A newsletter about building better futures for all of us, not just Mars colonies and asteroid mines for the rich.
The Looming Collapse Of The Ad-based Internet
In this week’s issue, we’re doing things a little bit differently. We’ve been talking a lot about the future, how it might look and how it might be built. In a new article for OneZero, I explore those questions in relation to the future of the web. The initial idea for the article came from…
The Tech Giants Just Won A Major Battle In Their Class War On Workers
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been discussing long-term changes to the economy and, by extension, our society. Those details help to inform the way that we think about the future, but it’s also important to understand that whatever future we fight for won’t be the only future on offer. Powerful actors will have their…
Rebuild De-industrialized Communities For People, Not Shareholders
Last week, we discussed how automation isn’t going to eradicate work and how that should reframe the debate about what the future looks like. Instead of responding to technological change, we need to imagine a future and develop the technology that will help us get there. I want to expand on that point, and extend…
Work Isn’t Going Away, But It Could Suck Less
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been considering long-term changes to our societies that haven’t always produced the best outcomes for the general public, and how we might change them in the future. This week’s issue spends a bit more time looking forward. Early on in the newsletter, when setting out some of the principles…
Capitalism’s Consumerist Treadmill is Making Us Miserable
Last week, we discussed the harms and inequities that have been normalized in our societies, and consequently which may be overlooked when we begin to think about what a better world might look like. This week, I want to drill down into that subject a little more, reflecting on some of the themes we’ve been…
Recognizing Injustice Isn’t Enough. We Must Also Imagine Alternatives.
Last week we reviewed how capitalism has altered our society over the course of many decades, to eradicate communal relationships in favour of market transactions. But there’s another aspect of this that doesn’t get enough attention and that we must recognize if we’re to truly build a fairer and more equitable world. Capitalism and the…
Blame Capitalism For The Erosion Of Community
Over the past 20 weeks, we’ve spent time looking back in order to remind ourselves that things were once different in a positive way. We built more public housing, we had more public ownership, and there was more energy to reimagine the way we work. I think it’s important to know that history and to…
After Throne Speech Canadians Need Action, Not False Promises
On Wednesday, Parliament rolled out the red carpet for our scandal-plagued Queen’s representative to outline the government’s vision for Canada in a Covid World. It certainly had a lot of big promises, but was very short on details. The bigger question, at least for this newsletter, is whether it moves us toward the type of…
Economic Planning Is The Only Way To Overcome Climate Change
In recent weeks, we’ve looked at historical examples of breaks with the status quo that led to fundamentally different societies for weeks, years and even decades. But it’s also important to bring that perspective home instead of thinking this is just something that happens abroad. A couple months ago, we discussed how public institutions used…
Learning From The Successes and Failures of Yugoslav Socialism
In last week’s issue, we looked at the anarchist reorganization of social and economic life in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War. Like the Paris Commune, it was a unique and brief period within a broader conflict — this week we’ll look at a much longer project. The former Yugoslavia comprised present-day Balkan states of…
How Spanish Anarchists Transformed Catalonia
Last week, we looked back at the Paris Commune and how the Prussian victory over French forces created a brief rupture where a different kind of society began to form. This week we’re looking at another: the Spanish Revolution. In April 1931, Spain declared its Second Republic, but the political situation was far from stable.…
What We Can Learn From The Paris Commune
As we discussed last week, we can’t repeat the past, but we can take inspiration from it. Our current histories justify the status quo, but developing alternative histories that centre different historical moments can help to inspire movements toward a better world. Today, that moment is the Paris Commune. In the words of Karl Marx,…
There’s Nothing Inevitable or Inescapable About Capitalism
Last week, we discussed how there’s no going back to the so-called golden age of capitalism. But that doesn’t mean we can’t take lessons from the past to inspire what we build in the future. During this series, we’ve already considered how public services were once much stronger and more dynamic in Canada, and the…
Nostalgia For The “Golden Age” Of Capitalism Is A Dead-End
In recent weeks, we discussed why scarcity is a political choice, not a necessity, and how the construction of suburbs in the postwar period helped to fuel a more individualist society. It’s important to look to the past, but we can’t get distracted in hoping for a return to some imagined period of greatness. In…
In Rich Societies, Scarcity Is A Crime
In recent weeks, we’ve been considering how our societies became more individualized and why workers need to help direct a society that better serves collective interests. Yet we also need to understand how the current way we organize society isn’t serving us well. Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much by Sendhil Mullainathan and…
Nationalization Isn’t Enough. Workers Should Control Their Workplaces.
In recent weeks, we’ve been discussing how there needs to be a greater role for the public sector to blunt the negative effects of the market and ensure our societies are best serving the whole population. But that can’t simply involve nationalizing services and continuing to run them as top-down enterprises. Workers and communities need…
Decent Housing Should Not Be Reserved For The Rich
In last week’s issue, we discussed how the postwar construction of auto-oriented suburbs individualized our lives to increase consumption and generate profits for corporations. One of the key elements of that transformation was promoting private homeownership — it’s something we must change to build a more inclusive world. When the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation…
We Need Public Luxuries For All, Not Private Luxuries For Some
Last week, we discussed how to build a better food system that centres collective solutions rather than individualizing the problems of hunger and lack of access to good meals. But the individualization of society is something that has taken root on a much larger scale, and must be addressed if we’re to build a more…
We Can Do Better Than Soulless Ghost Kitchens and Delivery Apps
In last week’s issue, we discussed how technological development could be redesigned to focus on human flourishing and the public good instead of serving ads and padding investors’ pockets. There are many ways that could benefit the public, but one of the most compelling is how it could interact with the food system. During the…
Technology For The People
In last week’s issue, we considered the need to take our telecommunications infrastructure back into public ownership so it can serve people instead of profit. The week before that, we began to lay out a vision for a more expansive Canada Post. But how might those ideas be combined to help us rethink technological development…
Telcos Should Be Run By The Public, For The Public
In last week’s issue, we discussed how Canada Post is being underutilized, and how it could make a significant difference in communities around the country by offering postal banking services, helping to fund the green transition and creating an integrated (and expanded) urban delivery network. But it doesn’t stop there. Private monopolies and oligopolies have…
Bless The Post Office
Last week, we discussed why billionaires’ visions of the future aren’t going to serve the working class. I concluded by asking how might we wield institutions (or imagine new ones) that do serve the many, not the few? We should start by expanding the post office. Canada Post is a staple of Canadian life. Sure,…
Fully Automated Luxury Fantasy
As we discussed last week, billionaires’ visions of the future, where we change very little about how we live, aren’t designed to serve anyone but themselves. Those on the left must challenge their visions and critically assess what a future that serves the working class might look like. Unfortunately, some on the left do get…
A Future For Space Billionaires
In recent weeks, we talked about the Canadian government’s unwillingness to structure the response to the pandemic in a way that ensures a better future. But it’s not just a problem at the government level. In his 2009 book Capitalist Realism, the late writer Mark Fisher asserted that it’s easier to imagine the end of…
Putting Workers at the Centre of Our Economic Recovery
After calls from unions, labour groups and British Columbia’s government, Canadians may finally get sick leave. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced on Monday that he will support a plan to guarantee 10 paid sick days for all workers, after the federal New Democratic Party demanded it in exchange for continued support of the suspension of…
A Future Workers Can Believe In
Several decades of neoliberal privatizations, tax cuts and attacks on workers’ rights have created a lot of problems in Canadian society. This newsletter will shed light on these problems, and present possible paths toward a future that empowers the working class, from policy changes to larger reimaginings of key Canadian institutions. Although this newsletter will…