RSA Replay: The Future of Capitalism

Channel 4’s economics editor Paul Mason shows how, from the ashes of the recent financial crisis, we have the chance to create a more socially just and sustainable global economy.

Over the past two centuries or so, capitalism has undergone continual change - economic cycles that lurch from boom to bust - and has always emerged transformed and strengthened. Surveying this turbulent history, journalist and Channel 4 economics news editor Paul Mason wonders whether this time capitalism itself has reached its limits and is changing into something wholly new.

At the heart of this change is information technology: a revolution that has the potential to reshape utterly our familiar notions of work, production and value; and to destroy an economy based on markets and private ownership. Almost unnoticed, in the niches and hollows of the market system, whole swathes of economic life are changing.. Goods and services that no longer respond to the dictates of neoliberalism are appearing, from parallel currencies and time banks, to cooperatives and self-managed online spaces. Vast numbers of people are changing their behaviour, discovering new forms of ownership, lending and doing business that are distinct from, and contrary to, the current system of state-backed corporate capitalism.

[NickLightbody]

Paul Mason's "Postcapitalism" book appears, based on the part I have read to date, to be a great contribution to a serious debate about where our world is heading. Very interesting and thought provoking. He seems to offer a reasonably credible analysis of much of what we are now observing in our lives.

[TheLivirus]

Having studied product development at a University where research is being performed on automation of product development, I found this talk very relevant and interesting. The basic idea is that in the future someone (the engineer, the businessman, or maybe even the customer) will set up the design constraints on the product of interest, and then the software explores the design space for optimal solutions and spits out ready concepts. The concepts will then be handled by a highly flexible production system and the product is automatically produced, packaged and delivered to the customer. Right now, this is mostly applied on specific products to generate variants, but more general solutions are in development.

[collinmanderson]

Nice talk. A few factual clarifications:
- I can't find a source off hand, but I'm sure there are some people out there who are paid to work on Apache (though not necessarily paid by Apache).
- Usually Linux computers get updated weekly at most. Some distributions have a "rolling update" which matches his description of updates, but most upgrades take a lot more then simply turning your computer on.

[RuSstarcraft]

Wasnt Wallerstein on to this in the 80s?

[lianatoo]

Congratulations for such clear position on  human society

[rfqt]

This is not new. Marx foresaw all this.