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Many C.E.O.s receive a lot of stock and stock options. Over time, they and other rich people earn a lot of money from the capital they have accumulated: it comes in the form of dividends, capital gains, interest payments, profits from private businesses, and rents. Income from capital has always played a key role in capitalism. Piketty claims that its role is growing even larger, and that this helps explain why inequality is rising so fast. Indeed, he argues that modern capitalism has an internal law of motion that leads, not inexorably but generally, toward less equal outcomes. The law is simple. When the rate of return on capital—the annual income it generates divided by its market value—is higher than the economy’s growth rate, capital income will tend to rise faster than wages and salaries, which rarely grow faster than G.D.P.

There is a fundamentalist belief by capitalists that capital will save the world, and it just isn’t so. Not because of what Marx said about the contradictions of capitalism, because, as I discovered, capital is an end in itself and no more.

Revive (and destigmatise) social housing, so that we can live well yet cheaply. Make all higher education free at the point of use, in order that the cognitive gap between the “serving” and the “serviced” classes become even more untenable. Strongly regulate capitalism (shorter working weeks, citizen’s incomes, powerful public infrastructures and networks) so that men, women and children can experiment with new mixes of the productive and the emotional in our lives. In short: support our autonomy, don’t prescribe our happiness.

A green politics has to be thinking passionately about zones of creativity and innovation for human beings, as well as the constraints and duties of low-carbon living. Otherwise the transformative dimension of our own nature will end up repressed and frustrated.

In life, you will become known for doing what you do. That sounds obvious, but it’s profound. If you want to be known as someone who does a particular thing, then you must start doing that thing immediately. Don’t wait. There is no other way. It probably won’t make you money at first, but do it anyway. Work nights. Work weekends. Sleep less. Whatever you have to do. If you’re lucky enough to know what brings you bliss, then do that thing at once. If you do it well, and for long enough, the world will find ways to repay you. This fall, in a toilet stall in Burlington, Vermont, I saw this scrawled on the wall: “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive. The world needs more people who have come alive.” If you’re doing something you love, you won’t care what the world thinks, because you’ll love the process anyway. This is one of those truths that we know, but which we can’t seem to stop forgetting. In America, success is a word we hear a lot. What does it mean? Is it money, power, fame, love? I like how Bob Dylan defines it: “A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.”

Butterfield is a strange choice for a two-time CEO of a gaming company. He’s no Mark Pincus — by his own admission, he’s not that into gaming. As a former philosophy student with a master’s from Cambridge, he was more interested in play as a framework for social interaction than play for play’s sake. “Infinite games are what we collectively do as a species for building culture,” Butterfield explains. “It’s fundamental for human beings, as deep a desire as hunger and thirst and sex.” From an early age, he was intrigued with how online communities like IRC allowed people to experiment with their identities. His then-wife Caterina Fake found the topic compelling too. “There are at least two kinds of games,” Butterfield says, paraphrasing a favorite scholar of his. “The first type is played for the purpose of winning and the second type you play for the purpose of play.” When they brainstormed a company to start, they settled on building “Game Neverending.” Butterfield and Fake spent a year and a half creating it.

I hate hipsters, I hate liberals, I hate rock’n’rollers, I hate the counter-culture, I hate movie people. I want to go somewhere quiet, peaceful and decorous, and be radical in my mind.

And it occurred to me then that fun is only fun when it’s stupid. That there is no joy without stupidity, without abandon, without judgment – that music is best enjoyed in this stupid way, in a stupid place like this, with people you love holding stupid tambourines and playing with strangers amid strangers, who are dancing around to a song about spaceship-people building municipalities without permits or city planners but with pop songs.

As a result of “manifest social complexity” and “concealed electronic complexity,” “the plight of members of the technological society can be compared to that of a newborn child …” yet in contemporary technological civilization people “are less fortunate than children” for they “never escape a fundamental bewilderment in the face of the complex world that their senses report.”