Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #CapitalistRealism
Most recents (5)
History is written by the winners, which is why #Luddite is a slur meaning "technophobe" and not a badge of honor meaning, "Person who goes beyond asking what technology does, to asking who it does it *for* and who it does it *to*."
locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-d… 1/
locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-d… 1/
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
pluralistic.net/2023/02/07/ful… 2/
pluralistic.net/2023/02/07/ful… 2/
#KimStanleyRobinson's #MinistryForTheFuture was groundbreaking, depicting a detailed, plausible transition from a world barreling towards a civilization-ending climate catastrophe to a world that meets the challenge as humanity decides to save itself:
pluralistic.net/2020/12/03/min… 1/
pluralistic.net/2020/12/03/min… 1/
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
pluralistic.net/2022/12/08/one… 2/
pluralistic.net/2022/12/08/one… 2/
Robinson's book is important: it not only disproves the (variously attributed) #CapitalistRealism aphorism that "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism" - it also imagines the means by which that ending was brought about. 3/
It's hard to overstate the impact of @davidgraeber's 2012 *Debt: The First 5,000 Years* on society; it's a truly magesterial history of the way that debt - and debt forgiveness - played in the establishment of advanced civilization and its downfall:
tor.com/2012/04/16/the… 1/
tor.com/2012/04/16/the… 1/
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
pluralistic.net/2022/07/08/jub… 2/
pluralistic.net/2022/07/08/jub… 2/
Graeber - a key #Occupy activist who helped coin "We are the 99%" - drew heavily on the scholarship of Michael Hudson, an economic historian, who led a team of Harvard assyriologists, Egyptologists and archaeologists in a major project exploring the role of debt in antiquity. 3/
My latest column for @locusmag is "The Unimaginable," about the relationship of science fiction plays to the future. Sf is a literature of inspiration and warning, not prediction.
locusmag.com/2021/11/cory-d… 1/
locusmag.com/2021/11/cory-d… 1/
I mean, thank goodness. If the future was predictable, there'd be no point in getting out of bed, because the future would arrive irrespective of our actions. 2/
Sfnal tales that posit a predictable future (like Asimov's "Foundation" or Heinlein's "Jonathan Hoag") are pure fatalism.
Instead of predicting a future, sf imagines *lots* of futures. 3/
Instead of predicting a future, sf imagines *lots* of futures. 3/
The surest recipe for despair is to fall prey to the fallacy of #CapitalistRealism: the idea that "it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism."
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When the world is on fire, sickened, flooding, and on the brink of out-of-control violence and you literally can't imagine any of that changing, it feels like you should just give up.
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This is the point of capitalist realism: to make us believe, as Margaret Thatcher liked to say, that "there is no alternative." It's not just a counsel of despair - it's also a statement in opposition to science fiction's core tenet, that alternatives can always be imagined.
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