I can’t remember the source, but there’s a quote that goes “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”.
I’ve yet to read any kind of optimistic sci-fi that operates in a capitalist society. The two most obvious (Star Trek and the Culture) both envision a post-scarcity society enabled by technology so advanced it might as well be magic.
At the time when he killed himself Fisher was developing the idea of "Psychedelic Socialism" as a potential counter to Capitalist Realism. I enjoyed this discussion of the idea:
As I understand it, the idea is that "consciousness raising" is a necessary component of catalyzing and maintaining the sense of empowerment, hope, and motivation necessary for a social movement to succeed. Although the consciousness raising in psychedelic socialism could literally be psychedelic drugs, Fisher is mostly using that are a metaphor. Consciousness raising could also take the forms like music & art, yoga, religion, ritual, reading circles, etc.
This suggests that things like the New Age beliefs of the Hippy movement, the Pan-African/Afrofuturist symbolism of the civil rights movement, or the rock and roll of the anti-Vietnam protests were not just trivialities. Rather they were essential to the movement's ability to impact the world.
Note: If you search for discussions of "Psychedelic Socialism" or related terms like "Acid Communism", a lot of the discussion that you will find is (not surprisingly) among proponents of drug/psychedelic exploration.
Personally, although I found some of the specifics of their viewpoints a little wacky (and in particular some of them are disturbingly anti-psychology), I found the overall ideas that they raised useful. That is to say: for your average person I think the best course of action is to just "absorb what is useful and discard the rest" when reading their discussions.
> technology so advanced it might as well be magic
All "optimistic" sci-fi is reliant on a utopian fantasy in some form, I wouldn't be looking to sci-fi authors to actually have a workable recipe for how to achieve any given desired societal outcome..
Really that quote is just asinine stupidity because literally anything undefined is harder to imagine than the end of the world with a side of throwing in of the usual socialist sophistry "everything I don't like is capitalism's fault!". It literally is "It is totally capitalism's fault that I am unable to come up with a better alternative to capitalism!" Never mind that they are the idiots who have spent lifetimes trying to solve economic problems using philosophical divorce-from-reality-is-an-intrinsic-virtue models and economic models that are so bad that they would have been laughed at as a joke by even bronze age merchants.
Divorce-from-reality-as-virtue was stupid back when Aristotle was using triangular models of falling objects and it even is stupider now.
I don't get how so many supposedly smart, educated people fall for things which are so obviously complete and utter bullshit.
Peoples inability to come up with a better alternative doesn’t mean there aren’t issues with capitalism.
Fossil fuels are the easiest and most effective way of powering transport at the moment (and pretty much the only game in town for air travel). Doesn’t mean they aren’t a massive problem.
The Windows API is no longer the focus for .Net. They are very clearly pushing large scale web apps.
I’d be curious to know what percentage of people are still writing windows clients. I suspect there’s a lot of legacy code still out there, but it’s clearly not the future
> Tom Waits did have a point that I think today's content creators need to take onboard. With music it was not always about money for everyone, the love of music was motivating enough, bringing people together for a good time.
The difference is that artists used to be able to earn a decent living from selling their art.
Today, artists (unless they are actually producing physical artifacts) are expected to give their work away for free (or for so little as to be pointless).
Deciding not to do “normal” things is fine. You don’t want to drink or smoke or watch TV? Good for you.
But it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. You can enjoy some really great TV and ignore the reality dreck. You can have a beer with friends or enjoy a wine with a meal without being an alcoholic.
And you can go for a run without feeling the need to look down on people who don’t want to do ultras.
I've seen the opposite. Business hires new CTO who has no knowledge of existing stack and why it is breaking but sells the top brass on a low code replacement because of how quickly he can build with it. Spends a year building the replacement, forces a hard switch and fireworks ensue.
I've never seen a local hardware store shed kit that wasn't complete garbage for the price.
Building a simple shed isn't hard, if you can handle assembling the kit you can buy and cut the basic materials yourself. The trickier parts like getting it watertight or installing doors and windows have to be done either way, all the kit gets you is a bundle of inferior materials and a bit of time savings cutting studs.
Canada has almost 100% public health insurance coverage, while Switzerland insurance is entirely private. The US is a mix.
The US public school system is based on where you live, while Sweden has a school voucher system where parents can choose where their kids go including private schools.
Swiss insurance is definitely NOT private the way US understands it so let's not throw them in the mix as an argument for private insurance. It's run by private companies true, but the rules to run them are very strict, established by the state and revised periodically both by the state and by popular referendums. So, there's absolutely no free insurance market and I'm happy having it this way.
This actually is a good point. Capitalism and Socialism are broad labels that make little sense outside of scholastic arguments.
As a side note, I live in a wealthy European parliamentary monarchy with stellar press freedom ratings and an abysmal quality of press that makes me want to ignore all local news outright. Is there an -ism for that? Decadentism?
Nope. Education is on par with neighbors if not better. Quality of pre-school and primary education is great, secondary and tertiary are acceptable.
But... The only news-only FM radio that expanded from a nearby country was banned and replaced by a stub Catholic FM radio some 10 years ago. Politics is non-existent. Parties are melting pots of scrubs.
"Social Democracy" is typically used as shorthand for "Social Market Economy". Which itself is obviously slightly fuzzy, technically speaking, but again is shorthand for "a mixed system where the State has a significant and proactive role redistributing wealth and identifying priorities, asserting primacy over pure market forces". How that is implemented can vary.
This is the problem when people talk about "socialism", "capitalism", "free market", and these kind of terms. Almost every country on the planet today has some elements of that – barring some extreme outliers – with all sorts of different different implementations and restrictions.
Talking about these concepts in broad general strokes is worse than useless; it just muddles things. Talk about health care, or social security, or specific free market issues, or specific things like that instead.
Medicare is "socialism" and popular; it was already instituted in 1973 (when this article was written). The American people had already "chosen socialism", just not the extreme version the author seems to implicitly assume.
Not socialism, that is what it is. The name is rather unfortunate as it brings up this confusion with big-S Socialism but social democracy is probably best defined as a balance between a free-market capitalist economy with a tax-financed social security system, tax-financed (e.g. Sweden, the U.K.) or through some mandatory insurance scheme (e.g. the Netherlands) universal healthcare, affordable (usually free) schooling up to ~16-18 years of age, often with some form of school choice which counteracts the ideological capture seen in some public school systems. Social democracy is not a precursor to "Democratic Socialism" (an oxymoron since it is hard to see how all private means of production can be "democratically" nationalised). It is the most likely end stage of a free market economy since it has shown to be a workable solution to the problems posed by unbridled free-market capitalism without taking away the benefits of the latter.
Have a look at one of those "happiness surveys" [1] and you'll find that the top countries in those list tend to be social democracies in some way or form. Find some Socialist countries - hint: look towards the bottom of the list - and you'll find people are less happy when the promised Utopia remains outside of reach - for them.
The US has killed, jailed, blacklisted, and otherwise denied civil liberties to people for having leftist politics. Whether that's "purely capitalist" or not, it's still not safe to be a leftist in the USA.
> Whether that's "purely capitalist" or not, it's still not safe to be a leftist in the USA.
I don’t disagree.
Remember that “shocking” scene from the Newsroom years ago where the main character had the audacity to suggest the US wasn’t the freedom-est country in the world?
The rest of the world just nodded and said “yeah, we know”.
It's not. It's got nothing to do with capitalism, pure or otherwise. In fact, I think there's a case for saying that the US state is both very large and highly invasive in people's lives both in, and outside, the USA. And that's a very un-capitalist trait.
I have to say I literally laughed when I saw the headline. Housing in NZ is still ridiculous. It’s dropped a bit in the last 6 months, but NZ easily ranks in the top 10 least affordable countries to buy a house, ESPECIALLY in Auckland
I’ve yet to read any kind of optimistic sci-fi that operates in a capitalist society. The two most obvious (Star Trek and the Culture) both envision a post-scarcity society enabled by technology so advanced it might as well be magic.