Dreaming in Zero Gravity

From Frank Pasquale’s review of Peter Frase’s Four Futures: Life after Capitalism.

The assumption of abundance that drives half of Four Futures reminds me of a critical discussion of dance under conditions of zero gravity. It’s fun to imagine what might happen if choreographers could devise movements unbounded by the risk of hard falls, broken bones, and twisted knees. But whatever art of human movement was devised in space would quickly diverge in its standards of excellence from the standards governing dance here on earth. Weightless artistic movement relates to present dance as Frase’s political economy of abundance relates to ordinary political economy. Given that the primary economic problem is scarcity, it may not be a form of political economy at all, but rather, pure politics.