zlacker

>>ColinW+(OP)
Another year closer to a Shadowrun future, minus the magic, where the most powerful corporations run everything, are more powerful than most nation states, and where your only allowed role in life is a consumer/corpse-servant for life (unless you want to risk the harsh penalties of being illegal and running the shadows).

I think we will get to a PostCapitalist future. The decisions we make in the next 7 years will likely determine whether the probable future is dystopian like Shadowrun, or utopian like Paul Mason (see his book "Postcapitalism: a Guide to Our Future").

Personally, I prefer Mason's, with his goals of:

- Rapidly reduce carbon emissions to stay below 2 °C warming by 2050 (edit: We've lost this battle, see the current 6-sigma sea ice event and recent AMOC reports - maybe we can hold it to 3 °C).

- Stabilise and socialise the global finance system.

- Prioritise information-rich technologies to deliver material prosperity and solve social challenges such as ill health and welfare dependency.

- Gear technology towards minimising necessary work, until work becomes voluntary and economic management can focus on energy and resources rather than capital and labour.

That will not be if we do not bring to heel the FAANG companies now, and prevent things like Apple's Private Access Token, Google's WEI, etc. from taking root (yanking them out of the ground where already present).

>>Commun+RH
The sort of Shadowrun/Snow Crash/ancap future you're talking about is what Cory Doctorow is calling technofeudalism[0]: one in which the primary driver of economic activity reverts to passive income scams[1] instead of active economic activity.

[0] https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/

[1] Economists call these "rents", even though they're more general than just rent paid to borrow some real property