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Finally, we will have realised that liberal ends of personal fulfilment and self-authorship mean little without socialist means.

— Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani (Page 217)

Prototype politics could not be more different, emphasis ing action and decision, no matter how minor or limited, over rhetorical cooperation. When we wanted to connect the world through trains, cable and roads, it was through example and imitation. When we desired universal literacy and sanitation, the same applied. When we sought democracy and forms of government that served the needs of ordinary people, it was through looking elsewhere and saying, "Why isn't that us?" Now the same impulse must apply in creating the institutions, cultures and technologies to address the problems of our age -from climate change to ageing and technological unemploy ment. This requires a basic admission that has been heretical for much of the left since Fukuyama declared history was over: quick, effective action can only happen through nation states. Complete decarbonisation, in certain respects, is no greater a challenge than road-building, universal literacy or electrification. It's time for us all to stop waiting and make history once more.

— Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani (Page 198)

What is more, luxury populism rejects the folk politics of ethical consumption and the sphere of 'the local' as inherently virtuous. The extent of the solutions needed to address the five crises are planetary, and while action will often be close to home - as the following chapters make clear - acknowledg ing the historic and global scale of any response is critical. Our ambitions must be Promethean because our technol ogy is already making us gods - so we might as well get good at it.

— Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani (Page 189)

A green politics of ecology without a red politics of shared wealth will fail to command popular support. Conversely the promise of red plenty based on fossil fuels and resource scarcity will fall victim to climate breakdown, leaving the world's poor exposed to devastation like never before. Which is why the only politics fit to fight climate change is the demand for FALC-driven by the impulse to lead fuller, expanded lives, not diminished ones.

To the green movement of the twentieth century this is heretical. Yet it is they who, for too long, unwisely echoed the claim that 'small is beautiful' and that the only way to save our planet was to retreat from modernity itself. FALC rallies against that command, distinguishing consumption under fossil capitalism with its commuting, ubiquitous advertising, bullshit jobs and built-in obsolescence from pursuing the good life under conditions of extreme supply, Under FALC we will see more of the world than ever before, eat varieties of food we have never heard of, and lead lives equivalent-if we so wish to those of today's billionaires. Luxury will pervade everything as society based on waged work becomes as much a relic of history as the feudal peasant and medieval knight.

— Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani (Page 188)

At present humanity consumes the resources of 1.6 Earths every year..

— Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani (Page 161)

.. there is more than enough technology for everyone on Earth to live healthy, happy, fulfilling lives. What stands in the way isn't the inevitable scarcity of nature, but the artificial scarcity of market rationing and ensuring that everything, at all costs, is produced for profit.

— Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani (Page 156)

If you doubt it, look into yourself, look at the two most important organs in your body, the brain and heart. Each depends on subtle self-organizing rhythms which now can be modelled by the computer; each is balanced in a delicate zone between too much order and too much chaos; each has the organization of what is called 'a strange attractor'. If the brain's rhythms become too ordered, too repetitive, one has a fit; if the heart's rhythms become too irregular, a heart attack.

— The Architecture of the Jumping Universe: A Polemic by Charles Jencks (Page 15)

Modernism itself was a Post-Christian movement, but it was based on a mechanistic science and a view that the universe developed gradually and deterministically. By contrast, the post-modern 'sciences of complexity' explain a more creative world, a picture filled out by many emergent sciences such as fractals, Chaos Theory, nonlinear dynamics and Complexity Theory itself.

— The Architecture of the Jumping Universe: A Polemic by Charles Jencks (Page 10)

Capitalism has a number of useful features. Yet none of its shortcomings match its inability to accept natural abundance.

— Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani (Page 137)

Just as with mobile since 2000, the adoption of renewable energy in poorer countries will be modular and distributed. Modular because solar cells and lithium-ion storage can be easily added to or upgraded, and distributed because generation and storage will often happen at the level of the household or street rather than a distant power station or energy hub. All of this is possible because of the good fortune of geography: despite being among the poorest countries on Earth, those nations near the equator – in Africa, Central America and Asia – enjoy sunshine like nowhere else. Now, with the onward drive of the experience curve across a range of renewable technologies, we are coming close to a tipping point – where nature’s gifts become an economic blessing.

The numbers speak for themselves. In 2009 a radio, mobile-phone charger, and solar system sufficient to provide four hours of light and television a day would have cost a Kenyan $1,000. Today it’s $350 and falling. Each passing year not only brings energy closer to the world’s poor, but energy far cleaner than fossil fuels and which is price deflationary – forever.

It’s no surprise, then, that a new generation of businesses are looking to cash in on the convergence between rising electricity demand and declining costs for solar. One is M-Kopa, an American startup launched in Kenya in 2011. Today the company has half a million pay-as-you-go customers generating their own solar energy. The company’s model is straightforward and, perhaps rather predictably, resembles the kind of contract associated with mobile phones. Customers pay a deposit of KES 3,500 (approximately $35) to take the system home and then a further KES 50 ($0.50) a day for a year before owning the system outright.

— Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani (Page 108)

The descendants of Atlas another nine years from now may plausibly have the kind of coordination typically associated with an ice skater, gymnast or sculptor. ... until 2015 Atlas had to be permanently plugged into a wall socket. Now, with its 3.7-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack, it can walk around for about an hour.

— Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani (Page 83)