Four Futures: Visions of the World After Capitalism at 10 years

Peter Frase published *Four Futures* in 2016, insisting his grid of communism, rentism, socialism, and exterminism were not predictions but possibilities — political outcomes dependent on who wins. Ten years on, the striking thing is not that one quadrant won but that all four coexist in the same economy, sometimes in the same company. The very rich already live in what Frase called "communism for the few" (he borrowed the observation from Charles Stross); gig workers experience exterminism's logic of warehoused surplus labor; intellectual property rentism structures everything from seed patents to AI model licensing; and pockets of socialist planning emerge in climate adaptation projects nobody calls socialist. Frase wrote that "where we end up will be a result of political struggle," but the more unsettling finding at the ten-year mark is that the struggle didn't produce a destination — it produced a stratification, where your quadrant depends on your zip code and your capital. The book's real prophecy wasn't any single future. It was that the grid would stop being a menu and become a class map.