We are living in an age of abundance for visions of postcapitalist futures. This is a good thing: there is a concerted effort underway to imagine our world differently, and there is a growing audience eager to hear it all. Jonathan Crary’s latest book, Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World, is a brief polemic targeted squarely at this audience. While there is much to admire about Crary’s deeply felt anger about the state of the world, even fiery polemics like his need some follow-through.

Unlike recent leftist books on the internet like Ben Tarnoff’s Internet for the People and The Promise of Access by Daniel Greene, Crary’s starting point is that what he calls the “internet complex” is fundamentally incompatible with a postcapitalist world, as technology is wholly intertwined with the planet-killing capitalist project. He argues that all of the internet complex’s “touted benefits are rendered irrelevant or secondary by its injurious and sociocidal impacts,” and “the notion that the internet could function independently of the catastrophic operations of global capitalism is one of the stupefying delusions of this moment.”

The end of capitalism will eventually come, he says, but the modes of communication we use thereafter will “bear little resemblance to the financialized and militarized networks in which we are entangled today.”