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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Back in 2019, @NaomiAKlein, @mollycrabapple and @AOC collaborated on a stellar short video set in the years AFTER a successful #GND transition: "A Message From the Future," narrating back to how we got to a place where we no longer feared the future.
Today, Klein has dropped part two in the series: The Years of Repair, once again featuring Crabapple's stop-motion watercolor animations, cocreated with #BLM cofounder @opalayo and @avilewis.
Years of Repair gets closer to our own timeline, describing the transition from our current capitalist crises of disease, incarceration and climate emergencies to a more just world, one devoted to healing and building rather than looting and extracting.
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It's hard to overstate what a tonic this is: breaking free of Capitalist Realism and letting your imagination visit a place where, as a species, we recover the best of our practices, the mutual aid and stewardship that built the world in spite of greed and oppression.
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Since Dec 4, I've been writing my own post-GND novel, "The Lost Cause," about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias funded by offshore plutes, and visiting that world every day has kept me sane through the plague months.
For years, Kim Stanley Robinson has written a series of audacious novels about a post-climate-emergency humanity, starting with 2012's "2312," set 300 years in the future. Since then, he's come closer and closer to the present day.
Robinson is landing an ever-closer series of volleys that start in the the unknowably distant future, then walk back to the present day, reverse-engineering a path from Capitalist Realism to a utopian leap.
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Klein's Messages from the Future are taking a similar path, and the closer they get to our dark moment, the realer (and hence, brighter) the future they paint becomes.
As fascism burns across America, it's important to remember that Trump and his policies are *not popular*.
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Sure, the racism and cruelty excites a minority of (very broken) people, but every component of the Trump agenda is *extremely* unpopular with the American people, from tax cuts for billionaires to kidnapping our neighbors and shipping them to concentration camps.
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If there's one are where tech has shown a consistent aptitude for innovation, it's in accounting tricks that make money-losing companies appear wildly profitable. And AI is the greatest innovator of all (when it comes to accounting gimmicks).
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Since the dotcom era, tech companies have boasted about giving stuff away but "making it up in volume," inventing an ever-sweatier collection of shell-games that let them hide the business's true profit and loss.
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In 2014, I read a political science paper that nearly convinced me to quit my lifelong career as an activist: "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens," published in *Perspectives on Politics*:
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The paper's authors are Martin Gilens, a UCLA professor of Public Policy; and Northwestern's Benjamin Page, a professor of Decision Making. Gilens and Page studied a representative sample of 1,779 policy issues.
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When a company sells you something for $2 that someone else can buy for $1, they're revaluing the dollars in your pocket at half the rate of the other guy's.
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Economists praise "price discrimination" as "efficient." That's when a company charges different customers different amounts based on inferences about their willingness to pay.
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Private equity firms are the demon princes of the hellspace that is the imploding, life-destroying, plutocrat-generating American economy.
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Their favorite scam, the "leveraged buyout" is a mafia bustout dressed up in respectable clothes, and if you mourn a beloved, failed business, chances are that an LBO was the murder weapon, and PE was the killer:
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> One actual therapist is just having ten chat GPT windows open where they just like have five seconds to interrupt the chatGPT. They have to scan them all and see if it says something really inappropriate. That's your job, to stop it.
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