Adds book: sci-fi: four futures

books/scifi/four-futures.mdwn

+[[!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