[[!meta title="Four Futures: Life After Capitalism"]]

## 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