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In News from Nowhere, Morris imagined a world in which human happiness and economic activity coincided. He reminds us that there needs to be a point to labour beyond making ends meet – and there is. Unalienated labour creates happiness for all – consumer and creator; whereas modern capitalism, in contrast, has created a treadmill in which this aspect of work has been lost. Capitalism, he explains, locks the capitalist into a horrible life, which leads nowhere but the grave.

No matter where they are based, people today can use the internet to cooperate and globally share the products of their cooperation as a commons. Commons-based peer production (usually abbreviated as CBPP) is fundamentally different from the dominant modes of production under industrial capitalism. In the latter, owners of means of production hire workers, direct the work process, and sell products for profit-maximisation. Think how typical multinational corporations are working. Such production is organised by allocating resources through the market (pricing) and through hierarchical command. In contrast, CBPP is in principle open to anyone with the relevant skills to contribute to a common project: the knowledge of every participant is pooled.

These participants might be paid, but not necessarily. Since commons-based projects are open systems, anyone with the right knowledge and skills can contribute, either paid by companies, clients or not at all.

Journalists can’t see the future, but they are able to peer through the lens of history to better understand the present. It’s a founding principle of Retro Report, the co-producer of this series. The future may be starkly different than the present, but it’ll be easier to understand once you uncover its deep continuity with the past. The social and technical transformations we’re currently living through are profound, but this isn’t the first time rapid, singular change has occurred. Before computer networks disrupted our communications, networks of steel rails and grids of artificial light upended our very concepts of space and time, day and night. Subtract trains and light bulbs from a modern city, and how much of it is even left?

The future has a history. And the stories we tell about incoming change—the stories we’ve always told about such changes—fall into consistent patterns. Dator gained some of his stature in future studies with his famous observation that predictions about the future—whether they’re coming from a corporate spreadsheet, a church pulpit or Hollywood—all boil down to roughly four scenarios. Growth that keeps going. Transformation upending the past. Collapse of the present order. And  discipline imposed, in some cases, to hold such collapse at bay.

“Most people, through their education, and through their acculturation, are locked into a single view of the future. They have never been encouraged to think about these alternatives, or forced to think about them,” Dator says.

Any theory of being American must explain one salient and striking fact: cruelty. America is the most cruel nation among its peers — even among most poor countries today. It is something like a new Rome. It has little, if any, functioning healthcare, education, transport, media, no safety nets, no stability, security. The middle class is collapsing, and life expectancy is falling. Young people die for a lack of insulin they cannot crowdfund. Elderly middle-class people live and die in their cars. Kids massacre each other in schools — when they’re not self-medicating the pain of it all away. The combination of these pathologies happens nowhere else — not a single place — in the world. Not even Pakistan, Costa Rica, or Rwanda. Hence, the world is aghast daily at the depths of American cruelty — yet somehow, they seem bottomless.(Of course I don’t mean that all Americans are cruel. I just mean that in the same way we say countries have attitude, dispositions, that there’s such a thing as a French or German national attitude or disposition, so, too there is an American one. Nor do I mean America is “the most cruel society in the world”. Can we really ever judge that? But it is uniquely cruel — a kind of special example — in weird, needless, and singular ways.)Let me throw that into relief. Scandinavians are the happiest, longest-lived, and most prosperous people in the world because they do not punish one another constantly — but lift one another up. But Americans do not believe this reality. The underlying sentiment that unites America’s manifold problems is a myth of cruelty.

The decisions made by algorithmic credit scoring applications are not only said to be more accurate in predicting risk than traditional scoring methods; its champions argue they are also fairer because the algorithm is unswayed by the racial, gender, and socioeconomic biases that have skewed access to credit in the past.

Algorithmic credit scores might seem futuristic, but these practices do have roots in credit scoring practices of yore. Early credit agencies, for example, hired human reporters to dig into their customers’ credit histories. The reports were largely compiled from local gossip and colored by the speculations of the predominantly white, male middle class reporters. Remarks about race and class, asides about housekeeping, and speculations about sexual orientation all abounded.

By 1935, whole neighborhoods in the U.S. were classified according to their credit characteristics. A map from that year of Greater Atlanta comes color-coded in shades of blue (desirable), yellow (definitely declining) and red (hazardous). The legend recalls a time when an individual’s chances of receiving a mortgage were shaped by their geographic status.