Or rather, it is a constellation of miseries, unevenly distributed, like everything else, that results from the gross exploitation of nature and people necessary for supplying profitably our pleasures and comforts. It is a misery particular to global capitalism. But our own unhappiness remains strikingly similar to what Morris had in mind. The environmental destruction produced by diesel-fueled trucks, rare earth mining, and rocket fuel were also in the future. In 1890, the year News from Nowhere was published, twenty-four-hour deliveries, video calls, and space travel were fictional. “You belong,” explains Ellen, “so entirely to the unhappiness of the past that our happiness even would weary you.” Not because of any fictional science of time travel, nor because he poses a threat to this particular future’s social harmony, but because his very being has been so thoroughly deformed by the social conditions of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism that he is incapable of experiencing the pleasures and desires of a world freed of competition, exploitation, and suffering. At the end of William Morris’s News from Nowhere, or, An Epoch of Rest (Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance), a woman named Ellen explains to the visitor, William Guest, that he cannot stay in this perfect place of clean air, meaningful work, and satisfying leisure.
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