This is no paean to the neoliberal 'gig economy' but rather an historical and contemporary tour of the radical potential of cooperative economics to disrupt capitalism as we know it. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, or even recently, in the fanatic rural cults of Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland, or the policed communities comprised of transphobic cis women in Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt. As O’Brien herself explains elsewhere, communes are “self-organized communities based on collectivizing [social] reproduction during periods of prolonged insurgency.

The book is committed to the idea that the land has to be given back, and it sees the potential for this to work along with the settler communes.

Everything for Everyone is a window into a possible future and a powerful antidote to our present moment’s ubiquitous moods of anti-utopianism, despair, nostalgia, and capitalist-realism. Published by the small leftist press Common Notions, Everything for Everyone is one of a very small handful of science fiction books I’ve found in English that describes an effective revolution in detail. We are likely to find ourselves in a blind alley if we center our vision of the future on worker cooperatives alone. We lap up imagery of dystopian violence, romanticize the aesthetics of every-man-for-themselves destruction. However, I couldn’t help but get thrown by a sudden aside about a space elevator, and one about Mars colonization efforts, which just didn’t feel in step with the more grassroots and personal approach of the rest of the book — though, by comparison, the long aside on how augmented reality dance groups connecting across the world created the post-capitalism internet is maybe my favourite thing ever .

One of the many historical gems in Everything is an eye-popping quote from 1930s socialist Norman Thomas: “The only effective answer to the totalitarian state of fascism is the cooperative commonwealth. But science fiction’s job is not to say what future is most probable; it is to make imaginable what is possible, to work out the logical consequences of a given development or set of developments in a coherent, vivid way. Once you see it, you can do something about it, which then clears the path for you to be able to begin looking after yourself properly. Yet, for years now, the utopian imagination has been not only pronounced dead, but also already transformed from a corpse to a souvenir.

As these pioneers show, cooperative enterprise is poised to revolutionize our lives, put people like us in charge of our economy, and engender creativity and innovation that serves us all. The interviewers, very old in the year of the recordings, have participated in insurrections, and, like their interviewees, their memories are also voiced through grief, rage, trauma, investments, and fierce attachments. To be written into one’s own work can be seen as megalomania, the immortality of solipsism, but in this novel, it is a political commitment. Everything for Everyone is not a dystopian end of the world, nor even a singularly perfect utopia, but something between. Every Sunday John Oliver swoops down on his snowy owl to deliver our weekly shipment of slow-motion catastrophes, which I watch on YouTube, clip after clip, in a sort of dissociative haze.

An example of the latter, An Zhou, an environmentalist, talks about the type of geoengineering necessary to revive a drowned and burned world. The novel also incorporates recent protest methods into its insurrectionary commune, such as the demand for Indigenous and ecological freedoms that clamored against the construction of pipelines, or taking the form of assemblies from Occupy, or the birth of new communication technologies against surveillance and capture, which were seen in Hong Kong and during Black Lives Matter protests. In other interviews, the authority of the interviewer breaks as the interviewees criticize the questions, crack jokes, refuse to answer certain questions, and even demand that the interlocutor become the interviewed. She is currently co-coordinating the Muslim Alliance for Gender and Sexual Diversity, a national organization that provides support and builds community by and for Queer Muslims.

While early reminiscences of war between organizers, governments, and fascist groups are initially compelling, such as Miss Kelley’s reminiscence on the people of New York vs. In Everything, Schneider occasionally recognizes the problem—that cooperative ownership, absent of a politics and culture committed to a transformative vision, doesn’t by itself deliver the desired change.

The platform cooperative enabled them to advocate for a commitment to realizing concrete forms of democratic ownership: An Uber owned by its drivers. I won’t go through all the novel’s worldbuilding, as though that could be what makes or breaks this book as a work of art. Abdelhadi and O’Brien have created a vivid image of the possibility that we will one day make a home of the world. The fact of their sentience can now be assumed through the nature of their communication with each other about the “modeling of virtual worlds.A professor of media studies as well as a journalist, Schneider, and his collaborator, the scholar-activist Trebor Scholz, are responsible for some of the more inventive digital efforts unfolding under the name of “platform cooperativism,” which they define as an effort to develop “shared governance and shared ownership of the Internet’s levers of power. It lets us imagine what can feel unimaginable in this moment—a total reorganization of social relations toward our mutual survival and the dismantling of the ruling death cult. In the first interview, the interviewers speak with a trans woman and practitioner of “skincraft” (a noncriminalized, essential, reparative form of sex work) who has held memorials in the form of gathering oral narratives.