On Four Futures

This little book isn’t especially profound, but it gave me something to chew on. I turned to it because I’m constantly baffled by the news, especially where it touches technology and economics — it feels like a seismic shift is underway that could decouple us from the capitalist mode of production, and not necessarily for the better. Frase speaks to exactly that worry, though he was writing nearly a decade ago; I don’t think I’d caught on to the scale of automation back then (he argues it had been ignored, largely because labor got cheaper after the 2008 crisis). His four “ideal types” of the future all assume mass automation has happened.

The first, “communism,” imagines an egalitarian, post-scarcity world — the Star Trek scenario, the dream, the thing to aim for. I’ve long wondered about the kinds of alienation that might arise there: many of us derive meaning from our work, and we might be deprived of it. I’m not fully convinced by that worry. What I did find compelling is his point that smaller hierarchies might form around reputation, the way they do in high school — though even that wouldn’t be grave, because reputation wouldn’t be welded to material survival the way it is now, when being disliked can cost you your job and therefore your food.

The second, “rentism,” is the one I find most likely. It amounts to: there’s no such thing as real scarcity, but fuck you, we’ll manufacture it anyway. Frase comes at it through intellectual property. In theory we have access to all the books, music, films, and shows we could want; in practice, pirate them and you risk heavy fines and prison. There’s obviously something to be said for paying creators — but even in 2024 that’s mostly not what happens. Routledge or Taylor & Francis sell a book for $150 and the author sees $2 in royalties; on a stream, Spotify takes seventy percent, the labels take most of the rest, and the musician gets what’s left. This is largely the status quo already, even if physical goods still know real scarcity. The third chapter, “socialism,” is the scenario where scarcity exists but we manage it as best we can — solarpunk, basically, and that’s about all I have to say about it.

The fourth, “exterminism,” takes seriously the idea that labor and productivity fully decouple. Part of what makes capitalism what it is is that capitalists depend on the proletariat as much as the proletariat depends on them; in this scenario the capitalists no longer need labor and can cut it loose, with everything produced by bots, so that we all starve or get killed or meet some other horrible end. At first I thought it the least likely scenario — I shouldn’t have been so naive. Then Frase raises Palestine: Israel once relied on cheap Palestinian labor, but over the past twenty years it has “diversified” toward Asian and African migrants. When Palestinians were necessary to the Israeli economy, cynical as that is, they were protected by that necessity; now that they aren’t, the state has a carte blanche to commit genocide without jeopardizing its own interests. That is the exterminist scenario.

Rentism is, by far, the most likely to me — a transformation of the status quo into something comparable under postcapitalism. Frase’s communism is the least likely, and also the one I pray we reach. Exterminism and socialism are toss-ups, but I’d call exterminism the more probable. Frase tries to reassure us that we might zigzag among several of these, which, fine — but two of them are flatly dystopian and should never see the light of day. I went in expecting little rigor and was pleasantly surprised. You won’t find detailed forecasts here, but the book gave me the material to even imagine a world beyond capitalist realism, both the versions that are worse and the ones worth fighting for.