I know I’m supposed to be finishing off The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb but I picked up something else yesterday by accident and I haven’t been able to put it down as they say in book reviews. The book is called How To Be Free by Tom Hodgkinson and it is quite possibly the best thing I’ve read in ages. Here’s a bit from a chapter called Submit No More to the Machine, Use Your Hands:

“ The future is always about machines. But I don’t think about the future; I think about the present. The future is a capitalist construct. The past teaches us that the future has let us down, and let us down many times. Dreaming of some kind of technological utopia in which machines will do all the work has failed us before, and it is failing us now, with our new faith in digital technology.

‘When we speak of the future, we speak of man’s hope for the future, which he is living now’, is a line I heard repeated once on a pop record. The ‘future’, so called, is in fact part of the anti-life system; we are essentially kept quiet by means of the idea that at some point in the ‘future’, things are going to get better, as per the theme song of the labour Party’s victory over the Conservatives.

The future is part of the classic Protestant notion of deferral of pleasures. Pensions, for example are sold with the idea of a brighter future. I believe that things can get better from the present moment, right here, right now….

…the problem with ideas of the future is that they are untested; they are all speculation, fantasy. The future has not happened yet. So it is, in fact, less woolly minded to look to the past for inspiration than to look to the future.”