Yellow - by Roger Peet (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Life after capitalism's AI dreamworld ends in ruin--and the struggles of building, defending, and transforming a liberated future. What happens after the revolution succeeds?

In Yellow, the unlikely beginning of another world is forged in the aftermath of capitalism's seeming AI-induced victory over labor, a delirious and ultimately fatal gamble on the prospect of eliminating workers from the process of value-creation. Capitalism's AI endgame has reached a feverish apogee when, in fact, they unleash the final crisis of a system built on exploitation. But the people they abandon do not disappear--they organize, fight back, and create a new society from the ruins.

Following three intertwined narratives, Yellow explores the history of the struggle that brought down capital's supremacy, the lives of those trying to survive within the terms of the revolutionary society that follows, and the psychotic fractured consciousness of the elites who digitize themselves in a desperate attempt to escape justice--only to become trapped inside the very systems they built to control others.

A sharp, darkly comic, and politically imaginative work of speculative fiction, Yellow asks the questions that few revolutionary stories pose: What responsibilities do the victorious have toward their defeated enemies? How does a society preserve liberation without reproducing domination? And how do people continue the struggle when the struggle has seemingly already been won?

Speculating on the present, Yellow imagines a future where the contradictions of capitalism have not vanished but transformed, requiring new forms of collective practice, responsibility, and imagination. For readers of radical futures, AI fiction, and political speculation, this novella offers neither easy dystopia nor utopian fantasy--but a vision of liberation that remains complicated, unfinished, and alive.

About the Author

Roger Peet is an artist, printmaker, muralist and writer living in Portland, Oregon. His visual work tends to focus on civilized bad ideas, predator-prey relationships, and the contemporary crises of biodiversity and Capitalism and what can and can't be done about them. His writing addresses the politics and history of social relationships with the natural world. He is a founding member of the Justseeds Artists' Cooperative and helps to run the cooperative Flight 64 print studio in Portland. He collaborates with artists, activists and scientists globally and locally in the service of a more generous and a wilder world.