PostCapitalism: A Guide to our Future

Paul Mason got there.

He's the author of the book Post-Capitalism, and he gave his post-capitalist pitch with a slide that said, automate all the jobs, which is what we like to hear, and made an explicit call out to the Marxists in the crowd, of which there were probably three.

But...

It was not an overwhelmingly left-wing crowd.

And then the last thing I would say briefly is I'm of an age, I'm in my early 60s now, but I'm of an age where the idea of automation from a left perspective was that it was going to bring us a utopia, a post-work utopia.

Paul Mason's book, Post-Capitalism, apart from that Paul Mason went off the deep end in terms of the military-industrial complex.

But Paul Mason, before that, wrote a book called Post-Capitalism, which laid out a prospectus that said the reason why we have labour-saving technology is to reduce the amount of work in our lives, to bring more time and background resource into our lives, partly so we can have more pleasant lives, but partly because so we can also have the resources as citizens to think through the challenges that we face, which are climate, which are technology, which are pandemic, which are crisis of meaning.

We need time and space to think through these questions and to deliberate amongst ourselves, to give ourselves more time as citizens to do this.

I want the data centres to be controlled in such a way that they give us more time and space in our lives as citizens to solve our big 21st century problems.