The Ministry for the Future 97-106: Promethean Authority, Invisible Revolution, Guggenmusik, No Fate, Dignity

This is our last, if not best, episode concerning The Ministry for the Future. (What does the phrase “if not” mean, anyway? We’ll never know!)

We talk the failurewin (or successlose) of progress. Trying things is about failing at them, there’s no such thing as fate. Need a posture of openness toward the future that’s about being willing to work, try, fail. Faith in the future, it’s not given, it doesn’t belong to someone else, or to capital. Revolution isn’t necessarily recognizable as such in the moment it’s happening, and even if you’re doing a revolution, you may have to do it again.

Radical democracy, the internet of animals, the personhood of plants, the return of meaning, living in loss, building on ruins science fiction's obsession with population, the shackling of science by capitalist instrumentality, family and solidarity, dignity, connection, the fundamental mysteriousness of Being, independent of the limitations capital places on us--we talk about it all, man. And we try to reconcile ourselves to the fact that even if we fix the planet we're still going to suffer. It might just mean that we keep going on and continuing to live. Life is in the living, and nothing is inevitable. Except suffering! Cool...

Also Escape from New York was set in 1997; Johnny Mnemonic was set in 2021. And should we do a newsletter?

Thanks for listening! We'll be back in a few weeks with an interview with KSR, some movie episodes, and our next Robinson book.

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Music by Spirit of Space

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