A.M.I.G.O. (eBook)

“There can be no real individual freedom in the presence of economic insecurity.”

Chester Bowles

Chapter 2

Samuel Alfonsin Jones stood before his bathroom mirror, mid-forties, bald – by the blade and natural recession (and the choice not to intervene with nature via chromosomal treatment) – with piercing, swimming pool-blue eyes. He smiled, winningly, it seemed. A strong chin, reminiscent of the great Caesars, he thought to himself, partly in jest. Am I getting a double chin? Not so much of a jest…

The President rubbed some shaving gel between his hands to warm it up and began to apply it to his face. Samuel liked to shave his head, first, and then finish off with his face, to allow the shaving-jell to soften his whiskers. The morning shave was one of the few relaxing times of his day. As usual, Profilism, the fabric of the Republic he was charged with leading, was at the front of his mind.

Although his mother had invented the Profiled Demand, System Optimized Economy – commonly known as Profilism – and the technology that made it possible, the ‘Father of Profilism’ was the first President of the Optimized Republic of Argentina, Herbert Borigia.

As he shaved, Samuel thought about the courage that it must have taken for one of Argentina’s most wealthy individuals to risk it all and create Amigo. Courage was a common theme of his musings lately…

It had all started in the 2030s, during the worst of the dark decades, when Herbert Borigia funded an experiment in a small town outside of Buenos Aires, he named Nacimiento. At the time near the end of El Fondo (“the bottom”), Nacimiento was an experiment in an alternative economic organization, a replacement for broken capitalism.

Borigia was himself a true capitalist, and multi-billionaire, and one of Argentina’s most successful industrialists. His companies produced everything from automobiles and air-to-air missiles to software and pharmaceuticals. He was also a rancher who owned vast estates and hundreds of thousands of head of cattle, and a robust crypto-mining operation to keep up with the constantly emerging and cycling crypto-currencies that served as a global pressure release on the excesses of corporatocracy and unfettered capitalism. He had it all. But unlike most of Argentina’s wealthy oligarchs, he had not inherited his wealth. He had created it from whole cloth.

The chaos of the dark times of El Fondo, however, had hit Borigia too. The constant cycles of inflation and devaluation associated with the currency wars between the thousands of crypto-currencies and the dozens of traditional currencies, and the tangentially associated workers’ revolutions springing up around the world, the soaring national debt of the West and the inexorable march of digital automation, resulted in hard currency inflation and real reductions of spending power such as the world had never seen; it meant that he could not effectively compensate workers in a meaningful and predictable way to encourage them to work.

While robotics might have been an option in the U.S., in faraway Argentina at that dark time, there was simply no way to run an extensive robotic ranch or manufacturing facility affordably – the mandarins that controlled the world’s banks just could not justify the risk of deploying the necessary capital to such an unstable place. More importantly, the highly skilled experts needed to maintain a significant robotic workforce could not be induced to locate to Argentina, when compensation for technical elites in the more developed economies was so robust, and the risks associated with governmental corruption and workers’ revolts so dangerous.

So, to a large degree it was people power, or nothing. There were times when Borigia wondered if nothing might not have been better for his personal finances; get the money off-shore and deposit it in some crypto-currency investment fund. The problem with that was that it would only make the situation in his country even worse, and that mattered to Herbert. He loved Argentina; he loved Argentineans.

For workers, the choices were no better; don’t work and starve or work and starve less. Either way, depending on the currency they chose for compensation, a month’s compensation could be wiped out in moments by a crypto-virus, or simply the whim of a major investment house to go short. Or, if they accepted payment in standard currency, an unexpected inflationary burst.

Faced with constant uncertainty that made each paycheck an existential crisis, many chose to work simply to have the opportunity to steal. Some workers stole his raw materials and peddled them on the black market; others stole computers or other office equipment, others worked just to have an office to sleep in.

At times, he paid people with sides of beef or other commodities. It was a constant struggle to find a way to generate value, keep that value in some usable form, and justify a portion of that to compensate people in a tangible way. This battering had driven his business to the brink, raising the unfathomable possibility of laying off thousands of workers already living on the edge, and handing them what would in many cases be a death sentence.

Sinking wearily into his First-Class seat on the return flight to Buenos Aires from a fruitless meeting with his New York bankers, Borigia was startled when the woman next to him – a tiny woman with short, blondish hair and elvish features – interrupted him.

“What after capitalism?”

Exactly! He remembered thinking subconsciously before he even internalized the interruption. Instead he had simply responded, “Excuse me miss?”

“What after capitalism?” – the woman had said again with a gentle but infectious grin on her face.

According to one version of this fortuitous encounter, a brief romance flared. Indeed, a recent movie depiction had the two joining the mile-high club in their first encounter. Others claimed that the CIA had engineered their meeting as a way to control Argentina, and that the revered Founder had been Eve’s sex slave. Samuel knew that neither story was true. To be sure, anything was possible where his polymorphically perverse mother was concerned, but Samuel had it from the old lady herself that their connection had occurred on a purely intellectual level.

“Herbert could have any woman he wanted…” she had once pointed out with an elfish scowl. “Why in the world would he want me?”

Prurient sexual innuendo aside, Borigia was a visionary and a patriot – and despite his great wealth, not dogmatically or self-destructively motivated or narcissistic. He understood the inherent dangers of the vast chasm that had emerged between the haves and have-nots, and how small the cadre of the haves was getting ever richer, driven by a global race to the bottom on taxation, robotic industrial mercantilism, and the chaotic rise of alternative crypto-currencies. He understood how flawed capitalism was to address the advent of networking affects, block-chains, automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence. The story of this first meeting, however, was legend in the Alfonsin-Jones family.

“I don’t know,” Borigia had responded in his perfect English developed while studying at an American school as a boy, “but if you have a suggestion, I’m all ears.” This always got a big laugh in the story telling, because Borigia had quite substantial ears.

“Eve Jones,” the Samuel’s mother had said sticking out here hand to introduce herself, “and you are Herbert Borigia, CEO of Borigia Industries.”

“Flattered,” was all he’d said as he shook her hand, momentarily weary that this woman was just some kind of billionaire groupie, and not the interesting person her initial comment had suggested – or at least that’s how Eve had interpreted his sarcastic response. But Eve was never one to be put off.

After a pause when Borigia thought the interruption was finished, she said, “That’s what you were thinking about, right? – what after capitalism?”

Borigia squinted his eyes in thought and then responded: “Well, I’m not sure I had boiled my thoughts down to that fine essence, but I guess if I did, that would be one of the questions rumbling around in my head.”

“Yep, it on everyone’s mind right now. The corporations and the gods have broken the system, and the basic universal income just isn’t enough.”

“I am afraid that you have the jump on me, since you clearly know who I am, but I have no idea who you are Ms. Jones.”

“I can see it in your gaze,” she had said ignoring his query. “It’s the same tired gaze I see in all the gods I work with; at least those who care about people.

And she was right. Although he rarely thought of himself as a ‘god’, he was, and he feared for the survival of Argentina as a state, or more specifically, for its millions of desperate poor people who could not compete with the robots and AIs, and couldn’t make enough money from offering their limited human talents to do anything more than subsist.

“And what do you do for these ‘gods’ as you put it, Ms. Jones?” Borigia was well acquainted with the popular term for the billionaire class.

She smiled at him, pursed her deep red lips and said, “Nothing in particular. Varies from god to god. Most recently I spent some time working on the economic system for...