 A great, quick-and-easy read. Peter Frase takes the "specters of ecological catastrophe and automation" (p. 1) as the motivation for his four futures. These futures are "deliberately hyperbolic, sketching out simplified ideal types to illustrate fundamental principles" (p. 9). (Interestingly, I used the words "hyperbolic" and "ideal types" to describe my own project on the future of migration.) His contribution to the debate is "politics, and specifically class struggle" (p. 21). This is a perspective that I welcome, given the oddly apolitical discussions of automation (reskilling, upskilling, etc. is completely absent of discussions of ownership and worker power).
Frase assumes, for the purposes of the exercise, that automation will completely do away with the need for human labour; "automation is the constant, ecological crisis and class power are the variables" (p. 28). With these variables Frase creates a two-by-two grid, with Abundance and Scarcity (ecological crisis) on the one side and Equality and Hierarchy (Class Power) on the other. Frase calls the combination of equality and abundance "Communism." In this world, everyone is free from the compulsion of meaningless work, and "labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want" (p.41). Frase has an interesting discussion on how this world (under his assumptions of abundance) could be created. Going beyond the dichotomy of reform or revolution, he talks about "non-reformist reforms," which would gradually subvert the power relations in the system. One example of a non-reformist reform is Universal Basic Income. If a Universal Basic Income program is designed so that it would free people from meaningless work, it would drive wages up for meaningless work, leading to automation by capitalists, leading to abundance and the eventual disappearance of the money economy. Frase does not believe that status hierarchies will disappear. He likens the capital relation as "a kind of social magnet, with capital on one end and labor at the other, that tends to align all other social hierarchies with the master hierarchy based on money" (p. 59). In this world, "a hundred status hierarchies [will] bloom." The combination of abundance and hierarchy leads to the scenario of "Rentism," where capitalists own the means to producing abundance (patents and copyrights). The key to understanding this scenario are the laws of intellectual property, which "dictates not only rights to the possession of physical objects but also over the copying of patterns" (p. 71). In this world, the economic system has changed from production of commodities (capitalism) to extraction of rents. In this world, automation will have rendered people useless as labour, but necessary as consumers. The only jobs that might exist are creators (of IP), lawyers, marketers (as there is a limited number of consumers to buy IP), and guards (to protect owners of IP), and all of these jobs could be rendered superfluous as well. The next two scenarios take into account the climate crisis, which will impose a condition of scarcity and limits on consumption. Socialism is what Frase calls the scenario with equality and scarcity. This scenario will require a radical rethinking between the relationship between human beings and nature. Frase comments that this will involve more human interference with nature instead of the opposite; there is no pure and pristine state of nature in balance, nature just is, and humans are a part of it. This scenario is called socialism because a state will be necessary to organize the large transformations in infrastructure and energy systems, and because wealth equality will ensure that all people survive through climate change, not just the most wealthy. This does not mean that economic activity will rely solely on central planning: the state can use production targets and let market mechanisms go to work to determine an efficient outcome. Finally, the scenario Exterminism combines hierarchy and scarcity. In this scenario, only a small privileged few are able to enjoy a high standard of living (so this is a situation of communism for the few) and automation has made the poor masses superfluous as producers of economic value, but potentially dangerous for the rich. The "solution" for the elite class? Extermination of the masses. Frase discusses the trends that are already happening, there is our heavily militarized society, the militarization of the police, walled off enclaves for the rich, the surveillance state, and a prison system that, in the United States, "now incarcerates 2 million people" (p. 135). Like the other scenarios, there are already signals that point to a possible emergence of elements of this scenario. Frase is completely ignorant of foresight and future studies--he does reference about "futurism," which he describes as works "that attempt to directly predict the future" (p.26) and puts himself in the lineage of world building and speculative fiction instead. However, this book was one of the best and most provocative futures-related works I've read this year. (Perhaps it is because he also speaks the language of the social sciences?) I think that his example shows the importance of multidisciplinarity, good scholarship, and good thinking in the space. Futurists need to be more than mere technicians or technology geeks--futurists need to be thinkers.
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 My friend Aaron's first "novel," although it might be more accurate to call it a collection of stories. The stories follow the unnamed first person protagonist ("I") and his unnamed girlfriend, who is always referred to in second person ("you"). The couple travels to various locations all over the world--they are rootless, transnational subjects--and talk about stories and books, this and that. The dialogue between the pair and the exploratory freedom with which the book is written reminded me a little bit of Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist and His Master.
The book begins with the anxiety of separation; there is the reference of the thirty cans of pineapple in Chungking Express: "I am a can of pineapple. Cop 223 is as well. We're watching Chungking Express. On April 1, Cop 223's girlfriend, May, leaves him" (p.9). This is one of the only consistent themes throughout. It serves as a weak connection for all of the stories and adds a latent tension. This theme is returned to in the concluding story, "Kafka's Guide to Love," as a way of wrapping up the book. Some of the stories lacked connective tissue to such an extent that I wondered if this was deliberate. The story "Snow in June" ends with "I wake up the next morning and you are not next to me. You don't leave a note, nor do you answer the phone... Maybe you'll be gone for a while" (p. 83). The next story, "Grocery Shopping in the Desert," begins with "We are naked" (p.85): an ellipsis... Perhaps Aaron is attempting to subvert Western novelistic narrative conventions? The writing is quite experimental. Different writing conventions are used: some stories are sub-divided using numbers (a la Milan Kundera in Aaron's own admission, although it was used differently than Kundera; Kundera modeled his novels after the structure of musical compositions, and used numbers to control the "tempo" of his sections); some stories use screenwriting conventions to mark dialogue (e.g. "You: Your eyes are brown"); in the chapter the "Kitchen God," Aaron experiments with a summative triplet at the end of the sub-sections. Various texts are referenced in all of the stories. These texts modulate and actively shape the stories by providing a new frame of reference with which to understand the story, (e.g references to Goethe and Barthes in "I Am the One Who Waits") and by seeping into the writing itself (the first chapter, "Do You Like Pineapples?" is a good example). Whether as homage or play, Aaron subtly references images, characters, and scenes from other writers in the book. "I notice a little mole on your lower back" (p. 12) (Murakami), man in a baseball hat in Macao (felt like some of Murakami's male characters), "you" smokes Virginia Slims (Wind-Up Bird Chronicles), "Is it you?" (p. 113) (Yoko Tawada's "The Bath"), the lunch meeting serving as an interpreter for a rich Asian couple (Yoko Tawada's "The Bath"). I noticed mostly references to Murakami and Yoko Tawada, although I am sure there are others. I thought that the best story is "I Am Writing about a Hole," which was nominated for the 2018 Pushcart Prize for nonfiction. Aaron writes that "When the hole is present, the part of you that wants to speak vanishes and you lose the desire to say anything..." (p. 134). The hole is tangentially connected to racism and Orientalist discourses. Aaron uses the films of Clint Eastwood, an essay by Salman Rushdie, Lost in Translation, and more to try to better understand the hole. He decides "to look for ways to deal with such issues without getting angry" (p. 143). Through Mo Yan, Haruki Murakami, and Yoko Tawada (all non-Western writers), he learns how to deal with the hole. And as he writes about the hole, the hole disappears--a Nietzschean move of overcoming through art.  A relatively quick, light, and interesting read. Not a serious academic study, even though Rybczynski is a professor at McGill University. No citations or theoretically abstruse language, although I could tell that the book required some academic research.
Rybczynski begins his study with Vivaldi's The Four Seasons--the weekend is an artificial construct in comparison to the cadences of the natural world. Does the weekend mark the shift from the pastoral to the industrial? Interestingly, according to Rybczynski's research, the 7-day week has remained fairly consistent for centuries, despite various official attempts to change it; Rybczynski concludes tentatively thay "it is certainly within the realm if possibility that the seven-day week is an instinctive attempt to establish a social calendar that more or less corresponds to an internal biological fluctuation" (p.49). While there were prescribed days of rest (e.g. Sabbath), leisure and the modern weekend was another development. Rybczynski traces its development to the formation of the middle-class consumer and, interestingly, commercial interests. He notes that the novel--a definitive leisurely pursuit--"was, from the first, a commercial venture" (p. 92). As activities of leisure became widespread, it increasingly became a public concern, especially as taverns, pubs, and gaming houses became popular locations of leisure. This contributed to the development of institutions of public leisure like the library. As for the modern weekend, it emerged as a combination of various factors, like the concession between capital and labour and the humanitarian efforts of the Early Closing Association, whose members were horrified at the working conditions in factories. Rybczynski goes on with his study into our contemporary forms of leisure, into leisure in some other societies, and more, but I will stop my study here. Read this off and on over a period of a couple of months; I cannot remember my varied impressions. |
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