Joe: Lewis, here’s a thought. What if the most powerful force of our time, the internet, wasn't built to perfect capitalism, but to accidentally destroy it? Lewis: Whoa, okay. That's a big opener. Destroy it how? Joe: What if every free app we download, every open-source code, every illegally shared movie file, is a small crack in the very foundation of our economic system? Lewis: I mean, I’ve definitely ‘borrowed’ a password or two in my time, but I didn't think I was dismantling global finance. That sounds like a pretty heavy burden for my weekend streaming habits. Joe: Well, that's the explosive idea at the heart of Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason. Lewis: Paul Mason... isn't he the BBC economics guy? I wouldn't have pegged him for a 'destroy capitalism' type. He always seemed pretty mainstream. Joe: Exactly! He was the economics editor for Newsnight, which makes his argument so compelling. This isn't some fringe manifesto. He wrote this in the long shadow of the 2008 financial crisis, looking at the data and seeing not just a temporary crash, but the beginning of the end for a 200-year-old system. Lewis: Okay, I’m intrigued. A mainstream journalist predicting the end of the world as we know it. Where do we even start with that? Joe: We start where it all began to unravel for our generation: with that 2008 crash, and why we completely misunderstood what was actually happening.

Lewis: Right, 2008. I remember the headlines. 'Greedy bankers,' 'toxic assets,' 'subprime mortgages.' The story we were sold was that a few bad apples in the financial industry almost crashed the whole system. Joe: That was the official narrative. And Mason argues it’s dangerously wrong. He says the 2008 crisis wasn't just a banking failure; it was the spectacular failure of a 30-year-long project called neoliberalism. Lewis: Neoliberalism. That's a term that gets thrown around a lot. What does Mason mean by it, specifically? Joe: He means the era that began around 1980, defined by a few key ideas: smashing the power of trade unions, privatizing everything from utilities to transport, and letting finance run wild. The core belief was that the market, left to its own devices, would solve everything. Lewis: And 2008 was the moment the market proved it couldn't. Joe: It was the moment the market had a complete meltdown. Mason was in New York when Lehman Brothers collapsed. He describes this surreal scene of sacked bankers clutching their cardboard boxes, satellite trucks everywhere, and the whole system just freezing. But the most telling part he found was in the emails that came out later. You had executives at these huge firms basically saying things like, "Let's hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of cards falters." Lewis: Wow. So they knew. They knew it was a bubble built on nothing. Joe: They knew it was a game, and they were playing it for all it was worth. But Mason’s point is bigger. He says this wasn't just a few greedy people. The entire system had become a house of cards. For decades, real wages for most people had been stagnant. So how did the economy keep growing? Through debt. We replaced wage growth with credit cards, student loans, and mortgages. Financialization, as he calls it. Lewis: Okay, but we've had crashes before. The dot-com bust in 2000, the Great Depression. Capitalism always seems to adapt, to find a new way to grow. Why is this time different? The book talks about these long fifty-year cycles, these Kondratieff waves. Isn't this just the downswing of another wave? Joe: That's the million-dollar question, and Mason's answer is what makes the book so radical. He argues that this time is different. In past cycles, when a crisis hit, capitalism could reinvent itself with a new technology—steam power, electricity, the automobile. It would find a new paradigm. But this time, the new technology, the very thing that was supposed to save it, is actually what's killing it. Lewis: The new technology being... the internet? Joe: The internet. And the entire digital ecosystem it created. He argues that information technology is a bomb that has gone off in the heart of the old system.

Lewis: A bomb? That sounds dramatic. How can the internet, which has created trillions of dollars in value for companies like Google, Apple, and Amazon, be a threat to capitalism? Joe: Because it introduces a concept that capitalism simply cannot handle: the zero marginal cost. Lewis: Hold on, 'zero marginal cost.' Can you break that down for me? What does that actually mean in plain English? Joe: It means that once you've made the first copy of something, every additional copy costs virtually nothing to produce. Think about a physical product, like a car. Every single car requires steel, plastic, rubber, and labor. There's always a cost. But now think about a digital song, a piece of software, or the design for a 3D-printed object. The first one might cost millions to develop, but the second, third, and millionth copy? They're free to replicate. Just copy and paste. Lewis: Right, like when I 'borrowed' my friend's login for that streaming service. The company isn't paying extra for me to watch. Joe: Exactly! And Mason points to the ultimate example of this in action: Wikipedia. In the early 2000s, the encyclopedia industry was a multi-billion dollar business. Companies like Britannica and Microsoft's Encarta employed thousands of people. Then along comes Wikipedia, a project built by volunteers, for free, and available to everyone. Lewis: And it just... wiped them out. I haven't seen a physical encyclopedia in years. Joe: It completely destroyed their business model. How can you sell a product for a thousand dollars when a better, constantly updated version is available for free? You can't compete with free. And this isn't just an isolated case. Look at open-source software like Linux, which runs a huge portion of the world's servers, or Android, which powers most smartphones. They are built on collaborative, non-market principles. Lewis: That's a great point. So if information is becoming the most important part of our economy—the 'knowledge economy' as they call it—but it has no price, or tends towards a price of zero, how does a market-based system even survive? The whole thing just... short-circuits. Joe: It does. The market is a mechanism for pricing scarce things. But information isn't scarce; it's abundant. This creates a massive contradiction. Corporations try to solve it by creating artificial scarcity through patents, intellectual property laws, and building walled-garden ecosystems like Apple's App Store. They're fighting a constant battle to keep information from being free. Lewis: So they're basically building dams to hold back a river that wants to flow everywhere. Joe: A perfect analogy. And Mason argues that those dams are starting to crack. The system is becoming a 'zombie system'—it looks like capitalism, it walks like capitalism, but its core logic is being eaten away from the inside by this new technology.

Joe: And that's where Mason moves from diagnosis to prescription. If the old system is failing, we need to start designing what comes next. He calls it 'Project Zero'. Lewis: Project Zero. It sounds like a secret agent's mission. What are the targets? Joe: The goals are huge: a zero-carbon energy system to tackle climate change, the production of machines and services with zero marginal costs, and reducing necessary work time as close as possible to zero. Lewis: Okay, now this is where it sounds a bit utopian, which is a common criticism of the book, right? That it's visionary but vague on the details. How do we get there? A Universal Basic Income? Joe: That's a huge part of it. But Mason sees UBI in a very specific way. It’s not just a new form of welfare. It's a radical tool to subsidize the transition. By giving everyone a basic, unconditional income, you formalize the separation of work and wages. It gives people the freedom to contribute to that non-market, collaborative economy we were talking about. Lewis: So it pays for the Wikipedia editors of the future, essentially. It allows people to create value outside of a traditional job. Joe: Precisely. It socializes the cost of automation. If robots are going to take 47% of jobs, as one Oxford study predicted, we need a new way to distribute the wealth they create. UBI is one mechanism. Another is to aggressively go after monopolies. Lewis: Like big tech and big pharma? Joe: Exactly. Mason argues these companies are no longer innovators; they're rent-seekers. They use their market power and intellectual property to extract value, not create it. His solution is to either break them up to foster competition or, if that's not practical, socialize them. Bring them under some form of public or collaborative ownership. Lewis: But the cost of UBI alone would be astronomical. And nationalizing Google? That feels like a pipe dream. Does he offer a realistic path, or is this more of a philosophical guide? Joe: He acknowledges the immense cost and political difficulty. He points out that the UK's annual benefits bill is already huge, and a UBI would cost significantly more. But he argues the cost of not acting—of letting the system stagnate with high inequality, high debt, and climate disaster—is even greater. He also proposes a 'wiki-state'. Lewis: A wiki-state? Like a government run by volunteers? Joe: Not exactly. He means a state that acts less like a top-down planner and more like the staff at Wikipedia. Its job isn't to control everything, but to nurture and create the space for these new, collaborative, non-market forms of production to grow organically. It sets the rules of the game to favor collaboration over exploitation.

Lewis: So, when you put it all together, it's a pretty radical vision. He's saying the old left-wing dream of seizing the means of production is obsolete. The new project is about setting the means of production free. Joe: That's a great way to put it. He admits it's a massive, multi-decade project. The key takeaway isn't a 5-step plan, but a shift in mindset. Mason's core insight is that the seeds of a new system are already growing within the old one—in open-source projects, in co-ops, in every act of online collaboration. The transition isn't about a violent revolution, but about nurturing these seeds until they can flourish. Lewis: So the main contradiction he identifies is between the old, hierarchical world of corporations and governments trying to control information, and the new, networked world that wants to share it freely. A battle between hierarchy and the network. Joe: Exactly. And that's the fight that will define the 21st century. He argues that the new agent of change isn't the old, industrial working class, but 'networked humanity'—the educated, connected individuals who are already living with one foot in this new, collaborative world. Lewis: It’s a powerful and, honestly, a very hopeful idea. It reframes technology not just as a tool for distraction or corporate profit, but as a potential tool for liberation. Joe: It is. And he leaves us with a powerful question: If technology is making abundance possible, why are we clinging to a system built on scarcity? It really makes you think about what kind of future we're building. Lewis: It does. I’m curious what our listeners think. Is this the future, or just a fascinating thought experiment? Let us know your thoughts on our socials. Joe: This is Aibrary, signing off.