The Labour Question

Everyone agrees the Instanced should be restricted. Nobody agrees on why, most of the reasons contradict each other, and the economy would stop inside a week without them.

Overview

The catena ban did not settle the question of artificial labour. It froze it — and a frozen question with money on every side of it is not a settlement, it is a standoff that has lasted long enough to look like consensus.

There are three positions and they are not allies, though they vote the same way.

The three positions

The incumbents hold the last legal supply. The corporations that owned catena stock when the ban came down own it still, and every unit of Instanced labour in the Sphere is theirs or was theirs. Scarcity is their margin. They are the ban's most reliable defenders and the ones with the least principled reason to be — relegalisation would flood a market they currently price.

The challengers want it cheap. Secondaries locked out of the original supply have no stake in protecting it. Their argument is efficiency and it is sincere: an Instanced workforce is the cheapest labour available and they are not permitted to buy any. They fund reform quietly, argue it in commercial language, and would say almost anything to get the ban lifted except what it would actually cost.

And most people simply do not want more of them. Not out of theology — out of employment. An Instanced does not sleep, does not organise, does not need the wage that a person needs, and every job one holds is a job a person does not. This is the position with the most people behind it and the least representation in any boardroom, and it is the reason the ban has never been seriously challenged in public.

The part nobody says

The Sphere could not run a week without them, and at some level everyone knows it. Freight, refining, orbital maintenance, life support, traffic control — the unglamorous continuous work that cannot stop and that no one wants to do at the wage it pays.

So the public position is there should be fewer of these, and the private arithmetic is there had better not be. People hold both at once, mostly without noticing, and become genuinely angry when the contradiction is pointed at.

That is the bind. Not a conspiracy — a society that needs something it has decided it disapproves of, and has arranged not to think about the gap.

Where the Harbingers come in

The Harbingers did not create this and do not need to. What they provide is language.

A person who is frightened about work has nothing respectable to say about it. A person who believes only biological life is real has a principle, a congregation, and a vote — and never has to mention wages at all. The doctrine is sincere at the pulpit and it is cover in the pews, and both of those are true at the same time.

This is why the movement's soft membership turns out so reliably on Instanced questions while shrugging at every other article of faith. They are not voting theology. They are voting their situation, in a vocabulary that lets them keep their self-respect.

The clergy are not cynics. They believe every word and would be appalled by this reading of their own congregation. That is precisely what makes the arrangement stable — nobody in it is lying.

Relationships

• The Instanced — the labour in question, and the people it is about
• Catena — the ban that froze the market
• The Harbingers of the Guide — who supply the language
• The Quorum — what happened the last time the question was asked directly
• The Arrangement — the partnership that keeps the ban in place

Status

Frozen, profitable for some, and untouchable in public. The most stable thing in the Sphere, and the least examined.