Inventing the Future

How can you build a future beyond neoliberal capitalism when political imagination seems exhausted? In Inventing the Future, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams argue that the left has trapped itself in “folk politics”—a style of activism that values immediacy, localism, and moral authenticity over large‑scale strategy. They show that while folk politics helped resist global neoliberalism, its focus on the immediate and experiential has prevented effective long‑term transformations.

Their central claim is striking: if you want to reinvent the future, you must combine technological understanding, institutional capacity, and collective imagination. Small, ethical experiments and protests must be supplemented by global strategies capable of contesting capitalist hegemony at its scale. The book’s argument unfolds through diagnosis, history, and proposal: first defining the limits of today’s activism, then analyzing how neoliberalism became dominant, and finally sketching a counter‑hegemonic strategy for a post‑work society.

The Problem of Folk Politics

Srnicek and Williams describe folk politics as a reflex more than a doctrine: the impulse to make politics tangible and immediate when global systems feel incomprehensible. Its core traits—temporal immediacy, spatial localism, and conceptual affect—render activism emotionally rewarding yet structurally ineffective. Movements like Occupy Wall Street, the Argentine neighborhood assemblies, and alter‑globalization campaigns found solidarity but lacked strategies to outlast repression or scale institutionally. Folk politics, they argue, cannot rival capital’s global foundations through moral gestures alone.

Learning from How the Right Won

To understand strategic success, the authors turn to neoliberalism’s rise. Hayek’s Mont Pelerin Society and its network of think tanks show how the right invested decades building intellectual legitimacy, elite networks, and policy machinery. When crisis hit in the 1970s, those ideas were “lying around,” ready for adoption by Thatcher and Reagan. The lesson is simple and urgent: ideas only gain power when institutions nurture them. The left must therefore build research networks, media organs, educational programs and alliances with technical experts to generate durable ideological and policy influence. You reclaim hegemony by acting strategically across decades, not reacting overnight.

Reclaiming Modernity, Freedom, and Utopia

Rather than rejecting modernity, the authors insist the left must claim its future‑oriented promises. They develop the concept of synthetic freedom—a positive, material freedom made possible by time, resources, education, and technology. This counters neoliberalism’s "negative freedom" where you’re formally free but materially constrained. They also introduce “hyperstitional progress,” meaning political imaginaries that actively produce futures by motivating collective action and innovation. Utopian imagination is therefore not escapist; it expands what is thinkable, trains desire, and invites participation in the shaping of real change (a perspective resonant with Ernst Bloch’s Principle of Hope).

Crisis of Work and Structural Surplus

Late capitalism produces massive surplus populations—people excluded from stable employment due to automation, global labor integration, and austerity. Automation displaces both manual and cognitive jobs, informalization swells worldwide, and punitive carceral systems absorb dispossessed citizens. The authors argue that defending the work ethic under these conditions is futile. A credible left program must plan for post‑work futures that address inequality, racialized exclusion, and ecological limits rather than nostalgia for industrial labor. The surplus analysis grounds their call for universal basic income (UBI) and shorter working weeks.

From Diagnosis to Design: Post‑Work Politics

The proposed alternative centers on automation, reduced work hours, universal basic income, and dismantling the moral valorization of work. These are “non‑reformist reforms”—achievable steps that cumulatively transform society’s structure. UBI and automation, properly managed, can decommodify survival and sever the direct link between productivity and income. Cultural work must accompany economic change: art, education, and media should reimagine leisure, creative activity, and care as values in themselves, not as by‑products of wage labor.

Technology, Infrastructure, and Repurposing

Technologies are not neutral; design choices encode politics. Srnicek and Williams advocate repurposing existing infrastructures for collective use—like the Lucas Plan’s worker proposals for social production or Chile’s Cybersyn experiment under Allende. They call for mission‑oriented public investment to redirect innovation toward social goals (linking to Mariana Mazzucato’s work on the entrepreneurial state). Repurposing is thus pragmatic utopianism: using what exists to build what could exist.

Organizing for Hegemony

Strategic organization is required to translate ideas into power. The authors suggest building an ecology of organizations—movements, parties, unions, research institutes, and media acting in distributed coordination. Populist framing can unify diverse groups (“the 99%”) against a clear antagonist, but enduring success depends on institutional depth. Leadership should be mobile and accountable: enable vanguard moments without authoritarian permanence. This plural structure mirrors ecosystems of the right but is directed toward democratic futures.

Imagination as a Political Tool

Finally, utopian imagination becomes both analytic and affective weapon. Political realism without vision leads to paralysis. Utopias reveal hidden possibilities, critique the present’s inevitabilities, and mobilize desire for collective aim. Cultural projects like Afro‑Futurism or cosmism extend the scope of what you can want. The left, Srnicek and Williams conclude, must learn again to dream—and to build institutions capable of turning those dreams into structure. You invent the future not by waiting for it, but by designing, organizing, and desiring it into being.

Srnicek and Williams begin with the diagnosis that much contemporary activism—what they name folk politics—mistakes immediacy for effectiveness. You can see it in Occupy’s tents, anti‑globalization protests, or local food and currency movements: all prioritize visible, affective presence but stop short of structural planning. Folk politics feels moral and participatory but fails to scale. It privileges small groups and emotional authenticity over abstraction, mediation, and sustained pressure.

Temporal, Spatial, and Conceptual Immediacy

The authors dissect three forms of immediacy. Temporal immediacy means reacting rather than strategizing—protests that flare without plans beyond the event. Spatial immediacy fetishizes the local, assuming moral superiority of face‑to‑face community, while ignoring that capitalism operates globally. Conceptual immediacy focuses on experience and feeling instead of abstraction and analysis. Together, these tendencies produce activism that comforts and excites but rarely transforms.

Horizontalism’s Appeal and Limits

Closely aligned is horizontalism: the rejection of hierarchy and representation through consensus assemblies and prefigurative living. You see its emergence from anarchist and autonomist traditions and in examples like Spain’s 15M and Argentina’s 2001 assemblies. Horizontalism’s egalitarian spirit is real—it resists domination and builds solidarity—but it falters when translated to national scale. Consensus democracy consumes time and excludes those unable to participate. Prefigurative zones like Occupy demonstrate alternative sociality yet collapse under logistical strain or repression. Without institutional mediation, they cannot endure.

Keeping the Local, Escaping Its Limits

Srnicek and Williams don’t dismiss localism; they urge combining it with abstract strategy. Use local experiments as laboratories but tie them to broader networks and infrastructure. Argentina’s factory takeovers and assemblies proved local capacities but remained marginal. A mature politics recognizes that scaling, institutionalization, and universality are not betrayals of democracy—they are its condition under global capitalism.

Lesson for Activists

Key takeaway

Retain the participatory ethics and solidarity of folk politics but fuse them with long‑term institutional strategy. Spontaneity without structure wins sympathy—not systemic change.

For you as an organizer, this means treating immediacy as starting energy, not destination. Build durable frameworks for scaling resistance, connect prefigurative practice to policy, and embrace abstraction without losing empathy. That is how folk politics becomes foundational, not fatal.

The authors turn to neoliberalism’s history as a case study in world-changing strategy. Neoliberalism didn’t win because markets are natural—it won through patient, networked, institutional work. Friedrich Hayek’s Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) and global think-tank systems illustrate how the right organized intellect to conquer common sense.

Building the Infrastructure of Ideas

Hayek and allies understood they needed a “war of position.” MPS linked elite academics, journalists, and financiers; funded scholars; and created think tanks like the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Manhattan Institute. They worked in layered timeframes: short-term public engagement through pamphlets and TV (Milton Friedman’s popular media outreach) and long-term scholar cultivation for government posts and policy formulation. By the time stagflation struck in the 1970s, neoliberalism had a ready-made diagnosis and prescription.

Crises as Windows for Change

The authors emphasize that ideas gain traction in crises. The right was prepared when opportunity knocked, translating theory into institutions—central banks, privatization regimes, deregulated finance. Over time, these material infrastructures made neoliberalism feel natural. The lesson is transferable: transformative politics must combine intellectual labor, institutional building, and readiness for conjunctural openings.

Implications for the Left

Srnicek and Williams call this strategy hegemony-building. The left should nurture its own media, think tanks, and research funding—not mimic conservatism’s ideology, but its organizational persistence. This redefines realism: true realism prepares infrastructure for future crises rather than adjusting within the limits of existing common sense. You can create new “realism” by reshaping what counts as possible.

Core insight

Enduring transformation demands intellectual ecosystems, long temporal horizons, and proactive engagement with crisis as the moment ideas materialize.

For you as a strategist, the message is clear: build your Mont Pelerin, not your next hashtag. Ideas shape structure only when they have institutional homes and patient networks.

The authors reassert modernity as terrain for emancipation, not corporate domination. They reject postmodern skepticism that abandoned progress as Eurocentric and offer an alternative: modernity as a plural, universal struggle to expand human capacities through collective design. If you cede the language of progress to neoliberalism, you concede the future itself.

Progress as Hyperstition

Progress, they argue, functions hyperstitionally—it becomes real when enough people act on its possibility. Think of the Soviet space program or climate justice frameworks: both mobilized imagination before infrastructure. Political fiction that feeds action transforms reality. The left needs visionary, desirable futures—images that organize projects and direct science and policy toward human flourishing rather than profit.

Subversive Universals

Modernity demands universals, but not Eurocentric ones. The authors propose “empty universals”—invitation platforms adaptable to diverse struggles. Feminism, anti-racism, and ecological movements already function this way: they claim universal rights to expose exclusion and expand inclusion. Universalism thus becomes a weapon of critique instead of colonial imposition.

Synthetic Freedom

Central to the new modernity is synthetic freedom, the positive capacity to act built through collective provision—UBI, health, education, time, connectivity. You are only free when you have means, not merely legal permission. This material liberty counters neoliberalism’s hollow freedom-to-choose within scarcity. Synthetic freedom therefore demands infrastructure: free time via shorter working weeks, universal incomes, and technological tools that expand participation.

Lesson

Reinvent modernity as collective empowerment rather than market acceleration. Freedom must be built, not merely declared.

This reorientation gives you a philosophical foundation for practical reforms. It turns progress, universality, and technology into emancipatory resources rather than conservative myths.

Automation, globalization and precarity are transforming work. Srnicek and Williams analyze how capitalism now produces surplus populations—vast groups excluded from stable wage labor. You see it in gig work, informal economies, long-term unemployment, and rising incarceration rates. These are not accidents; they are structural outcomes of accumulation and technological change.

Mechanisms of Surplus

Three mechanisms drive surplus creation: automation that eliminates routine tasks; global proletarianization bringing billions into insecure labor markets; and exclusion along race and gender lines through punitive institutions. Surplus is both economic and political: it reveals capitalism’s inability to provide meaningful livelihoods while maintaining consumption. State responses oscillate between forced participation (workfare) and violent exclusion (mass incarceration, border regimes).

Visible Symptoms

Wages stagnate, employment becomes insecure, and informal or gig work replaces stability. “Jobless recoveries” illustrate growth without labor absorption. In the Global South, slums and precarious economies expand; in the North, welfare retrenches. The result is a managed marginality sustained by surveillance and punishment rather than redistribution and solidarity.

Political Reorientation

The authors contend that defending full employment is a nostalgic error. Instead, the left must design post‑work solutions: UBI, shortened hours, automation under democratic ownership, and social programs addressing care. This prepares for capitalism’s coming transformation rather than resisting inevitable shifts. Surplus analysis thus forms the economic base for the book’s post‑work platform.

In one line

The end of secure work is not tragedy but opportunity—if you build institutions that treat freedom from work as a collective right.

Understanding surplus populations reframes your sense of crisis: poverty and precarity are systemic signals that demand structural redesign, not temporary relief.

The culmination of the book is a concrete post‑work program for the twenty‑first century. The goal is not escape but design: how to transform abundance into shared emancipation. Srnicek and Williams propose four interlocking reforms—automation, shorter weeks, universal basic income, and cultural transformation—as realistic pathways toward synthetic freedom.

Full Automation and Shorter Weeks

Automation, politicized correctly, liberates rather than dispossesses. Public investment and ownership can harness technology for collective benefit. Reducing the working week redistributes labor, cuts emissions, and increases leisure and civic participation. These shifts turn productivity gains into social time rather than unemployment.

Universal Basic Income and Cultural Renewal

UBI decouples livelihood from employment, increasing bargaining power and autonomy. It must be universal, adequate, and complementary to public services—not a neoliberal replacement. Cultural transformation is equally vital: dismantling the work ethic through art, media, and education that valorize free time, care, and creativity (resonant with André Gorz’s post‑work theories).

Political Construction

Making this real means hegemonic organization. The authors urge building institutional infrastructure: media, research foundations, populist movements, and alliances uniting labor, feminist and environmental causes. Each reform acts as both material demand and imaginative catalyst—a living utopia that expands what society finds possible.

Strategic lesson

The future won’t build itself; political coordination across theory, technology, and culture is how emancipation becomes infrastructure.

You end with a vision that is both pragmatic and radical: automate drudgery, secure livelihood, expand free time, and restore collective imagination. That is what “inventing the future” means.