Postcapitalism
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Mason discusses the existential threat posed to capitalism by the digital revolution. He argues that the digital revolution has the potential to reshape utterly our familiar notions of work, production and value; and to destroy an economy based on markets and private ownership. In fact, he contends, this is already happening. He points to parallel currencies, co-operatives, self-managed online spaces, even Wikipedia as examples of what the postcapitalist future might look like. Mason argues that from the ashes of the global financial crisis, we have the chance to create a more socially just and sustainable global economy.
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Highly engaging and entertaining. A curious read for anyone that will be around in some form, frozen or not, past 2050. In the first part of the book Mason provides an entertaining, if not deeply labor biased, summary of economic thought from Adam Smith and Karl Marx to Kondratieff. Here Mason sets up his basic argument that Neoliberal Capitalism is a gamed system whose primary tools: fiat money and financialization will become less effective as we move toward an information based system of Capitalism where increasingly the goods that we buy and sell are not influenced by the traditional rules of scarcity that drive supply and demand and ‘rational' markets. In short with IT, Robotics, AGI, Nanotech, 3D printing, Holograms, Crypto Currencies and VR much of what our economy will produce in the near future we will be able to create, copy and distribute for free and Mason appears optimistic that there is nothing that governments or corporations can do to prevent it. And since InfoTech will automate most of our work our rapidly expanding population of workers will not have sufficient means to acquire capital. In this scenario zero cost production and distribution seems almost required.
The scope of this book is large and I plan to reread it in a few months once some more substantive critiques come out. In the interim I'll just highlight some other points I found interesting:
Mason compares the upcoming shift that Capitalism will undergo as similar to what occurred from Feudalism to Merchant Capitalism. He uses the plays of Shakespeare to make visible some of the social changes that occurred during the playwrights' life. In an interview on the Guardian Mason suggested that people watch Wolf Hall (I've only read it) to get an understanding of what this transition will be like. I'll just remind you that even the crafty Cromwell could not navigate those times with his head still on.
Environmental and population demographic pressures are covered but too briefly. He describes regional haves and have nots where migration into all richer countries will have to be quelled. These sections are, in my view mostly incontrovertible at this point, but it's hard to deny that by 2050, ceteris paribus, most schemes to keep the current world economies financially healthy seem far too short sighted. One of the simpler examples, if I recall correctly, is that according to Mason upwards of 60% of the actual value of most of the world's energy companies are currently locked in reserves of carbon which if actually utilized could effectively destroy the planet. However, if these energy reserves are not pursued or are otherwise obstructed the value of these companies is basically hollowed out along with many of the world's economies that are tied to this speculative wealth in some manner.
Marx's ‘Fragment on Machines', not translated into English until 1973, is covered more extensively than in other recent books that concern themselves with automation and labor: ‘Rise of the Robots', ‘Machines of Loving Grace' etc. In this fragment Marx anticipated something like the Info Capitalism that Mason suggests, where abstract knowledge will become the primary force of production. There is a lot more to mine here.
Mason's solution, Project Zero, which includes a closed zero-carbon-energy system where the production of machines, products and services whose marginal costs trend toward zero and which drive labor time to zero will all be managed by extremely sophisticated computer networks and models. Of course this will happen in degrees. I am not in the current camp that worries about malevolent AI as much as I worry about all of our critical infrastructure relying on models that can evolve beyond our cognitive comprehension and control. It will be hard to secure such systems from each other-those wily, poor ‘have nots' above for example. Mason anticipates this by saying that any changes to the economy will be simulated millions of times before they are actually implemented in situ, and pervasively deployed software agents will monitor the entire network in real time at all times. For people not born into this world it will probably be alien and terrifying or worse stultifying beyond belief.
Property is not sufficiently covered but as Mason argues that the 1% will basically be eliminated, for their own benefit-they are miserable anyway, I suspect that all of their holdings will be communized in some manner. A UBI is proposed, at least initially. Again the primary argument here is that the marginal costs of products and services will naturally trend toward zero and so the UBI could as well.
