Post – Flux

English

The expansion of automation, due to its social and economic consequences, has often been viewed with anxiety. However, in recent times, it has also contributed to the revival of aspirations that echo the utopian ideal. In the mid-2000s, inspired by rather radical ideas, a current of intellectual thought (with authors such as Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams, Paul Mason, and Aaron Bastani among the most cited) reimagined visions of the future, defending automation as a potentially liberating technology. It was seen as capable of providing leverage for a broader political project of systemic transformation, specifically towards a “postcapitalist” society. This contribution aims to elucidate how and in what directions a political imagination, coupled with an emancipatory aspiration, has been (re)constructed and updated around this technology. While automation had already been envisioned as a means to liberate people from work, this analysis examines how the argument can be sustained by new potentialities and integrated into a “postcapitalist” aspiration. It also questions the implications for the logics of the productive system, especially the tension that seems difficult to resolve between the promises of abundance and the persistence of productivism. Finally, it demonstrates that such an ambition becomes even more political when it involves automating while simultaneously enabling a collective reappropriation of the machines and productive infrastructures engaged in such a trajectory.