Future Politics

In Future Histories, public interest lawyer and digital specialist Lizzie O'Shea argues that we need to stop looking forward and start looking backwards. Weaving together histories of computing and progressive social movements with modern theories of the mind, society, and self, O'Shea constructs a "usable past" that can help us determine our digital future. What, she asks, can the Paris Commune tell us about earlier experiments in sharing resources - like the internet - in common?

In Spies, Lies, and Algorithms, Amy Zegart separates fact from fiction as she offers an engaging and enlightening account of the past, present, and future of American espionage as it faces a revolution driven by digital technology. Drawing on decades of research and hundreds of interviews with intelligence officials, Zegart provides a history of US espionage, gives an overview of intelligence basics and life inside America's intelligence agencies, and explores the vexed issues of traitors, covert action, and congressional oversight.

Technological advances have benefited our world in immeasurable ways, but there is an ominous flip side: our technology can be turned against us. Hackers can activate baby monitors to spy on families, thieves are analyzing social media posts to plot home invasions, and stalkers are exploiting the GPS on smart phones to track their victims’ every move. We all know today’s criminals can steal identities, drain online bank accounts, and wipe out computer servers, but that’s just the beginning.

Abolition for the People brings together 30 essays representing a diversity of voices - political prisoners, grassroots organizers, scholars, and relatives of those killed by the anti-Black terrorism of policing and prisons. This collection presents listeners with a moral choice: “Will you continue to be actively complicit in the perpetuation of these systems,” Kaepernick asks in his introduction, “or will you take action to dismantle them for the benefit of a just future?”

In the face of unprecedented global change, New York Times best-selling author Alec Ross proposes a new social contract to restore the balance of power between government, citizens, and business.

In naher Zukunft: auf Grund der Maßnahmen zu Pandemien und Klimawandel hat sich das Leben vollkommen verändert. Ein Generationenkampf entbrennt in einer Welt, in der die Klimakanzlerin mit CO2-Lebenskonten, unlösbaren smarten Armbändern und Kontaktbudgets unerbittlich regiert.

On January 20, 2021, standing where only two weeks earlier police officers had battled with right-wing paramilitaries, Joe Biden took his oath of office. The American people were still sick with COVID-19, his economists were already warning him of an imminent financial crisis, and his party, the Democrats, had the barest of majorities in the Senate. Yet, faced with an unprecedented set of crises, Joe Biden decided he would not play defense. Instead, he set out to transform the nation.

Leading innovation expert Alec Ross explains what's next for the world, mapping out the advances and stumbling blocks that will emerge in the next 10 years - for businesses, governments, and the global community - and how we can navigate them.

Even leading capitalists admit that capitalism is broken. Green Swans is a manifesto for system change designed to serve people, planet, and prosperity. In his 20th book, John Elkington - dubbed the "Godfather of Sustainability" - explores new forms of capitalism fit for the 21st century.

George Friedman has forecasted the coming trends (politics, technology, population, and culture) of the next century in The Next 100 Years, and focused his predictions on the coming ten years in The Next Decade. Now, in Flashpoints, Friedman zooms in on the region that has, for 500 years, been the cultural hotbed of the world - Europe - and examines the most basic and fascinating building block of the region: culture.

In 2018, I had a dream of a coming second American Revolution/Civil War. In this dream, I saw events that are now unfolding at a rapid pace. I saw the conclusion of our present trauma, and the triumph over the evil that has been subduing our land. I saw how this victory will be accomplished. This is what I saw.

Surviving the Future is a story drawn from the fertile ground of the late David Fleming's extraordinary Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It. That hardback consists of 404 interlinked dictionary entries, inviting listeners to choose their own path through its radical vision. Recognizing that Lean Logic's sheer size and unusual structure can be daunting, Fleming's long-time collaborator Shaun Chamberlin has selected and edited one of these potential narratives to create Surviving the Future.

Since the global financial crisis of 2008, people have increasingly lost trust in institutions and elites, while seizing upon new digital tools to sidestep traditional gatekeepers. As a result, powerful new voices—once regarded as radical, unorthodox, or marginal—are disrupting the status quo in politics, business, and culture. Meanwhile, social and economic inequalities are stoking populist rage across the world, toxic partisanship is undermining democratic ideals, and the internet and AI have become high-speed vectors for the spread of misinformation.

Who Owns the Future? is a visionary reckoning with the effects network technologies have had on our economy. Lanier asserts that the rise of digital networks led our economy into recession and decimated the middle class. Now, as technology flattens more and more industries - from media to medicine to manufacturing - we are facing even greater challenges to employment and personal wealth. But there is an alternative to allowing technology to own our future....

Cities can make us sick. They always have - diseases spread more easily when more people are close to one another. And disease is hardly the only ill that accompanies urban density. Cities have been demonized as breeding grounds for vice and crime from Sodom and Gomorrah on. But cities have flourished nonetheless because they are humanity’s greatest invention, indispensable engines for creativity, innovation, wealth, and connection, the loom on which the fabric of civilization is woven. But cities now stand at a crossroads.

Can we scientifically predict our future? Scientists and pseudo scientists have been pursuing this mystery for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years. But now, astonishing new research is revealing patterns in human behavior previously thought to be purely random. Precise, orderly, predictable patterns.

We live in a time of vast changes that include accelerating globalization, mounting quantities of information, the growing hegemony of science and technology, and the clash of civilizations. Those changes call for new ways of learning and thinking in school, business, and the professions. Listen as psychologist Howard Gardner defines the cognitive abilities that will command a premium in the years ahead.

High-tech innovations are created at a dazzling speed, and it all points to a world that is getting faster at a dizzying pace. Azeem Azhar knows this better than most. Over the last three decades, he has founded companies bought by Amazon and Microsoft, served as the Economist’s first ever internet correspondent, and created a leading international tech newsletter and podcast, the Exponential View. Now, Azhar offers a revelatory new model for understanding how technology is changing the world.

In Higher Animals, New Yorker science writer Michael Specter explores how MRNA vaccines have transformed the scientific landscape and helped spark a biotechnology revolution. Biology is information, and increasingly, that means digital information. We need to think of biology the way we think about computer code, only instead of bits and bytes, we use the genetic letters: ACGT. The widely-used mRNA COVID vaccines offer the most immediate example of this groundbreaking moment in medical and scientific history.

Here, leading social philosopher Roman Krznaric unearths fascinating insights and inspiration from the last 1000 years of world history that could help us confront the most urgent challenges facing humanity in the twenty-first century. From bridging the inequality gap and keeping AI under control, to reviving our faith in democracy and avoiding ecological collapse, History for Tomorrow shows that history is not simply a means of understanding the past but a way of reimagining our relationship with the future.