Another Now

* Book: Another Now. Yanos Varoufakis.

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Review

Alberto, Sci-Fi Economic Sightings:

"Varoufakis is not a professional sci-fi author, but an economist and politician, and a former finance minister of Greece (see 1). Costa, a scientist and technologist, opens a communication channel to an alternate present that forked from our timeline in 2008, when the fork (“Other Now”) reacted to the financial crisis with deep reform and comprehensive mobilization. The book is built as the correspondence between Costa and his friends Iris and Eva in Our Now with their doppelgängers in the Other Now. Varoufakis, a game theorist, engineered some clever forms of collective struggle. Crowdshorters syncronize withholding of (heterogeneous) payments that form the different parts of the same securitized debt. This crashes the value of those securities, and brings chaos to financial markets. Solsourcers maintain a blacklist of evil companies, and organize mass withholdings of contribution payments to those pension funds that invest in those companies. Pension funds bow to the will of contributors, and divest from the companies on the blacklist. Bladerunners target Big Tech companies with consumer/user strikes: while the drops in revenue they cause are minimal, these strikes have a big effect on the price of those companies’ shares, and that gives Bladerunners an edge. In general, the idea is to use the massive financialization of late-stage capitalism as an agent of chaos against capitalism itself. The book is not an easy read, but it contains many fresh ideas for new forms of, for lack of a better term, class struggle."

(https://edgeryders.eu/t/econ-sf-a-selection-of-works-and-authors/8582)