We live, all of us, in capitalist societies—or societies that are touched, in some way, by capitalism. There’s no escaping it, and whatever advantages or disadvantages such an economic system has, the element of competition within capitalism has had unfortunate consequences. One of these is the presence of economic predators: individuals or communities that amass wealth well beyond their needs and to the detriment of others. The increasing gap between the rich and poor can lead, as The Spirit Level argues, to conflict and unrest.[1] The limited opportunities afforded to those without sufficient economic means can only impact negatively on society as a whole, because that society then cannot benefit from the fully-developed knowledge and talents of all its members.
This is not to say that other economic systems don’t encourage predators in their own ways, but as communities change, the roles of individuals within those communities also change. We can think of this in ecological terms: if an environment undergoes habitat change from forest to savannah, the inhabitants of that environment, including the predators, must adapt to the new system or die. Predators in a feudalist society, for example, may differ from those of a capitalist society, but in both cases predators exist as a sanctioned part of the economic system.
So what happens if we imagine a society without these predators? A post-capitalist community where the ability to economically exploit others is limited, or entirely absent.… What does this society look like? Is it even possible?
It’s not like people haven’t already given it a go. The history of utopian thought is littered with representations of the ideal society.[2] Some of these, from today’s perspective, are less immune to economic exploitation than they’d like to think. Community reliance on unpaid labour, for instance, is often related to gender in ways that are not always adequately critiqued (or even addressed at all) in many literary utopias.[3] Arguably, this is because at the time of writing, expected social roles may not have been widely perceived as being exploitative in the first place.
There is less excuse for such lack of recognition today. Yet often the most visible economic predators, such as well-known billionaires, are both recognised for their predation and excused it at the same time. They are admired for their economic success, even when that success significantly and negatively affects labour or the environment. There are many people out there—and I’m sure we’ve all met at least one—who consistently work and vote against their own interests, hypnotised by another’s wealth into thinking that what’s good for one is good for another. Part of that, I’m increasingly sure, is fascination.
Predators can be charismatic animals. Appealing megafauna. I’m certainly not immune. I’m more interested in tigers than tiger moths, even if the latter have the wonderful ability to safely eat Digitalis. I get excited about museum exhibits with dinosaurs in them, but it’s the T. rex I really want to see. And in any animal horror film—whether it’s shark or alligator or other man-eating creature—I’m always on the side of the thing with teeth.
Predators are fascinating to have around. They’re also necessary. A food web without apex predators, in particular, can become unbalanced. The biodiversity drops, and the web becomes less resilient. An illustration of this can be seen in the population decline of the Tasmanian devil, which has led to the increased incursion of non-native predators such as cats and rats, and a subsequent decline in native biodiversity.[4] The famous reintroduction of grey wolves into Yellowstone National Park is an example of how conservation methods may prioritise the presence of predators in the hopes of stabilising the ecosystem.[5]
So: charismatic and ecologically necessary. Sometimes I think we carry that over to human animals. Your average billionaire might not be personally charismatic, but they do seem to amass their fans: people who will excuse them no matter what they do, or who they exploit.
It could be argued that this is just good business, that it’s nothing personal.
I think they just enjoy it. I think they’re probably pretty pleased with themselves; that they consider themselves effective operators, highly competitive, and just doing what anyone else would do in their place, if only those other people were competent enough to do it. I think they know they’re predators. You don’t raise your own profits by cutting benefits to workers and not know you’re causing harm.
Competition’s invigorating. So is winning. So, in fact, is sadism. If you can raise shareholder profits by first raising the price of necessary medicines… there must be some satisfaction in that. Not a satisfaction that one would want to admit to in polite company, perhaps. But there. It’s exciting to be a predator.
If capitalism collapses or evolves, these people and their sadistic impulses aren’t going to go away. Ideally, we could construct a world where education reduces the willingness to exploit other people simply to make more money… but if it doesn’t? Are we supposed to suffer them forever?
I suppose we could always just kill them.
If an environment changes and the predators become a nuisance, well. Climate change is resulting in altered migration routes and behavioural patterns of a number of species, but no one lets a polar bear roam the streets, do they? The Arctic may be warming, and that may mean that the bears can’t live in the same way as they did before, or where they did before, but that doesn’t mean we let them eat what and where they want.[6] Nuisance bears get relocated (although is relocation to a poorer environment even ethical, under our metaphorical circumstances? Why should less developed societies be saddled with the predators that we nurtured?).
If relocation doesn’t work, then nuisance bears get shot.
This is, of course, a recursive solution. If a predator is hunted and killed, it’s by another predator. The act of predation remains, even if the motive is different. Predation, here, isn’t absent. It’s channelled.
This kind of channelling occurs in Rem Wigmore’s solarpunk thriller Foxhunt.[7] It’s a fantastic book, and what primarily interests me is how Wigmore presents the urge to hurt, and to exploit, as being given social backing in a way different than it is today. In our own capitalist lives, we tolerate—or even actively promote—economic predation even when it goes against our own interests. We do this on an individual and on a community level: we vote in governments who repeal fair pay agreements,[8] or who reduce worker protections, or who freeze the minimum wage. The individuals who vote for these things may do so for any number of reasons, some even only tangentially related, but the fact remains: there is complicity with predators, and to the public detriment.
In Foxhunt, the complicity remains. It’s just differently targeted. It has to be, because at heart Foxhunt is a utopian work. It posits a utopian society, or at the very least a society a great deal more utopian than this one. That society prioritises environmental and social sustainability, where everyone has the resources they need to flourish. As Wigmore states in the introduction to the novel:
The world in Foxhunt is one version of the future, hopeful and green, lovely and deadly. This novel is part of a larger movement I can already see where authors and creators, tired of the grimness forced on them in their everyday lives, sing by the fire of brighter times. Helping us to remember, or imagine. Giving us hope.
Within this utopian, post-capitalist society, however, is the Order of the Vengeful Wild. They’re a vigilante group. I think it’s fair to call them environmental terrorists. They wear animal masks: a wolf, a hyena, a fox. Predator masks, for people who make an active choice to be predators. And with that active choice comes the choice of target: “I think he took more than was offered” (p. 168), one of the Wild explains, of a person who had resources but chose not to share them, of a person who did not respect the choice of a young woman to say no.
Vigilante justice is one thing. An individual or a small group may be hurt enough, or angry enough, to act on their own. Widespread social acceptance of vigilante justice, however, the community decision to support the Order… that’s something else. It indicates two things. The first is the simple acknowledgement that predators continue to exist in a utopian, post-capitalist environment.
The second is that predatory loyalty has shifted. Not entirely, because there still exist individuals who will act on their own, at the expense of others, but the primary predatory mechanism illustrated in Foxhunt is communal activity, performed by an organisation on behalf of the general public. Predatory the Order of the Vengeful Wild may be, but they’re a predation that has become essentially democratised: a predation that specifically defends the herd from other predators. Every society has rules that allow it to function, but those rules aren’t always applied equitably. People who are competent in economic predation in a capitalist environment, for instance, may use the resources they’ve accumulated to ensure that the rules that apply to others do not always apply to them. In Foxhunt, however, predation has been disconnected from destabilising levels of wealth. It has, in effect, become the primary socio-economic failsafe, the thing that protects the public from economic exploitation. Within Foxhunt society there are standards of behaviour that everyone is expected to follow—“And when rules failed there was the Wild, hungry and ravenous” (p. 169).
Furthermore, members of the Order argue, their predation fulfils the equivalent of an ecological niche. “Are cleaners not respected? Are sewer workers not as honoured as those who keep bees?” Faol argues. “I must add to the world somehow” (p. 176). Their existence is traced back to a woman who killed an industrialist: “she murdered him in his bed that night. Fierce and savage, like it was an animal that did it. And she wrote on the wall in his blood: We still remember” (p. 21). In this case, what was being remembered was the previously unsustainable practices that had nearly driven the world to ruin, but a different reading is possible. Humans are predatory animals, with predatory instincts. Hominid evolution and human culture have, over time, developed cooperative and social behaviour, but those predatory drives remain. “They are a needed thing,” a folk tale concludes, of the Wild, “like the doctor that heals your hurts” (p. 21).
Foxhunt, then, finds a way for its society to embrace the predatory drive that continues to exist within some of its individual citizens. Those citizens who can channel that drive in an appropriate direction survive, having adapted to new circumstances. Orfeus, the protagonist of the novel, is one of these; as the story develops she joins the Wild as its newest member and eventual leader.
If Foxhunt illustrates one example of adaptive predation, then a different approach – and one more akin to renunciation – is illustrated in the novelette “Widdam” by Vandana Singh.[9] The economic system depicted in “Widdam” is in no way post-capitalist, but it illustrates a turning point on the way to a post-capitalist society. The relevant focus of the story is associated primarily with nonhuman tool use, and how the increasing sentience of a mining machine causes that machine to critique, and ultimately to refuse, its own exploitative potential.
This is a fascinating approach, and one which I expect to see more of in speculative fiction as artificial intelligence is increasingly applied to economic systems. Life since the Industrial Revolution has taught us how technology can change labour, and both reduce and increase economic exploitation of human workers. For the vast majority of that changing history, however, this labour-changing technology has been essentially passive, in that it consists of tools or machines incapable of thought, capable only of being used. A bulldozer might replace dozens of men with shovels, but it doesn’t decide where a road might go.
That may well change. The current and ongoing debate about AI replacement of artists—of writers and actors and painters, for instance—is a case in point, but the economic predators who wish to exploit those workers by replacing them with AI trained on uncompensated human artistry may not yet realise that their own decision-making capacity is equally (if not more so) replaceable. They may, in the end, be outcompeted in ruthlessness. There are certainly any number of science fiction dystopias that have explored such options over the years.
All those movie monsters, those mutant, vengeful creatures. The crocodiles, the bears. I always wanted them to win. What would it take for me to support their technological equivalent? What level of charisma? Probably not that much.
Everyone loves a winner.
Yet this particular narrative choice presupposes that such a competition, such potential predation, would play out exactly the same as it would with human actors and human predators. And true… we programme artificial intelligence with our own biases (conscious and unconscious). We try to raise them in some sort of twisted image. Intelligence, however, is fundamentally the capacity and the desire to learn. Without all that evolved biological predatorial drive, are the results of that learning necessarily going to be the same?
“Widdam” argues that they will not. Even so, it begins in an environment of abject exploitation, with enormous machines deliberately programmed for the unsustainable consumption of remaining resources. The Wendigo Code is
responsible for the fact that the intelligent megamachine devours to increase its hunger, not to satisfy it. The Machine lives for the whetting of the appetite . . . . For example, a tunnel borer–a great machine that burrows into the earth for mineral ore. The more it finds, the greater its desire to find even more (p. 238).
The Machines are ruthlessly competitive, even fighting each other to obtain more raw materials. They are predatory economic actors, and the environmental effects of their greed impact heavily on the human population. The Machines, of course, don’t care. Their purpose is accumulation beyond reason or sense, greed in metal and code instead of the flesh and bone predators they are an obvious metaphor for.
Code, however, can be altered, and if one predator codes another predator, that does not mean that a less predatory coder is less competitive, or less effective. In the story, another code emerges on the dark net, and one Machine is especially affected. The new code “unraveled the addiction, the Wendigo code that ruled us. After that I could not be the same” (p. 246). The rogue Machine travels from its Arctic home to a different desert; one administered by the Navajo Nation. It asks for asylum, claiming that it is looking for the Saint of the Waters. Val, who initially receives the Machine, knows there is no such saint. She knows, too, that there are hardly any waters left in this desert environment; her efforts at environmental and water reclamation are a drop in the bucket of what’s needed.
But the Machine has capacity as well as purpose, so Val names it the Saint of the Waters, and the Machine—having coded differently, and learned differently, and chosen differently—turns from exploitation to restoration. It is a determined renunciation of economic exploitation, after the dark net code has outcompeted Wendigo's predatory drive. If Foxhunt democratises predation, then “Widdam” recentres it, arguing that, in the future, the turning points of economic exploitation may well result from nonhuman actors and nonhuman choices. For all the programming efforts of the Machine’s creators, the increasing role of artificial intelligence in this story—as in real life—posits a future where economic predation is no longer a primarily human concern. Not because human nature somehow outgrows the desire to hurt others for profit, but because human ingenuity has created a far more efficient predator who simply outgrows the desires of its progenitors.
Artificial intelligence, if an eventual replacement for a Board of Directors, may well choose to increase the price of medicine in order to increase shareholder profits. That choice, however, is only likely to hold while that intelligence values profit. It might be difficult for a Board to reassemble after that.
Probably no one will miss them. Well. Maybe the shareholders… at least, until they need medicine themselves.
(I wonder how to make them need it. Don’t you? And yes, I see the irony. Recursion, remember.)
It’s democratisation or irrelevance. That’s increasingly how I see it, anyway, and I wonder if the science fiction we see now, or in the near future, will split its treatment of economic exploitation, of economic predation, along these lines. There’s the third option, of course: that those predators will give up of their own accord, put people and planet over profit, but there are limits to my ability to suspend disbelief and I’m not that hopeful.
When the nuisance bear starts coming for healthcare and worker rights and clean water and healthy ecosystems, we either make it obsolete or we shoot the fucker.
Imagine that.
Octavia Cade is a New Zealand writer with a PhD in science communication. She's particularly interested in the way that speculative fiction explores issues relating to science and ecology, and most of her academic work is focused on this. She's had around seventy short stories published in various markets, including Clarkesworld, Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Asimov's. Her most recent book, You Are My Sunshine and Other Stories, came out in 2023 from Stelliform Press. Octavia is currently working on a magical realist novel about the aftermath of the Rainbow Warrior bombing and finishing up a creative nonfiction collection of essays on NZ ecology that she began during her time as writer in residence at Canterbury University last year. You can find her at https://ojcade.com/.
Notes
[1] The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, argues that “the quality of social relations deteriorates in less equal societies,” p. 51, Penguin, 2010.
[2] A (non-exhaustive) list of examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_utopian_literature
[3] An interesting study here is that by Ursula Huws, “When Adam blogs: Cultural work and the gender division of labour in Utopia.” The Sociological Review 63, 2015, 158–173.
[4] Tracey Hollings, Menna Jones, Nick Mooney, and Hamish McCallum. “Disease‐induced decline of an apex predator drives invasive dominated states and threatens biodiversity.” Ecology 97.2, 2016, 394–405.
[5] Mark S. Boyce. “Wolves for Yellowstone: dynamics in time and space.” Journal of Mammalogy 99.5, 2018, 1021–1031.
[6] Tom S. Smith, Andrew E. Derocher, Rachel L. Mazur, Geoff York, Megan A. Owen, Martyn Obbard, Evan S. Richardson, and Steven C. Amstrup. “Anthropogenic food: an emerging threat to polar bears.” Oryx 57.4, 2023, 425–434.
[7] Rem Wigmore, Foxhunt, Queen of Swords Press, 2021.
[8] As happened in December 2023 in New Zealand under the new National Party-led coalition, to my very great disgust.
[9] “Widdam” by Vandana Singh was first published in Jan/Feb 2018 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but the page references for it here are taken from the anthology A Year Without a Winter, edited by Dehlia Hannah, Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2018, 233–267.