Four futures

anaulin reviewed Four futures by Peter Frase

Review of 'Four futures' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

My notes: anaulin.org/blog/book-notes-four-futures/

Mysteriarch 📖 reviewed Four futures by Peter Frase

Review of 'Four futures' on Goodreads

3 stars

A nice mix of leftist political economy and sci-fi speculative world building.

reverse reviewed Four futures by Peter Frase

Review of 'Four futures' on 'Goodreads'

No rating

Peter Frase sets out not to make accurate predictions about the future, but in very broad strokes to describe four possible futures, based on two axes: scarcity/abundance, and authoritarianism/freedom. He gives us visions of those futures and not detailed descriptions, because as he himself writes, such a thing is impossible.

In my opinion, such an undertaking is useful, for people to be able to set courses and be clearer about what kind of future they're fighting for.

I imagine that reading this book expecting something more precise would lead one into disappointment. I was not disappointed.

haagen_daz reviewed Four futures by Peter Frase

Review of 'Four futures' on 'GoodReads'

4 stars

Super super short. So there's a lot of places where Frase simplifies or skips things, not least in the framing of "there are Two Crises, automation and climate change, and I'm gonna analyze them along these two axes." But given the limitations/focus I think this book does a pretty good job of imagining and contrasting different societies we could be living in.

Some of the key assumptions that the book rests on:
- automation will dramatically reduce the need for human labor
- capitalism will end, in the sense that it will stop being the basis for a functional society
Which I find mostly compelling, though I'm not sure how much our automation trajectory will be affected by ecological collapse (which are two crises he treats as orthogonal).

There's also some pretty fun stuff that's basically like, "hey, realistically we are kind of far away from seizing the state & …

Super super short. So there's a lot of places where Frase simplifies or skips things, not least in the framing of "there are Two Crises, automation and climate change, and I'm gonna analyze them along these two axes." But given the limitations/focus I think this book does a pretty good job of imagining and contrasting different societies we could be living in.

Some of the key assumptions that the book rests on:
- automation will dramatically reduce the need for human labor
- capitalism will end, in the sense that it will stop being the basis for a functional society
Which I find mostly compelling, though I'm not sure how much our automation trajectory will be affected by ecological collapse (which are two crises he treats as orthogonal).

There's also some pretty fun stuff that's basically like, "hey, realistically we are kind of far away from seizing the state & the means of production. So in the meantime we can build strength by 'building alternatives to capitalism' and help people exist without depending quite so much on wage labor." Which is a kind of hopeful message, I think. In addition to avoiding the trap of "all we need is revolution," he also avoids a few others:
- ending capitalism will end sexism & racism
- ending capitalism will end hierarchies in general
- automation will mean people work less

And one final note: the four futures he envisions aren't end-points but different states that we can transition between. One could imagine a "rentist" future, with abundance and hierarchy, sliding into an "exterminist" future which then eventually transitions into "communism" for the surviving elite. Room for hope...?

Cam reviewed Four Futures by Peter Frase

Review of 'Four Futures' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

It was a pretty all right primer to thinking about how our society could go and is already going. I've been waiting to read this for a while, and I wish I'd read it when I first heard about it, since it would have had more impact. It uses science fiction and current events to paint pictures of what our future ideology/civilization could look like, and makes them all very real.

Lynn reviewed Four futures by Peter Frase

Review of 'Four futures' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Thought-provoking and in parts somewhat frightening book, but the author's conclusion is reasonable - that any future, or any succession of futures, is possible except a return to a capitalist system in which the behaviour of the wealthy is restricted by their need for human workers (who are rapidly being replaced by automation) to produce profit. Redistribution of resources from the 1% to the rest of the population is one of two key requirements for a non-nightmare future, but the 1% is not likely to go along with this willingly, and with protest of any sort increasingly treated as criminal by an ever-more militarised police force, the road to a non-nightmare future might be rocky indeed.