After Scarcity

For millenia, scarcity has been the defining feature of human existence. Through hundreds of generations, life has been an endless struggle over finite food, energy and resources. Now, for the first time ever, that era coming to an end. Transformative new technologies - from limitless green power to super-efficient agriculture - are taking us into a new era: the first age of abundance. In Technopolis, Azeem Azhar reveals how to organise politics and the economy in this new world. If managed badly, the age of abundance could be defined by inequality and grinding turmoil - with a tiny few seizing the proceeds of these burgeoning technologies. But the solution is at our fingertips. Azhar reveals how Technodemocracy - a form of digitally-enabled participatory democracy, rooted in decentralised technology - could transform our economies, our politics and our environment. Technopolis is a portrait of a world undergoing the greatest transition since the industrial revolution - and a manifesto for how to govern it. It presents us with a stark choice: meekly accept the growing autocracy of the technogiants, or rebel.