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There have always been markets. Capitalism, by contrast, is relatively new. Its laws of motion first emerged in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and reached escape velocity with industrialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth.

If capitalism didn’t invent markets, however, it d…

[...] A sharper tone prevails in the New York Times and on Fox News, in statehouses and on Capitol Hill. Criticisms once confined to scholarly circles, or to more oppositional outlets like The Baffler and Valleywag, have become conventional, even banal. One could be uncharitable about the heavy Koo…

This top-down, technologically determined future ignores all the ways in which energy transitions aren’t just a question of market shares, but of the social pressures and material constraints that cut across them. Decarbonization will demand more than just a different kind of technology curve, acce…

I think the Anthropocene framework has been a fertile container for quite a lot, actually. The Anthropocene has turned out to be a rather capacious territory for incorporating people in struggle. There are a lot of interesting collaborations with artists and scientists and activists going on.

Th…

Socialists aren’t the only ones who have been techno-utopian, of course. A far more prominent and more influential strand of techno-utopianism has come from the figures around the Bay Area counterculture associated with the Whole Earth Catalog, in particular Stewart Brand, who went on to play imp…