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diff --git a/books/scifi/four-futures.md b/books/scifi/four-futures.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e536018 --- /dev/null +++ b/books/scifi/four-futures.md @@ -0,0 +1,186 @@ +[[!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 |