Designing a credible alternative system requires a path-dependent counterfactual history.

Evidence

The guy at the pub wanted to know how his life would differ under my system in the here and now, with the technologies currently at hand, with our existing human stock, warts and all. I was not allowed, in other words, to project into a technologically more advanced future. Nor to populate my alternative system with people better, smarter or nicer than the ones we meet down the pub or in front of our bathroom mirror. In short, my blueprint had to be written as if it had been implemented already. However, since history matters, and everything we do is path-dependent, it would be daft to describe my system as if it existed in 2020 – the year the book would be published – without explaining how it had come about. In other words, I needed a believable alternative history of a political and social revolution that had occurred at some point in the past. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 702

Categorization

• SEED: A strong template for writing utopian/speculative political fiction: constrain the counterfactual to current tech and current ‘human stock,’ then build an alternative history to justify divergence.
• STORYSTEM: A novelist could use this exact method — a utopia implemented today, with no technological upgrades, reached via a divergence point in real history — as the skeleton of a political novel.
• XREF: The method mirrors how Kim Stanley Robinson structures near-future speculative fiction; also evokes the alternate-2008-fiction premise Varoufakis then built with ‘Another Now.’ — connects to: Counterfactual hypotheses can refocus attention on present political possibilities. — A. Hussain, N. Meer, Framing Muslim Integration, 760; Systematizing the unsystematic can force a historical way of thinking — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 894; Contingency of historical conjunctures is a precondition for political possibility (+2 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 702

Broader Connections

• Counterfactual hypotheses can refocus attention on present political possibilities. #qualifies (0.80) — A. Hussain, N. Meer, Framing Muslim Integration, 760
• Contingency of historical conjunctures is a precondition for political possibility #corroborates (0.80)
• New theory requires new history that resurrects suppressed events #complicates (0.80) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1426
• Systematizing the unsystematic can force a historical way of thinking #expands (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 894
• Method is not rules but the experience of a path making its own history #exemplifies (0.75) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 86