the path that leads to utopia is not necessarily itself utopian

Things in our world may not play out with such literal deceptions, but we can already see how our political and economic elites manage to justify ever-higher levels of misery and death while remaining convinced that they are great humanitarians.

But we can also say that even in a society without clear rulers, history will tend to empathize with the survivors; they are, after all, literally the only ones around to write it.

That is the other important point of this book. We can’t go back to the past, and we can’t even hold on to what we have now. Something new is coming—and indeed, in some way, all four futures are already here, “unevenly distributed,” in William Gibson’s phrase. It’s up to us to build the collective power to fight for the futures we want.

Whuffie recaptured the true essence of money: in the old days, if you were broke but respected, you wouldn’t starve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum could buy you security and peace. By measuring the thing that money really represented—your personal capital with your friends and neighbors—you more accurately gauged your success.

The right to intellectual property is ultimately not a right to a concrete thing but to a pattern. That is, it does not just protect “your right to control your copy of your idea” in the way that it protects my right to control my shoes or my house. Rather, it grants the right to tell others how to use copies of an idea that they “own.

Mainstream economists have for generations made the same argument about the supposed danger that automation poses to labor. If some jobs are automated, they argue, labor is freed up for other, new, and perhaps better kinds of work. They point to agriculture, which once occupied most of the workforce but now occupies only about 2 percent of it in a country like the United States.

If we can tackle the inequalities that make our current market societies so brutal, we might have a chance of deploying market mechanisms to organize consumption in an ecologically limited world, allowing all of us to come through capitalism and climate change as equals—“alive in the sunshine,” as the eco-socialist and Jacobin magazine editor Alyssa Battistoni says in a reference to Virginia Woolf.

… nature doesn’t care about us; it neither has interests nor desires, it simply exists.

Freedom begins where work ends- the realm of freedom is after hours, on the weekend, on vacation, and not at work.