Touring Post-Capitalist Imaginaries after 2008

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Touring Post-Capitalist Imaginaries after 2008

Jeffrey Barber, Integrative Strategies Forum

Imagining the end of capitalism

Since the 2008 global financial crisis, concerns about global warming, inequality and neofascism encouraged discussions, social campaigns, and publications advancing the discourse of what alternatives exist to the current dominant governance system of capitalism. The phrase “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” repeated so often over recent years, is a challenge to creative writers and producers of speculative future narratives.  This imaginative blind spot is understandable given the half-century dominance of neoliberal capitalism, the decades of Cold War anti-communism hysteria and blacklisting, and the many assumptions regarding the flaws and failures of pre-World War I, Progressive Era utopian fiction.

Rising awareness of climate change, biodiversity loss and authoritarianism as well as racism, sexism and the expanding inequality gap between rich and poor raise the question and challenge, especially in the science fiction domain: How do we imagine future alternatives beyond the conventional tropes of manifest destiny, techno-feudalism and collapse, particularly how an ecologically sustainable and socially just post-capitalist society might plausibly evolve, look and feel like?

The other phrase contributing to this challenge is Margaret Thatcher’s claim “there is no alternative” (TINA). Mark Fisher (2009) named the difficulties embracing both producers and consumers of post-capitalist imaginaries as capitalist realism, “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”

Touring postcapitalist imaginaries

In this paper, we embark on a chronotopic tour of some of the post-capitalist democratic imaginaries published after and influenced by the 2008 financial crisis, observing post-capitalist governance structures and strategies. While Star Trek is one of science fiction’s most well-known post-capitalist imaginaries, having abandoned the money system after the invention of replicator technology, our tour will concentrate on the much smaller set of SF narratives not reliant on such convenient techno-fantasy devices, restricting ourselves mostly to those stories within the realm of current science plausibility (with some exceptions).

Our tour is “chronotopic” in that we explore the spatio-temporal afforances of a series of storyworlds involved in alternative/future history timelines, along with critical speculations and commentaries regarding parallel issues and events in the author’s storywriting timeline. We are less interested in the plot and characters except in how they perceive, reflect, and portray the storyworld and its history. Our tour will focus on five science fiction novels imagining life and governance after capitalism. Admittedly, these reflect the authors’ US and UK-based perspectives.

Post-capitalist destinations

Writers of alternative futures and histories have produced numerous works imagining the end of capitalism, especially those set in postapocalyptic settings, where the remains of the capitalist past are equated with lost civilization. There are also the postcapitalist techno-fantasy storyworlds where advanced technologies have conveniently provided scientifically improbable utopian “solutions” to the earth’s most vexing problems (e.g., Star Trek’s replicator, wormhole travel). The scientifically plausible, if politically and culturally challenging scenarios, in imagining postcapitalist, utopian realist futures, unfortunately claim a disappointingly small share of the commercial flow of future imaginaries in media and popular culture.

We now set off on this tour of postcapitalist imaginaries, covering the overall collective timeline from 2008 to the 2160s, visiting five storyworlds published between 2016 and 2020.

Eminent Domain

We first visit Carl Neville’s Eminent Domain (2020), told through nostalgic and traumatic recollections of the past interlacing cat and mouse chases, interrogations, debates, dreams, and institutional reports. We follow a wide range of characters, from revolutionaries to dictators, security agents to moles, assassins and university students.

Our journey begins in the People’s Republic of Britain (PRB), the Former United Kingdom (FUK), in London across the second week of April in the year 2018. People here are celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the Breach and the “trans-European workers accords that established parallel power, integrating unions and institutions all across Europe following the victories of radical socialist governments.” This is a time of partying and reflections on the conclusion of years of struggle by “community-led initiatives and para-state mutualist organizations in both urban and rural areas of the former UK” in the transition to the current democratic socialism of the PRB. The alliance of rebelling networks and organizations eventually integrate into Security and Services Facilitation (SSF). One arm of SSF provides services: education, childcare, localized food and energy production; the other focuses on security.

We first follow Alan Bewes, one of the early visionaries of the Breach, who is quietly murdered in his sleep. Murder is upgraded to political assassination, and SSF assembles a team of veteran SSF agents to investigate.

Alternate timeline

This is not the depressing totalitarian hell of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four; more like the hedonistic party culture of Brave New World without the class exploitation and bioengineering in Huxley’s scenario. PRB culture instead more resembles Huxley’s Island, where psychedelic drugs are not designed to numb or brainwash citizens but to enhance their experience and imagination.

In this alternate history of the PRB, neoliberalism, capitalist realism, and Thatcherism failed to take root. Instead, socialism prevailed, not just in the UK but in other countries throughout Europe (the Co-Sphere) as well as the People’s Republics of United Africa and the Middle East. Instead of collapsing, the post-Stalinist Soviet Union managed to establish sufficient technological, political, and economic resilience, assisted by the affordances offered by the sophisticated computer tools necessary for central planning to work effectively. A Russian comrade describes their Pro/Diss system as “a beautiful, sublime, crystalline interlinking of networks and information flows, interfacing with our most advanced AI and robotics to mediate production and distribution on a scale, vaster, faster and more complex than any system before it.”

Market vs. central planning

While neoliberal critics continue to downplay central planning, a number of contemporary left economists point out how, with the rise of Big Data technology, some of the biggest corporations are central planning practitioners, as highlighted by Phillips and Rozworski in The People’s Republic of Walmart (2019). In Eminent Domain history, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, unions amalgamated in a Universal Union in alliance with SSF, the latter being “instrumental in distributing food, re-commoning land for cultivation and dwelllings, infrastructure and logistics support, and ensuring, through mass action, that key industries and facilities became publicly owned.” SSF also played a major role in cooperativization in the capital and investment strike known as the Autarchy.

Taking place in the 1970s, the Autarchy mirrors the IMF bailout and the UK’s Winter of Discontent that took place in our world, a time of austerity, protests, and anger, yet leading to very different political outomes. In Eminent Domain, Margaret Thatcher does not become prime minister or claim “there is no alternative;” nor does the neoliberalism of Hayek and von Mises take hold with its agenda of deregulation, privatization, and glorification of the market. In this history, the British Left was not paralyzed by the pessimism of capitalist realism, but instead enjoys the benefits of the socialist distribution of wealth, healthcare, housing, food, information, and leisure time, not to mention a diversity of recreational pharmaceuticals.

We spend much of our time accompanying a number of SSF members investigating the assassination, which apparently orginated from the new right-wing administration of the United States. The new American president, who resembles a fusion of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, has scuttled the détente between the US and Co-sphere, becoming increasingly antagonistic towards the socialist Co-Sphere of nations, especially targeting the PRB with various sabotage activities. Soviet Russia has its own issues with the PRB, believing it is too democratic internally, creating risks to the Co-Sphere.

Ministry for the Future

In contrast to the alternate history of Eminent Domain, our next destination takes us to a near future, the year 2025. This is the world of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future (2020), published during the Covid pandemic and two months before the January 6^th insurrection at the US Capitol. We first arrive in the Indian province of Uttar Pradesh at the scene of a catastrophic heatwave killing millions: the deadly consequence of denial, disinformation, and deflection of responsibility from the threat of global warming that climate scientists and activists  have been warning of for decades. As so often happens, the consequences fall not on the deniers and those responsible, but on vulnerable populations, some among the least responsible.

We then shift to Zürich, Switzerland, where the new UN Ministry for the Future is officially tasked to deal with the urgent and politically complex problem of climate change. As head of this new UN agency, Mary Murphy works to achieve agreement among national governments, transnational corporations, and other stakeholders. Mary is confronted by the sole survivor of the Uttar Pradesh tragedy, development aid worker Frank May. Frank represents the strident voice of climate desperation, the need to take immediate and radical action against the maddening inertia of government bureaucracies, class privilege, and corruption. Our tour follows the dialogue between these two characters and the range of actions proposed and taken, amplified by a heteroglossia of mystery voices, human and nonhuman (including photons and markets), challenging capitalist realism dogma with an array of sustainability concepts, principles, riddles, and policy tools as well as more violent means involved in the postcapitalist future discourse.

Financing is a major issue, where the priority of corporate profits clash against the costs of effective climate mitigation and adaptation mechanisms. The failure of the market to adequately address climate change, even undermining efforts to deal with it, highlights the inadequacy of the neoliberal ideology still dominating national governments and corporations. As  he Ministry team race against the clock of deepening and irreversible impact, other players seek more immediate, radical actions, such as the geoengineering, hostage taking at the World Economic Forum, bombing of power plants, and targeted assassinations of CEOs.

Rube Goldbergian machine for social change

As Michael Svoboda (2020) observed, technical topics covered in Ministry for the Future include “the history of central banking, modern monetary theory, the Gini index, blockchain technology, Mondragon, carbon taxes, clean energy technologies, Jevon’s Paradox, different forms of geoengineering, population biology, and wildlife corridors.” Altogether, the result of this “Rube Goldbergian machine for social change ultimately delivers the goods: a more equitable social economy and a more stable climate.”

Central planning vs. market

The Ministry’s AI persona, Janus Athena, struggles to explain to us computer illiterate humans the thinking behind the software team’s economic plan. The AI reviews Friedrich Hayek’s argument (and premise of neoliberalism) that markets are the best calculator and distributor of value, addressing Hayek’s claim that planning gets things wrong “because central planning can’t collect and correlate all the relevant information fast enough.” This was a fatal flaw in the Soviet Union’s premature efforts deploying complex central planning aspirations to pre-capitalist modernization “But now, with computers as strong as they’ve gotten, the Red Plenty argument has gotten stronger and stronger, asserting that people now have so much computing power that central planning could work better than the market.”

Another Now

We return to London, this time in the parallel alternate world created by Yanis Varoufakis, an economist, activist, and former Finance Minister of Greece, who wrote Another Now to provide a more entertaining vehicle for the post-capitalist ideas in his 2023 nonfiction book, Techno Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism. The protagonists of Another Now (an ex-Wall Street investment banker, a radical feminist philosopher, and a mad computer scientist) confront an alternative history which split precisely following the 2008 financial crisis. This split resulted in an apparently thriving socialist UK, where banks and investors, instead of being bailed out at the expense of taxpayers, were held accountable, as public and private investment was redirected into radical community-oriented productivity and needs. In the year 2025, when the Ministry for the Future is launched in Zurich, our three characters secretly converge inside a small computer lab in San Francisco, confronting a physically small but significant tear in the space-time continuum, allowing them to interrogate their parallel selves in a radically different political landscape. This could have been their own history, they realize, given a different set of decisions and actions by the Left and community organizations at the time. Like the PRB, this Other Now rejected neoliberalism, engaging in the collective task to construct an egalitarian, socialist alternative in this parallel London.

This post-2008 socialist society has essentially eliminated poverty and class injustices (although not the “cockroach” of patriarchy). In this world, the affordances and power of digital technology are turned to the benefit of the people, in contrast to our world’s prioritization of profits over people. In the Other Now, community-based networks and campaigns organize strategically to take advantage of the historic opportunity presented by the 2008 financial crisis, steering the offical response away from bailing out the commercial bank and investment sector that caused the problem. Instead, they radically restructure the financial and others institutions and thus the flows and valuation of labor and goods. From the bits of information our protagonists are able to squeeze through the wormhole, they learn various features of the Other Now, including:

…an absence of income and sales taxes; the freedom of workers to move from company to company while taking their personal capital with them; the curtailment of large companies’ market power; universal freedom from poverty, but also from a welfare state demanding that benefit-recipients surrender their dignity at the door of some social security office; a payments system that was free, efficient and which did not empower the few to print money at the expense of the many; a permanent auction for commercial land that exploited market forces to the full in the interests of social housing; an international monetary system that stabilized trade and the flow of money across borders; a welcoming attitude to migrants based on empowering local communities and helping them absorb newcomers.

The new system addresses many societal ills; alas, not persistent sexism and patriarchy.  

Techno-rebels

In the Other Now, new activist communities emerged in response to the possibilities opened up by the financial crisis, including  the Crowdshorters movement. The Crowdshorters “undermined the central banks’ efforts surgically and stylishly,” understanding that “by privatizing everything, capitalism had made itself supremely vulnerable to financial guerilla attacks.” They understood that “the creation of CDOs out of plain debt—a process known hubristically and ironically as securitization—afforded the perfect opportunity for a peaceful grassroots revolution.”

Other techno-rebels include the Solsourcers (Solidarity Sourcing Proxies), who targeted the largest shareholders in the great corporations: pension funds. The Bladerunners were neo-Luddites, adamant that the new technologies “should be utilized in the cause of shared prosperity, not as instruments of neo-feudalism or of a class war by the few against the many.” Their strategies strengthened those of climate activists, teaming up with the Environs “in order to hasten the demise of the fossil fuel industry. Together, they forced panicking governments to introduce stringent limits to pollutants, to reduce net-carbon targets to zero by 2025 and even to limit land-clearing and cement production.” Within three years, the Crowdshorters, the Solsourcers, the Bladerunners and the Environs had formed a highly effective network of targeted activists that the oligarchy-without-frontiers could not withstand.

The International Monetary Project (IMP)

One important institutional mechanism in the Other Now transition was the International Monetary Project (IMP), successor to the International Monetary Fund, which regulated the world’s currency system. The IMP had instituted a market-based, almost fully automated system able to balance out global trade and money flows. In addition, the system “was a mechanism generating money that funded the transition of developing regions to low-carbon energy, green transport, organic agriculture, as well as decent public education and health systems.”

PerCap

The other key transition mechanism, initiated in the US  in 2011 for anyone with a social security number, was a federal account called Personal Capital (PerCap), to which the Fed credited small amounts each month. Graduallly, accounts migrated at different paces for different countries from the commercial banks to the new central bank system. Investment banking gradually melted away after corpo-syndicalist legislation ended tradable shares, leaving the flow of digital money across PerCap accounts as the remaining legal tender.

Once capitalism had died, and markets were freed from private ownership, a different kind of value took over. Instead of judging something’s worth by its exchange value—what it would fetch in return for something else—the Other Now judged worth according to experiential value—the benefits the thing brought to the person who used it. Prices, quantities and monetary profits were no longer the sole masters of society.

New York 2140

In our tour, we move ahead one century, from the 2036 London of Another Now to Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140. We find ourselves on Madison Avenue and the Met Life Tower. Modeled after the Campanile in Venice, the building, where much of the story is centered around, is now a co-op, owned and governed by its residents. It is soon to be threatened with absoption by a higher ground investment firm, eager to reap what financial benefits may accrue from the especially flooded remains of buildings, which also served as the humble habitats of the poor and desperate. Our local host/narrator is obviously a New Yorker, choosing to remain the mysterious “citizen” commentator, intermittently helps us with the chronotope of 2140 New York, for example in his brief review of the millions of years of geological change shaping the area, how ice age glaciers shaped the Hudson River Valley and the current shape of Manhattan Island, now flooded with the 50 foot rise of sea-level, submerging much of what we knew as the major neighborhoods, business districts and coastlines making up New York City.

Capitalism still reigns, although greatly weakened by ecological catastrophes, scandals and other pressures. We are nevertheless in the midst of a major ecosocial-political transition. Unlike the global politics of the Ministry for the Future, the politics of New York 2140 are at the city level, where global policies and visions must be played out. Among the operations of local governance in this urban watery landscape of climate adaptation, we attend council meetings of the co-op and building habitat. We visit the office of the Mayor and are introduced to their head of security services, Inspector Gen Octaviasdottir. Inspector Gen takes us on a tour of some legally questionable establishments in less well-lit neighborhoods. Unlike the PRB, recreational drugs here are illegal, but available. Gen is looking for two precocious lefty computer programmers abducted by real estate investment thugs, part of a criminal plot to capture common property in the drowned city.

It is through Charlotte, head of the Householders’ Union, that we begin to see the work of NGO and the public/private hybrid organizations and networks in the background, with the potential to join together in powerful political waves. As these various characters talk and work together, including hedge fund analyst-in-transition Franklin Garr, they manage to outsmart their investment firm opponents.

“I wanted a finance novel that was heavily based on what lessons we learned—or did not learn—from the crash of 2008 and 2009. All science fiction novels are about the future and about the present at the same time,” Robinson explained in a 2019 interview. “It’s about finance, and climate change, and New York as a place, and those particular characters, and what we could do now to influence events to make a better future for the people yet to come. Utopian climate change fiction: the obvious next hot genre.” (Kimon, 2017).       

This story also begins with a criminal investigation.  Not of murder, as in Eminent Domain, but of missing persons. Not assassination but abduction. We are in the midst of a ruthless real estate war of urban development investors in a future flooded New York City. This is not the climate apocalypse of Day After Tomorrow, but the area is definitely altered by the sealevel rise. New York, with its many busy canals and aquatic traffic, has become an American Venice. The novel opens with a conversation between two computer programmers (soon to be abducted) about the nature and value of money, preparing readers with the historical-economic context of the story. Beginning with the provocative line “whoever writes the code creates the value,” explaining that “without our code, there’s no computers, no finance, no banks, no money, no exchange value, no value.” We are told “the problem is capitalism,” noting that “we’ve got good tech, we’ve got a nice planet, we’re fucking it up by way of stupid laws. That’s what capitalism is, a set of stupid laws.”

This conversation about money, value and the destructive nature of late capitalism, is followed by the opportunistic thoughts of real estate investor Franklin, who later experiences his own mental transition as to his own goals and the meaning and impacts of his particular work and knowledge. Franklin is the inventor of the Intertidal Property Pricing Index (IPPI), “which allows investors to price drowned assets. No one knows exactly what half-submerged buildings are worth—the seas could rise again,” but the IPPI “makes it possible to buy derivatives based on underwater mortgages; as a result, a new housing bubble is underway” (Rothman, 2017). The trick is being able to leave before the bubble breaks.

We move to Washington, DC, after Charlotte’s election as Representative of New York State’s Twelfth District.  A new Congress has arrived to consider the call for a new government bailout following what the Citizen described as another “popped bubble, liquidity freeze, credit crunch, big finance going down like the KT asteroid.” We observe the meeting between the Federal Reserve chair and secretary of the treasury and the big banks and investment firms “all massively over-leveraged, all crashing.” They are indeed offered a bailout of four trillion dollars, “on condition that the recipients issue shares to the Treasury equivalent in value to whatever aid they accepted…Treasury would then become their majority shareholder and take over accordingly…Future profits would go to the U.S. Treasury in proportion to the shares it held.”

This time, in the year 2143, the investment banks are nationalized. There is no financial flight, as  similar salvation-by-nationalization offers were being made by the central banks of the European Union, Japan, Indonesia, India and Brazil. According to the Citizen, “the U.S. government would soon be dealing with a healthy budget surplus. Universal health care, free public education through college, a living wage, guaranteed full employment, a year of mandatory national service, all these were not only made law but funded.” In conclusion, “the neoliberal global order was thus overturned right in its own wheelhouse.”

Infomocracy

Our last tour stop is just twenty years later, scrutinizing the future global system of data-driven micro-democracies in Malka Older’s Infomocracy (2016), taking place in the 2160s.

Microdemocracy

Here the previous world of nation states has evolved into a complex system of centenals, political entities of 100,000 citizens, each with the ability to choose their type of government in global elections taking place every ten years, centenals of a particular party collectively united politically while geographically distributed. Rather than a particular type of government being place-based, as with the nation states which evolved during the era of imperialism and colonial empires, historically tending to violently suppress ethnic and other resistance movements, governance models are democratically chosen and enacted across the vast patchwork of local populations. With each election of centenal governments, the most votes establish the Supermajority party, which becomes the hegemonic political force for that decade, until the next election decides whether to anoint a new party Supermajority. The election process is administered by the global fact-checking bureaucracy know as Information, an institutional, peace-keeping structure that evolved from a nonprofit synthesis of the United Nations and internet companies to ensure citizens and organizations have access to undistorted information.

Disinformation

Infomocracy was published in 2016, the year of Donald Trump’s first election to the presidency amid growing attention to the abuse of public data, as embodied in the Cambridge Analytical/Facebook scandal and Russian social media disinformation campaigns (Kaiser, 2019; Wylie, 2019). As of the 2024 US election, the issue of disinformation and access to reliable information sources has only deepened. In an interview (Open Mind, 2019), Malka Older explains how the idea for the book came out of “frustration and annoyance with the way things are in the world today,” citing disinformation campaigns such as the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry in the 2004 election and the focus more on personalities than governing policies.

…for me, the idea that information is a public good that we should think about in much the same way that we think about electricity, that we think about water, is a very powerful one. You know, one of the theories, one of the frameworks for thinking about what’s going with social media and with these corporations now is the idea of surveillance capitalism, that these companies are profiting, not just from the sort of ads that we see immediately but really from taking this agglomeration of data that they learn about us as we use them and selling that….to imagine making data, all data free and public is one way to turn that around.

Corporations

What companies remain have morphed into global political governance parties who also compete for centenal votes in the elections. “PhilipMorris is the big corporate to worry about,” one character advises. Corporate rhetoric, advertising, and lobbying is relentlessly monitored by Information, which in the days of the first election, “was still trying to assert itself, and they jumped all over it, shut it down. The language in the legal precedent is clear and forceful… Diverting, twisting, or otherwise affecting the information received by citizens is illegal for any government.”

Apocalyptic vs. utopian realism

In their review of Ministry for the Future, Monticelli and Frantzen (2024) pose utopian realism as “an antidote to today’s pervasive atmosphere of capitalist realism.” Robinson’s books explore a multiplicity of strategies confronting the threats of climate change and approaches that combine “top-down strategies with grassroots organizing, technological solutions with back-to-nature projects, and ecomodernism with eco-spiritualism.” While these strategies are directed at climate change, they ultimately involve the deeper challenge of changing the socioeconomic system and petropolitics which generated the problem.

At the time of writing, immediately following the 2024 US presidential election, the need to provide ecotopian alternatives, storyworlds and postcapitalist futures, stories of sustainability transitions, strategies and visions has reached a critical stage. Malka Older’s Centenal Trilogy provides a welcoming ambiguity for the reader to fill in the history and changes which led to the world-wide adoption of microdemocracy and acceptance of Information as mediating agency. Older leaves room for readers and other writers to imagine different scenarios as to how a global agency as Information and microdemocracy could evolve.

The details of these five stories overlap in their engagement with the strengths and weaknesses of our capitalist present and past, given the overall timeline between 2008 and 2160. Various climate action strategies identified in Ministry for the Future and New York 2140 can easily be imagined within the other three storyworlds, moving power away from corporate elites to local communities and democratic governance.

Each of the authors struggle with the obstacles of disinformation, propaganda, and surveillance, as studied by Shoshana Zubof (2019), Cory Doctorow (2020) and others. Each of these authors envision creative disruption emerging from these waves of economic crises. However, we have been visiting scenarios where bailouts are tied to meaningful system change. Whereas Older and Robinson imagine the evolution of alternative utopian/dystopian systems, Neville and Varoufakis imagine parallel alternative histories of post-capitalism.

What made the Soviet Union stay united and economically robust in Eminent Domain? Could improvemenets of Big Data controlling central planning have been sufficient to not just survive but thrive? Phillips and Rozworski (2019) suggest this scenario in their book The People’s Republic of Walmart, pointing out how past criticisms of Soviet central planning are now surpassed by the capabilities that came with computerization, systems modeling, and the technological advances in microelectronics and artificial intelligence.What was dismissed as failures of Marxism are now embraced as essential operational norms of multi-national corporations dealing with the complexities of global production, distribution,  consumption data and decision-making. Neville describes his novel’s intention as “an attempt to think against the the onslaught not really of capitalist realism but more of something like ’neoliberal reason’” (Hatherly, 2020).

Our tour ends, looking back on these interchanges between alternate worlds and histories, the exchange between actual and possible realities, allowing us to peruse both, to reflect on what is possible in our own futures. To get to a future we want, we must be able to imagine it first.

WORKS CITED

Bastani, Aaron. Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto. Verso, 2019.

Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? John Hunt Publishing, 2009.

Hatherley, Owen et al. “Inside the People’s Republic of Britain.” Tribune, 17 Sept. 2020, tribunemag.co.uk/2020/09/inside-the-peoples-republic-of-britain.

Kaiser, Brittany. Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower’s inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again. HarperCollins, 2019.

Kimon. “More NY2140 interviews and reviews.” May 9, 2017. http://kimstanleyrobinson.info

Monticelli, L., & Frantzen, M. K. “Capitalist Realism is Dead. Long Live Utopian Realism! A Sociological Exegesis of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future.” Sociological Review, 2024, doi.org/10.1177/00380261241261452.

Neville, Carl. Eminent Domain. Repeater, 2020.

Older, Malka Ann. Infomocracy. Tom Doherty Assoc Llc, 2016.

Older, Malka. “High-Tech Dystopia and Utopia.” Open Mind, 2017.

Phillips, Leigh, and Michal Rozworski. The People’s Republic of Walmart: How the World’s Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism. Verso, 2019.

Robinson, Kim Stanley. The Ministry for The Future: A Novel. Orbit, 2020.

Robinson, Kim Stanley. New York 2140. Orbit, 2018.

Svoboda, Michael. “The Ministry for the Future: A novel by Kim Stanley Robinson.” Yale Climate Connections, October 22, 2020.

Varoufakis, Yanis. Another Now: A Novel. Melville House, 2021.

Wylie, Christopher. MINDF*CK: Inside Cambridge Analytica’s Plot to Break the World. Profile Books, 2020.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Hatchett Book Group, 2019.

Jeffrey Barber is President of Integrative Strategies Forum (ISF), a US nonprofit organization outside Washington, D.C., engaged in research and policy advocacy, promoting public participation, dialogue, and collaboration in developing sustainable production/consumption policy (currently focusing on plastics), systems, and practices. ISF is especially interested in ecocultural projects imagining and building sustainable futures. He is a co-founder of the Global Research Forum on Sustainable Production and Consumption, with a background in media and audience research at SRI International (Stanford Research Institute), the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Arbitron Ratings (now part of Nielsen Research), and Peter D. Hart Research Associates.

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