Fully Automated Luxury Communism with Zarinah Agnew and Eric Wycoff Rogers
Upstream
Upstream
4.9 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 24 May 2022
⏱️ 59 minutes
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Summary
Fully automated luxury communism. Fully automated luxury gay space communism..? Fully automated, queer, neo-decadent, meta-modern communism? Okay so, what does all of that mean? You've probably heard the phrase fully automated luxury communism before, whether in a podcast like this, or in a meme maybe, but what exactly does it mean? Maybe the phrase conjures up images of a utopian, moneyless society where all of our jobs have been taken by robots and we just frolic and play all day? Perhaps it evokes ideas of a Starship Enterprise tech utopian world marked by adventures and quests. Maybe it's something in between. In this conversation we've brought on two guests to explain what fully automated luxury communism is, what some different iterations of it might look like, why it's an important Northstar for the left to reach for, and how we might get there. Zarinah Agnew is a trained neuroscientist formerly at University College London, and then UCSF, a self-described guerrilla scientist, and part of the Beyond Return organization. And Eric Wycoff Rogers is a scholar, organizer, designer, artist, and currently PhD student in American history at Cambridge and also part of the Beyond Return organization.
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Transcript
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| 1:14.7 | Don't wait to become rich to go and like build a post-carsity economy for yourself. Go and start |
| 1:19.7 | prefiguring it now. I think it's very important that people learn how to imagine futures that |
| 1:24.2 | are worth living for. I read this quite the other day that said, think about what you'd die for |
| 1:28.7 | and then go and live for it, which I think is important. When we'd sci-fi, there's lots of sci-fi |
| 1:33.0 | stories that sort of depict a post-carsity world. Create a vision for yourself that you feel |
| 1:37.5 | invested in and have these conversations at your home with your friends and family. I think it's |
| 1:42.2 | really important that we collectively learn to strive for something better. It's also really important |
| 1:47.1 | that we learn to think critically about the stories that are fed to us. It's very common to think |
| 1:51.5 | about the right to full employment and the right to work and the right to own a house. But what if we |
| 1:56.2 | fought for the right not to work, the right to not need to own a house? Because imagine a world |
| 2:01.3 | in which housing was so abundant that it would seem absurd to own a house. You don't feel like |
| 2:06.0 | we need to own oxygen right now because oxygen is abundantly available to us and so we don't need |
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