Get the latest tech news
Magical Thinking: Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (2011)
Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward presented a twentieth century that was free of nineteenth-century drudgery.
New technologies offered new opportunities to get rich, empowering a rising class of enterprising monopolists—men like Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller, whose imperial accumulations of industry and infrastructure contrasted with the misery of the working poor who staffed their factories and furnaces and lived in slums. The ideals of the Revolution had been perverted to permit a buildup of power by the few—“despotism of the vilest and most degrading kind,” in George’s words—and this dictatorship of the rich posed as grave a threat to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as the British Crown had a century earlier. What Looking Backward conveys, despite its limitless appetite for logistical detail and language that often veers from wooden to limp, is above all a feeling, a mood, the hard-won optimism of Bellamy himself, patiently awaiting the day “when heroes burst the barred gate of the future.” On how to hasten this future’s arrival, however, the book says little.
Or read this on Hacker News