Buy the book #1: Four Futures
Posting seems a good way to make myself (re)read some good books. I’m starting with Peter Frase’s Four Futures (2016). In it, Frase (Jacobin magazine editor and ‘lapsed sociologist’) conducts an illuminating thought experiment: how might automation and climate crisis play out in the context of an already extremely unequal world?
(Note the phrase ‘thought experiement’: this isn’t about prediction; the core premise of the first two futures is that - rather like ‘replicators’ on the USS Enterprise - automation will mean abundance. But abundance on whose terms?)
Frase’s first scenario might feel familiar to readers of Iain M Banks’s Culture novels or viewers of Black Mirror. In a ‘communist’ world of equality and abundance, what will succeed work and money as fuel for purpose and meaning? Time, in a phrase that’s been stuck in my head ever since, to “let a hundred status hierarchies bloom.”
This future won’t much resemble actual communist societies of the twentieth century or distant past; it will look much more like the post-/late-capitalist world of Nosedive and the rest (not to mention our current reality of attention, influence and ‘sovereign individuals’ / rampant egomaniacs). The basic human impulses - around status, sex, violence, art, religion and control - will abide (just as today’s landscape of egomaniacs, patronage and terror recalls everything from the Victorians to the Vikings).
Scenario two is also eerily resonant: a future where an elite controls access to technology and content; taxes people with exposure to advertising; and creates human employment to serve SaaEmpire? That feels a lot like (Fifteen Million Merits and) our enshittified present.
In the second half of the book, Frase switches one variable: in a world of scarcity, should we buckle up for Mad Max, or settle for something more like Silo? (Except his final, worst-case scenario is more Mad Max-meets-Elysium-or-Fallout: surviving the climate crisis is ruthlessly fought for and defended by elites, leaving the rest of us/you to fight among themselves.)
One ray of hope that we might arrive at future three - a ramshackle but roughly egalitarian world of limited resources - comes via a moment in a different book, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future. One narrative fragment, set amid a city in crisis, recalls: “…people hung together with those they knew, for sure, to go get water. Possibly to protect each other from the crazies, if someone lost it or whatever. But that seldom happened. We were so afraid that we behaved well, that was how bad it was… fuck every idiot who thinks [there’s no such thing as society]. I can take them to a place where they will eat those words or die of thirst. Because when the taps run dry, society becomes very real.”