MIT Press began publishing journals in 1970 with the first volumes of Linguistic Inquiry and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Today we publish over 30 titles in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and science and technology. Neil Vallelly offers a rich tour of what he calls the futilitarian condition brought about by neoliberalization. Systemic and ubiquitous, this condition deprives us of meaningful lives and robs the world of a future. With an elegant pen, reader-friendly philosophical thoughtfulness, and scores of examples, Vallelly explains that gnawing feeling: "isn't what I'm doing--in my job, ecological practices, ethical consumerism and more--really futile?" Becoming-common, he argues, is our only way out. Where classical Marxists once believed in the inexorable historical arrival of a better tomorrow, one of the most alienating features of neoliberalism is how it naturalizes history out of existence. Since there is “no alternative” to the world as it is, aesthetics becomes the endless recycling of cultural images and symbols from the past, a pastiche of postmodern nostalgia for a time where people could actually make a difference. Even language becomes increasingly incapable of bearing the gravitas of meaning we need it to, as communication is flattened by digital discourse and the rich texture of the world becomes liquidated into two hundred eighty digestible characters. Politics Against Futility Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (Princeton University Press, 2011)

Futilitarianism is one of those strong books which excels in outlining a birds-eye view of society and the world we inhabit. Rather than analysing neoliberalism from one limited vantage point, Vallelly draws together perspectives from different disciplines – sociological, political-economic, psychological and philosophical – to contribute a holistic account to the canon on neoliberalism. Vallelly concludes that the way to overcome futility is through a ‘becoming-common of the futilitariat’ (173). If we recognize that we are all subject to futility, though to unequal degrees, then we can begin to imagine a world in which utility is reclaimed by the people and for the common good. Without imagining a world aiming towards the common good, we will hitherto be trapped in the futilitarian condition.

PERC seeks to refresh political economy, in the original sense of the term, as a pluralist and critical approach to the study of capitalism. In doing so it challenges the sense of economics as a discipline, separate from the other social sciences, aiming instead to combine economic knowledge with various other disciplinary approaches. This is a response to recent critiques of orthodox economics, as immune to interdisciplinarity and cut off from historical and political events. At the same time, the authority of economic experts and the relationship between academic research and the public (including, but not only, public policy-makers) are constant concerns running through PERC’s work. The rest of the book explores how the logic of futilitarianism and the futilitarian condition manifest themselves in everyday life in the twenty-first century by focusing on several examples of the ways individuals are encouraged, or even forced, to maximise utility. Chapters examine the relationship between human capital theory and the rise of self-branding as a form of utility maximisation; the rhetoric of personal responsibility and the escalation of both precarity and, to quote the late David Graeber, “bullshit jobs”; the relationship between social media, language production, and anxiety; the depoliticising effects of futilitarianism, especially for the Left; and, finally, the crisis of utilitarian thinking in the grim reality of the COVID-19 pandemic, where cost-benefit calculations had to contend directly with quantifying acceptable numbers of deaths. The MIT Press has been a leader in open access book publishing for over two decades, beginning in 1995 with the publication of William Mitchell’s City of Bits, which appeared simultaneously in print and in a dynamic, open web edition. Since then, for all his insistence on its rationalistic simplicity, many have complained about deep tensions in Bentham’s position. Was he making a psychological claim about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain simply being fundamental human motivations, a moral claim about how they should be the fundamental human motivations, or both? But Bentham was convinced of the power of his argument, and claimed that the best moral and political system would be one dedicated to achieving the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, as determined through a kind of felicific calculus. To Vallely, capitalism has always been undergirded by the idea of utility maximization as an intellectual crutch. By linking endless capital accumulation with the purported attainment of utility, the historical and ongoing injustices of colonialism have been justified on the basis of the supposed longterm interest of the colonized people. Similarly, ever-widening inequality is justified as part and parcel of ‘human progress’, a view well-lodged in the writings of establishment thinkers like Harvard’s Steven Pinker. But whereas Keynesian capitalism advocated a more ‘majoritarian’ variant of utility, the Hayekian push towards neoliberalism put the onus on the individual, thus leading to the current futilitarian condition.

For this reason, utility can never be conceived exclusively as an economic or philosophical concept. Instead, utility is always representative of a certain understanding of political economy, of the relationships between forms of production, labor and trade and the mechanisms of government, power and, ultimately, capitalism. This fact is most evident in the work of Jeremy Bentham, a late 18th- and early 19th-century philosopher and social reformer. Bentham was the founder of modern utilitarianism and he could find only one credible measure for utility: money. In an essay titled “The Philosophy of Economic Science,” he wrote: “The Thermometer is the instrument for measuring the heat of the weather, the Barometer the instrument for measuring the pressure of the Air…. Money is the instrument for measuring the quantity of pain and pleasure.” Drawing on a vast array of contemporary examples, from self-help literature and marketing jargon to political speeches and governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, Vallelly coins several terms--including "the futilitarian condition," "homo futilitus," and "semio-futility"--to demonstrate that in the neoliberal decades, the practice of utility maximization traps us in useless and repetitive behaviors that foreclose the possibility of collective happiness. While nihilism is certainly present in neoliberalism, the concept of futilitarianism makes room for another dimension in the meaninglessness of neoliberal life. In this dimension, meaninglessness is neither something that is passively instituted nor actively embraced, but something that emerges in people’s lives without their consent or even knowledge, whether this be in their job, education, social circumstances, economic situation or legal status. Where nihilism entails taking up a certain outlook on the world, futilitarianism is much more insidious and internalized. After all, many of us might believe we are contributing to society in a meaningful way — ask any PR consultant. This leads to the sense of futility and emptiness Vallelly powerfully diagnoses as emblematic of neoliberal capitalism. Communities and political movements are disaggregated into atomized individuals. They are paradoxically made to feel that relentless but narrow self-improvement, the pursuit of wealth, power, and status within the system is all that matters, and that they are powerless to change that same system.Drawing on a vast array of contemporary examples, from self-help literature and marketing jargon to political speeches and governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, Vallelly coins several terms—including “the futilitarian condition,” “homo futilitus,” and “semio-futility”—to demonstrate that in the neoliberal decades, the practice of utility maximization traps us in useless and repetitive behaviors that foreclose the possibility of collective happiness.