Haven't read that one for a few years, but it always seems more and more spot-on.
The 'Australia Project' part is fanciful sci-fi, but the point is clear - the work that all humans have put in for generations is being co-opted by the few in the ownership classes. Ordinary people find themselves treated more and more as replaceable machines then are finally optimised out of the process and disenfranchised entirely.
OTOH when you look at much of the non-western world, thinking about problems with concentrated ownership in a post-scarcity society seems a million miles away from the people who still need a clean water supply and a reliable source of food.
>OTOH when you look at much of the non-western world, thinking about problems with concentrated ownership in a post-scarcity society seems a million miles away from the people who still need a clean water supply and a reliable source of food.
It's really not. The pre-capitalist world had a much more egalitarian international wealth distribution, with India, for example, making up a double-digit percentage of the world GDP. These non-Western poor countries wouldn't be nearly so poor if not for the same capitalistic process that is steadily leaving the Western working classes out in the cold (and now even the Chinese working classes, as they get to be more expensive than robots or Africans).
Fair enough, I guess it just strikes me as odd to talk about post-scarcity anything when we have poverty on such scales. I guess it can all be an outgrowth of the same phenomena.
Well let's be clear: there are lots of Indian villages who would have plenty of drinking water if some Western firm wasn't bribing the government into letting them steal all of it. There are Mexican farmers who would have a good deal more food if NAFTA hadn't ruined them. There are Argentine workers who would have much better wages and easier access to, well, everything, if the IMF had not tried to liquify their entire nation into debt-service payments.
I'm not sure I'd blame 'capitalism' outright like that, but the actions of some of the so-called* free-market evangelist nations and organisations have been despicable and made a lot of places a lot worse off, yes. But I don't think you can blame the totality of world poverty on that, not honestly.
*(I say "so-called" because it's usually "free market for you, trade barriers for us")
The 'Australia Project' part is fanciful sci-fi, but the point is clear - the work that all humans have put in for generations is being co-opted by the few in the ownership classes. Ordinary people find themselves treated more and more as replaceable machines then are finally optimised out of the process and disenfranchised entirely.
OTOH when you look at much of the non-western world, thinking about problems with concentrated ownership in a post-scarcity society seems a million miles away from the people who still need a clean water supply and a reliable source of food.