Thread by @ExcelPope

I’m trying to read Bastani’s book, but I really don’t know how much longer I can put up with shit like this.

Also, little annoyances…he talks about “Cassandras” who have been predicting the death of Moore’s Law for years, yet have been wrong.
Why use that particular term, incorrectly, when there were plenty of correct options?

“In 1990, at just 35, Romer authored a now celebrated academic paper titled Endogenous Technological Change”
At ‘just 35’, eh? It’s hardly child prodigy terrain, is it?
Unrelated: Bastani turned 35 in February.

“The Bank of England, Oxford University, a global technology consultancy and the United States Congress are far from siren voices that are easy to dismiss.”
His fondness for mythological mixed metaphors is really starting to get to me.

Profoundly wishing Bastani had the large brains of a few of his ancestors helping out, to avoid page-filling dross like this.

I have made it to 100 pages in! The main problem is that there’s been less than 20 pages worth of material. In several places he repeats himself, almost word-for-word. Yes, Aaron, I am now completely clear that the steam engine was invented…can we move on?

“Like a nuclear reactor fixed at the centre of our solar system, the Sun is responsible for every organism you’ll ever see.”
Aaron seems unclear on what happens at nuclear reactors.

Passed the half-way mark, but I can take no more today! I’m off to bed, to dream dreams of fully automated luxury communism.

“Private business was incapable of even launching a liquid-propellant rocket into orbit until 2008, sixty-four years after a V2 left the Earth’s atmosphere. So much for private sector innovation.”
Stupid private business, not doing immensely costly things for no reason.

This reads very much like he thinks this figure means people were living much longer, rather than there was a huge reduction in infant mortality.

“If all of this sounds dizzying, that’s because it should”
How would any editor let a sentence that illiterate make it into a published book?

185 pages in, having struggled through an especially boring chapter on creating synthetic food (complete with *another* comparison of binary and DNA bases), and the maestro is finally about to start explaining Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Yay?

Friends, I don't think I'm going to make it…
"Capitalist realism is simply too adaptable for a radical politics of management and technocracy, meaning any rupture must be understandable to most people in an idiom that they readily understand."

I think he's saying that the revolution is going to have to be dumbed down. The irony of him saying that in the least comprehensive way possible is…

"You can live only your best life under FALC"

I can confirm that we're not yet under FALC.

"Our ambitions must be Promethean because our technology is already making us gods"
STOP DOING THIS! READ THE FUCKING PLOT SUMMARY OF A MYTHICAL TALE BEFORE YOU REFERENCE IT!

Breaking: Bastani has just confirmed that FALC will not, repeat NOT, be delivered by storming the Winter Palace.
If you are currently travelling to St Petersburg, abort! ABORT!

"It is like ouroboros - the snake of ancient mythology that eats its own tail - intentionally designed to create inequality and a weak incapable state."
Oh, I give in. Whatever. Yes, the snake eating its own tail was the universal sign of inequality.

"It may prove the handbrake helping reverse privatisation…"

"There is a world to win"
And, with those words, I HAVE FINISHED THE BOOK!
(I'm not reading the bibliography, I'm not @JeremyDuns)

I'd like to offer my sincere condolences to Leo Hollis, Bastani's editor who, according to the acknowledgements, "made this an infinitely better book". I can only shudder with revulsion at the thought of what the raw material he got was like.

Like Orwell's 'The Road to Wigan Pier', FALC is a book of 2 halves. The first about the present, the 2nd laying out a course for the future.
It's also written using the Latin alphabet, to form English words, written left-to-right.
There comparisons end.

Bastani is not a good writer and, worse than that, he's dull and repetitive.

Some of the stuff about current and near-future technology could be interesting, but he lacks the intellect to explore or explain and he falls into the trap of assuming that positive trends will continue long enough, and that solutions to big problems are close at hand.

If you're interested in that kind of thing then read a book that can do them justice. My personal recommendation would be 'Soonish', by Kelly & Zach Weinersmith.
amazon.co.uk/s?k=soonish&re…

Three-quarters of the book are taken up with bad explanations (and re-explanations) of technology and it's falling price, before we're really introduced to FALC.

And what a disappointment it is. Populism, state ownership, better public services and investment banks.
Several people have commented that Bastani is re-inventing the world of Star Trek. Oh, how I wish he had. At least that would be vaguely interesting.

Instead we get 185 pages on the wonders that capitalism has achieved, and is making ever cheaper, followed by 60-pages on why we must immediately abandon capitalism.

Orwell understood the arguments against socialism, and addressed them one-by-one, building his case on the leg-work he'd done meticulously chronicling the lives of people at the bottom of the social heap.

Bastani tells you that life is (mainly) getting better, and then glues Labour's 2017 manifesto onto the end.

It would be nice to think that post-scarcity is achievable. If it is then it will radically change our world. Let's hope the architects of that new world have more to draw on than the unambitious blueprints of a dullard.
/END

I'm glad this thread has been so popular, thank you all. My notifications have been a bit manic, so my apologies if I've missed a few brilliant responses and witty bon mots. I'd go and look for them now, but I really need a bit of a lie-down.