Cztery przyszłości. Wizje świata po kapitalizmie

by Peter Frase

Nie można się dłużej oszukiwać: już wkrótce nasz świat będzie wyglądał zupełnie inaczej. Powód? Postępująca automatyzacja, dynamiczny rozwój technologii oraz drastyczne zmiany klimatu. To wszystko sprawi, że w przeszłość odejdzie tradycyjnie rozumiany kapitalizm do tej pory definiujący naszą rzeczywistość. Jak mówić o rynku pracy, kiedy jej większość wykonują maszyny? Jak podejść do dystrybucji dóbr, kiedy katastrofa naturalna może dramatycznie ograniczyć ich liczbę?

Frase wybiega myślami w przyszłość, choć jak daleką – trudno powiedzieć. Sięgając do ustaleń naukowców oraz futurystycznych wizji rodem z science fiction, Frase udowadnia, że znaleźliśmy się w decydującym momencie. A to, czy przyjdzie nam zbudować technologiczną utopię w stylu Star Treka, walczyć o ostatnie zasoby jak w Mad Maksie czy żyć w świecie ludzi lepszych i gorszych jak w Elizjum, zależy od bieżących decyzji politycznych i ekonomicznych.

Rozważane w książce scenariusze to wypadkowa tego, jak poradzimy sobie z technologią i środowiskiem. Jak przebiegnie automatyzacja? Kto na niej skorzysta? Co zrobimy w świecie po katastrofie naturalnej – dostosujemy dystrybucję zasobów do liczebności populacji czy może liczebność populacji do dostępności dóbr? Balansując między światami nadmiaru a niedoboru, czerpiąc garściami z nauki i popkulturowych wyobrażeń, Frase snuje fascynującą opowieść o świecie, w którym wkrótce możemy się obudzić.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Economics, Philosophy, Theory, Sociology, Audiobook

127 pages, Paperback

First published March 10, 2015

About the author

Peter Frase is an editor at Jacobin magazine, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center, and has written for In These Times and Al Jazeera. He lives in New York City.

Reviews

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just from looking at it, you can tell that ‘Four Futures’ will only describe each of its scenarios briefly. This a 150 page book, after all. Yet somehow the brevity disappointed me nonetheless. (It probably didn’t help that I read it in the throes of insomnia.) Not that I disagreed with what was said, nor that the choice of four options didn’t seem sensible, rather that the introduction (more than a fifth of the total page count) set up slightly unrealistic expectations. Specifically, it claimed to be ‘social science fiction’ - my absolute favourite sub-genre of fiction - rather than futurism. Then the scenarios themselves lacked the detail and colour to really live up to that. Frase was most likely trying to keep it simple, whereas I wanted more depth and density. That said, I really liked the up-front assumption that capitalism is destroying itself, based on this excellent Wolfgang Streek quote:

The image I have of the end of capitalism - and end that I believe is already underway - is one of a social system in chronic disrepair, for reasons of its own and regardless of the absence of a viable alternative. While we cannot know when and how exactly capitalism will disappear and that will succeed it, what matters is that no force is on hand that can be expected to reverse the three downward trends in economic growth, social equality, and financial stability and end their mutual reinforcement.

Frase cites a fairly limited selection of sci-fi novels to support each of the four futures, so the rest of this review will discuss each in turn and suggest additional relevant sci-fi references. Let’s be honest, this is one of those books that I liked although part of me was always thinking, ‘I would have written this a little differently’.

Communism

In this future of abundance and equality, sadly the least likely of the four, ubiquitous automation releases the population from unwanted work, the benefits of this are shared through a basic income, and climate change can be easily dealt with using technology. The chapter focuses on how meaning in life might be found without late capitalism’s emphasis on paid work as identity. Frase mentions pseudo-currencies online based on status and social media likes. The elision between personal identity and hierarchies of ‘esteem’ was interesting in itself. Without a job to provide a group that you’re part of (‘postdocs’ in my case), activities currently minimised as hobbies could provide similar groupings. Would they need to be hierarchical, though? I think work hierarchies are all about competition for a scarce resource: promotion to more senior, allegedly better jobs. Without that scarcity, I think the word hierarchy might be less immediately applicable. While social media esteem does involve a jockeying for popularity, there isn’t the same sense that only a strictly finite number of people can be recognised for whatever reason. Surely abundance and equality would also allow for more co-operation rather than competition.

The communist scenario reminded me of the Culture novels, especially The Player of Games, in which games and love affairs occupy the leisurely lives of citizens. Particularly interesting to me in that novel was the discussion of Culture language, which is deliberately structured to restrict hierarchies and prevent sexual discrimination. It strikes me that a communist world would radically alter the meaning of words like value and work. I imagine such a world would also place great emphasis on experiences: travel, sports, and art in particular. I wonder what sort of literature it would produce? Unfortunately, we’re very unlikely to find out.

Rentism

This future involves abundance thanks to automation, without equal distribution of the gains involved. In such a world, a privileged elite holds the patents and extracts rents from everyone who wants a copy. Again, climate change has somehow been fixed by technology. I liked the use of Transmetropolitan and its ‘maker codes’ as an example here. I was also reminded of a totally OTT cyberpunk novel in which media piracy carried the death penalty. This was applied in a darkly absurd fashion by the inevitable cyberpunk hired killer, who executed the offender than used some of their brain matter to improve the performance of coaxial cables in his stereo system. (I’m pretty sure that’s a real book and I didn’t just dream it. Can't remember the title for the life of me, though.) Cyberpunk as a sub-genre is predicated on ubiquitous computing with strongly-enforced corporate gatekeeping.

Rentism has the plausibility of already being visible everywhere. The most valuable corporate assets these days are forms of intellectual capital, not machines or buildings but algorithms, designs, DNA, and databases of personal information. The extent to which this undermines the operation of capitalism is the theme of Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future and should be obvious to any A-level economics student. If the supply of a good is infinite, because it can be copied at effectively zero cost, the price falls to zero. Free market economics cuts its own throat! Only monopolism, a so-called market failure, prevents this. According to Mason, and in my view as well, this situation is inherently unstable due to the difficulty of preventing piracy.

Socialism

Now we come to the futures in which climate change cannot be handily swept aside by technology. In the socialist scenario, there is scarcity but relative equality thanks to government intervention and planning. This calls to mind several sci-fi novels that I have known and loved. Gwyneth Jones’ Bold as Love series, in which an anarchic government of rockstars steers England through economic and environmental collapse. Ken McLeod’s Intrusion and Julie Zeh’s Corpus Delicti: Ein Prozess, both of which explore how interventionist governments that deal effectively with environmental collapse can also take an unnecessary level of interest in women’s bodies. The former series is hopeful to a point, the latter two are less willing to put their faith in governments. Intrusion is very much a Labour utopia/dystopia, which encouraged me to compare it with the Conservative austerity and privatisation that happened instead. If your freedom is constrained, do you prefer it to be for a greater public good or for higher shareholder returns?

I was a little surprised that the socialism chapter didn’t mention carbon rationing, which was briefly discussed as a potential (Labour) government policy back in the halcyon days of 2008. The Carbon Diaries 2015 and sequel spin out the consequences of such a policy. It did, however, talk about economic planning in Francis Spufford’s fascinating book Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties' Soviet Dream. Could supercomputers plan the economy for us? I would hope they could at least monitor environmental limits and warn against activities that would cross them - a carbon cap and trade scheme would obviously require automated monitoring and control. Frase’s take on cap and trade was interesting: that if the government controls the price mechanism then it’s not a capitalist market per se. To my mind, the truly subversive and anti-capitalist element of cap and trade is placing a hard quantitative limit on carbon emissions, production of some good, or whatever. This is antithetical to the magical thinking in free market economics that wealth can increase infinitely and that the Earth will costlessly absorb infinite pollution forever.

Of the four futures, I think socialism is the best we can now hope for. I believe that we’ve missed our chance for a smooth, technology-led climate change mitigation. If that was ever possible (and there are structural reasons why not cf Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming), it certainly seems too late now. A world in which everyone has a basic income and carbon ration, however, looks vanishingly distant, simply because it would require a reckoning with the tiny elite who control a disproportionate share of global wealth.

Exterminism

The final and most plausible future is one in which climate change causes scarcity and the wealthy retreat to their citadels, while everyone else struggles to survive. Unfortunately this can already been observed in the horrific and inhumane treatment of refugees in America, Europe, Australia, et al. At a national level, racism and xenophobia allow rich countries to turn a blind eye to the suffering and death of refugees. At an international level, the richest insulate themselves further by building bunkers and retreats in New Zealand. (If you feel like being incandescently angry, read this very long New Yorker piece on super-rich survivalists. These people seem unwilling or unable to face the fact that they caused, and are still causing, the instability that they fear. Their greed for wealth and privilege has undermined the social contract and faith in politics. Their lifestyles are changing the climate. Their espousal of neoliberalism has split society, undermined trust, and depleted the public realm. And now they want to buy their way out of the country, indeed the world, that they've wrecked for short term gains!)

Anyway, Frase’s first sci-fi example in this chapter is the film Elysium, which he admits has a political economy that is ‘somewhat difficult to extract’. I found it a rather unsatisfactory dystopia, in which the shock was that a white American guy had to deal with a similar daily life to a developing-world slum inhabitant. The plot's focus was on getting healthcare for the underclass, without any explanation of why it was so scarce in the first place given total automation. Why aren’t the elite extracting rents on the technology? Anyway, the film's resolution seemed to me like a metaphor for Obamacare: now you can get basic healthcare, no need to concern yourselves with all the other problems caused by structural inequality. A more apposite example of a rich elite quite actively trying to kill off an unemployed underclass can be found in The Ballad of Halo Jones. The main character lives in an overcrowded and dangerous ghetto for the unemployed, until in desperation she signs up for the army as a way to escape. The war she joins is brutal and pointless, quite possibly only happening as a way to simulate production of weapons and kill off the unemployed. That seems to me the most likely form more active exterminism would take: fomenting wars. Actually, this also a theme in the last novel I read, S. N. U. F. F.. Given the resource shortages that climate change will continue to cause, it probably won’t take much encouragement.

The most depressing thing about ‘Four Futures’ is that it was published in 2016, yet since it was written the world has moved significantly closer to an exterminist future thanks to Brexit and Trump. I don’t think that’s just the sleeplessness talking. Still, a thought-provoking book that provides a tidy taxonomy for life after capitalism. I just wish it had been at least twice as long.

[Adam McPhee · Rating 5 out of 5]

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).

With that in mind, Frase uses science fiction and social theory to look at four possible futures. He "posits that we can end up in a world of either scarcity or abundance, alongside either hierarchy or equality. This makes for four possible combinations."

They are:

Communism (equality and abundance): In this scenario he envisions a basic income that grows irrelevant as the tax base shrinks and as automation reduces the need for work. What's left of it, he argues, could be used as a kind of 'whuffie', the reputation-measuring currency in Doctorow's post-scarcity novel, and he looks at dogecoin as a sort of precursor to this (it's an internet currency that's essentially worthless, and so used for tipping people online).

Its chief pitfalls are that we'll never automate everything, and doing away with money might be possible, but we'll still have hierarchies (he cites infighting wikipedia editors).

Sci-fi examples: Star Trek, Corey Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magical Kingdom

The long-run trajectory, therefore, is one in which people come to depend less and less on the basic income, because the things they want and need do not have to be purchased for money. Some things can be produced freely and automatically, as 3-D printing and digital copying technologies evolve into something like Star Trek’s replicator. Other things have become the product of voluntary cooperative activity rather than waged work. It therefore comes to pass that the tax base for the basic income is undermined—but rather than creating an insoluble crisis, as in the hands of basic income critics, the withering away of the money economy, and its corresponding tax base, becomes the path to utopia.

...

But I would still argue that the communist society I’ve sketched here, though imperfect, is at least one in which conflict is no longer based on the opposition between wage workers and capitalists or on struggles over scarce resources. It is a world in which not everything ultimately comes down to money. A communist society would surely have hierarchies of status—as do capitalist and all societies. But in capitalism, all status hierarchies tend to be aligned, albeit imperfectly, with the master hierarchy of capital and money. The ideal of a postscarcity society is that various kinds of esteem are independent, so that the esteem in which one is held as a musician is independent of the regard one achieves as a political activist, and one can’t use one kind of status to buy another. In a sense, then, it is a misnomer to refer to this as an “egalitarian” configuration; it is not, in fact, a world that lacks hierarchies but rather one of many hierarchies, no one of which is superior to any other.

Rentism (Hierarchy and abundance): a really great look at how intellectual property rights aren't rights to property but to patterns, and how we're expanding the concept to include more and more patterns that we used to not think of as things that were commodifiable (he talks about fashion designers lobbying to copyright dress patterns, Monsanto copyrighting sees, John Deere arguing that farmers can't use third-party software on its tractors, etc). This, combined with greater automation, creates wealth inequality as the amount things people can buy grows, but "squeezes human labor out of the system". Eventually, all that's left is a dwindling creative class, rentiers who collect payments without contributing to the system, and a class of guards who enforce the rentiers' rights.

For all these reasons, it seems that the main problem confronting the society of anti–Star Trek is the problem of effective demand: that is, how to ensure that people are able to earn enough money to be able to pay the licensing fees on which private profit depends. Of course, this isn’t so different from the problem that confronted industrial capitalism, but it becomes more severe as human labor is increasingly squeezed out of the system, and human beings become superfluous as elements of production, even as they remain necessary as consumers.
Ultimately, even capitalist self-interest will require some redistribution of wealth downward in order to support demand. Society reaches a state in which, as the French socialist André Gorz put it in his 1999 book Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-Based Society, “the distribution of means of payment must correspond to the volume of wealth socially produced and not to the volume of work performed.”23 Or, to translate from French Intellectual to English: you deserve a decent standard of living because you’re a human being and we’re a wealthy enough society to provide it, not because of any particular work that you did to deserve it. So in theory, this is one possible long-term trajectory of a world based on intellectual property rents rather than on physical commodity production using human Ultimately, even capitalist self-interest will require some redistribution of wealth downward in order to support demand. Society reaches a state in which, as the French socialist André Gorz put it in his 1999 book Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-Based Society, “the distribution of means of payment must correspond to the volume of wealth socially produced and not to the volume of work performed.”23 Or, to translate from French Intellectual to English: you deserve a decent standard of living because you’re a human being and we’re a wealthy enough society to provide it, not because of any particular work that you did to deserve it. So in theory, this is one possible long-term trajectory of a world based on intellectual property rents rather than on physical commodity production using human labor. What Gorz is talking about is something like the universal basic income, which was discussed in the last chapter. Which means that one long-run trajectory of rentism is to turn into communism.

inally, any society like the one I have described, which is predicated on maintaining great inequalities of wealth and power even when they have become economically superfluous, will require a large amount of labor to prevent the poor and powerless from taking a share back from the rich and powerful. The economists Samuel Bowles and Arjun Jayadev call this type of labor “Guard Labor” and define it as “the efforts of the monitors, guards, and military personnel … directed not toward production, but toward the enforcement of claims arising from exchanges and the pursuit or prevention of unilateral transfers of property ownership.”17 It includes private security guards, police officers, the military, prison and court officials, and weapons producers. An estimated 5.2 million guards worked in the United States in 2011.18
These would be the main source of employment in the world of anti–Star Trek: creators, lawyers, marketers, and guards. It seems implausible, however, that this would be sufficient—the society would probably be subject to a persistent trend toward under-employment. Especially if all the sectors except (arguably) the first would be subject to pressures toward labor-saving technological innovation. Even high-level managerial functions can be partly automated: in 2014, a Hong Kong venture capital fund called Deep Knowledge appointed an algorithm, a program called VITAL, to its board, where it receives a vote on all investments.19
And perhaps even “creativity” isn’t such a uniquely human talent (if we reduce that word to the creation of replicator patterns). In a paper presented to a 2014 conference of the Association of Computing Machinery, a group of medical researchers presented a method for automatically generating plausible hypotheses for scientists to test, using data mining techniques.20 Such approaches could eventually be applied to other formulaic, iterative processes like the design of pop songs or smartphone games.
What’s more, there is also another way for private companies to avoid employing workers for some of these tasks: turn them into activities that people will find pleasurable and will thus do for free on their own time. The computer scientist Luis von Ahn has specialized in developing such “games with a purpose”: applications that present themselves to end users as enjoyable diversions but which also perform a useful computational task, what von Ahn calls “Human Computation.

Sci-fi examples: Charles Stross' Accelerando, "Anti-Star Trek", Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan

Socialism (equality and scarcity): Similar to communism, but with the realization that we live in a finite world and have to deal with climate change. "In general," Frase writes, "the struggle is over how to recognize and control the waste products of human civilization, rather than imagining that we can ever separate ourselves from nature." He argues we need a "state-driven project that can mobilize resources and labor in a way that's beyond the capabilities of either the free-market or (a) communist free-for-all."

He warns against the obstructive tendencies of modern politics, where the left believes it's too late to take meaningful action, and the right can't be bothered because climate change will only effect the poor.

He makes a case for a centrally-planned economy, and that humans have to take their place as custodians of the planet on a large scale that probably involves geoengineering, but also restructuring our daily lives.

Sci-fi examples: Kim Stanley Robinson's Pacific Edge, Mars Trilogy, 2312. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

Exterminism (hierarchy and scarcity): The scariest of the four, made all the worse because it's basically already happening. With the need for labour diminished by automation the rich no longer have the need for the working classes, who are no longer working, they're just poor. He cites the algorithmic drone targeting in the war on terror, the militarization of America's police and the growing prison industry. It's terrifying.

In a 1983 article, the Nobel Prize–winning economist Wassily Leontief anticipated the problem of mass unemployment that has been contemplated throughout this book. In what he calls, with some understatement, a “somewhat shocking but essentially appropriate analogy,” he compares workers to horses.

One might say that the process by which progressive introduction of new computerized, automated, and robotized equipment can be expected to reduce the role of labor is similar to the process by which the introduction of tractors and other machinery first reduced and then completely eliminated horses and other draft animals in agriculture.5

As he then notes, this led most people to the conclusion that “from the human point of view, keeping all these idle horses … would make little sense.” As a result, the US horse population fell from 21.5 million in 1900 to 3 million in 1960.6 Leontief goes on to express, with the cheery confidence of a mid-century technocrat, his confidence that since people are not horses, we will surely find ways to support all of society’s members. Echoing Gorz and other critics of wage labor, he argues that “sooner or later … it will have to be admitted that the demand for ‘employment’ is in the first instance a demand for ‘livelihood,’ meaning income.”7 However, given the contemptuous and cruel attitudes of today’s ruling class, we can in no way take that for granted.

Fortunately, even the rich have developed norms of morality that make it difficult to reach for this Final Solution as a first resort. Their initial step is simply to hide from the poor, much like the characters in Elysium. But all around us, we can see the gradual drift away from just corralling and controlling “excess” populations, into justifications for permanently eliminating them.

Sci-fi example: Blomkamp's Elysium

[Philippe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Peter Frase’s essay is an exercise in what is commonly known as 'scenario planning’. The author himself seems to be totally agnostic about this intellectual discipline that has a rich, decades-long history. But that doesn’t detract from his attempt to visualise a range of post-capitalist futures. The basic idea behind the methodology is straightforward: identify a limited number of critical uncertainties and investigate how they might interact to shape different, but plausible and coherent futures. In this book, Frase identifies three uncertainties:

* The extent to which automation will make human labor superfluous;
* The extent to which climate change will lead to scarcity of natural resources and human habitat;
* The type of coordination and redistribution mechanisms relied on by our societies.

Frase makes a very strong, almost theoretical hypothesis about the impact of automation: all the futures discussed in this book assume that the need for human labor in the production can be eliminated. That renders the whole analysis rather speculative to my mind. But admittedly it leads to interesting questions. So, if automation is the constant, then the impact of the ecological crisis and the tensions and accommodations between classes are the variables.

As far as the impact of climate change is concerned, the spectrum runs from scarcity to abundance. In other words, we may or may not be able to transition to more environmentally benign infrastructures and behaviours. Politically we may evolve towards a more egalitarian or a more hierarchical society. So this leads to either more distribution or concentration of political and economic power.

Combining these two critical uncertainties leads to a typology of four scenarios: egalitarian-abundance (‘communism’), egalitarian-scarcity (‘socialism’), hierarchical-abundance (‘rentism’), hierarchical-scarcity (‘exterminism’).

Given the political assumptions that define the various futures, each scenario embodies different solutions to deal with both the impact of total automation. As a result four distinct storylines appear:

* The story of Communism revolves around the way we construct meaning when life is not centered around wage labor;
* Socialism reflects an egalitarian society that works together to rebuild and deepen its relationship to nature;
* In the Rentist future intellectual property becomes a key component of the property held by the capitalist class;
* Finally, in the Exterminist future the ruling classes find no better response to the threat of impoverished, restless, idle masses than to incarcerate or eliminate them.

The shock of reading this book is that the most cynical, dystopian scenario seems the most plausible one. Given the abundance of telltale signs in the world today one could easily elaborate this story into a full-length book.

It is also interesting to note that Frase foregrounds the concept of a 'basic minimum income’ in each of the three other scenarios. But it seems to play a different role and assume a different weight in each scenario.

Clearly, this book encapsulates an interesting thought experiment, obviously within the limits of the foundational hypothesis of total automation. Although Rentism strikes me as the least likely of the bunch, none of the scenarios can be easily dismissed. They should give all of us pause for thought.

3,5 stars.

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am often astonished at the power of a really simple futuring technique - such as 2x2 matrices - to generate such interesting results. This book represents one such exercise. There are many of the conclusions that I don't agree with, there are some parts where I feel that the model is ill-defined, but the overall product is one that ought to commend our attention.

The basic premise of the book - that the liberal order established by the Washington Consensus has moved beyond it's shelf life. It's very difficult to argue against that belief. However, that in itself is uninteresting because it fails to consider what comes next. A futurist would keep one eye on what is likely to replace the Washington Consensus. This is what the author tries to do.

The analysis has two critical uncertainties - the axes of the 2x2 matrix - a world of hierarchy as opposed to a world of equality and a world of abundance as opposed to a world of scarcity. This gives rise to four possible worlds - equality with abundance, hierarchy with abundance, equality with scarcity, and hierarchy with scarcity. Underpinning each of these worlds are the twin issues of automation and climate change. These rather colour the approach to each of the futures.

Each future is characterised by the dominant features that the author believes will be apparent. Equality and abundance is characterised by communism. Not the Soviet communism to which we have become accustomed. More the communism described by Marx, where the state withers away and we can all live our lives in relative harmony. Many have described this rather utopian vision, but the author sees it as possible if the singularitarians and transhumanists are any where near correct.

Hierarchy and abundance is a different matter, however. In this case, automation leads to material abundance, but the protection of intellectual property rights leads to the benefits of automation accruing to only a few. The 1%, if you like. This scenario is dubbed as one of Rentism, as a fortunate minority benefits from the rents accruing to technology. These are 'Rents' in the Ricardian sense. In modern times, we would call this passive income.

The world of equality and scarcity is characterised as one of socialism. In this case, the scarcity of climate change has outweighed any benefits accruing from automation. However, the scenario has a sense that society sees itself as being in it all together, and the climate induced hardships are shred out on a widespread basis. There is a lot to commend this view of the future.

The final scenario - hierarchy and scarcity - is perhaps the darkest. The author labels this a world of exterminism. In this world there isn't enough to go round, and those at the top of the hierarchy secure the lion's share for themselves. It leads to a widespread reduction in population numbers, a scenario characterised by the dominance of security issues and, ultimately, genocide.

As with all futures, there are elements of each of these which are evident in the present. For example, one dimension of exterminism could be seen as the apparent indifference towards the poorer nations displayed by the richer nations. One could argue that the recent moves towards co-ordinated climate action represents a socialist solution - the pain is distributed amongst those most able to bear it. Equally, it could be argued that the world of Rentism is evident in the technology sector today, where the winner takes all, protected by barriers of intellectual property law. The world of communism is less evident today, but one could argue that the NHS exhibits elements of that world.

If each of the scenarios are present today, it is not unreasonable to take the view that elements of each scenario will be present in the future. In many respects, this is how we ought to approach 2x2 matrices. They highlight potential dominant themes rather than produce a specific blueprint for the future.

This is all to the good, but there were points at which I felt a little short changed. This was over both the critical uncertainties and the dominant issues. With a focus on two critical uncertainties - social relations and material abundance - I felt that the book missed more than it caught. For example, I would have liked to see more prominence for the mechanism of distribution (market based or centrally planned?) to complement the issues of social relations (ownership and control). I feel that the author missed something important here.

One major omission in the book was a time frame in which all of this was to happen. A sharper focus on this would, I feel, have shed better light on the dominant issues. For example, if the book had a time horizon of a couple of hundred years (it was sub-titled 'Life After Capitalism'), then perhaps climate change might not be a dominant issue because the climate damage would have already been done. Equally, in two hundred years time, ought our current concerns about automation seem quaint?

By not grasping the issue of time, the author opens himself to all sorts of challenges in the realms of dominant issues. I would imagine that most futurists would be able to identify five off the top of their heads (mine would be war, security, space exploration, the funding of public services, and the re-invention of humanity). By omitting a time frame, the author opens himself to the criticism that he ought to have talked about 'those' issues instead.

I quite liked the book. It is short and to the point. It is readily readable. The author has an engaging style of writing which makes the prose just flow along. It is an important work on an important topic that is not a hard read. If only academic texts could follow this lead.

[Brandy Cross · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thought experiments serve no value expect to make the reader think. It's a pity then, that these ask so little of that. Though I strongly suspect the brevity was an attempt to appeal to Frase's readers at Jacobin, it leaves little room for more than the briefest of conjecture in any of the four concepts. Brevity is, however, the worst element of this book, so it can't be all that bad.

Four Futures is broken into eponymous parts. Each pulls from a combination of literary and real-world references, attempting in his own words to balance between social theory and science fiction, a few constants are set (e.g., automation and the climate crisis will continue their current courses, human labor will become less relevant, etc.) Frase's thought experiments therefore exist within very narrow confines, made still narrower by the fact that each experiment is less than 10 pages of story with the rest of the book dedicated to setting background and offering data which might make it plausible. This is a work which tries very hard to be accessible by refusing to believe you've done any real-world research, whilst simultaneously expecting you to be very well read in sci-fi and cyberpunk (I am, so it's probably not too far off the mark for most readers). My opinion of this book is also at least partially driven by the fact that I find Frase to be a lazy researcher, e.g., his claim that Dominic Cummins definitely said "And if a few pensioners die, so be it" , despite the highly contested nature of the statement and Frase's own lack of further corroborating evidence.

Equality and Abundance:
There's very little thought experiment here. A bit of background information, the surmise that a switch into abundant socialism would lead to trading in relationships and social trust, and a bit of interesting information relating to Whuffle and Bitcoin. This is less a thought experiment and more putting a few pieces together and calling it a story. Poorly structured, poorly developed, but interesting nonetheless. The most interesting concept is simply an obvious. As automation increases and the cost of goods fall, UBI becomes increasingly irrelevant, leading to a natural shift away from traditional currency. Doh.

Hierarchy and Abundance:
Automation has been the pet project of the left for as long as machines have existed. If you can automate work, you can enable socialism and work-free culture, allowing people to take on jobs as they see fit, because they want to, not because they'll starve if they don't. Frase pulls ideas from Star Trek, Neuromancer, Cryptonomicon, and others to postulate about what might happen when the only valuable thing is the new idea. When all goods are replicable, without effort, what then?

I found the outcome to be lazy and predictable. Hacking, piracy, collectives designed to drive free stuff to those who need it – those kinds of things will always exist. Leaving them out is sad and deprives the experiment of any real vibrancy.

Equality and Scarcity:
Equality and scarcity considers the construct in which humanity bands together to recognize the pressing demands of climate change and does so in time to stop the crisis. This semi-utopia is one of hard work, restructuring daily life, and limiting consumption but it is one that is largely appealing. It lacks a roadmap or even a pretense of considering the path to this state, but it does pull on the ideas of communes, green energy, and revitalization of public and private spaces.

This would be very interesting if developed beyond the bare minimum to have a point although I'm not entirely sure it reached that stage in its published form. How do we get from the robber barons of Silicon Valley hiding away in their golden arks to communal living and recycling? Frase certainly doesn't say.

Hierarchy and Scarcity:
Ah yes, pessimism. Also, Frase's pet concept based on both its placement at the end of his little book of theories and the frequency of which it crops up in his ongoing works. This is not a new idea. Elysium, Snow Piercer, and others thought of and created better concepts for it – despite the first being an absolute waste of your time and the digital discs it was recorded on – Frase adds nothing to the concept. His story is brief. The idea is simple. Work is automated but there isn't enough to go around. Workers have no value because work is expendable. And, with encroaching climate change and decreasing liveable space on earth, the wealthy simply retreat and either allow the masses to die or deliberately commit a genocide. It's peak mistrust of the rich but is so poorly developed you'll have to fill in most of the blanks yourself.

+1 star for the literature references, which add a lot to the work if you're familiar with them.

[Robert Clarke · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a chilling account of humanity trying to cope with the "endgame" of capitalism, which up to the upcoming age of climate change and automation-induced unemployment, had enriched everyone's lives extraordinarily well.

Frase's fourth scenario, "Exterminism" is a horrifying amalgamation of Elysium, Atlas Shrugged, BioShock, The Terminator, Manna, and Ender's Game - where the isolated wealthy elite in charge of the robots use those robots to genocide the immiserated "buggers" left unemployed and redundant on Earth, as indirectly and guilt-free as possible. Knowing the depths of human greed, it's sadly not an unlikely scenario that people in power would systematically kill off the redundant, revolting humans left on the surface to have more of Earth's resources for themselves. Ruthless psychopaths inclined toward power would nuke the Earth's surface if it meant they got to rule over the ashes.

The irony is that the end-state, a post-scarcity Communist utopia not unlike Star Trek or The Culture, would be realized whether it's for 7 billion humans each given a universal basic income of $30,000, or 30,000 billionaires and their families living on inheirited wealth after a mass die-off similar to that of America's original inhabitants making way for wealthier European colonists. Since robots do all the work, people would be left to do whatever they want to. All the world's resources are essentially free to them, as they would be in a post-scarcity communist society - albeit more shared. They get an exponentially lesser share if they don't exterminate the poor, therefore the poor must be exterminated to make Lebensraum for the master race.

You know, as if the so-called "master race" couldn't help genetically inferior "untermenschen" transcend their biological limitations, or mine space for more resources to share. The Nazis had grand ambitions for space as well - unfortunately only after a greater Holocaust against all Eastern Europeans, explicitly modeled after American colonization. An exterminist future is a consequence of closed minds lacking in distinctly human traits like imagination or empathy. You could build a Death Star and blow up Earth to sate the primitive reptile brain at the heart of fear and greed, but it'll never be enough for our reptillian overlords. (Just ask David Icke.)

4/5, could've been longer and more in-depth. I'm also not a fan of this guy's stereotypically leftist antipathy to capitalism as the root of all modern evil, rather than a free market system that amplifies evil already present in human nature while also enabling humanity to thrive at scale and individuals to succeed on their own merits, as opposed to the feudalism that came before.

Make no mistake Jared Diamond, the human race was never predominantly tolerant or egalitarian, not even in hunter-gatherer bands. Where do you think the word "tribalism" comes from? Why don't you ask the chief and his harem of wives! The animal kingdom of literal Darwinism couldn't care less for any sort of justice outside "you were too slow and got devoured by a wolf". Human brains are supposed to be above such reptillian urges - but alas, Social Darwinist tribalism couldn't be more alive in the age of President Trump.

In spite of this, I hope humans will someday come to their senses, stop bickering about identity politics, and look to the stars in search of greater horizons as each human individually self-actualizes. Together we could rule the galaxy and find a way to escape entropy, but we're trapped upon this dump of a rock on a collision course with extinction, as Donald Trump and friends grow richer at the expense of everyone else.

Get a fucking grip, humanity. Trump won't bring your redundant factory job back and he knows it. We're at a point where all unfulfilling work could be automated away, leaving us at long last with lives of leisure to pursue our passions - working not because we have to, but because we want to. But that's only if we want to.

[James (JD) Dittes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is there a horror movie villain you can think of that has more lives than capitalism? Rumors of its demise stretch back to the era of the trust-busters and the Progressive Party. Every time a depression or war or rival ideology seems to have the system on its knees, its limbs burst to life and someone appears to proclaim, "I'm back!"



Considering the events since The Great Recession, along with growing numbers of Americans who support socialized college funding and medical insurance, this might be another time to contemplate Capitalism's demise. At least that's what Peter Frase sets out to do in this short, thought-provoking look into the future.

I'll admit that I was expecting something of a manifesto here, but that's not what I found. Frase presents the future in an imaginative way--including references to literature and sci-fi movies like "Star Trek" and "Elysium" along with the thoughts of political scientists. This adds levity to scenarios that are far-ranging, and I think that it makes the book more accessible to readers.

What replaces Capitalism? Frase frames his ideas in the growing calls for another basic tenet of socialism: the Universal Basic Income (UBI). Ten years ago, this was a laughed-at, pie-in-the-sky proposition. Now it is getting more serious consideration. Why? Because people recognize that automation--more than globalization--is eliminating jobs but not the need for human beings to have a basic standard of living.

Frase's futures include Communism--when the UBI is in place, and automation ends the role of scarcity in the economy. He takes a look at Renterism, where corporations own all the cars (Uber), the seeds/food (Monsanto), and other key elements of daily life, typical people will find their rights reduced in the face of production efficiencies. Fase's chapter on Socialism goes beyond current debates about health care and student loans into the theme of climate change and social-engineered energy production. His final chapter, on Exterminism, examines the possibility that excess workers will be sloughed off into even broader prison systems as the wealthy retreat into offshore utopias guarded by walls and private security forces.

For me, the demise of Communism came from its inability to reward innovation in the way that Capitalism can. I'm skeptical of Frase's ideas about an end to scarcity, because this is a chronic problem in communist countries--look at Venezuela's current food shortages, where were hampered by low oil prices and exacerbated by a command economy. Still, I buy the jobs-free technological future that he foresees, and I'm growing in acceptance of the UBI.

This is a thought-provoking, insightful look into four possible futures, should capitalism fall by the way side. Should rumors of capitalism's demise prove once again to have been greatly exaggerated, Frase's book still shines light on very real possibilities or adaptations for the future.

Special thanks to Net Galley and Verso Books for allowing me an advanced copy to review.

[Odo · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5/5.0

[Reid tries to read · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four Futures: Life After Capitalism argues that the future will be determined by two interrelated phenomena: the replacement of labor by automation and the effects of climate change on our environment and resources. The applications AI is used for are already wide and growing exponentially. Super computers like IBM’s Watson are already assisting higher skilled jobs like doctors in sifting through copious amounts of data to make more accurate diagnoses of patients while replacing lower skilled jobs like call centers. Robotics are another area experiencing rapid technological advancement. In the 20th century robots began replacing humans on the factory lines to make industrial products such as cars; today more finetooth motor skills are being replaced by robots. For example, the US Department of Defense now relies on robotic automated sewing machines to produce its soldiers' uniforms in order to avoid depending on Chinese labor for such tasks. Self driving cars are replacing personal cars as well as Uber services across American cities. Amazon has begun replacing workers with drones and other robots across its factory floors and supply chains. Agricultural tasks that once required precise human hands, like fruit harvesting, are now being replaced by robots as well. The ability for robots to replicate human tasks has been a constant feature of capitalism, but the ability for them to mimic and even improve on the most intricate human skills seems to be improving rapidly. There is potential in the near future for robots to be able to do literally everything that humans can without complaining, getting tired, needing a break, or wearing down.

When it comes to climate change, the evidence is pretty clear: human produced carbon emissions are rapidly heating the earth's climate, leading to extreme weather conditions and a depletion of valuable resources like water. Science is pretty clear it is not a question of whether man-made caused climate change is occurring; it absolutely is. The question we have to ask and answer now has become how bad will it get and who will survive it?

The results of climate change and large scale automation will be decided by the politics of class struggle. The capitalist class has an entrenched interest in maintaining fossil fuels, since they are literally the lifeblood of the capitalist system. All climate change denialist movements are funded by the fossil fuel lobby, while further looking “green capitalists” have not found market incentives to be profitable enough on a wide enough scale to significantly reduce carbon emissions whatsoever. Likewise, automation making work obsolete could lead to greater inequalities or shared prosperity depending on the outcomes of class struggle. “Who benefits from automation and who loses is ultimately a consequence not of the robots themselves, but of who owns them.”

The future will be either “socialism or barbarism”; this book speculates on 2 possible socialisms and 2 possible barbarisms. The 2 socialisms could be societies characterized by equality and abundance (communism), or equality and scarcity (socialism). Or we could succumb to barbarism: hierarchy and abundance (rentism), or hierarchy and scarcity (exterminism).

Best scenario: communism (abundance + equality)
Marx did not say much about the content of a communist society. Production would be rationally planned and democratically organized, as opposed to being subjected to the whims and coercions of the all-encompassing capitalist market of today. This was a precondition for communism, rather than the end goal as one might put it. Rather, communism is a system based on emancipation from work. Work has for all of human history been a necessity; under communism work would entail the full flourishing of the human creative spirit. Work would be liberating rather than oppressive or constraining. Freedom today begins when work ends. Under communism, freedom would be constant because the drudgery of necessary labor would be eliminated.

In “Critique of the Gotha Program” Marx wrote: “In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and with it also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but itself life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”. Instead of having bosses devise plans that we carry out, communism would have eliminated the distinction between subordinate worker and subordinating boss. This is what Marx means by “after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor… has vanished”. The idea of a workplace itself would also be abolished; there would no longer be a distinction between where one worked for necessity and where one worked as a collective leisure activity. With the elimination of labor as the only way to obtain “the means of life”, the very activities people partake in become “life’s prime want”. Work is no longer work, because there is no longer a distinction between our ‘jobs’ and what we choose to do in our ‘free time’. This can happen after the “productive forces” are developed enough so that each person can be given what they need as long as they give what is best of their ability, which they would willingly do because that should match up with their “prime want”. Today many people go into their fields not because of pay but because of the satisfaction their job gives them (as a special ed teacher I can personally attest to this). Under communism, the idea would be that people would willingly work on whatever they are most interested in because it provides them with a sense of fulfillment, and that these interests would ultimately benefit society at large. All jobs people would not want to do would, by that point, be done by automation. Widespread automation, the elimination of exploitative hierarchies, and the avoidance of ecological collapse would all be necessary to bring this future into being.

This future is not just one Marxists believe in. Keynes, the anti-communist liberal, wrote the essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” where he predicated that in future generations “man would be faced with his real, his permanent problem: how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares; how to occupy the leisure which science and compound interest will have won for him”. Even in the realm of fiction, the famous child’s cartoon ‘The Jetsons’ showcased a society where the characters worked a few hours a week while their needs were met by luxurious technologies.

Today most people’s “work” falls under three overlapping categories: wage labor they must perform to survive, labor they perform so that society may function better, and labor they perform for personal satisfaction. Communism seeks to eliminate “work 1” and strengthen “works 2 and 3”. Many studies find that the shift from being employed as a wage laborer to being retired entails an immediate increase in one’s self-reported happiness. If society could ‘retire’ everyone from wage labor, it stands to reason we would have a happier society.

In a communist society not all issues are solved, rather (paraphrasing Cory Robin), the “hysterical misery” of not having one’s basic needs accounted for is “converted” to “ordinary unhappiness”. People will still have interpersonal issues, hierarchies will produce themselves in other ways, but the difference will be that all these issues will be separated from the stresses, alienation, psychological and physiological ailments, and other issues inherently associated with wage labor. While not all issues will be solved under communism, today’s issues are irreconcilably connected to the fact that most people spend most of their time laboring for wages and spending their free time recovering their mental and physical energy from the drudgeries of the working day. The conflict between capital and labor might not directly cause all other issues in the world, but it undoubtedly shapes all issues in some way. It is therefore difficult and purely speculative to predict what issues will be present under a future communist system if that system does come into being at all. Very likely, while material goods won’t be scarce, immaterial things like respect and dignity will always remain scarce in some way. People might compete over status symbols, although these status symbols won’t be tied to certain commodities but rather certain activities one performs or feats one accomplishes. The difference is, even if something ethereal like ‘respect’ becomes a way to hierarchically rank or order people, a person’s lack of ‘respect’ won’t affect their access to basic means of subsistence like the lack of money does today.

Rentism (hierarchy + abundance)
What happens in a future where abundance is possible, but resources are hoarded by state institutions and the class hierarchies they maintain? If the techniques and means of production advance to such a degree that communism is possible, but these means of production remain monopolized in the hands of a tiny ruling class, rentism could be the result. Ownership becomes a little different in a fully automated world. Very specific kinds of information, like computer software and algorithms, are needed to program and run such a society. The control of this information technology through means like IP and patent laws would be the basis of ownership. If some futuristic equivalent of 3D printers can create any object we desire, and these devices become widespread due to abundance, the control over the information needed to print from these devices would be paramount. The control of information, rather than just the physical means of production, would be the basis for class power in rentism.

The difference between rentism and capitalism would be that, under capitalism, the owners of the means of production use money to produce commodities so that they can make more money to produce more commodities as infinitum; capitalism is a process of endless accumulation. Rentism would be based purely on extracting rents from people to use the means of production for themselves. “Rent” originally referred to the payments given to land owners so that a farmer could plow that land or a factory owner could set up shop on that land; being able to claim ownership over land automatically generated payments of rent for that owner simply because they controlled access to that property. Rentism would function in a similar manner. While capitalists arguably take risks, organize production, and implement innovative ideas, rentiers of past, present, and future are passive recipients of income who add nothing to the production process. They are purely parasitical.

The right to use intellectual property forces people to pay money to the ‘owners’ of ideas, patterns, and designs. Some companies today control intellectual rights over nature itself. For example, Monsanto holds patents on the genetic makeup of certain seeds and soybeans. Farmers have been sued by Monsanto for using seeds from their previous year’s crops, since Monsanto technically ‘owns’ those seeds in the eyes of the U.S. Supreme Court. This forces farmers to buy new seeds from Monsanto every year. Other companies, like Apple, can sue you for jailbreaking your iPhone since Apple technically owns the software for the iPhone. The iPhone or Mac may technically be yours, but all functional aspects of the iPhone/Mac are still the property of Apple. John Deere sues people for modifying the software on their reactors by arguing that nobody owns the tractors, they merely license them for life from John Deere. A society where the threat of lawsuits/punishment for infringing on the property owners of material things (like soybean genes) or immaterial things (like modifying phone, computer, or even car software) is ubiquitous, omnipresent, and readily enforced would characterize rentism.

In such a future, let’s suppose that everyone has access to a portable device that can create almost any object out of thin air in a short time while using very little energy to do so (similar to ‘the replicator’ in Star Trek, another example of a fictional communist society of abundance). However, to access a replicator one must purchase it from a private company. You also have to pay a licensing fee every time you use the device to create something, because some company somewhere owns the replication rights to any particular thing you are creating. If everyone is constantly forced to pay money in licensing fees, then they need some way to earn money. However, what kind of jobs exist in a society that has no need for human labor to create things thanks to replicators? There might be a need for a ‘creative class’ of people to invent new products to replicate, but this would probably not be a field that needs to hire too many people. Most people don’t make much money in creative fields now because of the amount of people trying to get into them (for every successful musician, entrepreneur, etc there’s thousands of failed ones) forces wages down as the supply of creative laborers outstrips any demand for them. This would only get worse in the rentist future described above. Lawsuits between companies over patent infringement would also increase in this future, generating a need for a lot of lawyers. However, neither lawyers nor a creative class could sustain an entire economy no matter how large the bureaucracies of empires of lawyers grow. Human lawyers would also likely have to compete with automated AI lawyers as well. People in this future have potential access to everything via replicators, but only a limited amount of funds to replicate what they want and limited amounts of time to enjoy their replications. This would likely lead to omnipresent marketing as companies try to sell consumers on their replicators and convince people why their replications are better than others. Companies would likely compete with each other over the costs of replication, driving down the price to replicate things. People would also be employed in the coercive positions needed to maintain the class hierarchies of a rentist society such as police and military forces, private security, etc.

A society of creatives, lawyers, marketers, and guards (each of whom would have to compete with robots, AI, and automation) would likely be the main forms of employment in this future hellscape. This would likely mean that low levels of employment would be a persistent feature of this society. The problem of effective demand would consequently remain an enduring issue as human labor is constantly squeezed out of the system, and human beings themselves become increasingly replaced by robots in most fields. Stagnation and periodic economic crises would persist, but it is difficult to see how the lower classes would be able to overcome their complete lack of political power, as well as the ideological inundation they would have forced upon them in such a society, to create any sort of radical change.

[Joel · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sometimes you click on a link somewhere, in something that you’re reading, which takes you to another link and another and another as you continue the train of thought of your line of inquiry as far as time allows. When that happens to me, often times the end of the line in the referrals process is a book, which I sometimes put in my Amazon cart and forget about it till it arrives at my doorstep and I pick up the book and try to figure out what I was thinking.

So it goes with “Four Futures”. This nasty little tome by Peter Frase isn’t really a book; it’s sort of more an extended whine replete – from the first sentence to the last (which I’ll admit I didn’t get to) – with tired recitations of the debunked thoughts of yesteryear and unsubstantiated assertions buttressed by outrage and insult as the only recourse by and for the weak-minded.

It used to be people would write to attempt to persuade others. It is widely believed that the best way to bring others around, to sway them to the validity of your claims is through the written word. Debates are hostile, arguments unhelpful – winners needing to show their dominance, losers attempting to not be humiliated in front of their peers. But the pen – in the quiet of night, darkness cut by the flickering flame of a candle that illuminates just as the black words on paper enlighten.

Those days are over, it would seem.

Specifically, “Four Futures” looked – at least when I mistakenly bought it – to be an outside-the-box presentation of four ways the world could see itself reorganized if things continue to go as they currently are. ‘Currently are’ means technological innovation continues to undermine employment and environmental degradation continues to cause life conditions to worsen for people who are degrading their environments. Indira Gandhi, Frase is not. “Poverty is the greatest polluter,” to Frase has given way to – wait for it – rapacious evil of corporations motivated only by a conspiracy of greed.

What does Frase propose? Ignore “climate deniers”, they are crackpots anyways; really try what Marx was trying for (of course not the half-hearted attempts of Pol Pot, Hugo Chavez and Joseph Stalin – but really do it!); condemn the corporate interests and the managerial elite, etc. How to do this? Read Keynes and Krugman – never mind that those two have been widely debunked. Never mind that Frase doesn’t seem to understand spontaneous order; can’t figure out issues of scarcity; and still pines for that simplified planned world that has produced famine after famine after famine. As I tried to read this book (I didn’t go very far, neither should you), I channeled Ayn Rand a little bit – for giggles. As Frase decried the fallacy of Wall-E’s portrayal of post-work, technologically advanced humanity (I’m not kidding) while he defended the idea of “Universal Basic Income” which, he claims, doesn’t have to produce sloth and deviance, I imagined what Rand would have said about Frase’s workless world. Machines producing for the consumptive purposes of the listless masses; what could go wrong?

Of course forget that we have the technology that we have because of capitalism which, though imperfect, actually does take into consideration incentives; forget that the only solution for greed is competition, and that planning just makes another less-accountable elite; forget that planned economies do not work because the profit motive is the only way for humanity to allocate its scarce resources. And forget that in rich places the environment is getting better: reforestation and water purification and detoxifying our rivers while in poor, workless places the environmental damage continues relentlessly. Or, for the know-nothings, better yet just forget everything humanity has learned about itself since we pulled ourselves from grinding poverty and 35 year life-expectancy. I’m sure that’s gonna work!!

All that to say – don’t read this book. And if you can figure out a way I can un-read it, I’d be grateful for the hint.

[Murtaza · Rating 3 out of 5]

As the title suggests there are four possible future configurations of society and they're all already here to varying degrees. Abundance and egalitarianism, abundance and hierarchy, scarcity and egalitarianism or scarcity and hierarchy. These four configurations come with very different levels of violence and its unclear as yet which one we will end up with. The two major macro trends facing humanity today are the automation of labor and ecological destruction. How we decide to respond to these is a question of politics and what sort of absolute value we give to human life.

In the best case technology helps abolish all want and the rent-seekers preventing its democratization are disowned of their properties. In the worst the rich wage a war against newly expendable people amid a growing automation of labor and contraction of resources. This project is aided in cases where class differences overlap with tribal ones. There is a concept in this book mentioned of a "self-preventing prophecy" that is somewhat hopeful. There is a lot of borderline nihilism in many leftist and environmentalist critiques of society. But at the same time it's possible that these critiques are helping build capacity to avoid the worst outcomes that they direly predict, as Orwell's 1984 did. That's perhaps a thin reed to tie ones hopes to, but its not nothing.

[Kusaimamekirai · Rating 2 out of 5]

One would imagine that a book envisioning (but as the author constantly reminds us does not guarantee) four distinct post-capitalist scenarios involving socialism, communism, scarcity and abundance should be if nothing else interesting.
Somehow however, this book is not.
Maybe it’s the overly technical language. Maybe it’s the reliance on science fiction tropes (a genre I’m not particularly familiar with). Most likely it’s the relentless gloom of the author.
Yes, it’s difficult to be bright and cheery about a future with probable resource scarcity run by a wealthy elite as the earth burns up around us.
However there are no solutions here. Within these four scenarios we are unemployed, at the mercy of rich owners of intellectual property, or simply exterminated when we cease to be useful to the capitalist class.
I suppose it’s a useful thought experiment for some, but in a world already filled with gloom, why add to it by reading the flights of fancy of someone who imagines how much worse it could be?

[Kars · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Something new is coming.”

Fuck yes this is good. Short, well-written exploration of what the twin challenges of automation and climate change might bring us in the future. Not as prediction but as a call to arms. Frase mines the history of leftist thought for useful ideas and uses recent sci-fi pop culture as metaphors for exploring them. The book covers a lot of ground in a small package and ties together a lot of ideas that any ‘progressive’ interested in technology has likely already come across but adds value by tying it all together in a coherent if somewhat cheeky two-dimensional framework. Essential.

[TraceyL · Rating 1 out of 5]

Read it for a reading challenge. Economics is just boring, man.

[Ignacio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Agradable lectura que plantea cuatro posibles vías para las próximas décadas, planteada cada una en la intersección de dos ejes: abundancia-escasez e igualdad plena-desigualdad. Como Frase cuenta en la introducción y recuerda en el epílogo, no trata de hacer un ejercicio de futurismo sino, a partir de cuestiones clave en la actualidad (calentamiento global, renta básica universal, la propiedad intelectual, la segregación por clase social, el exterminismo...), discutir sobre cómo podría articularse una sociedad ateniéndose a las condiciones de contorno de esas variables y cuáles sería los mayores problemas, en su formación y en su desarrollo. La conclusión final, de hecho, funciona como un pequeño aldabonazo cuando enfatiza que ya estamos viviendo estos cuatro futuros, aunque no estén distribuidos de manera uniforme (siempre Gibson).

Frase no oculta su militancia marxista, algo evidente a lo largo y ancho de Cuatro futuros. De una manera que puede antojarse básica, aunque no trivial, plantea una serie de cuestiones que son atractivas para el lego y no evitan las aristas, como la barrera que supone el idealismo arcadista o el precio de conseguir una utopía. Y acude a referencias literarias y fílmicas de cf afines a su cosmovisión, bien referenciadas por la edición de Blackie Books. La mayor pega que le encuentro está precisamente en el futuro que evita: la digitalización de la personalidad y el paso de la humanidad a un entorno virtual. Quizás porque de todas las soluciones planteadas sea la que más problemas plantea para su toma de posición.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great read. So great, in fact, that I couldn't put it down. I read it in one day. It felt like the exact book that I needed at this moment. It answered the still lingering question: What's next? Where do we go from here? The biggest takeaway for me was the importance of a universal basic wage. If you have a knee-jerk reaction to the notion of people getting paid for doing nothing, then you should read this book. Technology will inevitably continue to replace workers and drive down the cost of labor (and thus the returns to labor). If that's true, then what are people for? (Credit goes to Wendell Berry for that question.) We're already seeing the effects that automation are having on jobs and wages. McDonalds is, right at this instant, developing technologies to replace its workers. The moment fast-food workers successfully win their bid for a liveable wage, they'll be replaced by machines. And if you think only low-skill workers are at risk, you're wrong. Technologies are already replacing white-collar workers, too. (See Suskind & Suskind, "The Future of Professionals.") But the takeaway is not all doom and gloom. A universal basic wage will allow all of us to live a life liberated from the oppressive forces of capitalism. We can embrace work that is meaningful, not just remunerative. We all wonder, at some point in our lives, what would we do if money didn't matter? Soon, maybe it won't.

[Sanjay Varma · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is really concise. I skimmed the whole thing but was put off by his writing style from giving it more attention. He proposes two axes on which to understand social organization:

Hierarchy --> Equality
Scarcity --> Abundance

He does a business 101 comparison of the four possible quadrants in this matrix. Many of his examples are drawn from sci-fi novels. He tries to squeeze socialism, capitalism, and communism into quadrants, but I think this was unnecessary, and didn't enhance his argument.

I felt like the Hierarchy+Abundance future is the most likely. Though we have abundance enough to provide everyone on earth a good life, this will not happen, the rich will take it all and leave the rest of us to toil and worry each day. Today's "financialization" of the economy is the heaviest chain yoked on humanity's neck since the invention of religion. And the internet is a most ingenious addiction with infinite potential to compensate oppressed people with cost-free imaginary palliatives.

[Vivian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I actually used to imagine the fourth future as a kid - it's scary to think that this could be our potential future. The precedence we've already seen make a lot of the ideas brought up in this book very plausible and I wonder what role I will play in shaping the future as time goes on.

[Szymon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bardzo piękny szkic. Odrobinę szkoda, ze tylko szkic i zarys, chociaż zdaje sobie sprawę, że gdyby miało to być cos głębszego, miałoby 1000 stron i było zupełnie inną książką.
Tym niemniej, daje do myślenia i stymuluje, otwiera. Ważne myśli nie tylko o celach, ale i o drodze. Cytując, "powinniśmy raczej być szczególnie zainteresowani drogą prowadzącą do tych utopii i dystopii niź dokładną charakterystyką miejsc docelowych (...) nie musimy wybierać jednej z czterech przyszłości: możemy mieć je wszystkie i istnieją przejścia z każdej z nich do wszystkich innych". Cztery rodzaje czekajacej nas przyszłości, w wielu miejscach nieoczekiwane przeploty i współzależności.
Bardzo dużo odniesień do kultury popularnej, to na plus też.
Bardzo się cieszę, że mi ją polecono.

[Ana Ulin · Rating 3 out of 5]

My notes: https://anaulin.org/blog/book-notes-f...

[Robin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Four Futures would be an excellent choice for a leftwing bookclub!

[Susana · Rating 4 out of 5]

El ensayo que voy a recomendar cuando me pidan no ficción divertida, social y breve. Se lee en un suspiro y aporta una intrigante reflexión sobre cómo puede ser un futuro posescasez según dos posibles ejes, cambio climático e igualdad social. Todo ello basándose en reflexiones de novelas de ciencia ficción. Me gusta que sugiere y permite reflexionar sobre cómo incluso un futuro de crisis climática sería más llevadero en una sociedad igualitaria que otro más materialmente estable pero donde las actuales desigualdades se mantienen.

[Simon Parent · Rating 4 out of 5]

Decent overview of a few key considerations about our future. I think it was much too light on details, very short, as this sort of subject make me imagine a lot more considerations and scenarios, but based on the arbitrary small axis of consideration (egalitarianism and abundance), it did a decent job, especially in painting a convincing rentier Capitalism picture of our current future.

[Zach · Rating 5 out of 5]

So good. Sci-fi stuff to explain the social changes coming in the very near future. And its got some real passion behind it. Not too long either. Fantastic . huge fan

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

a short read describing the unsettling but impending future post capitalist society.

[Kokelector · Rating 3 out of 5]

El cruce entre ciencia ficción y realidad se hace latente en una posibilidad constante que siempre nos acarrea la chance del futuro. Son cuatro escenarios pensados a la luz de los acontecimientos vividos en ese momento (2016): no había pandemia ni poisible tercera guerra mundial aún; pero si estaban latentes las posibilidades de un futuro que quizás ya está aquí, pero que por las condiciones capitalista es muy desigual para quienes habitamos el planeta. Son cuatro escenarios: Comunismo (cada cuál según sus capacidades y según sus necesidades), Rentismo (rentas en torno a productos), Socialismo (administrar la escasez) y Exterminismo (no quedan suficientes recursos naturales para todas y todos). Cada uno ligado con una obra de ficción que intentó adelante ese futuro. Ante los cambios que se avecinan en Chile y el mundo, la lectura de Peter Frase pasa por entender la automatización que nos entrega la robótica, los avances en salud que ayudan a la longevidad y la escasez de recursos naturales que ya se avecina. Todo entendido desde la perspectiva que aún existen las clases sociales en disputa y que buscan el otorgamiento de beneficios en desmedro de otros. Una lectura interesante para entender el mundo en el cual nos encontramos, y quizás imaginar hacia dónde vamos, porque dentro de sus ensayos la perspectiva de una pandemia mundial que aún nos tiene con restricciones no estaba en su mirada. Pensar cómo aportaremos como seres humanos para que la catástrofe no nos encuentre de manera tan desprevenida. Imaginar y pensar el futuro, siempre será un ejercicio sano de convivencia.

(...) “𝘌𝘴𝘱𝘪𝘯𝘨-𝘈𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘦𝘯 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘤𝘳𝘪𝘣𝘦 𝘭𝘢 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘻𝘢𝘤𝘪ó𝘯 𝘥𝘦𝘭 𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘣𝘢𝘫𝘰 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘰 𝘭𝘢 𝘴𝘪𝘵𝘶𝘢𝘤𝘪ó𝘯 𝘦𝘯 𝘭𝘢 𝘲𝘶𝘦 𝘱𝘶𝘦𝘥𝘦𝘴 𝘴𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘴𝘧𝘢𝘤𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘶𝘴 𝘯𝘦𝘤𝘦𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘴 𝘣á𝘴𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘴 —⁠𝘤𝘢𝘴𝘢, 𝘴𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘥𝘢𝘥 𝘰 𝘴𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘦 𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘳𝘰⁠— 𝘴𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘳 𝘲𝘶𝘦 𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘣𝘢𝘫𝘢𝘳 𝘯𝘪 𝘤𝘶𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘳 𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘶𝘯𝘢 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘪ó𝘯 𝘣𝘶𝘳𝘰𝘤𝘳á𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘢. 𝘌𝘯 𝘭𝘢 𝘮𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘥𝘢 𝘦𝘯 𝘲𝘶𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘨𝘶𝘦𝘴 𝘵𝘰𝘥𝘰 𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘰 𝘚𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘰 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘢𝘥𝘰 𝘥𝘦 𝘦𝘫𝘦𝘳𝘤𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘶 𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘩𝘰 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘰 𝘤𝘪𝘶𝘥𝘢𝘥𝘢𝘯𝘰, 𝘦𝘯 𝘷𝘦𝘻 𝘥𝘦 𝘩𝘢𝘤𝘦𝘳 𝘰𝘵𝘳𝘢 𝘤𝘰𝘴𝘢 𝘢 𝘤𝘢𝘮𝘣𝘪𝘰, 𝘵𝘶 𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘣𝘢𝘫𝘰 𝘩𝘢 𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘰 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘻𝘢𝘥𝘰.” “𝘓𝘢 𝘮𝘪𝘴𝘮𝘢 𝘥𝘪𝘯á𝘮𝘪𝘤𝘢 𝘴𝘦 𝘦𝘷𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘪𝘢 𝘦𝘯 𝘦𝘭 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘺𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘰 𝘥𝘦 𝘞𝘪𝘬𝘪𝘱𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘢, 𝘲𝘶𝘦 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘤𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘢 𝘰𝘵𝘳𝘰 𝘦𝘫𝘦𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘰 𝘥𝘦𝘭 𝘵𝘪𝘱𝘰 𝘥𝘦 𝘭𝘶𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘴 𝘲𝘶𝘦 𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘴𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘯 𝘭𝘢 𝘦𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘪𝘥𝘢𝘥 𝘥𝘦𝘭 𝘤𝘢𝘱𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘮𝘰. 𝘌𝘯 𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘪𝘱𝘪𝘰, 𝘞𝘪𝘬𝘪𝘱𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘢 𝘴𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘪𝘢 𝘢 𝘴í 𝘮𝘪𝘴𝘮𝘢 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘰 «𝘭𝘢 𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘪𝘤𝘭𝘰𝘱𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘢 𝘲𝘶𝘦 𝘤𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘦𝘳𝘢 𝘱𝘶𝘦𝘥𝘦 𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘳», 𝘶𝘯𝘢 𝘪𝘯𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘵𝘶𝘤𝘪ó𝘯 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘧𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘢𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘦 𝘥𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘤𝘳á𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘢 𝘺 𝘥𝘪á𝘧𝘢𝘯𝘢. 𝘌𝘯 𝘭𝘢 𝘱𝘳á𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘢, 𝘯𝘰 𝘦𝘴 𝘵𝘢𝘯 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘻𝘢𝘥𝘢 𝘯𝘪 𝘪𝘨𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘢. 𝘌𝘴𝘵𝘰 𝘦𝘯 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘦 𝘴𝘦 𝘥𝘦𝘣𝘦 𝘢 𝘲𝘶𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘥𝘶𝘤𝘦 𝘭𝘢𝘴 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘪𝘨𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘥𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘴 𝘥𝘦 𝘭𝘢 𝘴𝘰𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘥𝘢𝘥 𝘦𝘯 𝘭𝘢 𝘲𝘶𝘦 𝘴𝘶𝘳𝘨𝘦: 𝘶𝘯 𝘯ú𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘰 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘤𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘥𝘢𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘦 𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘦 𝘥𝘦 𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘴 𝘴𝘰𝘯 𝘩𝘰𝘮𝘣𝘳𝘦𝘴 𝘣𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘰𝘴, 𝘺 𝘦𝘭 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘪𝘥𝘰 𝘥𝘦 𝘞𝘪𝘬𝘪𝘱𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘢 𝘭𝘰 𝘳𝘦𝘧𝘭𝘦𝘫𝘢. 𝘊𝘰𝘯 𝘴𝘰𝘭𝘰 𝘶𝘯 𝘵𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘦 𝘱𝘰𝘳 𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘥𝘦 𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘢𝘴 𝘴𝘦𝘨ú𝘯 𝘶𝘯𝘢 𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘶𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘢 𝘥𝘦 𝟸𝟶𝟷𝟶, 𝘵𝘦𝘮𝘢𝘴 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘰 𝘭𝘢 𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘢 𝘧𝘦𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘢 𝘵𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘯 𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘰𝘴 𝘦𝘴𝘱𝘢𝘤𝘪𝘰 𝘲𝘶𝘦 𝘦𝘭 𝘥𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘥𝘰 𝘢 𝘭𝘰𝘴 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘫𝘦𝘴 𝘴𝘦𝘤𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘰𝘴 𝘥𝘦 𝘓𝘰𝘴 𝘚𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘴𝘰𝘯.” (...)

[MURAT BAYRAKTAR · Rating 2 out of 5]

Peter Frase'in okuyucuya hiçbir şey katmayan ,izlediği ve okuduğu şeylerden etkilendiği çok belli olan, kafası karışıkken bir şeyler karalamak istediği kitabı. Kitap ilgi çekici bir girişle başlayıp ümit vadederken sonraki sayfalarda tamamen hayal kırıklığı yaratarak benim için bir kez daha 'sadece iyi bir fikirle kitap yazılmaz' ı kanıtlıyor. Her bölümde sürekli bilim kurgu ve distopik filmlere veya kitaplara atıflar yaparak, lafı geveleyip tam konuya girecekken hiçbir şey anlatmadan bitiriyor. Can alıcı sorular sorarak okuyucuyu kendisine çekiyor ve tam cevap verecekken bir anda konuyu dağıtıp alakasız yerlere bağlayarak bölümü sonlandırıp diğer bölüme geçiyor. Sürekli kitap ve film alıntıları bir yerden sonra sıkıyor ve kitabı ciddiye almamı engelliyor. Bir türlü fikirlerini -ki çoğu alıntı- bir yere bağlayamıyor ve bize aktaramıyor. Okunmasına gerek olmayan kitaplardan..

[anjana · Rating 5 out of 5]

peter frase quoted arjun!!!!!!!!!!!!! twice!

[Ruedigar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really closet to 3.5 🌟

[jasmine sun · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5* for premise, 3* for execution? one of the rare times i thought a book should’ve been longer!

no one reads ken liu short stories and expects them to be realistic, to build a complete and coherent world, or to outline a path from the present day to the utopia/dystopia portrayed.

likewise, you have to understand what this book is before reading it. this book is not a blueprint, a deep dive, or an analysis of modern capitalism. instead, it’s a brief thought exercise about four post-capitalist futures. it’s more sci-fi than not, though the academic/analytical language can leave you expecting something else.

the introduction clarifies this purpose: frase embraces weber’s extreme “ideal types” approach and assumes away major variables like the automation of most labor. frase instead manipulates two variables: (1) the level of resource scarcity and (2) the level of social hierarchy.

despite having my expectations set, i wish frase spent just a while longer elaborating each possibility. each of the four scenarios is sketched out in less than 50 pages. a sci-fi short of that length focuses on one element of a future society; this book‘s scenarios sketch out the entirety of social/economic/technological/environmental relations. as a result, sections felt insufficiently explained or rushed (“wait, we’re only spending a page there?”).

what i did gain was:
- potential futures to compare and orient my efforts either toward or against
- sparks for new lines of inquiry
- reading recommendations (theory, fiction, etc) in related genres

i also thought frase made a strong case for why activists and theorists should spend more time thinking about utopias - reminded me of kathy weeks’ “utopian demand.”