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[[!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
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