Clear Bright Future (Paperback)
Paul Mason
Sold by CitiRetail, Stevenage, United Kingdom
AbeBooks Seller since 29 June 2022
New - Soft cover
Condition: New
Ships from United Kingdom to U.S.A.
Quantity: 1 available
Add to basketSold by CitiRetail, Stevenage, United Kingdom
AbeBooks Seller since 29 June 2022
Condition: New
Quantity: 1 available
Add to basketPaperback. Our world order is under pressure as never before. From new authoritarian regimes in the US, Turkey and Russia, to the imminent break-up of the European Union and a social media awash with intolerance, things look set to fall apart just as abruptly as the Soviet Union did some thirty years ago. How did we get here, and what do we do now? In this searching new exploration of our crisis, Paul Mason argues that at its heart lies an attack on the idea of humanity itself. As the free-market system reduced us to two-dimensional consumers, genetics has stripped us of our belief in humans as agents of change. And now the dystopian forces of the authoritarian right are pushing the world towards a pre-modern understanding of the human being- one that aims to destroy the very concept of universal human rights, and create a new world in which we are biologically destined to form hierarchies based on ethnicity and gender, and to obey the demands of religious conformity. If these forces are not stopped, Mason warns, we will relive something even worse than the 1930s. In response, he demands a radical defence of the human being- a reinvention of humanism; a re-assertion of the universality of human rights; and a struggle for a society where biologically determined hierarchies are abolished. We have the power to imagine and design a better system. We must, Mason concludes, reach deep into the history and experience of resistance in order to be our own saviours. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.
Seller Inventory # 9780241390337
Today, the human race faces a new problem. Thanks to information technology, vast asymmetries of knowledge and power have opened up. Through the screens of our smart devices, corporations and governments know what we're doing, what we're thinking, can predict our next moves and influence our behaviour. We, meanwhile, don't even have the right to know that any of this is going on. As Paul Mason argues in this pyrotechnic new book, all this is intimately connected to the urgent economic, political and moral crises we are living through now.
Clear Bright Future explores how, during the preceding decades, the free-market system reduced us to two-dimensional consumers. Underlying the dominance of these forces, Mason contends, is the idea that human values no longer have foundation - an idea that, as we allow the all-pervasive presence of machines in our lives, we are tacitly coming to accept. And, if these forces are not stopped, we will relive something even worse than the 1930s.
But there is another way. We have the power to imagine and design a better system, at the heart of which is a radical reassertion of our common humanity. All this, Mason asserts, starts with a simple, fundamental choice. Will we accept the machine control of human beings, or will we resist it?
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