A major new manifesto for a high-tech future free from work
Nick Srnicek is the author of Postcapitalist Technologies (Polity, forthcoming) and the co-editor of The Speculative Turn (Re.press, 2011 with Levi Bryant and Graham Harman). Alex Williams is a PhD student at the University of East London working on a thesis entitled Complexity & Hegemony.
A conceptual launch pad for a new socialist imagination.
*Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums*
Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams' project dares to propose a
different way of thinking and acting. Given the fizzling of the
Occupy moment, a radical rethinking of the anarchic approach is
badly needed but just not happening. This book could do a lot of
work in getting that rethink going.
*Doug Henwood, author of Wall Street and editor of Left
Business Observer*
A powerful book: it not only shows us how the postcapitalist world
of rapidly improving technology could make us free, but it also
shows us how we can organise to get there. This is a must-read.
*Paul Mason, author of Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our
Future*
Srnicek and Williams demonstrate how a sustainable economic future
is less a question of means than of imagination. The postcapitalist
world they envision is utterly attainable, if we can remember that
we have been inventing the economy all along.
*Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock: When Everything
Happens Now*
Inventing the Future is exactly what we need right now. With
immense patience and care, it sets out a clear and compelling
vision of a postcapitalist society. Equally importantly, it lays
out a plausible programme which can take us from 24/7 capitalist
immiseration to a world free of work.
*Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism: Is There No
Alternative?*
Most important book of 2015
*Aaron Bastani, co-founder of Novara Media*
Neoliberalism and austerity seem to reign supreme-the idea of a
society not run for profit seems impossible. Or does it? The
fascinating Inventing the Future by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams
argues for a radical transformation of society.
*New Statesman books of the year 2015*
A future free from work might seem unrealistic, but it is actually
the elephant in the room that Cameron et al. would rather you
ignored. Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams' fabulous study Inventing
the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (Verso) opened
my eyes to the role technology might play in making society
possible again.
*Times Higher Education Supplement*
Inventing the Future is unapologetically a manifesto, and a
much-overdue clarion call to a seriously disorganized metropolitan
left to get its shit together, to start thinking-and
arguing-seriously about what is to be done . It is hard to deny the
persuasiveness with which the book puts forward the positive
contents of a new and vigorous populism; in demanding full
automation and universal basic income from the world system, they
also demand the return of utopian thinking and serious organization
from the left.
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
Inventing the Future offers an ambitious, thoughtfully creative and
meticulously researched blueprint for a new strategy toward
building a mass global movement to counter the hegemony of
neoliberal capitalism . Srnicek and Williams offer a profoundly
thoughtful, meticulously analyzed contribution to this body of
work. Most importantly, they offer a glimmer of hope that the
future is something that might still be invented by us, not imposed
from above.
*PopMatters*
Accessible and original.
*Archinect*
I love the way [Srnicek and Williams] talk about a basic income as
something really transformative.
*Caroline Lucas, British Member of Parliament*
As well as books such as Guy Standing's The Precariat: The New
Dangerous Class and Paul Mason's Postcapitalism, one recent text is
talked about more than most among people interested in UBI.
Inventing the Future was published last year and has already
created significant buzz in leftwing circles.
*Guardian*
This is a book I've been waiting for . The purpose of
neo-liberalism is to cancel the future, where tomorrow looks
exactly like today only with more stuff and more debt. To hell with
that! Our lives are too short and too precious to exist in this
Matrix. Please read the book, tell others to read it and let's
invent our future.
*Compass*
In Inventing the Future, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams take on the
two key questions of the left, if I can characterise them broadly:
why are we so bad at saying stuff, and do we have anything to say?
Their diagnoses of the shortcomings of what they call 'folk
politics,' are perceptive, clear, brutal, but respectful. Their
prescription for the future can seem vertiginously sudden-you'll
need to either get on board with a basic citizen's income, or form
a better refutation than 'it sounds expensive,' and fast. But
critically, they identify our urgent task: to own modernity.
*Guardian*
Srnicek and Williams have courageously drafted a call to re-imagine
left politics from top to bottom.
*Public Books*
They argue that, in the future, the workplace won't exist in
anything like the form we have now, and in any case it will have
very few permanent workers. Assuming this position, they ask: What
would be the social vision appropriate to a jobless future?
*n+1*
In 2015, [Srnicek and Williams] expanded the manifesto into a more
concrete book, Inventing the Future... The book attracted more
attention than a speculative leftwing work had for years
*Guardian*
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