Fully automated gay space communism
On November 10th,a prominent believer in the philosophy, Aaron Bastani, uploaded an explainer of Fully Automated Luxury Communism to YouTube (shown below). You simply begin. You must be more of a robot—or at any rate a dutiful employee.
In The MartianMatt Damon is abandoned on Mars after a freak accident forces his fellow explorers to leave him stranded on a lifeless planet. In the end, what I'd call for is something akin to the internet meme of Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism — a yet-to-be-imagined society built atop radical democracy, robust social welfare, and freedom of self-expression most closely resembled by communism.
The characters make their way home by following strict orders from superiors: Bullock from the older male Clooney, and Damon from the scientists back on Earth. And you can either accept that or you can get to work.
We do not live in a golden age of space exploration. Whole features are devoted to a lone adventurer facing off against the void of open space. Le Guin. Then the next one, then the next. My friends, I believe that the fast rocket fleet Will carry us on From one star to the next.
The fact that contemporary filmmakers choose to display space travel as a banal fight for survival against an alienating, murderous void is telling. Without a bright future for people here on earth to look forward to, the exploration of space seems like sheer decadence.
Millenial socialists have set their eyes on the stars. On those distant planets our trails will remain And keep dusty prints of our steps.
Fully Automated Luxury Communism : Willful naiveté acts as its animating self-contradiction
Solve one problem. In Gravity, Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, in Manned Maneuvering Units, attempt to rescue themselves from certain death after their shuttle is damaged and their crewmates are killed by flying debris.
Space exploration, we are told, is a miserable job that someone must do. This is how I end. Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto is a book by Aaron Bastani first published by Verso Books in It outlines a vision of a post-scarcity, post-capitalist society driven by technological advances such as automation, artificial intelligence, and synthetic biology.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweets about Star Trek forming her political consciousness.
Young leftists throw space-themed May Day parties and decorate their apartments in Soviet space propaganda. The Mars rover was cool for a minute, but those long pans of red desert eventually started looking like Arizona. In Gravity and The Martiana full battery of stunning special effects shows us exactly how grim, dull, and dangerous space is.
In mainstream culture, space itself has become a playground for the billionaire class. You solve enough problems, and you get to come home. Survival is intrinsically linked to obedience and technocratic perfectionism.