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-[[!meta title="Four Futures: Life After Capitalism"]]
-
-* Author: Peter Frase
-* Year: 2016
-* Publisher: Verso / Jacobin
-
-## Trechos
-
-    Fictional futures are, in my view, preferable to those works of
-    “futurism” that attempt to directly predict the future, obscuring
-    its inherent uncertainty and contingency and thereby stultifying
-    the reader. Within the areas discussed in this book, a
-    paradigmatic futurist would be someone like Ray Kurzweil, who
-    confidently predicts that by 2049, computers will have achieved
-    humanlike intelligence, with all manner of world-changing consequences.
-    24  Such prognostications generally end up unconvincing as prophecy
-    and unsatisfying as fiction. Science fiction is to futurism what
-    social theory is to conspiracy theory: an altogether richer, more
-    honest, and more humble enterprise. Or to put it another way, it
-    is always more interesting to read an account that derives the general
-    from the particular (social theory) or the particular from the general
-    (science fiction), rather than attempting to go from the general
-    to the general (futurism) or the particular to the particular
-    (conspiracism).
-
-    -- 16
-
-               Abundance   Scarcity
-    Equality   communism   socialism
-    Hierarchy  rentism     exterminism
-
-    Exercises like this aren’t unprecedented. A similar typology can be
-    found in a 1999 article by Robert Costanza in The Futurist. 26
-    There are four scenarios: Star Trek, Big Government, Ecotopia,
-    and Mad Max. For Costanza, however, the two axes are “world view
-    and policies” and “the real state of the world.” Thus the four
-    boxes are filled in according to whether human ideological
-    predilections match reality: in the “Big Government” scenario, for
-    example, progress is restrained by safety standards because the
-    “technological skeptics” deny the reality of unlimited resources. My
-    contribution to this debate is to emphasize the significance of
-    capitalism and politics.
-
-    [...]
-
-    So for me, sketching out multiple futures is an attempt to
-    leave a place for the political and the contingent. My
-    intention is not to claim that one future will automatically
-    appear through the magical working out of technical and ecological
-    factors that appear from outside. Instead, it is to insist that where
-    we end up will be a result of political struggle. The intersection of
-    science fiction and politics is these days often associated with the
-    libertarian right and its deterministic techno-utopian fantasies; I
-    hope to reclaim the long left-wing tradition of mixing imaginative
-    speculation with political economy. The starting point of the entire
-    analysis is that capitalism is going to end, and that, as Luxemburg
-    said,
-
-    -- 17
-
-    Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano, describes a society that
-    seems, on the surface, like a postlabor utopia, where machines have
-    liberated humans from toil. For Vonnegut, however, this isn’t a utopia at
-    all. He describes a future where production is almost entirely carried
-    out by machines, overseen by a small technocratic elite. Everyone else
-    is essentially superfluous from an economic perspective, but the society
-    is rich enough to provide a comfortable life for all of them. Vonnegut
-    refers to this condition as a “second childhood” at one point,
-    and he views it not as an achievement but as a horror. For him, and
-    for the main protagonists in the novel, the main danger of an automated
-    society is that it deprives life of all meaning and dignity. If
-    most people are not engaged directly in producing the necessities
-    of life, he seems to think, they will inevitably fall into torpor
-    and despair.
-
-    -- 19
-
-    The French sociologist Bruno Latour has made the same observation through his
-    reading of Mary Shelley’s seminal science fiction tale, Frankenstein. This
-    story is not, he observes, the warning against technology and humanity’s hubris
-    that it is so often made out to be. 13 The real sin of Frankenstein (which is
-    the name of the scientist and not the monster) was not in making his creation
-    but in abandoning it to the wilderness rather than loving and caring for it.
-    This, for Latour, is a parable about our relationship to technology and
-    ecology. When the technologies that we have created end up having unforeseen
-    and terrifying consequences—global warming, pollution, extinctions—we recoil in
-    horror from them. Yet we cannot, nor should we, abandon nature now. We have no
-    choice but to become ever more involved in consciously changing nature. We have
-    no choice but to love the monster we have made, lest it turn on us and destroy
-    us. This, says Latour, “demands more of us than simply embracing technology and
-    innovation”; it requires a perspective that “sees the process of human
-    development as neither liberation from Nature nor as a fall from it, but rather
-    as a process of becoming ever-more attached to, and intimate with, a panoply of
-    nonhuman natures.” 14
-
-    -- 43-44
-
-    But short of that, there are ways to turn some of the predatory “sharing
-    economy” businesses into something a bit more egalitarian. Economics writer
-    Mike Konczal, for instance, has suggested a plan to “socialize Uber.” 26  He
-    notes that since the company’s workers already own most of the capital—their
-    cars—it would be relatively easy for a worker cooperative to set up an online
-    platform that works like the Uber app but is controlled by the workers
-    themselves rather than a handful of Silicon Valley capitalists.
-
-    -- 48
-
-    The sociologist Bryan Turner has argued that we live in an “enclave society.” 8
-    Despite the myth of increasing mobility under globalization, we in fact inhabit
-    an order in which “governments and other agencies seek to regulate spaces and,
-    where necessary, to immobilize flows of people, goods and services” by means of
-    “enclosure, bureaucratic barriers, legal exclusions and registrations.” 9 Of
-    course, it is the movements of the masses whose movements are restricted, while
-    the elite remains cosmopolitan and mobile. Some of the examples Turner adduces
-    are relatively trivial, like frequent-flyer lounges and private rooms in public
-    hospitals. Others are more serious, like gated communities (or, in the more
-    extreme case, private islands) for the rich, and ghettos for the poor—where
-    police are responsible for keeping poor people out of the “wrong”
-    neighborhoods. Biological quarantines and immigration restrictions take the
-    enclave concept to the level of the nation-state. In all cases, the prison
-    looms as the ultimate dystopian enclave for those who do not comply, whether it
-    is the federal penitentiary or the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay. Gated
-    communities, private islands, ghettos, prisons, terrorism paranoia, biological
-    quarantines—these amount to an inverted global gulag, where the rich live in
-    tiny islands of wealth strewn around an ocean of misery.
-
-    [...]
-
-    Silicon Valley is a hotbed of such sentiments, plutocrats talking openly about
-    “secession.” In one widely disseminated speech, Balaji Srinivasan, the
-    cofounder of a San Francisco genetics company, told an audience of start-up
-    entrepreneurs that “we need to build opt-in society, outside the US, run by
-    technology.” 12  For now, that reflects hubris and ignorance of the myriad ways
-    someone like him is supported by the workers who make his life possible.
-
-    -- 53
-
-    Remember exterminism’s central problematic: abundance and freedom from work are
-    possible for a minority, but material limits make it impossible to extend that
-    same way of life to everyone. At the same time, automation has rendered masses
-    of workers superfluous. The result is a society of surveillance, repression,
-    and incarceration, always threatening to tip over into one of outright
-    genocide.
-
-    But suppose we stare into that abyss? What’s left when the “excess” bodies have
-    been disposed of repression, and incarceration, always threatening to tip over
-    into one of outright genocide.  But suppose we stare into that abyss? What’s
-    left when the “excess” bodies have been disposed of and the rich are finally
-    left alone with their robots and their walled compounds? The combat drones and
-    robot executioners could be decommissioned, the apparatus of surveillance
-    gradually dismantled, and the remaining population could evolve past its brutal
-    and dehumanizing war morality and settle into a life of equality and
-    abundance—in other words, into communism.
-
-    As a descendant of Europeans in the United States, I have an idea of what that
-    might be like. After all, I’m the beneficiary of a genocide.
-
-    My society was founded on the systematic extermination of the North American
-    continent’s original inhabitants. Today, the surviving descendants of those
-    earliest Americans are sufficiently impoverished, small in number, and
-    geographically isolated that most Americans can easily ignore them as they go
-    about their lives. Occasionally the survivors force themselves onto our
-    attention. But mostly, while we may lament the brutality of our ancestors, we
-    don’t contemplate giving up our prosperous lives or our land.  Just as Marcuse
-    said, nobody ever gave a damn about the victims of history.  Zooming out a bit
-    farther, then, the point is that we don’t necessarily pick one of the four
-    futures: we could get them all, and there are paths that lead from each one to
-    all of the others.
-
-    We have seen how exterminism becomes communism. Communism, in turn, is always
-    subject to counterrevolution, if someone can find a way to reintroduce
-    artificial scarcity and create a new rentist elite. Socialism is subject to
-    this pressure even more severely, since the greater level of shared material
-    hardship increases the impetus for some group to set itself up as the
-    privileged elite and turn the system into an exterminist one.
-
-    But short of a civilizational collapse so complete that it cuts us off from our
-    accumulated knowledge and plunges us into a new dark ages, it’s hard to see a
-    road that leads back to industrial capitalism as we have known it. That is the
-    other important point of this book. We can’t go back to the past, and we can’t
-    even hold on to what we have now. Something new is coming—and indeed, in some
-    way, all four futures are already here, “unevenly distributed,” in William
-    Gibson’s phrase. It’s up to us to build the collective power to fight for the
-    futures we want.
-
-    -- 63-64