Unlike many of the topics discussed in earlier chapters, such as robotics and cloning, the connections between sf and economics may not seem apparent at first glance. Yet, these two topics are increasingly linked in recent scholarly and fictional collections. The front cover of Futures and Fictions (2017), for example, describes the book as “essays and conversations that explore alternate narratives and image-worlds that might be pitched against the impasses of our neoliberal present.”1 Economic Science Fictions (2018), an anthology of critical and fictional works, begins from the premise that the economy itself is shaped by a number of fictions, hence the revisionary power of sf is a useful tool for theorizing its structures anew.2 Strange Economics (2018) uses fiction to explore the strangeness of our economic systems and includes discussion questions for each story posed by Elisabeth Perlman, a historian of economics.3 Economics also propels several of the stories in The People’s Future of the United States (2018), a collection whose title deliberately echoes Howard Zinn’s revisionist A People’s History of the United States (1980): the stories collected here share Zinn’s focus on the marginalized and oppressed.4
This economic turn is not specific to sf. Such concentrated attention on economic structures is apparent in other areas of cultural production and study today, following the 2008 economic crash and influenced by popular movements for economic justice, such as Occupy, that came in its wake. Acute attention to economic themes is evident in much contemporary culture, such as the HBO series Succession (2018–) or the popular film The Big Short (Adam McKay, dir.; 2015), and studies of financialization and culture have become an important new area of cultural critique. Nonetheless, there are reasons why sf has a central voice in such conversations, not the least of which is how the economy itself has turned to instruments such as derivatives, in which speculation names not merely the wager of the market but also a projection into the future. Moreover, these instruments are increasingly detached from any material production and are often traded by AIs running algorithms, yet another materialization of sf in daily life.5 In his foreword to Economic Science Fictions, Mark Fisher draws attention to the fictions that inform capital’s story about itself—such as the justice of the invisible hand—and argues that “capital’s economic science fictions cannot simply be opposed; they need to be countered by economic science fictions that can exert pressure on capital’s current monopolization of possible realities.”6 Many sf writers agree.
The economy itself has turned to instruments such as derivatives, in which speculation names not merely the wager of the market but also a projection into the future.
In addition to the cultural turn toward economic analysis that has shaped the last decade, there is a strong tendency for cultural theories to see in sf a tool able to think through ongoing economic crises and chart out possible ways forward. For example, Peter Frase’s Four Futures: Life after Capitalism (2016) takes on the relationship between ecological crisis and technological change to project four possible futures arising from this moment, based on social orders of either equality or hierarchy, and conditions of either abundance or scarcity.7 It may seem challenging to imagine conditions of abundance in a context of climate change and one where people fear job loss due to automation, but this scenario, too, has a kind of sf theory behind it in the discourse of accelerationism. Adherents to this social theory argue that rather than seek to dismantle capitalism as a path toward social change, we should instead accelerate it, thereby also intensifying its inherent contradictions and prompting its collapse, opening the path to something better. Technological change is generally what is imagined to accelerate in this way, in some views leading to the technological singularity and thus quite different conditions for human existence (discussed in chapter 5), while others see this as a chance to reorient technology toward collectivist ends that would free people from labor that is dangerous or simply demeaning and boring, creating a postcapitalist world. Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s Inventing the Future (2016) is a manifesto of sorts for this leftist version of accelerationism. They argue that “the utopian potentials inherent in twenty-first-century technology cannot remain bound to a parochial capitalist imagination” and that “articulating and achieving this better world is the fundamental task of the left today.”8 Much of this work reads like sf, drawing especially from Afrofuturist and other activist discourses within the genre.
Economic structures are vital to our understanding of human social orders, something that has long shaped sf. While Golden Age sf of the 1930s and 1940s imagined marvelous improvements through technological innovation, they were often funded by millionaire inventors or imagined to be the source of some clever inventor’s rise to wealth, an early sf vision of the Silicon Valley dotcom boom that would catapult many into the financial elite in the 1990s. Such works assume that a market economy would simply continue into the future, rewarding the innovators, even if this system was imagined to be based on some new currency, often issued by a global government. The future outlined in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation works (1942–1953) projects thousands of years of future history of a galactic empire organized by mathematical governance of a planned economy.9 Science fiction has often delighted in inventing novel kinds of money, from the “ob” currency of Eric Frank Russell’s “And Then There Were None” (1951), a system of mutual aid in which people strive not to become over-obligated by providing as much as they take from the community; to the whuffie currency of social metrics in Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003), a post-scarcity world in which money as we know it is irrelevant; to time itself as a currency in Andrew Niccol’s film In Time (2011), a currency used to make visible how unjust economic orders extend the lives of the wealthy as they simultaneously shorten the lives of the indebted. Philip K. Dick’s midcentury works often depict a future economy using a credit system rather than physical currency, such as the PosCred in the anticonsumerist Ubik (1969). Its protagonist, Joe Chip, sometimes cannot make his domestic technologies function because he lacks sufficient credits, a very prescient vision of pay-as-you-go licensing that is now common in software. The idea of a credit system dates all the way back to Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000–1887, therein imagined as the foundation for a system in which all citizens are entitled to a share of collectively produced wealth.
Felix Martin argues in Money: The Unauthorized Biography (2015) that instead of understanding money as either a commodity (like gold) or a medium of exchange (like a system of accounts), we should understand it as “a social technology: a set of ideas and practices which organise what we produce and consume, and the way we live together.”10 This definition connects economic systems with sf technological extrapolation. William Gibson’s recent The Peripheral (2014) is partially set in a future kleptocracy, a social order that emerges after a series of entwined environmental, economic, and social disasters kills most of the human population, and partially in a near future that seeks to prevent this catastrophe. Gibson uses parallels between these timelines to draw attention to financial structures in the near future (the reader’s world) that prefigure the coming dystopia based on the abuse of political structures to extend elite personal wealth.
Claire North’s 84K (2018) imagines a very similar future, although hers does not require the disruption caused by apocalyptic die-off. Insurance companies and privatized governance rule the day, and ownership is in the hands of a tiny elite, such that tracing corporate structures reveals that ultimately all companies are owned by The Company, which contracts through its various subsidiaries to provide all goods and services to UK citizens. A complicated actuarial practice calculates the financial costs to society of all crimes—property damage, but also loss of labor-power from murdered individuals, for example—and bills them to the perpetrators. Those unable to pay said fines are confined to a debtors’ prison, funded by corporate sponsors for whom they serve as an indentured labor force; meanwhile, wealth concentrates in fewer and fewer hands and jobs that pay a living wage vanish. £84,000 is the price the assassin pays for a contracted death that launches the novel’s revolutionary plot. Such a vision of the future without work offers a dystopian counterpoint to the utopian vision of accelerationism’s postwork future. Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous (2017), about a future in which patented pharmaceuticals sharply differentiate the quality and longevity of life available to the wealthy from that which is accessible to the poor, is another novel that features indentured labor, with people selling their lives in a contract rather than being employed for a wage. Sam J. Miller’s Blackfish City (2018), set in a floating Arctic city in a world devasted by climate change, features similar financial contracts, and the wealthy ensure their continued hegemony by fueling ethnic and religious dissent among the dispossessed.
The contrast between these novels and accelerationism’s hopefulness points to the need to pair the automation of labor with a social system that frees human life from reliance on wages. Here sf, social activism, and speculative design all converge in the ideal of a guaranteed basic income system, which could enable increased automation of labor without casting more people into poverty. Various proposals for guaranteed basic income have been advocated by activists and contemplated by governments, but as yet there is no consensus on the costs or benefits of a system of public support that is neither tied to means testing nor distributed via specific criteria of entitlement (such as food stamp projects, aid to families with children, and the like). The Future Tense project at ASU (discussed chapter 3) held an event about universal basic income in September 2018, and the topic appears as a motif across a number of chapters in Adrian Hon’s A History of the Future in 100 Objects (2013), an intriguing blend of futurology and sf that provides glimpses into a possible future by describing one hundred new technologies as if from a further future for which they are artifacts of the past.11 Hon’s technique stresses the degree to which technological and social changes are entwined, and although basic minimum income is not one of his one hundred innovations, it recurs across more than a dozen of his chapters: as a demand citizens make in the wake of some innovations, as a solution to problems caused by unemployment due to innovation, or as the condition of possibility that enabled the time and creativity required for a major breakthrough. Similarly, Tim O’Reilly’s nonfictional WTF? What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us (2017) projects the great wealth that software innovation will bring but warns that, unless society finds a way to share this wealth equitably, disruptive rather than positive social change will be the result.12
Fiction is beginning to imagine worlds that feature universal basic income, such as the hugely popular The Expanse series (2011), written by James S. A. Corey,13 adapted into a television series on SyFy (2015–). Most of the plot is focused on political conflicts, but we see in the background that basic income support is part of the social structure, although it is regarded with some of the same stigma often attached to existing social welfare programs. Hugh Howey’s “No Algorithm in the World” (2018), one of the stories in A People’s Future of the United States, offers something like the accelerationist view of a future freed from both labor and economic precarity. Told from the point of view of a son whose father is an entrepreneur, the story anticipates a radical shift in attitudes toward the economy by the generational gap between these characters. The father credits his economic success to his trust in the market: his willingness to always model his businesses on whatever big data algorithms tell him is needed for an area. He frequently derides those he sees as wastrel freeloaders, living off basic income rather than working as he does. The story is told while his son accompanies him on business errands, their only opportunity to spend time together. Eventually the son reveals that he and his wife both plan to quit their jobs and live on “basic [income]” so that they can devote time and energy to raising the child they expect, showing contempt for his father’s work ethic that he views as empty of human values such as love and community. Both generations experience economic benefits because of a more efficient economy managed by algorithms, but only the son embraces values not predicated on economic contributions being the core of life.
Many of the stories in Strange Economics use the estrangement techniques of sf to draw attention to the problems of our contemporary economic system, using familiar genre icons to help readers conceptualize otherwise difficult to grasp abstractions of a financialized economy. Fraser Sherman’s “The Grass Is Always Greener” interrogates the generational effects of wealth and income inequality by imagining a world in which those with capital but poor fates can literally purchase the destiny of someone poor in capital but rich in other ways, such as family or friends or career happiness. Neil James Hudson’s “The Slow Bomb” allegorizes how we ignore the risks of climate change for the sake of profit. It imagines a world-destroying bomb falling over decades: its economist protagonist is asked to write a report for the government proving that it is worth increasing the bomb’s rate of fall by siphoning away some of its energy, that is, shortening the time left for the world, in order to enhance economic productivity in the present via this siphoned energy. Wayne Cusack’s “Guns or Butter” rewrites alien invasion so that the damage is caused not by physical occupation by alien forces but rather by these aliens flooding the market with technologies such that local industries die out and humans are enthralled to economic alien overlords. K. M. McKenzie’s “Consumption” presents an immersive virtual world experience that reads the emotions of its players to promote hyperactive shopping—all purchases made while in the simulation are billed to real accounts and materially delivered outside the game, although their material form is not quite as fantastic as they seemed in simulation.
A number of motifs recur across sf stories that project the future in economic terms. Concern about for-profit health care is a prevalent theme, as is the idea that an excess workforce is an unproductive drain on the economy, usually expressed in stories that critique how such people are thus dehumanized. Popular films have taken up similar themes, such as Miguel Sapochnik’s Repo Men (2010), a satire that lampoons the death caused by a health-care industry that prioritizes profit, set in a world in which expensive artificial organ replacements, purchased on installment, are violently repossessed from living patients if payments are late.14 Duncan Jones’s poignant film Moon (2009) envisions a future of mining a new energy source on the moon. The protagonist, Sam, is lonely in this isolating work but counts the sacrifice worth the salary he will eventually make upon his return to Earth. The visual aesthetic of the film is not the familiar sleek space-age design of earlier films, but more evocative of the dirty and dangerous conditions of other kinds of energy mining. The inhumanity of this economy of extraction (of energy, of surplus value) is made starkly visible when Sam eventually learns he is just another disposable part of this system, a clone who will be incinerated when his labor-power (and life) are used up. He will be replaced by a store of identical Sams, all waiting to serve their three years, each sustained by the illusion that he is the original, human Sam.
Perhaps the closest connection among sf, contemporary culture, and finance is in the social technologies of payment systems, especially the invention of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. Bitcoin and other digital currencies raise the question of what makes a currency “real” and detach this “realness” from both physical entities (such as gold) and governments (as what legitimates a currency). The rise of Bitcoin and the alternative cultures that surround it reinforce the ways we might think of the economy as a kind of sf, and of money as a social technology shaping far more than methods of payment. New forms of payment, from coin and cash, to debit and credit cards, to electronic payments via mobile phones, have all shifted social relations of the market, and, throughout the twentieth century, have tended to put banking institutions at the center. A bank account is often required to receive funds from aid agencies and employers, the credit rating system increasingly has power over people’s daily lives and opportunities, and online commerce has resulted in a massive transformation of employment conditions as storefronts close and massive warehouses proliferate.15 Such changes inform a larger conversation about access to financial institutions as necessary for civic inclusion, inspiring experiments with digital currencies, further fusing sf and materiality. These discussions have common roots with sf cultures of the 1990s, especially the significant overlap between cyberpunk and the online liberation group cypherpunks, who see in cryptocurrency an important way to elude government surveillance of one’s financial transactions. Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (1999) explores this culture in its tale of an IT start-up that develops its own international cryptocurrency. Political opinion differs widely regarding how cryptocurrencies will unfold in the future: while Bitcoin emphasizes privacy and freedom from fees paid to financial institutions, others, such as FairCoin, seek to reinvent currency in ways that privilege equality and redistribution.16 Those experimenting with different cryptocurrencies thus embed their design within distinct and different visions of desirable futures, positioning currency as another technology that can create multiple outcomes.
The rise of Bitcoin and the alternative cultures that surround it reinforce the ways we might think of the economy as a kind of sf, and of money as a social technology.
As sociologists of economics note, and as sf is beginning to explore, what is potentially most revolutionary about cryptocurrencies are their underlying blockchain architecture. Blockchain enables a wide range of new peer-to-peer applications such as Airbnb and Uber, sometimes referred to as platform capitalism (or the shared economy), and opens the door to thinking about other technologically mediated forms of distributed corporate and civic decision making. In their overview of such possibilities, Wall Street journalists Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey imagine a future of “entities owned by multiple shareholders for which routine financial decisions—when to release funds to pay for expenses, how big a dividend to pay—are automated by the firm’s guiding software and entrusted to a tamperproof system that’s verified by the blockchain.”17
This automated governance is reminiscent of Asimov’s Foundation but even more strongly resembles posthumanist futures projected in Iain M. Banks’s Culture series (1987–2012), set in a distant future where the economy is planned by AIs and all boring or dangerous work is done by nonsentient machines. Charles Stross’s Accelerando (2005) takes this vision a step further, imagining an AI that has emerged from the interactions of so many smart trading algorithms. As in the case of technologies such as robotics or genetic engineering, the imaginative exchanges work in both directions. Just as Stross extrapolates current AI trading beyond the singularity, venture capitalists such as Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss draw on sf imagery when they describe their vision that “a Trade Singularity will occur, whereby trade between machines, computers and things, will exceed trade between humans. Uncreative tasks will become primarily automated causing goods and services to become much cheaper and living standards to rise.”18 Karl Schroeder’s novel Stealing Worlds (2019) imagines a version of blockchain governance, combined with AI, that might give voice to nonhuman entities such as riverways or particular animal species as part of a new vision of collective governance that prioritizes environmental sustainability over capitalist profit.
In Neptune’s Brood (2013), Stross directly takes on questions of debt, specifically debt as made into the type of tradable financial instruments that prompted the 2008 crash. This novel was inspired by reading David Graeber’s masterful Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), which demonstrates how debt has been used as a tool of political control.19 Stross’s protagonist is a scholar of accounting practices and, as she unravels a mystery related to a lost colony and appropriated assets, she educates readers about three kinds of money in this future: fast money is used for daily transactions, and is similar to currency as we recognize it; medium money is a fixed asset, something that can serve as a stable store of value over a long duration, necessary for civilizations that involve the time dilation of interstellar travel; and finally slow money is currency traded between interstellar civilizations, a universal currency that requires decades or more to complete a single transaction. The world Stross imagines needs all three kinds of money to accommodate trading across stellar distances. The larger thematic point has to do with how such financialized economies, always trading in terms of projected value, make debts into tradable assets, burdening a future that must pay debt generated by consumption in the present.
Kim Stanley Robinson also makes indebtedness central to New York 2140 (2017), a novel that is equally about climate change. By 2140 the city has adjusted to the fact that much of Manhattan is underwater: transport by water has taken over, and people live on only the highest floors of skyscrapers. The plot is propelled by tension between the wealthy, who still live in privatized residences, and those who live collectively in cooperatives, pooling resources in a less consumerist economy. The denouement involves a collective debt strike—countering how debt has become an engine of wealth creation in the financialized economy—a refusal to pay that crashes this unjust economy. Robinson’s combination of ecological and economic themes testifies to how much the economy is a technology like any other, a tool to shape the future in diverse ways—and thus an apt topic for sf.