240 pages
English language
Published Jan. 9, 2021 by Melville House Publishing.
What would a fair and equal society actually look like? The world-renowned economist and bestselling author Yanis Varoufakis presents his radical and subversive answer in a work of speculative fiction that recalls William Morris and William Gibson
The year: 2035.
At a funeral for Iris, a revolutionary leftist feminist, Yango is approached by Costa, Iris’s closest comrade, who urges him to carry out Iris’s last wish: plough into her secret diaries to tell their story. “But”, Costa insists “leave out anything that might help Big Tech replicate my technologies!”
That night Yango delves into Iris’s diaries. In them he discovers a chronicle of how Costa’s revolutionary technologies had unveiled an actually existing, fully democratized, postcapitalist society. Suddenly he understands Costa’s obsession with the hackers trying to steal his secrets.
So begins Yanis Varoufakis’s extraordinary novelistic thought-experiment, where the world-famous economist offers an invigorating and deeply moving vision of an alternative …
What would a fair and equal society actually look like? The world-renowned economist and bestselling author Yanis Varoufakis presents his radical and subversive answer in a work of speculative fiction that recalls William Morris and William Gibson
The year: 2035.
At a funeral for Iris, a revolutionary leftist feminist, Yango is approached by Costa, Iris’s closest comrade, who urges him to carry out Iris’s last wish: plough into her secret diaries to tell their story. “But”, Costa insists “leave out anything that might help Big Tech replicate my technologies!”
That night Yango delves into Iris’s diaries. In them he discovers a chronicle of how Costa’s revolutionary technologies had unveiled an actually existing, fully democratized, postcapitalist society. Suddenly he understands Costa’s obsession with the hackers trying to steal his secrets.
So begins Yanis Varoufakis’s extraordinary novelistic thought-experiment, where the world-famous economist offers an invigorating and deeply moving vision of an alternative reality.
Another Now tells the story of Costa, a brilliant but deeply disillusioned, computer engineer, who creates a revolutionary technology that will allow the user a “glimpse of a life beyond their dreams” but will not enslave them. But an accident during one of its trial runs unveils a cosmic wormhole where Costa meets his DNA double, who is living in a 2025 very different than the one Costa is living in.
In this parallel 2025 a global hi-tech uprising, begun in the wake of the collapse of 2008, has birthed a post-capitalist world in which work, money, land, digital networks and politics have been truly democratized. Banks have been eliminated, as well as predatory, data-mining digital monopolies; the gig economy is no more; and the young are free to experiment with different careers and to study ”non-lucrative topics, from Sumerian pottery to astrophysics.”
Intoxicated, Costa travels to England to tell Iris, his old comrade, and her neighbor, Eva, a recovering banker turned neoliberal economics professor, of the parallel universe he has discovered. Costa eventually leads them back to his workshop in America where Iris and Eva meet their own doubles, and confront hard truths about themselves and the daunting political challenge that “the Other Now” presents.
But, as their obsession with the Other Now deepens, time begins to run out, as the wormhole begins to deteriorate and hackers begin to unleash new attacks on Costa’s technology. The trio have to make a choice: which 2025 do they want to live in?
Varoufakis has been claiming for a while that we already live in postcapitalist times. That, since the 2008 crisis, capitalism has been morphing into technofeudalism. Another Now, a riveting work of speculative fiction, shows that there is a realistic, democratic alternative to the technofeudalpostcapitalist dystopia taking shape all around us. It also confronts us with the greatest question: how far are we willing to go to bring it about?
An enjoyable detailed modern vision of a tech-supported financial utopia.
Kinda depressing though - if that's the systemic change we need to save ourselves then it's safe to say humanity is finished.
As a sci-fi book, this one is certainly lacking.
But in sketching a post-capitalist world it is really astounding.
It's hard to wrap your head around how the world could function without capitalism, but Yanis explains in (sometimes to much) detail how it can function. And what a glorious world it can be.
After reading "Talking to my daughter" I expected another non-fiction book. Big surprise, Yanis Varoufakis wrote a science fiction novel that plays in the near future. The plot is, that the protagonist Costa who is a scientist managed to create a wormhole into a parallel universe. This "other now" diverted from our branch of reality after the global financial crisis of 2008. People in "our now" have counterparts in the "other now" and they can exchange messages on how the parallel universe evolved after the crisis.
It turns out that they have learned their lessons after the big headache and changed direction so that they abandonded capitalism and all the greed coming from it. Yes, they had also incidentes where people fell for the temptation of getting rich fast, but they even overcame this.
Yanis Varoufakis wrote an interesting metaphor about what could be if we would focus on other …
After reading "Talking to my daughter" I expected another non-fiction book. Big surprise, Yanis Varoufakis wrote a science fiction novel that plays in the near future. The plot is, that the protagonist Costa who is a scientist managed to create a wormhole into a parallel universe. This "other now" diverted from our branch of reality after the global financial crisis of 2008. People in "our now" have counterparts in the "other now" and they can exchange messages on how the parallel universe evolved after the crisis.
It turns out that they have learned their lessons after the big headache and changed direction so that they abandonded capitalism and all the greed coming from it. Yes, they had also incidentes where people fell for the temptation of getting rich fast, but they even overcame this.
Yanis Varoufakis wrote an interesting metaphor about what could be if we would focus on other things than just money and greed. The book shows a wide spectrum of ideas, has references to the global pandemic, references to the Star Trek universe where people strive to improve and yes, there is even a section about sex. The other characters in the book, Iris, Eva and Thomas have interesting discussions about the future of economy where they have diverse positions.
An interesting read, even if the start and the end is a bit confusing.
