Why the utopian vision of William Morris is now within reach

May 1, 2018

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Morris’s utopian society has no government nor a monetary system. Craftwork has made ‘wage slavery’ obsolete, and parliamentary democracy has given way to new forms of cooperation. The means of production are democratically controlled, and people find pleasure in sharing their interests, goals and resources.

The central character and narrator, William Guest, finds himself in conversation with a young girl, a citizen of Morris’s utopian society:

Source: aeon.co

China’s experiment in ranking and monitoring citizens has started

Depending on their score bracket, residents hold a grade ranging from A+++ to D. Some offenses can hurt the score pretty badly. For drunk driving, for example, one’s score plummets straight to a C. On the other hand, triple As are rewarded with perks such as being able to rent public bikes without paying a deposit (and riding them for free for an hour and a half), receiving a $50 heating discount every winter, and obtaining more advantageous terms on bank loans.

China is monitoring employees’ brain waves and emotions

Chinese businesses and the military are monitoring employees’ brain activity and emotions. The ’emotional surveillance technology’ helps employers identify mood shifts so they can change break times, an employee’s task, or even send them home. The technology reportedly increases productivity and profitability, with one company claiming its profits jumped by $315 million.

Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin-based

That the Kazakh language is currently written in Cyrillic – and the persistent use of Russian in elite circles – is a legacy of the Soviet Union’s rule, one that some of its neighbouring countries sought to shed right after the union’s collapse in 1991. Azerbaijan, for example, started introducing textbooks in Latin script the next year, while Turkmenistan followed suit in 1993. Kazakhstan is making the transition almost three decades on, in a different economic environment that makes the costs hard to predict.

Why the utopian vision of William Morris is now within reach

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China’s experiment in ranking and monitoring citizens has started

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Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin-based