AWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Over at the Vector website, an article on speculative fiction and bioterrorism, with an emphasis on so-called 'lone wolf' bioterrorism.

Marta-Led Demons

Didja miss me don't even answer that shut up you're not even that funny okay you are. There is a snippet below about labour theories of value in the era of Quantified Self.

Here's the context (or skip to the snippet): I've been finishing up a Creative Writing PhD, which is a funny sort of thing. Actually, it's several funny sorts of things, because there's a fair bit of formal variation from university to university, and from PhD to PhD. Which is a good thing. I understand in Coventry, evaluation of the practice component focuses quite heavily on your performance, with respect to the other PGRs in your intake, within a vast verdant combat arena tucked full of traps, weaponry, intrigue and heartbreak. But in every practice-led PhD, there's always a 'practice' component -- for me, that means some fiction, including "Froggy" and Marta -- and then a critical/reflective component.

I initially found that critical/reflective bit quite difficult, since it wasn't a mode of writing I was familiar with / fruitfully unfamiliar with when I got started. But I think I more or less have got it now, which is pretty cool because I'm supposed to hand it in next week.

One aspiration for afterwards, BTW, is to spin off my two cents on practice-led research (also known as practice-as-research or practice-based research, although each phrase has its own connotations) and especially on how it formally relates to speculative fiction.

• Speculative fiction may sometimes aspire to 'lead' research, offering to shift our technoscientific imaginary, and opening spaces which stricter R&D methodologies may explore (shout out DARPA you avant-garde murderous fucks). 
• 'Hard' speculative fiction may also be implicated with expert discourses (whether that's physics or sociology), in a way which resembles the dialectic between the creative and the critical/reflective components of practice-led research. 
• Both speculative fiction and practice-led research are prone to adopting a slightly tricksterish attitude toward external evaluation, eluding or deferring judgment by a kind of bait-and-switch which insists that you've usually evaluated the wrong thing, and that they know more than they're letting on. Speculative fiction's version of this is, of course: "oh no, of course I don't claim to predict the future, ha ha ha" (zooms meaningfully away on hoverboard with fixed wide-eyed stare). 

In a nutshell, I feel like practice-led research and speculative fiction have stuff in common, which means things can actually get quite awkward (but interesting) when you try to do both of them at once.

All of this serves as a kind of apology for various aspects of the following snippet (which probably bug only me anyway), which is a fragment of reflective commentary, about a very brief passage in the mini-novel Marta and the Demons. 

(So it's me talking about some fiction I wrote. But in this bit, the themes of money, labour, and Quantified Self predominate. The yys are because I haven't done the page numbering yet and/or because I generously "allow readers to decide for themselves". Also, I've shouted it out before, but Tim Maughan's sf-ish vignette "Zero Hours" is great and still really relevant here).

Work as Money

[...] This scene [a drunken conversation between Myeong and Carly, about trying to invent a labor-based currency,] was partly inspired by schemes such as Local Exchange Trading Systems and time‑based currencies.[1] Under such systems, a member might earn one credit by working for one hour, which can be spent to hire an hour’s labor from another member. It was easy to imagine Carly thinking along these lines; at this moment in Carly and Myeong’s relationship, it felt right that Carly might have recently re-calibrated her speculative faculties, and be eager to support inchoate wishes, while still ready to feel like the grounded pragmatist of the pair.

Carly comes up with the name “WorkCoin,” and envisions WorkCoin’s value deriving from “the number of hours [worked]” (M: yy). But for Myeong, whose entrepreneurial obliviousness is reaching its peak, the word ‘hours’ is already enough to cut Carly short. 

One objection to time‑based currencies is that every hour of work is qualitatively different to every other hour. Of course, flattening such heterogeneity according to egalitarian principles, rather than market mechanisms, may be part of the appeal of time-based currencies. But I wanted Myeong to focus on something different. Myeong wants to preserve the qualitative heterogeneity of work, conceived primarily as a phenomenological heterogeneity, but with gestures toward the importance of third-person perspectives.

My second inspiration for this scene was Viviana Zelizer’s account of money’s own heterogeneity. Zelizer contests money’s reputation as a uniform, impersonal, and fungible social relation. For Zelizer, “people are constantly creating new monies, and they do so by segregating different streams of legal tender into funds for distinct activities and relations” (Zelizer 2011: 89). Money “may well ‘corrupt’ values into numbers, but values and sentiment reciprocally corrupt money by investing it with moral, social, and religious meaning” (Zelizer 2011: 97). Myeong, Zelizer, and I conspired to flesh out Myeong's aspiration, barely acknowledging Carly's contributions. Instead, Myeong would aspire to use technology to accentuate, extend, and rationalize money’s existing heterogeneity, in order to reflect the heterogeneity of work. Every hour of work is different from every other. Every penny is different from every other. Why shouldn’t we map one set of differences onto the other?

Myeong’s vision is probably ultimately incoherent. Formulating it coherently certainly offers a challenge. First, how should work be demarcated from non-work (cf. §2.5.2)? We certainly cannot get by, in this context, with the approximation that paid work is ‘real’ work (not without begging the question). Nor should we really want to. Nancy Hartsock tersely invokes the theme of what counts as ‘real’ work by describing “a third person, not specifically present in Marx’s account of transactions between capitalist and worker (both of whom are male),” who “follows timidly behind, carrying groceries, baby, and diapers” (Hartsock 1983: 234). Second, since any sum of WorkCoin will have passed through many hands, whose work should count as “what real people [have] really done, to make that money exist” (M: yy)? Third, even if work could somehow be legitimately demarcated and documented, how can WorkCoin legibly represent such data for human subjects? Who could experience something like WorkCoin, and what would they experience? How could WorkCoin’s quantifications be visualized, aestheticized, and perhaps – given Myeong’s desire for a WorkCoin in which “you could see the workers” (M: yy) – embodied and personified? Fourth, even if a legible WorkCoin were possible, why should that materially alter labor’s subjugation within some interlocking “matrix of domination” (Collins 2000: yy)? In other words, a fine-grained mapping of labor to value may sometimes lead to fairer compensation. But it can also – as the example of Amazon shortly shows – lead to something else entirely. On a larger historical timescale, the questions multiply. How would Myeong’s WorkCoin reflect the particularity of work, when that work is implicated with events – such as the production of the means of production – which have taken place long before WorkCoin came into being? Or when some properties of today’s work may take months or centuries to surface? How would something like WorkCoin function as a transferable IOU (cf. §3.4.2, §4.1), connected not only with past labor, but also with promises of future labor? Whenever I tried to extend the quantification of labor deep into the past and future, I felt it lost its particularity again. It became more nebulous and colorable, more manipulable by existing power hierarchies. Beyond these questions lay further concerns about access and exclusion, about privacy, and about energy and sustainability.

While I tried to position WorkCoin as a wild and impractical fancy, it is also “essential that estrangement leads to the realization that things do not have to be the way they are” (Spiegel 2008: 370). I expected WorkCoin could create a space for speculation about more practical implementations of a labor-based currency, both in terms of its enticements and its dangers.

One precedent is the Quantified Self phenomenon – loosely what Myeong has in mind when she refers to “fuddy-duddy, gamified, making-flossing-fun, improve-the-way-you-sit bullcrap” (M: yy). Quantified Selves are people who aim to improve their self-knowledge and autonomy through “novel ways of self-tracking with the help of digital technologies” (Lupton 2016: 9).[2] Gary Wolf, one popularizer of the term, describes his fine-grained self-tracking in a work context:

Taking advantage of the explosion of self-tracking services available on the Web, I started analyzing my workday at a finer level. Every time I moved to a new activity – picked up the phone, opened a Web browser, answered e-mail – I made a couple of clicks with my mouse, which recorded the change. After a few weeks I looked at the data and marveled.

(Wolf 2010: n.p.)

Similar tracking technology is also used in factories, warehouses, and other workplaces; a high-profile example is Amazon’s avant‑garde brutalizing of its workforce, “in the use of monitoring technologies to track the minute-by-minute movements and performance of employees” (Head 2014: n.p.):

With this twenty-first-century Taylorism, management experts, scientific managers, take the basic workplace tasks at Amazon, such as the movement, shelving, and packaging of goods, and break down these tasks into their subtasks, usually measured in seconds; then rely on time and motion studies to find the fastest way to perform each subtask; and then reassemble the subtasks and make this “one best way” the process that employees must follow.

(ibid. n.p.)

While such monitoring technologies come nowhere near to disentangling “real people” or “[o]ur own true selves” (M: yy) from the abstract figure of the worker, they do enrich that figure with fine‑grained data. They suggest how Myeong’s first bold vision of WorkCoin, as a marvellous money inscribed with all the heterogeneity of work, might yield to something more practicable. Instead of expressing “[o]ur true selves,” a WorkCoin analogue might simply express some salient data about the work which underlies it.[3]

Some time later, after attending a workshop involving time-based currencies, and speculatively exploring hybrid forms of monetary value – with price determined by interactions of supply, demand, and labor time – I did consider fleshing out WorkCoin further, perhaps in a later story. At the same time, I was wary that, merely seeking to estrange money, I might inadvertently glamorize, celebrate, normalize or naturalize the use of such intimately oppressive tracking technologies; or I might point to unlikely ways of appeasing, containing, or mitigating technologies that are hungrily bent on coercing workers “to squeeze every last drop of labour-power from their bodies” (Moore and Robinson 2015: 7). For the time being at least, I decided to let WorkCoin, like the incomes perceived by Li Shu (M: yy), and like Encarl’s Smartgularity (M: yy), remain a faintly implied shape, only partly jutting into story cycle’s representational field. 

The difficulty of theoretically demarcating work from non-work, and the brutal and exploitative history of such demarcation as it has practically occurred, could be no security against the possibility that technologically accomplished quantifications of work might in principle gain legal backing or widespread social acceptance. Stock prices already make a resounding claim to quantify the future flourishing of firms; the reputation metrics of digital matching platforms such as Uber and Airbnb make a fairly resounding claim to render precise and legible the trustworthiness of taxi drivers or holidaymakers. It seemed important to confront the possibility of some specific socio‑technological ecology of data collection, extraction, warehousing, analysis, and visualization and gamification, making a resounding claim to render ‘work’ – or perhaps ‘smart work,’ ‘hard work,’ or even ‘happy work’ – as precise and legible data.

The stories Moneykins, and perhaps especially ‘Alice,’ often feature imagery of bodies surfacing and stretching free from the media in which they have been obscured and imprisoned, and even in which they have been constituted. For instance, the Weaver breaks free from her cloud and its enigmatic Chesses, and the leprecoins from their magic metal (M: yy, yy). These images arrived in my writing of their own accord, but I started to think of them as small, scattered allegories about humans disentangling themselves from money, whether partly or fully, temporarily or for good.

At the same time, as explored in §2.1-§2.5, money can be tenacious, adaptable, and stealthy. It can linger in the places it has explicitly been banished from. Bewitchingly detailed representational regimes – such as Quantified Self technologies, the reputation metrics of the sharing economy, Doctorow’s Whuffie, or Myeong’s WorkCoin – may promise to extricate humans from money’s power, to create alternative ways of organizing collective action, and to in effect “render gold and silver of no esteem” (More 1997 [1516]: 44). Yet they may actually end up extending the power of money, in new forms, deeper into human lives. [...]

---

[1] See e.g. The Economy of Hours (www.economyofhours.com) and TimeRepublik (www.timerepublik.com); for historical background cf. Warren (1852).

[2] I prefer to say ‘Quantified Selves’ because I am a little reluctant to call Quantified Self a ‘movement’ with ‘members.’ There is an awkwardness around the term, perhaps because it tends to emphasize the agency and knowledge of the quantified individual, and downplays the way in which, even in the most sanguine circumstances, the Quantified Self is inevitably also a Quantified Other. But the term has widespread recognition, and I find even the awkwardness itself sometimes useful, a constant reminder of the unwieldiness and counterintuitivity of the subject matter.

[3] For instance, a few important dimensions of distinction might include tedium, discomfort, and other affective states; freedom and constraint; the ‘embedded labor’ of prior training and experience; the ‘quality’ of the work as measured by innumerable metrics; the danger and luck involved; and of course the work’s financial productivity. These evade tracking technologies to different degrees and in different ways. “WSTT [Wearables and other Self-Tracking Technologies] measure only users, creating an illusion that the precarian worker – constructed by a particular affective and social field of which these technologies are a part – is identical with humanity,” and the illusion that this worker figure is also “the defining point of human bodily capabilities and the point from which we should start – an outer limit of ‘human nature’ which restricts political and social possibility” (Moore and Robinson 2015: 5; cf. also Maughan 2013).

May: Executive Summary

PRIZES. One piece of news speeds its vast shadow into all crannies of all affairs current and upcoming: that is, the inaugural Sputnik Awards have arrived, and that means there's a shortlist here and the chance to vote here. (For the full effect, make sure you name your ballot and leave an e-mail address). Some general chitchat about it over at File 770. Results announced in October.

Meanwhile, procedures for the Hugos are being warmly debated again, and there's also a long interesting thread dangling from the Clarke. & here's Books & Pieces on bookish awards. & a bit earlier, Abigail Nussbaum on the Hugos, & a discussion at Making Light.

*   *   *

I was a VICE vox pop on boat naming. Here's the long version, which starts to maybe touch on democracy, and has a little bit about Iain M. Banks in it. (There are some very interesting banks in Banks's novels, by the way. Mostly of the "slope" kind rather than the financial kind. Maybe one to add to the names series one day). I want to be in VICE constantly.

*   *   *

BIDDING IS OPEN in Con or Bust's annual auction. Funds raised go to support people of colour to attend conventions.

*   *   *

I finally took that stupid quiz. Griffindor.

*   *   *

CONFERENCES ETC. I thoroughly and meticulously enjoyed the Fantasies of Contemporary Culture in Cardiff, and presented something there titled  "There Is No Cognitive Estrangement." Always the drama Jo. Should actually have been "We're Running Low On Cognitive Estrangement Must Remember That The Next Time I Pop Out." I got to share a panel with Kanta Dihal, whose paper "'This is Not Science Fiction': Communicating Science through Fantasy" touched on Flatland, Flatterland, and The Science of Discworld among others, and David Mellor, whose paper "Fallen Robots" explored cybersecurity and subjectivity via the android imagination (on the android imagination, more in a sec). And I totally missed the last train.

I've also been wistcontemplating some of Wiscon on Twitter, and especially Sofia Samatar's timeline. And there's going to be a special issue of the journal Foundation on science fiction and theatre (which I hope I will get round to submitting to. Always the drama Jo). Deadline for that's February, which appropriately enough, IS SET IN THE FUTURE. Registration has now opened for Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities in Glasgow on 4 July as well (clashes with Fantistika sadly). And it's CRSFSFRA in about a month, where I am going to give two papers, neither candid, and then immediately fall into a trance. Come! And I went to Brett Scott / Stir to Action's Alternative Finance workshop (Storify here), and happened to write some science fiction while I was there, which I hope to share soon. Right now it's called "Froggy Goes Piggy" but I think it might become "Zippety Doo-Da, Zippety Data."

*   *   *

Meanwhile, read Brett's recent article on Intelligent Personal Assistants, "When You Talk To Bots, You Talk To Their Bosses."

And/or Charlie Brooker's on point Black Mirror: "The Waldo Moment" (snippet).

And/or Kibwe Tavares's likewise Robots of Brixton:

And here is ASUS's demo video for Zenbo, a sort of lovable tablet on wheels:

Yussus ASUS! While android aesthetics clearly has a strong working grasp of cute -- these designers are adept at skating safely across the phenomenology of homuncular companionship without getting sucked into its many uncanny valleys concealed by wicker-mesh and jungle foliage -- the atmosphere of uncanniness here is holy fucking shit intense. 

The closest I can come to describing the feel of this video is the certainly pointedly and perhaps therapeutically tedious pastoral scene in Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale, the one that follows the self-enclosed tragedy of Act One, crossed with the semi-successful attempts of late 90s British quasi-comedy like Blue Jam to synthesize the rhythmic sensibilities of drone music into its quasi-comic timing. 

What to make, for instance, of the super-emphatic enunciation that mom, pop, and grandpops use? Is it a deliberate decision, or did it just happen? The strange peppy briskness reminds me of Chris Goode et al.'s fascinating verbatim theatre piece Monkey Bars, in which the adult actors tasked with appropriating and elevating the words of children so often find themselves overcome by an ambient paedomorphic curse, mysteriously unable to access their adult voices, stuck between innocence and experience. Likewise in the ASUS vid, it's as if everyone lived under the ritual prohibition of some Lil Lacanian Name-of-the-Kiddo. As if Zenbo and everything connected with him were secretly organized around the desires of the child -- though perhaps only in the sense that the Holocaust of Roberto Benigni's It's A Beautiful Life is organized around the desires of the child? -- and yet we cannot quite admit this without breaking the spell. 

Or is it extrapolative futurism: is the idea that the pollution of our social world by voice-recognition interfaces and synthesized speech will soon nudge all our voices into this crisp, singsong barking? Of course that tone is also an awkward invocation of deafness and dementia, and more generally, of age, illness, disability, isolation, depression, and death. It's easy to laugh at the infomercial gizmos that are introduced with an unconvincing demonstration of everyday inconvenience accompanied by hyperbolic frustration -- and I LOVE ANY PARODY OF THAT, IT GETS ME EVERY TIME -- but it is potentially ableist to write off some of those products as self-evidently useless (and also, ambigously, potentially ableist to be euphemistically marketing them at Everyman). Maybe in the follow-up vid Zenbo will scoot around a hospice. As is, the grandpa is -- like the upleaping father of Kafka's tale -- preternaturally hale, bursting out of the frailness assigned to him by the story. 

Everybody is also retired, insofar as the video plays strongly on the theme utopian automation. The robot Zenbo emancipates Claire Lancaster from a half-lit claustrophobic nightmare of impossible and conflicting labour demands, but we never see exactly and specifically what Zenbo does. Well, of course not! ASUS don't know, and don't think they're supposed to know, what Zenbo exactly and specifically does. ASUS are in the business of creating a niche and a few fragments of techno-social practices to fill that niche with, with the not-implausible hope of tempting third party developers and early adopter ingenuity to fill in the details later. Zenbo is first and foremost a tablet. 

Meanwhile, the name Zenbo echoes zenbu: by way of doing nothing, Zenbo does everything. "Hey Zenbo, turn the lights on!" Zenbo is the light of the world. Zenbo is a chibi messiah, whose arrival heralds a  -- more Disney's (and Cory Doctorow's) Magic Kingdom than the Kingdom of Heaven -- uncanny world of labours shrunk to piffling puzzles. It's soccer, it's dressing up time, it's memorization games, and the big annual event is a family portrait ("but somehow, we always pull through in the end"). Even the labour of preparing a feast is reducible to a two step recipe and five minutes in a microwave. The palaver around the family photo-shoot, the introductory jazz, the worn old books, the retro-patriarchy of our protagonist's pre-Zenbo slatternly stresses, all betray the video's retro-futurism. (Come back Target Women, we need you!) Eric Lancaster, the sort-of-breadwinner, is described as a "Father, writer, and slacker." We don't even see him writing, just editing (with a quota of two pages): probably he skim-writes, infusing the outputs of algorithmic storytellers with that human touch for big cheques. A bit like how he gets Zenbo to tell stories to his daughter.

Weirdly, there's a paradoxical feeling of scarcity. It feels post-apocalyptic, except instead of a dwindling supply of candle-stubs and tuna-cans, there is a dwindling supply of incident, grotesquely distended across eleven minutes.

A video like this is a useful provocation to the discourse swirling around design fiction and diegetic prototyping. Is design fiction about provoking the future? Does design fiction really create the socio- bit of a socio-technological novum, and drag the tech kicking and screaming into reality behind it? Is design fiction really -- or solely -- a way of testing things out cheaply? Is design fiction really about testing and expanding the limits of the imagination? Well, maybe. But I'm more interested in the relationship of design fiction texts to genres such as the legal contract, the financial instrument, and the sovereign promulgation. "I have placed my Zenbo in the clouds. It is a sign of my covenant with you and all this earth." Might design fiction sometimes work, paradoxically, not despite its lack of imagination, but because of it? Might not a brutal and ostentatious celebration of imaginative mediocrity also prove an excellent instrument for provoking the future into a desired formation? In the ASUS video, for instance, we might decipher an insistence that the bar to this future is low, so low that you (yes even you, parent, pioneer/early adopter, and Slacker) can probably find some way to feed off it. The point is not to say, "Behold the bold idea!" so the money flows toward it. The point is to say, "Look how much money is already bound up in, and bound toward, this idea, without it even being bold." The point is not to innovate gracefully, to extrapolate cunningly, and to strenuously exercise the imagination against the inertia of everyday existence: it is to withhold the imagination, to say, this fragment of future is so inevitable that it does not even depend on innovation, vision, or imagination.

*   *   *

What would it be like to Tinder swipe-left on a Zenbo? 

Would ubiquitous Zenbos change the nature of faces?

*   *   *

#ZombieEconomy Lisa Prugl we live in Gramscian moment - 'the old is dying and the new is not yet born' - neoliberalism is dead

— Johnna Montgomerie (@j_montgomerie) June 1, 2016

NEOLIBERALISM IS SO LAST HEGEMONY. IMF says so. This makes me really uneasy. Your friendly reminder that domination (or capital or whatever) is as it were cunning; it reinvents itself, occupies new discourses. In recent years the condemnation of austerity, of course, has put the left into a rather weird alignment with many voices in mainstream neoclassical economics. So if you're a leftist or radical or progressive or something even better, now might be a good time to think about what's coming next.

*   *   *

ALL OF WHICH REMINDS ME. It was Towel Day recently, celebrating the life and work of Douglas Adams, work which I think has held up really pretty astonishingly well. I put up this HIGHLY SIGNIFICANT NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN CORRESPONDENCE. [Fill in clickbait.]

*   *   *

PLUS. There was a lot of controversy this month and some seriously inspiring oratory to do with a panel in which Captain America says, "I'm with her!" (or something like that. To do check). Abigail Nussbaum and Martin McGrath share different thought-provoking and well-supported perspectives about it. Kate Elliott's sort-of related tweets about pacing, patience, & inevitable climb down (& expectation thereof) were interesting. But I gotta say they're among the exceptions: a lot of what I stumbled across just seemed to be a tragicomedy of fans ramblingly over-rationalizing their dismay at having a very simple pleasure threatened? Because you see Captain America is good and is actually not a HYDRA agent, so.

*   *   *

AND. Paul Cornell launched his novel Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? and I caught a snippet at BristolCon fringe (he read alongside Martyn Waites AKA Tania Carver. See Cheryl Morgan's blog). One thing I really enjoyed about the Sherlock excerpt was a very contemporary-feeling little twist on the venerable fantasy trope of collective beliefs, fears, dreams, wishes or memories taking on reality. In Who Killed Sherlock Holmes?, the ghost of Holmes is a looping composite that can accommodate slightly contradictory versions of the detective. ('Skyping Ze Executive Producer on Xmas Eve' could be another for Kraftwerk Kristmas album btw). (From earlier: 'Names in SFF #13: Benedict Cumberbatch.') (Also: guest post at Peter Sutton's blog).

*   *   *

On a more personal note Morticia will be sitting her grade-four quail-egg ocarina exam on Tuesday so keep us in your prayers, and your tusks ever-jutting should our faction fall.

*   *   *

For Griffindor!

The Internet of Oh and One More Things

I'm not sure when it will be out, but I have another strange story coming out, this one in MIT Technology Review's Twelve Tomorrows which is  available for pre-order. (I took everything way too literally and put in loads of reviews of technology). There's some sweet hype from io9 here. io9 you do come from the future!

Informal acknowledgements to go with the story. The twenty-two words beginning “Mercifully, the whole thing” are from William Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum” and the forty-nine words beginning “You know how to take a book” are from Max Black’s “The Identity of Indiscernibles” (see Note). Other background reading which was really helpful included Vinyals, Toshev, Bengio, Erhan, “Show and Tell: a Neural Image Caption Generator”; Anh Nguyen, Jason Yosinski, Jeff Clune, “Deep Neural Networks are Easily Fooled: High Confidence Predictions for Unrecognizable Images”; Margalynne Armstrong, “Reparations Litigation: What About Unjust Enrichment?”; Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., “Repairing the Past: New Efforts in the Reparations Debate in America”; Brett Scott, The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money; Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English culture, 1830–1980; and Lisa Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors. And thanks to Tim Maughan for selfie drones (see my pre-emptive response to his Superflux Drone Fictions).

And really special thanks to Nathan Crock and Bradford Tuckfield for invaluable assistance in thinking through the PrivilegeCheck thing -- in way more detail than actually made it into the story -- and to Samantha Walton, Lucy Kemnitzer, Rob Kiely, Mark Bolsover, William Ellwood, & Sarah Hayden for all your help with writing & editing. And to my ma for receiving suspicious packages for me.

*   *   *

DeepDish SausageFest

Elsewhere: I think I finished this one before Google's DeepDream went viral and showed the internet what we had long suspected, that our monads are puppyslugs. But for what it's worth, this story definitely goes into DeepDream-type territory, so here's an interesting Medium piece by Kyle McDonald on more recent imagery generated through deep convolutional neural networks.

Earlier: I read TT 2014, by the way, and it has some great work in it (two of which are mentioned in my economic speculative fiction listicle. Speculonomics. Fictisticle.).

Later: There is more to story to tell about that world (because it's this world) so hopefully there will be some kind of sequel / prequel / interquel before too long.

Note: I figure NeurodiversiME partly works by scraping and sculpting content, so a few micro-plagiarisms are appropriate. Max Black ICE or whevs, come at me, orbs.

Marxist Science Fiction Studies

According to Mark Bould, because science fiction rarely addresses “the economic dimensions of social totality” it leaves a negative space which “is often primarily, if unwittingly, bound by the structures, potentials and limits of capital” (Bould in Marxism and Science Fiction (2009), p.4).

According to this approach, fantastic literature, and science fiction especially, has a particular mode of telling us about the historical moments which produce it. For the most part – and despite the importance to science fiction of pedagogic essayistic or dialogic inserts (info-dumps) – this mode isn't overt or deliberate. Teasing out science fiction's knowledge requires interpretation that can see the text’s “negative space”: that is, which is alert to a variety of allegorical figurations, psychic transferences and disguises, symptoms, inversions and negations, and lacunae and aporia.

Behind such thinking, there is also the excellent intuition that it is difficult to directly acquire and sustain knowledge of the economic dimensions of social totality. It is not just for the extra challenge that we try to discover such knowledge in certain kinds of cultural production: it is because we think we have good reason to believe that it will be more discernible there than elsewhere.

For Bould, the reason that science fiction reliably produces these rich negative spaces is that it does not “take place in a world which pretends to straightforward mimesis” and it therefore cannot help but foreground its own internal consistency. Reading science fiction implies a continuous process of identifying fantastic elements and trying to relate them to each other and to its less fantastic elements. The systems which are thereby produced tend to “impact against material reality,” sort of in the sense that material reality leaves scuff-marks and indentations.

In short, material totality falsifies itself through ideology, and one of the best ways of exposing it is by studying the false totalities of fantastic literature.

There are some elegant ideas there, and they aren't just Bould's. I think that theoretical approaches of this kind underpin a great deal of science fiction scholarship (especially Marxist of course), and a great deal of that scholarship is very useful. It's roughly the sort of thing I did in my sprawling review of Cory Doctorow's Pirate Cinema and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I think we should keep doing it, too!

But the paradigm has been creaky for a while. Here are some of the main issues.

First, why should tacit knowledge of social totality be so reliably present in cultural production at all, let alone at such a convenient grain and scale, and in association with so many striking shibboleths? Is it not just as likely that at, any one moment, the most significant features of social totality may have left no traces, or a pattern of partial and misleading traces, in whatever work of fantastic literature happens to be under inspection?

Well, good progress can be made on those questions just by setting aside the habit of scholarly squeeing -- where valorizing the text and valorizing the institution of text-valorizing comes first -- and thinking carefully and realistically about ideology (and by looking at what theorists of ideology, especially Althusser, have actually said, not what we tell undergraduate students they said in the hope of being proved delightfully and invigoratingly wrong). One rule of thumb is: the author (and perhaps some editors) made this text, so let's think about how the supposed tacit knowledge was preserved intact through that particular bottleneck.

Second, how should we approach science fiction which does attempt, in one way or another, to address the economic dimensions of social totality? When it comes to economics, it is difficult to sustain a firm distinction between science fiction (where material reality leaves its imprints) and science fiction studies (which exposes them, as if by taking rubbings). Why shouldn’t science fiction writers undertake, within their narratives, to also interpret and explicate the negative spaces created by their imaginative world-building? As a reader, I know that they do do this. They go ahead and weave the sorts of statements you could imagine literary critics making into the texts. Why wouldn't you? And so when economic terminology and concepts appear explicitly in science fiction narratives do they require some different interpretative approach? And/or the same approach, with particular alertness to the confusion which will be caused by interpreting economic language as a symptom of something which is, once hermeneutically excavated, necessarily construed in the same economic language?

Third, what word can I use instead of "totality" to avoid a really boring conversation?

Fourth, there is a tradition of more-or-less informal literary criticism which places science fiction in some privileged relationship to the future. It is easy to take the mick out of futurism, and although science fiction studies rightly rejects naive accounts of science fiction as a predictive art based on rigorous extrapolation of present circumstances, the notion that science fiction has a distinctive temporal orientation is intuitively pretty persuasive -- and it's an influential part of how writers and readers of science fiction talk about science fiction. Science fiction is about the future (including Gibson's famous future that is "already here"). Science fiction tells us what's going to happen, what might happen, what won't happen but at one point could have.

Approaching the same issue from the other side, the economic humanities unpick the ways in which the models, thought experiments and other cognitive-rhetorical constructs of our best predictive sciences -- economics, say -- work as fictions, albeit also as sporadically performative, self-fulfilling (or other-fulfilling) prophecies. In short, while science fiction studies has got comfortable with the idea that science fiction doesn't predict the future, the study of future-predicting practices has started investigating the ways in which they are science fiction.

Design fiction in particular seems to be challenging the scholarly orthodoxy that science fiction tells us more about its contemporary moment than any future moment, by orienting itself at materialisation, mediated by readers. Fabian Muniesa (2014), drawing on Jean-François Lyotard, remarks that “[k]nowledge about things no longer occupies an overarching, critical, general and properly modern position but is now, in a sense, part of the industrial functioning of things” (p.8). We might not want to accept design fiction as SF or SF-related in any way; it could be understood as a kind of unsubstantiated grab for some cultural capital clustered around the idea of the future. But assuming we did accept it on more-or-less its own terms: design fiction doesn't fall into the trap of trying to work with complex and chaotic social trends. Instead, it usually concentrates narrowly a single imaginary product or service in the hope of performatively influencing its likelihood of emerging. A video clip on Kickstarter, which portrays a mock-up or prototype of a product in an effort to fund its development, may be considered a design fiction.  Design fiction does not attempt to predict the future: it attempts to pitch it.

Authors and fans have a particular way of evaluating science fiction: according to what it knows about the future. Literary critics don't have to get on board with every bit of that, but they can't afford to ignore it either.

New Genre Wednesdays: Metafuturism (FIVE DRONES)

UPDATE: Check out SUPERFLUX Issue 1: editorial by Warren Ellis and drone fictions (not, to be fair, "predictions") by Tim Maughan.

*   *   *

When will I have a Drone watch that buzzes around my head all day reminding me what time it is + what U2 is up to
— Elif Batuman (@BananaKarenina) September 11, 2014

What is metafuturism?

First, that's "-futurism" not as in futurismo, but as in futurology: sifting the present for traces of the future, just as historians sift the present for traces of the past.

Metafuturism Manifesto

Metafuturism morphs from futurism through the so-called Timidity Turn. It doesn't make predictions about the future. It just makes predictions about predictions about the future.

Metafuturism Sampler Exposure Draft: FIVE DRONES

E.g. I predict Tim Maughan's forthcoming bestiary of drones project may include the following drones:

1. Beats Moth

Autonomous hexacopters with superdirectional mics, the Beats Moth flock is all about providing the perfect tailored soundtrack to your day ... and night! Basically you walk around, and the drones play music that suits whatever it is they think you're doing. At first a novelty and a nuisance, Beats Moths unlocked new funding flows when it became obvious that some spots in the city are, in the long run, just way happier than others. Soon it became all about creating positive associations ... and negative ones! Now the sponsor's commercial jingle, slightly morphed for deniability, and perhaps algorithmically blended into the diffuse circumference of a recent chart hit, gets beamed into the ears pedestrians who are, all else being equal, probably ecstatic. Likewise a competitors' soundscape, stripped to its bare essentials, gets associated with instants of glare, stress, jostle, honk and stink. This is Muzak 2.0, or at least, 1.01. These drones even link up to a facial recognition database and a perpetually seething analysis of who might perv / shyly crush upon / actually fully-fledged fall in love with whom -- and what that falling-in-love should sound like, commercially speaking. Your eyes meet across a crowded room, just as Big Data suspected that they might. If ad priming be the food of love ...

2. MePee

These drones are taking the piss. Small, fleet, minty total-genital-possibility-space floating urinals skirr city centres of a Saturday night, guarding the wheelie bins and alley edges, drifting into the urb-suburban peripheries as dawn approaches scouring the homeward stumbleways. One-off use is extortionate so subscription is recommended. Also you don't have to watch the ads ("You may skip to urination in 10 seconds") and you get a free basic urinalysis with a huge array of paid upgrades: seriously, subscribe. Drones' onboard promotional equipment includes webcams linked to facial recognition software, 4.3V800MA searchlight, and speakers broadcasting helpful reminders of case-law relating to the Public Order Act 1986 and relevant local bylaws. Two main malware threats are both ransomware. The first -- varieties include PissCam Police, Piss2PotIn -- uses basic GC-MS analysis to look for prohibited substances, but a small fee will keep your positive results ex-directory if that's a desirable in your industry (the database of positives is generally used more by employers and insurers than law enforcement). The second form of ransomware, known as Clamp, relies on certain hardware mods, and has a more direct tactic.

3. Pronoun Pterygota

These are pretty self-explanatory. Small, lightweight, originally colour-coded but -- following controversy -- now generally colourless with a ticker (e.g. "they / them"). Pronoun Pterygota slip forward when they decipher a fresh contact in process, and soon retreat to the discreetest dynamic labyrinth of the dronethick air you could wish for; but should you ignore the datum they've provided, they'll swiftly turn as loyal to your fucking eyes as the summer wasp swarm is to its cider. A cheap, flexible, swarm-based pronomial decorum solution. Pronoun Pterygota are a thing.

4. Face Manager Bat

This winged familiar obsesses over your looks so you don't have to! Not only will you never again futz your Cute Meet with a crumb of tuna on your chin or a dead fly in your side-burn: the real benefits roll in when you install a free ambiance and line-of-sight optimisation ap such as TomTom Nano. Swipe your Face Manager Bat in Mirror Mode, apply one of thousands of fun filters like MySpace Angle or Shadow-Dappled Shepherdess, or just manipulate your cheekbones manually by dragging on the touch-mirror, and simply tap the "What My Crush Sees" button. You'll get real time data via Glass or headphones on how to jut your jaw or incline your nape. No known malware, though certain forms of complex love polygons run the risk of falling into feedback loops from which arise processes like arms races or bidding wars for optimally cute angles. You move, your crushes or transitive crushes move in response, so you move again, and so on. Like sunflowers following a time-lapse Big Bang of all the suns in the universe, you will loll and twirl, your bodies perhaps contorted and laced together, tugged by your elegant questing faces into a tangle, and in a few extremely rare cases, your very bones torn apart, and at the edge of your crush's vision, the light extinguished from your brooding, exquisite, enigmatic eyes.

5. Copatrice

It's not exactly clear where these come from, but they keep coming. They do one thing: follow cops around and broadcast what they're doing. The name is weird: maybe the idea is to turn cops to stone by overwhelming them with their own imagery. Following a series of futile countermeasures, cops just stopped looking like cops. Now anybody could be a cop.

*   *   *

UPDATE: Check out SUPERFLUX Issue 1: editorial by Warren Ellis and drone fictions by Tim Maughan. Looks intense. See also Superflux's The Drone Aviary at the V&A.