's right to choose. A major difference between Philip K Dick's 1968 book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and the first film is that the novel's Rick Deckard is not only human but has a wife, Iran, depressed by her post-apocalyptic life. In Blade Runner Deckard's wife is an off-screen ex-wife, and perhaps only an implanted memory. The decision to cut the character, along with the book's concept of Mercerism, a quasi-religion that focuses on the importance of empathy, seemed questionable in the first film, but these absences are cleverly addressed in the second.

Much of the criticism of the sequel centres on the relationship of the blade runner K, played by Ryan Gosling, and his holographic PA cum emotional support, played by Ana de Armas. After a hard day retiring early-model replicants, K returns home to be greeted by Joi who flits, at the touch of a button, between the visual but insubstantial roles of housewife and sex kitten. I don't think this sad scene is about the satisfaction of male fantasies but the all-too-obvious gap between sexist cliché and reality. From K pouring two glasses of booze and drinking both to the visual overlay of steak and chips on a bowl of grubs, what we see is an attempt to assuage despair rather than a guy living a 1950s suburban ideal. This role-play is softened by Joi and K's mutual consideration - he clearly needs someone or something to care about - which may be synthetic but is emotionally convincing. In a later scene, Joi employs Mariette, a "basic pleasure model" played by Mackenzie Davis, to provide a physical presence so she can take her and K's relationship to the next level, giving a whole new meaning to "threesome". This is not simply a satisfaction of physical desire but an uncertain encounter in which identity is fluid, which oddly reminded me of the film Performance. It's closer to psychosis than troilism. As will become apparent, K's identity is no more stable than Joi's.

Though both the original film and the sequel reduce women to their instrumental value as sex-bots or breeders, much the same approach applies to the men, who are either mere muscle or killers. In this context, the iconic "I've seen things you people would never believe" speech by Rutger Hauer's Roy Batty in the first film was an act of rebellion, albeit a Luciferian expression of pride by a psychopath. In the new film the equivalent is Sapper Morton, played by Dave Bautista, an older generation replicant hiding-out as a farmer of protein grubs, saying "You've never seen a miracle" before he is retired with extreme prejudice by K. The discovery of the buried bones of a woman who died in childbirth on Morton's farm many years ago explains his meaning and provides the engine of the plot when K and Joshi realise that she was a replicant and thus supposedly incapable of bearing a child. This turns out to be Rachael, played by Sean Young in the original film as a new model of replicant with implanted human memories and empathy, while the father of the child is subsequently revealed to be Rick Deckard, played by Harrison Ford in both films. While the sex of the child is uncertain, we can now see the Holy Family coming into focus. The French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve is on record as pro-choice, but much of his work displays a Catholic concern with the emblematic role of birth.

The bad guy of the new film is the industrialist Niander Wallace, played by Jared Leto, who is assisted by his replicant henchwoman Luv, played by Sylvia Hoeks. She appears to have retained some of the psychopathic traits of the older generation, while occasionally squeezing out a tear. Wallace is motivated by the dream of birth (he's definitely "pro-life" and not in favour of anyone else's right to choose), specifically rediscovering the secret of self-reproducing replicants that Eldon Tyrell had (perhaps accidentally) achieved with Rachael, but which was lost in the "blackout" that creates a convenient disjuncture between 2019 (the year of the first film's setting) and 2049. Wallace's goal is a "disposable labour force" for the expansion of the off-world colonies. Though the newer generations of replicants are not limited to the 4-year lifespan of the first film's models, and there doesn't appear to be any shortage of them, self-reproduction offers the potential of exponential growth in their number. While this is standard megalomania, with top notes of Miltonic hubris ("storming Eden") and Silicon Valley transhumanism, there's also an echo here of the historic shift of the plantation economy of the US South from imported black slaves who were worked to death (on average after 7 years) to the reproduction of slaves through breeding following the abolition of the slave trade in the early nineteenth century.

The two characters who instrumentally pursue the death of others, i.e. killing for what they imagine to be the greater good, rather than just doing a job, are both women: the police lieutenant Joshi, played by Robin Wright, and the replicant rebel leader Freysa, played by Hiam Abbass. Joshi wants Rachael's child terminated as she fears a war would be triggered if replicants suspect their destiny is not fixed, while Freysa is prepared to sacrifice Deckard to preserve the security of his and Rachael's offspring and thereby maintain the hope of future independence for the replicants (there's a bit of The Matrix in this focus on the saviour child). Joshi sees the relationship of replicants ("skin-jobs") and humans in terms of segregation, which echoes old race politics: "The world is built on a wall that separates kind. Tell each side there's no wall, you bought a war or a slaughter". The social importance placed on empathy has led to newer androids that are near-indistinguishable from humans and thus paradoxically more dangerous than the older models. Freysa sees the relationship more in terms of class, the new generation of replicants having been uneasily integrated into terrestrial society as workers rather than kept off-world as helots. She seeks to raise the consciousness of these "proles", who are supposedly programmed to obey but appear more than capable of autonomous thought and action. The "new hope" of this film is the replicants' emergent ability to choose.

Though set in our relative future, the film reflects an alternate historical timeline that appears to start in 1948, the year that George Orwell wrote 1984. The choice of future date may have something to do with 1948 + 101 (the interrogation scene between Wallace and Deckard, with Luv in attendance, echoes that between O'Brien and Smith in room 101 of the Ministry of Love, while the manufacture and unreliability of memory is central to both stories). Though some thought the prominence of the Atari brand in the first film reflected early-80s US anxieties over Japanese economic strength, rather than just commercial product placement, which would prove prescient when Sony acquired Columbia Pictures (co-producers of the sequel), another theory is that the first film resides in the alternate timeline of Dick's The Man in the High Castle in which the Axis powers won the Second World War, hence the Asiatic flavour of Los Angeles. The new film includes some pointed Russian references, not only the Cyrillic script on Sapper Morton's farm buildings but a "CCCP Soviet Happy" holographic advert. I think this is less about contemporary concerns over Russian meddling in US politics, or even an attempt to scotch the earlier alternate history theory, and more a harking back to the Cold War. This is a film that at times recalls a chilly East Berlin as much as the arid Nevada desert.

Blade Runner 2049 is a literate film. The scene of Mister Cotton (played by Lennie James) and his sweatshop kids owes more to Dickens than Dick, while Deckard, isolated in a ruined Las Vegas, quotes Treasure Island explicitly and Robinson Crusoe implicitly. We even get a cameo appearance by Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, a book about gestation and uncertain identity, as a discussion topic for K and Joi. The film's art direction, which is surely Oscar-bound, includes nods to Tarkovsky's Stalker, Kubrick's The Shining and Gilliam's Brazil, as well as Ridley Scott's original, which went meta with its subsequent "generations". Villeneuve's vision of the Wallace Corporation owes a stylistic debt to Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, as did the 1982 film's Tyrell Corporation, but he adds to the layers by additionally citing Welles' adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Trial. In a separate scene, Joi decides to give K the name Joe, i.e. Joseph K, after he suspects that he may, like Pinnochio, have become a "real boy". This occurs after K discovers the whittled wooden horse that featured in his memory, which he had hitherto assumed to be implanted, leading him to imagine he might be the lost child. K finds it buried among the ashes of an old furnace, like a reverse Rosebud.

Though the film plays with religious themes, formal religion remains an absence in its universe. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Mercerism was a technologically-enabled quasi-religion with near-universal adherence. It was centred on empathy with living things, having arisen after World War Terminus made both humans and animals a rarity on Earth. Though there were elements of parody in this, notably of Christian suffering and tele-evangelism (the "empathy box"), Dick's point was that empathy was the characteristic that distinguished the human from the replicant (or the dehumanised human), hence the Voight-Kampff test. The novel's emphasis on animals as the ultimate status symbol, both artificial (those electric sheep) and real, which only survived in the first film's mechanical owl, is revived in the second film. This is not just in the incidental detail of Deckard's old dog or the offer of a goat by the trader Doc Badger (played by Barkhad Abdi), but in the very concept of Joi. That might appear to support the claim that the film is sexist - placing a synthetic woman on a par with a pet - but the point is that animals provide existential meaning in the original story - someone, or something, to care about - not just a means of personal gratification. This emotional investment in mainly artificial animals reflected the absence of terrestrial human childbirth, due to radiation poisoning, and the reluctance to invest emotionally in androids (in the film's radiocative Las Vegas, Deckard plays Frank Sinatra on a jukebox singing "One For My Baby").

If there is a contemporary relevance in this it might be the performative empathy (and anger) of social media. Consider the fun we all now have trying to distinguish bots from humans on Twitter and Facebook (and consider also whether Donald Trump or Katie Hopkins could pass the Voight-Kampff test). Significantly, the future envisaged in Blade Runner 2049 does not feature smartphones, and I don't think that's just because it's a projection of 1948 or 1982 vintage Sci-Fi. Its world is technologically implausible (if we ever make androids, they'll be easily distinguishable as such), which is why the objectification that clutters the surface of the film should be taken with a pinch of salt, but it is one in which emotional contact is enormously powerful, a point made concrete in the physical isolation of Rachael and Deckard's now-adult child, Ana Stelline, played by Carla Juri. Ana spends her life in a large glass womb, a sterile environment necessary to protect her inadequate immune system, passing her time manufacturing memories to be implanted into replicants. She is eternal child, virgin and mother all rolled into one. The penultimate scene sees Deckard, who has made being an absent father a lifelong mission, reunited with his daughter, though they remain separated by glass. As K dies outside in the snow, having sacrificed his "life" but perhaps found his "soul", we're still not sure whether Ana represents a dead-end or the start of a revolution. What is sure is that the future is female.

Star Wars as Counterfactual History

Now that the fever around Star Wars: The Force Awakens has abated, I thought it might be fun to look at the series through the prism of counterfactual history. The first thing to note is that George Lucas's creation is set in the past - "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away" - so it is a suitable subject for a historian. It is also entirely fictional, a characteristic it shares with the counterfactual. The over-arching Star Wars story has the framework of a classical political history, notably the transition from republic to empire (and back again), while the historical parallels with the American Revolution and the Vietnam War (and even the post-9/11 era in Episode VII) are clear. It also has strong mythic elements, employing a narrative arc built on Greek and Roman tales and archetypal, if somewhat two-dimensional, characters (Lucas's Freudian obsessions are now giving way to more Jungian tropes under the Disney influence).

With its antique social forms (from taverns to princesses), and daft technology (from light-sabres to death-stars), Star Wars is unimaginative and implausible as Sci-Fi, but this simply highlights that it owes more to counterfactual history than speculative fiction. If The Lord of the Rings is a reactionary fantasy, and Star Trek is a thought-experiment about the liberating potential of technology, Star Wars occupies a parallel universe of the historically familiar in which social development (as opposed to chronology) appears to have stopped. This is why the messed-up production history (the 22 years between the shooting of episodes IV and I) does not really matter. It's not like fashions alter: everyone still dresses as if they had just wandered in from a WW2 film or a Western. Despite its pretensions to rationalism, this is a universe in which change is the product of personal ambition, economics has barely advanced beyond mercantilism, and the galaxy is under the sway of secret societies and the soupy metaphysics of the Force. If I had to put a date on its intellectual vintage, I'd say around 1770.

Counterfactuals are categorically different to speculative fiction. While a counterfactual may be employed in the creation myth of a utopia or a dystopia - the South wins the American Civil War, the Axis Powers win World War Two - the purpose of speculative fiction is to construct a social or political model in which particular relations can be tested under changing conditions: could chattel slavery survive in an industrial society, would a totalitarian regime implode under the impact of modern technologies? Speculative fiction tends towards the dialectic: contending forces, constant stress, disruptions in the social fabric. The subject is change. In contrast, the subject of a counterfactual is likely to be persistence. When change does feature, it usually takes the form of new technologies seamlessly integrated into a traditional setting (those daft light-sabres again), which is an ideological plea for the independence of social relations from the material base: we can acquire high-tech and maintain an aristocratic hierarchy.

Because they are conservative, counterfactuals are paradoxically often optimistic. They seek to wish away actual changes (no fall of Constantinople, no Bolshevik Revolution), but in so doing they annihilate history and imagine an eternal present in which social relations are unchanging. Even those counterfactuals that imagine pessimistic scenarios tend to do so in order to highlight current virtues or make satirical contrasts with the present day. For example, most fictionalised alternate histories in which the Nazis successfully invaded Britain (or the USSR invaded the USA) feature a heroic resistance and complicit state apparatchiks. Just as British pre-1914 "invasion literature" reflected anxiety over empire and the social question, so a Nazi Great Britain was an extreme example of the imaginative response to the welfare state, while the WW3 strand in American culture (e.g. Red Dawn) was more about resisting gun control and Washington than a genuine expectation of a Russian revanche in Alaska. In a similar vein, Star Wars is not just about the eventual triumph of good over evil, but about resilience: the Jedi order cannot be destroyed.

Counterfactuals that extrapolate developments - i.e. "if X didn't happen" - usually reflect the belief that social continuity is to be preferred, even when they allow for technological change. Tory historians who wonder what would have happened if the UK hadn't been involved in the two world wars are usually mourning the loss of empire. Their defence of this approach invariably privileges the opinions of contemporary elites. As Niall Ferguson says, "Virtual history -- and this is a very, very important point, which isn't understood by many people who dabble in 'what if' questions -- is only legitimate if one can show that the alternative that you're discussing, the 'what if' scenario you're discussing, was one that contemporaries seriously contemplated". This distinction is nonsense. The plausibility of an option to a political elite is irrelevant. The UK declaring neutrality in 1914 is no more "realistic" than the Battle of the Somme being stopped by the intervention of Martians. Neither happened: a miss is as good as a mile.

Rightwing alternate histories tend to emphasise the pivotal role of individuals, which is both a reflection of their non-materialist ideology and their emotional origin in the realms of fantasy fiction. This can be inadvertently entertaining. Consider this from the economist Bryan Caplan: "Suppose Karl Marx had never been born.  How would the modern world be different? ...Without Marx, there would have been no prominent intellectual promoter of violent revolution for socialist dictatorship. There would still have been a big socialist movement, including many socialists dreaming of bloodbaths and tyranny. But the movement as a whole would have rapidly evolved into something like social democracy. Third World dictators would still have killed in the name of socialism. But there would have been no Soviet Union without Marx. And without the Soviet Union, there would be no fascist Italy and no Nazi Germany" (the Fascist party was founded in 1915, two years before the Bolsheviks seized power). Killing Luke Skywalker at birth might well have preserved the Galactic Empire, but that's because it's a fictional construct.

Counterfactual history is the louche cousin of comparative history, whose methodology it freely borrows to lend itself some credibility. The latter seeks to contrast developments between different groups or territories, usually in the same historical period. This is a perfectly respectable undertaking that can provide valuable insights, but it requires caution. It tends towards the study of nation states, as units of measure that are more easily compared, and the treatment of economic development as the product of competitive advantage rather than internal social relations, which has an obvious ideological purpose. Its methods are also easily twisted to support non-contemporary and often absurd equivalences, for example Niall Ferguson's recent claim that Muslim immigration to Europe parallels the fall of the Roman Empire. This goes beyond the idea that history repeats itself (or rhymes) to an older, reactionary idea of recurrence as the working of fate. This is a key feature in Star Wars, particularly evident in The Force Awakens.

Conservatives who defend alternate history as a method of enquiry tend to be selective in their interpretations not only of what is plausible but of what is likely. For example, Ferguson believes that had the UK remained neutral in 1914, Germany would have won a short war whose consequence would have been a more liberal German state and lasting peace in Europe (and incidentally an EU that the UK never joined). However, this requires the denial not only of actual history, but of any alternative outside the preferred one: "there's simply no way to imagine a Nazi regime emerging, or, indeed a Weimar Republic emerging, if the Kaiser Reich, the Imperial Reich, is victorious in the war that it begins in 1914". For this to be true, we must accept that Weimar and the Nazis had no causes outside of Germany's defeat, which is dangerously close to the Nazi's own interpretation.

If Star Wars has the form of a counterfactual history, what is the factual history to which it runs counter? One theory is that Lucas's films (including the Indiana Jones series, which he wrote for Steven Spielberg to direct) are an attempt to imagine an alternative American cinema in which the studio system of the 40s and 50s survived the impact of television unscathed. Instead of the "golden age" of the 70s auteurs that the upended industry produced, distinguished by films as diverse as The Godfather, The Exorcist and Taxi Driver, we would have had Star Wars episodes I to III, in strict chronological order and hard on the heels of American Graffiti (which influenced the iconic TV series, Happy Days). What this suggests is that Lucas's films remain stuck in the 1970s. Though he is no longer the driving creative force, it is hard to see the Star Wars series escaping that decade any time soon.

Meat and Potatoes

Ridley Scott's The Martian is essentially a corporate video for NASA, which has ambitions to put a human on the Red Planet sometime in the next twenty years or so. Since the Challenger disaster in 1986, films about feasible space exploration (as opposed to fantasies based on wormholes, like Contact or Interstellar) have struggled with the dilemma that chucking meat into space is costly and dangerous, compared to the use of probes and unmanned vehicles, but that without human interest there is unlikely to be sufficient political support to ensure adequate funding. This has given rise to a guilty fascination with jeopardy and sacrifice, from Apollo 13 to Gravity, where the focus is on safe recovery rather than exploration. This new film follows the same outline, but it presents a more gung-ho attitude, arguing that human ingenuity will overcome most problems so let's take the risk. Given that by 2030 we will have even better explorer-bots, The Martian is a plea for the flexibility and endurance of the hardworking meat-based astronaut. Jeremy Hunt would be impressed, and not just because of the Chinese angle.

The film opens with a prologue in which the Ares III mission members confirm their humanity through workplace sarcasm (you wouldn't get that with a robot), before a sudden, violent storm obliges them to abandon the planet. Mark Watney, played by Matt Damon, is hit by debris and presumed lost, probably dead. Commander Lewis, played by Jessica Chastain, is obliged to abandon him to save the rest of the crew. Once Watney awakes to find himself injured and marooned, we move to one of Scott's favourite SF tropes: the violent opening of the stomach. Following the "chestburster" of Alien, and the self-administered Caesarian of Prometheus, Watney has to surgically remove shrapnel from his own belly, having been punctured by a detached antenna. This heralds the Robinson Crusoe section of the film in which our lonely Martian improvises survival while vlogging his endeavours "for the record". After taking stock of his supplies and realising he cannot hold out till the next scheduled mission arrives, he decides to grow his own food by creating an indoor greenhouse. He then turns his attention to communication, recovering the handily-proximate 1997 Pathfinder from the sand and using it to beam back a mayday to Earth.

The central section of the film transfers the themes of utilitarian calculation and improvisation back to Earth, where NASA must decide what to do (and publicly say) and nerds must use their ingenuity to solve problems against the clock, which rather obviously echoes Apollo 13. Watney's "science the shit out of it" strategy is actually more about technology than science, as is made clear by the heavy use of power tools both on Mars and back at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. Some of Watney's key technology is surprisingly antique, such as his fondness for inventories with paper and pen and his reliance on a written table to translate hexadecimal values (they sent a mission to Mars without calculators?) His skills range from shit-stirring to code-hacking. Though the technological improvisations are credible, there are some scientific implausibilities: the Martian storm would be far less destructive due to the lower atmospheric pressure (it wouldn't be able to topple a heavy rocket); the gravity appears to be little different to Earth (it's actually about 0.4g); and much of the surface of Mars is permafrost so extracting water would be trivial (just put dirt in a microwave and strain the results).

The third section sees the rest of the Ares III mission crew - now on their way back to Earth on board the spaceship Hermes and recently informed that Watney is alive - take control after their boss (Sean Bean) ignores the big boss (Jeff Daniels) and reveals a way that their buddy can be saved at risk to them and thus the mission as a whole. This powers through a series of can-do scenes that echo 2001: A Space Odyssey (including temporarily cutting communications to privately discuss their plan - one of a number of nerd in-jokes) and Gravity (playing tag in space, flirting etc). As is now traditional, the ship includes a rotating torus that allows for the simulation of Earth-like gravity, though as per the stately waltz convention established by Stanley Kubrick, it rotates at a much slower rpm than would be required to simulate 1g given it's modest diameter (and that's without worrying about dizziness, deep-vein thrombosis and other problems). The advantage of this conceit is that the crew can lounge around a big white table and have a "count me in" meeting.

The characters are two-dimensional, which is not necessarily a problem given a plot centred on situational puzzles. Jeff Daniels, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jessica Chastain and even Sean Bean try to invest them with some nuance, but the exposition-heavy dialogue (which bizarrely includes deleting expletives in text transmissions) gives them little to work with. Michael Pena reprises his driver role from Fury, which had me mentally substituting Brad Pitt and Shia LaBeouf's characters from that film (that would have been a great mashup). Matt Damon's Watney is both relentless and chirpy: Jason Bourne with a sense of humour. There is no dark night of the soul, and emotional tensions are limited to the conflicting loyalties of immediate team and wider organisation. Society is just a media-coordinated chorus. The "folks back home" interludes are perfunctory, as if NASA were downplaying the ramifications of a possible personal tragedy, with Watney's non-existent beyond a verbal reference to his parents. This is a highly institutionalised story.

The choice of the Massachusetts-born Damon in the role of the stranded astronaut, and his character's English name, had me thinking of the seventeenth century settlers of New England. This is reinforced by Watney's salvation through potatoes, that iconic New World vegetable, which were part of the special Thanksgiving dinner included in the mission's supplies. I thought I might be reading too much into this until Watney started to talk of colonial theory in the language of John Locke: it is only by growing crops that you can lay claim to (and thus colonise) the land. Locke believed that native Americans did not "mix their labour" with the soil, hence they had no claim to it, unlike industrious white settlers (I presume this argument comes from the original book by Andy Weir, who is on record as cleaving to the Bay Area mix of social liberalism and fiscal conservativism). The use of Martian soil and its mixing with the crew's dried shit is emblematic of this territorial claim. It's also redundant: you'd think a botanist like Watney would be familiar with hydroponics, particularly as it's already been tried for real on the International Space Station.

Watney goes out of his way to justify appropriating the personal property left behind by the other crew members, from audio tapes to a crucifix that he uses for kindling (religious belief gets a couple of polite nods). He even expounds on international law in respect of piracy when planning to commandeer the rocket ship handily left in anticipation of the future Ares IV mission many miles distant (no, that didn't make sense to me either). During the trek to the ship, Mars looks like a roseate Monument Valley, all sand and heat (the average temperature is actually well below freezing), while Watney's rover vehicle looks like a covered wagon and he takes on the look of a Protestant patriarch with his now unkempt beard. This echo of the Old West reminds us that the one danger Watney knew he would not have to face would be "hostiles", which makes the obsession with the legality of dispossession all the more striking. This is not the inhabited planet of Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, or Philp K Dick's Martian Time-Slip, so the proprietorial concerns must be directed elsewhere.

The Martian is a film nostalgic for the New Frontier of the 70s, after the first lunar landing but before the Challenger disaster, when NASA was at the height of its influence, hence not only the Kubrickian stylings but a soundtrack featuring disco, ABBA and David Bowie's Starman. As a PR exercise, it understandably skips the Space Shuttle years, though it can't help suggesting that cutting corners on safety is the result of budget constraints and unreasonable media pressure rather than institutional hubris and groupthink. Though NASA is obliged to seek the assistance of the Chinese, and one of the Hermes' crew is a German, the agency always asserts its primacy, at one point putting the Chinese in their place by telling them: "we haven't done that since Apollo". Ouch. If anyone is going to Mars, NASA intends to be in the lead. As a piece of bid-candy it is impressive, but I can't help thinking that it's focus on meat and potatoes - astronauts and territorial claims - is already history.

Fast and Furious

The is-it-a-feminist-film-or-not? reading of Mad Max: Fury Road is a misdirection. George Miller's series has always been about a man - the clue is in the title - who has gradually evolved from a two-dimensional reactionary into a three-dimensional one. The fun of the films is essentially boyish: smirking parodies of heroic forms and daft cars, like a cross between Blackadder and Top Gear. The presence of Miranda Richardson did not make the former feminist, any more than the hiring of Sue Perkins would the latter. The redeeming virtue of Mad Max is that his confusion (the condition of modern manhood) has not curdled into either fascistic misanthropy or unthinking misogyny. In that sense, Max is a more complex character than most "action heroes" and more empathetic than his obvious progenitor, the "man with no name" played by Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone's westerns (there is an amusing reference to this in the latest film in Max's initial refusal to reveal his name, a ploy that echoes all the way back to the Odyssey).

This latest instalment in George Miller's seminal series has an elegiac air about the scenes featuring Tom Hardy as Max, many of which are bathed in the "magic hour" sun that became a feature of westerns in the 70s, such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Days of Heaven. This is a visual shorthand for historical inevitability: my time is over; all things must pass. Hardy, like Gibson in Mad Max 2, is also noticeably close-mouthed (Miller naturally parodies this by having him muzzled for a large part of the film). Though this reinforces the feminist reading, because Charlize Theron's Furiosa gets to do marginally more talking and just as much arse-kicking and problem-solving, the underlying message is conservative: talking gets you into trouble. It also has the effect of characterising Max as a figure only partly of this world, for whom every utterance appears to be a conscious effort of translation, though more in the mould of a social outsider than the uncanny demi-god that Eastwood perfected.

Miller's films often employ a story-telling trope and use artefacts as mediums of memory, with the postmodern irony being that these tales and memories are inevitably misleading or delusional, to the point of downright fatal. In Fury Road, we get the legend of "the Green Place" and an old biker-lady's portmanteau of "heirlooms". The film ends with Max melting away in the crowd as Furiosa is popularly acclaimed the new leader of the Citadel, the heart of this "civilisation" (no need for nonsense like an election). This trope signals a man moving from the real to the mythical realm, a process that has been underway since Max quit the police force in the first episode in 1979. Tom Hardy has apparently been contracted to do three more films. By the last I suspect he'll need no dialogue at all. This shouldn't detract from the qualities the actor brings. If Mel Gibson's incarnation had a little too much of the Achilles about him, Hardy's resourceful hero has the air of an Odysseus.

The key anxiety addressed by this fourth film is not to be found in the relationship of the sexes but in the image of a world of work (the Citadel's social hierarchy is literally powered by treadmills) in which men are increasingly constrained and even envious of women's ability to choose between a biologically-mandated role (i.e. reproduction and nurturing) and a life that is in no way inferior to that of a man (Furiosa's skill in driving the war-rig or shooting, and the independence of the Vuvalini bikers). Mad Max's initial job upon capture by the forces of the Citadel is to be a blood-bag for Nux, a sick warrior, which calls to mind Marx's famous use of the vampire metaphor but also the traditional male fear of being "bled dry" by wife and kids, of being tied-down by the job (Max is literally chained to Nux, and then stuck on the front of his car like an oversized Spirit of Ecstasy). Apart from the mindless mob and the comedy villains (the ruler of Gas Town, in a shabby suit with nipple rings instead of a fob-watch, was a particular delight), the only male role in this society appears to be that of war-boy.

Slowly dying from radiation sickness and brainwashed into a beserker desire for death in battle (Valhalla awaits), the war-boys make explicit the roots of the Lost Boys trope, which Miller introduced in the previous Mad Max instalment, in the cannon-fodder of the Great War. These "half-lives", controlled by the physically and morally corrupt Imortan Joe, the tyrant of the Citadel, represent the madness of men. "Who killed the world?" one of Joe's "breeders" (the harem of physically hale swimwear models that constitute the plot's McGuffin) accusingly asks Nux. The unstated answer is men, but the film tells us that not all men are the same: there's always the exceptional Max, with his independent resourcefulness and guilt-ridden flashbacks. The conservative pessimism of Miller's dystopia is evident in the lack of subtlety in his social order. The figures of authority are monsters and slaves to their own mad ambitions, their enforcers are idiot lumps of muscle or deluded youths, while the common people are weak and inept (they can't even seem to fill a billy-can with water without descending into chaotic violence). The only real exception - and a welcome splash of lurid colour - is Coma, the Doof Warrior, the artist henceforth known as the double-neck-guitar-cum-flamethrower guy.

Fury Road features a running theme of binoculars and telescopes: the far brought near and the world framed, which is a knowing joke about the process of film-making (one of Joe's deformed sons oversees the action from a director's chair). The series can be thought of as one long pastiche of cinema tropes by Miller, which tends to obscure the backward-looking nature of the films' politics. Mad Max was always out of time, and always more concerned with the US (i.e. American cinema heritage) than Australia. The moral breakdown and biker gangs of the original 1979 film were a hangover from the social anxieties of the late 60s that would bring Nixon to power. The energy crisis and fetishisation of petrol in the second film, released in 1981, was a re-run of early 70s fears rebooted by a punk aesthetic that would prove as influential in cinema and design as its near-contemporary Blade Runner.

Mad Max 2 also made clear Miller's debt to Sergio Leone, including some obvious plot parallels with A Fistful of Dollars (which Leone in turn borrowed from Kurosawa's Yojimbo, and Kurosawa borrowed from Dashiel Hammett's novel Red Harvest). The third film, released in 1985, took a sociological turn with the more complex politics of Bartertown, but is remembered mainly for the postmodern way in which it cheerfully pastiched its predecessor in the series with ever more improbable vehicles, big hair and a gonzo-brilliant Tina Turner. To British audiences, watching after the end of the miners' strike, it seemed spookily up-to-date - a dominatrix leader crushes a competing social power that controls the energy supply - but in fact the political subtext was still focused on the 70s energy crisis and the fear of a post-apocalyptic social breakdown filtered through tropes borrowed from The Lord of the Flies and Riddley Walker.

The fourth film fully catches up with the fear of nuclear war, referenced in the prologue and an ever-present theme in the sickness of Imortan Joe and the "half-life" war-boys. Ideologically, we appear to have finally reached the 1980s, hence the Vuvalini, a gang of mature biker chicks who distrust men and specialise in clean headshots, look like a women's group just returned from Greenham Common. There are also some more ambivalent gestures towards contemporary concerns, such as the tech-augmented human (Furiosa's prosthetic arm good, Imortan Joe's life-support system bad) and the atavistic perils of religion (Valhalla standing in for Paradise, to avoid a too-obvious equivalence of the war-boys with teenage Jihadis), but this remains an economy centred on petrol as much as water, which is a stunning conceit when you think that in a genuinely "regressed" society a horse would be far more valuable than a car (apart from ominous birds and a two-headed lizard that Max eats, fauna is noticeable by its absence).

The traditional western-film themes of home and redemption are as strong as ever, but what has become ever more prominent in the series is the sense of being lost in the world - uprooted and unable to recognise the sites of memory. The "Green Place" that the escaping women search for has declined into a toxic mud-flat with crows and stilt-wearing scavengers, shot in the crepuscular monochrome of The Seventh Seal, that they pass by unwittingly. The entire narrative arc is essentially a cinematic joke: "there's no place like home". Having spent the first half of the film fleeing from the only greenery to be seen anywhere in this desert landscape, supposedly to find the Green Place of legend, Max intervenes to turn the convoy around and target the liberation of the Citadel. If the first half owes a lot to The Wages of Fear (the transportation of a valuable but volatile cargo), the second owes most to the wagon train sub-genre (settlers, complete with seeds, must brave "hostiles" to reach the promised land) with a strong dash of Stagecoach (a pregnant woman, self-sacrifice, male and female outsiders making common cause).

Though this literal about-turn looks like a two-fingered salute by the director to narrative logic, it actually marks the transition of the film from a study in the alienation of forced labour to the valorisation of a settled order. Though Max believes he must remain an outsider, he also believes that civilisation must advance (or at least recover from its ecocidal folly) and that the women - Furiosa, the "wives" and the Vuvalini - represent the forces of progress. Having been robbed of his surplus blood by Imortan Joe's war-boys, Max freely provides a transfusion to save Furiosa, the rebel who was an "Imperator", a favourite of the old regime. The possibility of revolution is sublimated by restoration (here recast as "redemption", in traditional western style), a more glorious revolution, in which the corrupt monarchy, driven insane by its desire for heirs, is overthrown not by a democratic uprising but by an oligrachic coup. This is the birth of the republic. If the first half of the film is Greek, the second half is Roman.

The sociologist Richard Sennett, in his 2006 book The Culture of the New Capitalism, talked of the stresses of the new social order (i.e. what has come to be known in pop-culture as the "precariat"): "Only a certain kind of human being can prosper in unstable, fragmentary social conditions. This ideal man or woman has to address three challenges. The first concerns time: how to manage shortterm relationships, and oneself, while migrating from task to task, job to job, place to place .... The second challenge concerns talent: how to develop new skills, how to mine potential abilities, as reality’s demands shift. ... The third challenge follows from this. It concerns surrender; that is, how to let go of the past." That's a pretty good thumbnail sketch of Mad Max: Fury Road, but one that also hints at the tragic dimension that keeps us interested, namely Max's inability to escape his past. Regardless of its passing the Bechdel test with flying colours, the film is bonkers and I'm already looking forward to the fifth instalment.

Curb Your Enthusiasm

Paul Krugman, who has long cultivated the fertile lands between Sci-Fi and economics, has been thinking about the implications of "IT-mediated car services" like Uber. He avoids mentioning robot drivers, perhaps to prevent the discussion tail-spinning into angst about capital-labour substitution before the madness of cars gets a proper airing: "when you think about it, for most people owning a car is quite wasteful. It’s an expensive item of equipment that sits idle most of the time; it requires parking (and often a parking structure) both at origin and at destination; it requires maintenance and is a big hassle all around". In other words, it is an inefficient use of capital that involves a significant waste of land.

The promise of Uber et al is that "reliable, quick-response chauffeur services could free many people from the need to tie up all those resources in a consumer durable that they only use now and then. And from a social point of view it would avoid the need to tie up so much capital that sits unused most of the time". The implication is that the capital could be put to more productive use (from a social point of view) elsewhere, though Krugman is coy about recommending increased investment in public transport, which would simply bring the anti-state harpies down upon him. Instead, he seems keen to get marginalists onside by echoing the thoughts of Tyler Cowen, who previously advocated the incentive pricing of parking, in respect of capacity.

"There is, however, an obvious problem: rush hour. Peak car use comes twice a day, and that would seem to dictate that we have nearly as many cars as we do now even if they’re supplied by the likes of Uber. But here’s where surge pricing comes in. If traveling during peak hours is more expensive than off-peak, people will have an incentive to shave off those peaks. People who aren’t commuting to work will avoid travel at peak hours; some people will find other ways to travel; some people (and businesses) will rearrange their schedules to take advantage of cheaper off-peak travel".

As with all incentive-based arguments, the first question to ask is: who are these "people" of whom you speak? If traveling during peak hours is more expensive than off-peak, then peak-time travel will be dominated by the better-off. You could spin this as a form of progressive taxation, but the reality is that peak hours will only command a premium if they are a more attractive good. In other words, this is a system in which the less well-off exchange relative inconvenience for a discount on travel costs (unlike the democratic basis of public transport). While there will always be some individuals whose time preference makes this a win-win, aggregate satisfaction must be reflected in the time-slot price. The most popular slots will cost the most.

Though his blog post is provocatively titled "Life without cars", what Krugman actually envisages is "a society that still relies mainly on cars to get around, but manages to do this with significantly fewer cars than we need at present", which is a pretty accurate thumbnail sketch of New York, where the incentives of housing density, land value and loss of utility (i.e. traffic jams), as well as decent public transport, mean that more households are car-less than own a vehicle. It would be easy to suggest that familiarity with limos makes Nobel laureates comfortable with services like Uber, and easier still to suggest that well-paid economics professors like the idea of buying marginal services while investing their capital for yield, but Krugman is clearly in tune with the zeitgeist.

The wider secular trends are the move from ownership to subscription (already seen in many other areas) and consequent concentration of capital; the emergence of a generation that considers ownership of both homes and cars to be unfeasible in the short-term, if only because all their capital went into tuition fees; growing concerns about the environmental impact of cars (which is not unrelated to the decline of car manufacturing in developed nations); and the increased physical control of city centres and public spaces, variously sold on the grounds of security, "traffic management" and pollution reduction (London is well ahead of the field here).

Massively open online car schemes (hey, MOOCS!) may prove to be a stepping-stone to the introduction of robot cars in metropolitan areas - i.e. first get the infrastructure of car pools in place and then substitute the drivers. They promise a brighter and better Sci-Fi future, with minimal discussion about the changing landscape of power. As Krugman himself said (in the Wired interview linked to above), "Evil will come in stylish, Steve Jobs-inspired designs".

An Inspiration to Lawyers Everywhere

The first time I came across the word Apartheid may have been in Arthur C Clarke's 1953 novel, Childhood's End, which I think I read around 11 or 12, so about 1972. Superior aliens, the Overlords, turn up out of the blue to stop the Cold War and save humanity from extinction. They insist that this will only be a watching brief (their shyness is eventually explained by their resemblance to traditional European images of the devil), and that they will keep their interventions to a minimum. The two notable exceptions are to stop the bloody killing of the whites in South Africa, following the collapse of Apartheid a few years earlier, and the bloody killing of bulls in Spain, which Clarke obviously felt had gone on long enough.

South Africa also featured in another SF classic, Michael Moorcock's The Land Leviathan of 1974. In an alternate early twentieth century, the republic is an enlightened outpost of democracy and racial harmony, whose president is the former lawyer, Mohandas K Gandhi. Moorcock's Oswald Bastable books are now seen through the prism of what would subsequently be pigeon-holed as Steampunk, and consequently works of techno-whimsy, but they were actually a satire on colonialism and the compromises that liberalism makes with it. Though set in an Edwardian world of imperial self-confidence and Fabian social progress, the critique had a sharp, contemporary resonance in the 70s when the reactionary right still urged that we should sympathise with the predicament of a white minority faced by communist encirclement without and the "immaturity" of blacks within.

The transformation of the ANC from part of the problem to the basis of the solution is now attributed to the dignity and forbearance of Mandela and his imprisoned colleagues, aided and abetted by the wider anti-apartheid movement, but this was actually the product of more profound forces, notably the global triumph of neoliberalism. I recall meeting a South African businessman in the early 80s who assured me that change was inevitable, partly because disinvestment and sanctions were hurting, but more because the inefficiencies of the system were holding back capital. Apartheid prevented the growth of a larger consumer society, and it stopped industry making full use of the available talent. It just wasn't good business. While the Afrikaaner small capitalists, farmers and state functionaries were in two or three minds, symbolised by the lunacy of the Bantustan strategy and the AWB, the predominantly "anglo" big capitalists were largely reconciled to the inevitability of majority rule after the Soweto Uprising in 1976. It was a matter of cutting a deal that would keep the country open to international capital and marginalise the SACP.

In 1982 Mandela was moved from Robben Island to Pollsmoor Prison, which (it subsequently transpired) was the first fruit of the unofficial negotiations opened between the Apartheid regime and the ANC that would culminate in his release in 1990. Exploratory discussions between "people of goodwill", whether through deniable back channels or semi-official "Track II" NGOs, is a key modus operandi of neoliberalism. Where the 50s and 60s had been marked by a reluctance to talk except under duress, symbolised by the absurd "hot line" (and parodied by the Batphone), the era since the 70s has been one of promiscuous chat on the back of increased trade and travel, improved communications technology and globalisation. The strong commercial slant has fed back into the language of politics and diplomacy, thus "conferences" and "treaties" have been updated to "talks" and "deals", and the official products of negotiation are often aspirational and hazy: words like "openness", "reconciliation" and "commitment" feature a lot. The real promise is always more talks, more chat, more sidebar business opportunities.

From our vantage point today, it is clear that big capital was the winner in South Africa in the 90s and 00s. An inefficient and debilitating racial divide was replaced by a more efficient but equally debilitating class divide. In some respects, the fate of the ANC was the result of its leaders being lawyers, very much in the tradition of the Edwardian Gandhi, if not exclusively committed to non-violence. At the same time that Algeria was undergoing a bloody war of independence, the ANC was fighting the long drawn out treason trial of 1956-61. It is little remembered now, but the founding of the Pan-African Congress in 1959, and the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, were seen by many contemporaries as reproaches to the strategy of the ANC. Paradoxically, the jailing of Mandela and other ANC leaders after the Rivonia trial in 1963 reinforced their pre-eminent role in the struggle. Had they been released, they might have been marginalised by more militant elements in the townships.

As the needs of capital increasingly pointed towards the dismantling of Apartheid, Mandela increasingly became a symbol of hope and his eventual release a promissory note of change, but with the specifics left suitably vague. The deferred gratification of "hope" was a leitmotif of the times, from Berlin in 1989, through New Labour in 1997, to Obama in 2008. Since then, we have realised the extent to which neoliberal society was based on illusory hope: that incomes and house prices would keep on rising, that education would pay, that ability would determine success. One of the best films of the immediate post-crash era was 2009's District 9. Though most people interpreted it as a specific parable of Apartheid, it was actually a universal parable of class and its fragility, with the white protagonist's accidental infection, and the instrumental attitude of his employer and family, forcing him into the underclass as he transforms into an alien "prawn". Hope had turned to fear.

When I first saw the film, I recalled Childhood's End because of the South African connection and the hovering mother ship, though the aliens are quite different. Whereas the "prawns" of District 9 are troublesome proles, the Overlords can be read as a prescient metaphor of neoliberal interventionism (the image of Tony Blair as a horned devil will obviously please some). Michael Moorcock's vision of an alternate South Africa was obviously ironic, but in one respect he too was prescient in imagining a society whose figurehead and moral compass was a crusading lawyer. What he perhaps didn't anticipate is that it would be the corporate lawyers who would ultimately be the power behind the throne.

An Adventure in Space and Time

So who is Doctor Who? The Mark Gatiss-penned An Adventure in Space and Time last week provided us with some clues, ahead of the global brand-fest of The Day of the Doctor on Saturday. I don't mean by this the secret name of the Doctor (probably Gerald), or what moral traits he embodies as a humanised deity (something called lurv, no doubt). What I mean is where do you position the character in social and cultural history?

The title of Gatiss's drama is suggestive. The official guide to the coronation of ER2 in 1953, written by the rhapsodic historian Arthur Bryant, claimed that "a nation is a union in both space and time. We are as much the countrymen of Nelson, Wesley and Shakespeare as of our own contemporaries. Our queen is the symbol of that union in time" (the echoes of Burke are clear). In 1963, the Tardis (a metaphor for the powers of TV and film generally) allowed us to escape from a particular space and time, i.e. the UK's diminished position in the postwar world and the burden of post-imperial history, and go gallivanting through these earlier, more glorious epochs, not to mention a wonderful future. The appearance of ER1 in The Day of the Doctor was quite knowing.

Another important clue was the CV of William Hartnell, the first Doctor. As Gatiss noted, he had previously been type-cast as a tough soldier, usually a hectoring NCO, having featured in the films The Way Ahead and Carry On Sergeant, plus the TV series The Army Game. This was a neat link to the appearance of John Hurt as the "war Doctor" in the 50th anniversary spectacular. The legacy of wartime was all-too apparent in the original TV series, from the Daleks, who combined nostalgia for a dependably evil enemy (the Nazis) with high tech weaponry (the Nazis), to the Doctor's initially authoritarian style and obsession with secrecy. The WMD in 1963 was the threat of mutually assured destruction (Dr. Strangelove came out the following year). Today, John Hurt gets a finely-worked box with a big red button, which he ultimately declines to press (Gallifray is saved to some sort of inter-temporal USB drive).

The coincidence of the first broadcast with the assassination of John F Kennedy means that Doctor Who is associated with a pivotal moment in the orthodox (and sentimental) narrative of US-inflected postwar history: the moment when political illusions were lost and the counter-culture started (the pains of adolescence etc). This obscured the British significance, which started in the late 50s with the acceptance that empire was over (the "New Elizabethan Age" didn't last long) and the breakdown of class rigidities marked by kitchen sink realism and the false dawn of meritocracy. The formal moment was Harold MacMillan's "Winds of change" speech in 1960, while the informal moment was the birth of Europhile mod subculture (first jazz and French style, then R&B and Italian style).

British establishment dramas about international relations tend to employ one of two tropes: the spy or adventurer who must defend British interests alone (an extrapolation of nineteenth century self-reliant liberalism and imperial honour, from Samuel Smiles to Gordon of Khartoum), or the quintessential (yet paradoxically eccentric) Briton whose mere presence is reassuring (from Phileas Fogg to Henry Higgins). The most popular examples usually combine both tropes, from The Lady Vanishes to The Avengers. The 1960s was a particularly fruitful period for new variations on these old themes. The James Bond film series (with Q as significant as 007) is the most territorially aggressive (i.e. the most resentful at loss of empire), while The Prisoner turns frustration and doubt into existential crisis within a claustrophobic society (despite the 60s style and fashionable paranoia, this was about 50s conformism).

The character of Doctor Who for the first 25 years was essentially Edwardian, with stylistic nods to Prospero (via Forbidden Planet, and ultimately repaid via the Sycorax) and the Great Oz. This meant an emphasis on brains over brawn and an insistence on a certain deportment - i.e. upper middle class values. For all the scary aliens and innovative music, the initial series was as comforting as a Sherlock Holmes story in The Strand Magazine (another influence), hence its popularity across generations. This was a Time Lord, not a Time Pleb, who dressed in a fashion that would not have been out of place in 1900 (steampunk avant la lettre), and who was always associated with the "deep state" of UNIT and other loyal but covert agencies (I suspect Doctor Who is very popular at GCHQ, and only copyright kept him out of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). The choice of a police call box was not arbitrary.

In An Adventure in Space and Time Gatiss subtly suggests that the Doctor's growing eccentricity and kindliness in the first series was as much a product of Hartnell's declining health as a conscious decision to lighten-up the authoritarian sourpuss. As such, the Doctor became a sympathetic emblem of national self-doubt: you don't have to be a psychologist to recognise eccentricity as anxiety displacement. Over the years, Doctor Who has fruitfully overlapped with Monty Python (no one expects the Spanish inquisition in much the same way as no one expects the Doctor) and A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams wrote and edited a number of Doctor Who scripts). In its modern incarnation, the programme's affinities have tended towards retro adventure (the many juvenile spin-offs) and a hankering for Edwardian stability (Steven Moffat's Sherlock, despite the contemporary setting).

The modern revival of the series in 2005 was interesting because it initially went for the gritty, modern, pan-sexual style of Christopher Eccleston. (The best Who joke ever? When challenged on his accent: "Lots of planets have a North"). This has gradually reverted to Edwardian type, via the retro New Wave style of David Tennant to the teddy-boy-about-to-become-mod style of Matt Smith. The suspicion is that Peter Capaldi will be a full-on Robert Louis Stevenson tribute act, complete with cavalier 'tache and wee goatee. I really hope they let him have a Scottish accent.

The 1989-2005 interregnum (excepting the 1996 Paul McGann TV film) can retrospectively be bracketed by the Lawson Boom and the early warning signs of the Great Recession. The series had been canned by the BBC not simply because of its declining quality (it had always had imaginative production values, but never what you'd call quality ones), but because it seemed to have lost touch with modern concerns. In an era of sanctified individualism and conformist ambition, the more traditional values of Doctor Who (loyalty, sacrifice, selflessness etc) seemed out of tune with an audience flitting between Neighbours and Eastenders. In fact, Doctor Who never went away. The torch was simply handed on to Doc Brown in the Back to the Future series of films (a conservative trilogy about restoring the natural order), complete with juvenile companion, a somewhat sexier time machine, and a running nerd joke (the flux capacitor = reverse the polarities).

The 90s was the era of large-scale and often circular (i.e. going nowhere) American SF TV series, such as the revamped Star Trek, The X-Files and Stargate, plus bullish cinema spectaculars about defeated threats to Earth, such as Armageddon, Independence Day and Men in Black. Parallel to this was the growth of a more interesting strand of films dealing with the nature of reality and power in an increasingly networked and virtual world, such as The Matrix, Existenz and various Philp K Dick adaptations, which, unlike the popular pyrotechnics, could at least survive the return of history in 2001. In this rich speculative ecology, the spirit of Doctor Who eked out a shadow life in the student rag-week deconstruction of Red Dwarf.

In retrospect, the attempt to relaunch the Doctor in 1996 made one crucial error: Paul McGann should have been the youthful companion and Richard E Grant the main man. That would have been brilliant, particularly if he could have channelled full-on Withnail. In fact, Grant did play the Doctor, first in a 1999 Red Nose Day TV skit (the "Quite Handsome Doctor"), and then looking like a disappointed Dracula in the 2003 animation Scream of the Shalka. That would have been one Bad Doctor in the flesh. Perhaps that's the secret of his longevity: he is a vampire on our nostalgia as well as our aspirations. Perhaps the real Who is the woman they call ER2. Or perhaps she's a shape-shifting Zygon, and has been for over 400 years.