From 23ac9f57b9b4c761cb8edc5bfa0c0de77ec89326 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Silvio Rhatto Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2017 14:06:22 -0300 Subject: Change extension to .md --- books/scifi/four-futures.mdwn | 186 ------------------------------------------ 1 file changed, 186 deletions(-) delete mode 100644 books/scifi/four-futures.mdwn (limited to 'books/scifi/four-futures.mdwn') diff --git a/books/scifi/four-futures.mdwn b/books/scifi/four-futures.mdwn deleted file mode 100644 index e536018..0000000 --- a/books/scifi/four-futures.mdwn +++ /dev/null @@ -1,186 +0,0 @@ -[[!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 -- cgit v1.2.3