Left Anchor Four Futures Revisited - 353 UNLOCKED
Jul 9, 2025
A revisit of Peter Frase’s four-futures framework and why its automation and climate axes still matter. Conversations about abundance versus scarcity and equality versus hierarchy. Debates on AI’s role in science, risks from agentic systems and deepfakes, and whether technology will be enclosed by elites. Arguments for open-source, democratic control, and political tools like taxation to shape technological futures.
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Two Axes That Define Four Futures
- Peter Frase frames futures by two axes: ecological scarcity vs abundance and social hierarchy vs equality.
- Holding automation constant, the matrix yields four archetypes: communism, rentism, socialism, and exterminism, each driven by class power and climate outcomes.
How Rentism Turns Abundance Into Rents
- Rentism is abundance plus hierarchy where elites extract value via IP and platform control rather than traditional capital accumulation.
- Frase warned big tech could monetize patterns/algorithms, turning replicator-like abundance into paid access controlled by a few.
Market Tools Under Democratic Control
- Socialism in Frase's sense is egalitarian scarcity where markets are used as allocation tools under democratic control.
- Example: coupon-based internal markets for food banks beat centralized Soviet-style planning without enabling private aggregation or resale.
