One weird trick to make monopolies self-destruct

Remember when corporate raiders broke companies up?

Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 novel Ministry For the Future was a groundbreaking work: it’s the tale of a detailed, plausible transition from a world on a collision course with civilization-ending climate catastrophe to one where the challenge is met, with humanity collectively deciding to save itself:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/03/ministry-for-the-future/#ksr

Robinson’s book is important: it not only disproves the (variously attributed) capitalist realism aphorism that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism” — it also imagines the means by which that ending was brought about.

It’s a tale of what I’ve called “The Swerve”: the day we stop listening to the first class passengers at the front of the bus that’s barreling towards a cliff, rush the driver and yank the wheel before we go over the edge:

https://locusmag.com/2022/07/cory-doctorow-the-swerve/

Since the book’s publication, it has been the subject of intense foment, such as the excellent Crooked Timber seminar on the book’s strengths, flaws, and future: