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Comment by peppers-ghost | Hacker News Reader

To me at least it's hard to imagine a good future because I understand climate change will ruin quality of life for most of humanity. I know what must be done to combat it will not be done due to the economic systems that dominate most countries. It's easier to envision the end of the world than it is to envision the end of capitalism.

Just knowing we do have the ability to slow things down, but actively choose not to in the name of profits and comfort is incredibly depressing and demotivating. The future looks bleak because it will be.

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> It's easier to envision the end of the world than it is to envision the end of capitalism.

Yes, so let us try to envision the end of capitalism; in a myriad different stories. That's one thing I want sci fi writers to do.

We don't even need this - we have a pretty good explanation for what's going on, it's just that people don't want to admit it. the reality is that "work grows to fill available space", but, up until a point. Slowing/declining populations, but high workforce productivity speak to the basic tenets of the population-led economic growth model starting to get a little suspect.

A very broad brush view might be that it took 60 years for automations in the workplace to finally match pace with demand, but increasing automation in knowledge work vs the potential for aggregate demand to fall means we'll have to come to terms with the "required" level of productivity, rather than assuming more growth is the objective.

If we can get this right, we might see the globe get more equal, more leisure time, and a shrinking of the investment sector since the pursuit of growth might get more nuanced. All of that would take a long time, though.

Anything written about "Ending Capitalism" will remain speculative fiction for the foreseeable future. Capitalism has become humanity's majority religion--people believe in it almost without question. Ending capitalism as about as likely as ending Christianity or ending Islam. I don't think it's possible to have enough utopian fiction to cause us even envision ending it.

I think we can't see past because we rely on it for how we live today. But if that reliance went away we would drop it in a heartbeat.

Like imagine if we suddenly got access to replicator technology. Why would we need to care about the stock market? No more factories or shipping, just throw in your old bike and get a new back. Not saying that this is a likely scenario, but there's a sliding scale of far-fetchedness between having replicators and having no difference from today that Sci-fi can explore.

If someone suddenly invented the Star Trek replicator, it would be instantly outlawed. The entirety of Corporate America would dump $ billions into lobbying for the harshest possible penalties for producing, selling, owning, or using one.

But the corporation who invented the replicator would have trillions and would theoretically be able to out lobby them.

I supposed we'd reach the inevitable equilibrium: Corporations are allowed to use and profit from replicators, but individual people are not.

Eventually replicators that can make other replicators would get invented and then who can or would care to enforce those laws?

Everyone has access to the "copy / cp" commands, yet the USA to this day criminalizes its use on certain digital files, at the behest of the (relatively small) Copyright Industry. I have no doubt that a working "copy, but for physical stuff" would be criminalized in the same way, this time with massive physical goods industries pushing for legislation. Enforcement would be draconian.

> Enforcement would be draconian.

Or at least some industry advocacy group would resurrect the "You wouldn't download a car!" ad campaign.

If it was an almost-replicator big corps would mass produce it and sell it. If it was an actual replicator that can also make other replicators you'd only need a few of them before anyone can get one from their neighbour.

> Yes, so let us try to envision the end of capitalism; in a myriad different stories. That's one thing I want sci fi writers to do.

It does seem like everyone on this thread wants that as the main authors mentioned are ursula le guin (e.g. the dispossed) and iain m banks.

>It's easier to envision the end of the world than it is to envision the end of capitalism.

Is it? Or have people just convinced themselves that everything except their personal utopia is capitalism?

Not sure I understand what you're getting at here. The only country not dominated by market forces that I know of is China and it's barely the case even there.

> The only country not dominated by market forces that I know of is China and it's barely the case even there

There are diverse examples that are much better for this than China. E.g. Bhutan or North Korea. There are also non-national societies such as the Amish.

Are any of these societies something you'd aspire to move towards in your country?

I'm saying: I can imagine ways of running a political economy other than capitalism, and I know of other people who have done more work than I have to imagine such things, but there just doesn't seem to be very much interest in an authentically post-capitalist system relative to the vast interest in taking some other political issue entirely (technology, the environment, race, gender, various national or inter-imperial rivalries, etc) and conflating it with capitalism to encourage pouring a lot of effort into it (the thing conflated with capitalism).

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