Fully Automated Luxury Communism - with Aaron Bastani

25 June 2019| Newspeak House, London, UK

Virtual Futures presents Aaron Bastani in conversation on his new book, 'Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto' (Verso, 2019). This event is kindly hosted by Newspeak House, the London College of Political Technologists.

Will new technologies liberate us from work and provide us the opportunity to build a society beyond both capitalism and scarcity? Bastani argues that automation, rather than undermining an economy built on full employment, might instead be the path to a world of liberty, luxury and happiness - for everyone.

Discover how improvements in renewable energies will make fossil fuels a thing of the past, how asteroids will be mined for essential minerals, and how genetic editing and synthetic biology will prolong life, virtually eliminate disease and provide meat without animals. Rather than a final destination, such a society might herald the real beginning of history.

In conversation with Richard Barbrook, Senior Lecturer at University of Westminster.

Moderated by Luke Robert Mason, Director of Virtual Futures.

Aaron Bastani is co-founder and senior editor at Novara Media. He holds a PhD from the New Political Communication Unit, University of London, examining social movements in the digital environment which fail to correspond to the traditional logic of collective action. His research interests include new media, social movements, asymmetric strategies and post-scarcity political economy. He has written for Vice, London Review of Books, Guardian and Open Democracy.

Richard Barbrook is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Westminster, London, England. He is a trustee of Cybersalon and a founder member of Class Wargames. He has written about the politics of the Net and gaming in his books Media Freedom: The Contradictions of Communications in the Age of Modernity; The Class of the New; Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village; and Class Wargames: Ludic Subversion Against Spectacular Capitalism.