PS: By the way, there's a bit at the end where it sounds like the UK General Election was in 2008, though it was actually 2010. I really just meant things were starting to go Tory and weird around that time. E.g. that posh racist MP off Have I Got News For You? was suddenly London Mayor.
PPS: And an addendum to the bit about how economists construe "demand": maybe you can also think of payoffs within game theory and mechanism design as an alternative / complementary way in which economics tries to think through desire and satisfaction with a bit more nuance and granularity.
A version of this list will be appearing in FOCUS in early 2019.
As a writer responding to one of these prompts, you'll probably want to ask two questions: (a) why are things like this in the first place? (b) What are the implications?
Think of an economic system to which you are politically opposed. Imagine, in as much detail as possible, a working version of this system. Make it a bit like utopia. Take all your objections seriously, but devise science fictional solutions to them. Use this as a setting to tell any kind of story you like.
A story featuring a designer market or a complementary currency (see e.g. Bernard Lietaer) whose purpose is not to solve a specific set of social problems, but to create them.
Your story is set in an intimately surveilled (or sousveilled) society. In this society, if an analysis of your behaviour suggests that you want something, you automatically buy it (even if that puts you into debt).
Write a thriller, a love story, a murder mystery, a coming-of-age-fable, and/or a comedy of manners. Set it in the near future, during the transition to a Universal Basic Income system. Make sure there are lots of kinks in the process.
Imagine an economy without economies of scale. Why don't they exist? What are the implications?
Precarious workers in the gig economy start to gain a little more security by developing their own digital tools for distributed solidarity. What data do they gather and how do they share and use it? What might a social media platform look like if it were organised around workers' interests? How might algorithmic curation work if it were trying to drive not engagement, but class consciousness?
Imagine an economy in which all prices and wages have a random element. (Maybe things are priced in this format: something like $3d6 means the cost will be $3-18, but with a higher chance of it being $9 than $3 or $18. Something like $1d20 means the cost will be $1-20, with every price equally likely). Why? What are the implications?
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has dominated economic policy and politics, despite its many well-demonstrated shortcomings. Various alternatives exist; e.g. Bhutan uses a Gross National Happiness Index. Imagine a world where economic policy is focused on some unusual alternative to GDP. Perhaps the story is about trying to change to a different metric, and the unexpected consequences.
Imagine an alternative timeline in which the 1973 Chilean coup failed or never happened in the first place. What next for Stafford Beer and Cybersyn? (You may want to read Eden Medina's Cybernetic Revolutionaries first).
Invent a few new cognitive biases, or exaggerate some existing cognitive biases, and extrapolate how they will reshape the economy.
Imagine an alternative timeline in which the Soviet Union pursued the project of a computational command economy in a big way. (You may want to read Francis Spufford's Red Plenty first).
A tweet-based currency.
Industrial disputes are handled algorithmically, and/or are gamified.
An economy that has been designed with institutions specifically to disincentivize all kinds of rational egoist, homo economicus type behaviour.
Set your story in a future where regenerative design, redistributive design, and generous design have become normalized. The economy is based on processes that revitalize the resources they need, that distribute value widely instead of letting it pool and concentrate, and that aim to create positive externalities (rather than just no negative externalities. Check out Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics to find out more about these terms). These features could be in the foreground, or just in the background. You could stress test the world you have invented in various ways. You could explore what happens when these principles are so ingrained, even the bad guys operate by them. E.g. how does a scientist supervillain, or a mercenary company, or a giant killer robot, try to abide by such principles?
A reputation based currency but with some twist. The twist is up to you, but just for example, you can start by reading Cory Doctorow's critique of his invention reputation currency Whuffie (and this post may be handy too). How might things be different if you had several reputation scores, and any increase in one of your reputation scores meant a decrease in your others?
Imagine a world in which all "markets" are actually networked barter systems. There is no money as such. Goods and services are "priced" in credits, but there's no such thing as owning credits by themselves. What you can do is request goods or services, and list your own goods and services in exchange. The system gets around the coincidence of wants problem by some kind of multilateral matching algorithm, and clears all requests as quickly as feasible. Think through the details of the system, and imagine how it reshapes the economy and people's everyday lives.
What we usually call "ownership" is actually a bundle of rights, for instance the right to use something (in certain ways), the right to earn income from it, the right to transfer it, the right to exclude others from using it, the right to dispose of it, etc. Think of different ways of dividing up "ownership." Imagine a society in which these rights are not typically bundled together.
Similar to the last one: imagine a world in which it is easy to place complex conditions on how something will be used when it is sold. What kinds of conditions do people place? Why? What are the second- and third-order effects?
Again similar to the last one: technology gives most commodities a fine-grained modularity. Ownership as we know it is obsolete, but there are competing ideas about what new forms should take its place. Some producers, still seeking to maximize profit no matter what, want to extract value from micro-licensing long after they have "sold" something. Other actors are trying to establish a circular economy that is restorative and regenerative by design.
Military science fiction featuring a company of high tech mercenaries that seek to reconcile their chosen profession with being green and sustainable.
A world of great abundance -- perhaps kind of post-scarcity -- in which anything that is paid for is paid for with on-the-spot by micro-labour (never more than ten minutes).
Imagine a universe without Nash equilibria.
Imagine a universe without Pareto optimality.
Imagine a universe in which Walrasian general equilibrium is not even theoretically possible, although partial equilibrium is.
Imagine a democracy based on rotating through Nash equilibria rather than political parties.
Imagine all the people, living life in peace, yoo hoo ooh-ooh-ooh.
All economic transactions are done through some kind of a Vickrey auction.
There are already many LETS communities and time banks all over the world. Imagine one system growing until it fundamentally alters the nature of capitalism, or perhaps in some sense replaces it.
Imagine an economy in which some or all goods aren't characterized by diminishing marginal utility, but by more complex curves that go up and down at different amounts. How? Why? So what?
Imagine an economy where each quantum of cash bears a record of all the historical transactions it has been involved in. (So a bit like a blockchain, but imagine that the data is a bit more rich than what amounts were transferred).
Create a magic system based on the stock exchange.
Imagine a sophisticated form of economics that uses little or no mathematics. Maybe it is mainly visual.
There is a small close-to-post-scarcity utopia existing at the fringe of a large capitalist society. How do the utopians deal with the arbitrage?
Build an economy in which every good or service has a different price depending on who's buying it. Among other things, think about how such an economy handles its complex arbitrage problems.
Imagine a world in which certain categories of goods periodically "rotate," e.g. all instances of commodity a turn into commodity b, all commodity b into commodity c, c into d, d into e, and e into a. Why? And how do people adjust to this phenomenon?
Imagine a society in which the division of labour is done in some radically different way.
Imagine a functioning economy and financial system in which there is no interest (and also probably no arrangements like buy-to-lease which in some ways functionally approximate interest bearing loans).
Imagine a world in which all transaction costs are zero. Or, imagine a world in which all or key transaction costs are exotic in some way, perhaps fluctuating predictably according to some irresistible external impulse.
Imagine a society without what David Graeber calls "bullshit jobs." Or imagine the difficult transition to such a society.
Imagine a science fictional reason for an unambiguous positive correlation between inflation and unemployment.
A world in which something called "smart inflation" exists. What is it, and how does it work? How does it reshape the economy and society?
Some kind of biopunk world in which affect (feelings) can be transferred, commodified, bought and sold.
In the near future, the Earth divides into just two societies: one Left Accelerationist, the other Right Accelerationist. What happens?
In the near future, the Earth divides into just two societies: a Promethean Leftist society, and a Green Leftist society. What goes down?
Cash and markets come to an extremely advanced, complex alien society that has never had such things in all their history.
Another variant on Doctorow's Whuffie, from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. In the novel, you can't really "spend" Whuffie to buy things. It just goes up and down depending what people think of you. But what if you could spend it? What if you gained credits automatically through conduct people approve of, which you can choose to deplete to buy things? The credits are erased, rather than transferred.
Design a blockchain utopia. Make it an ambiguous, critical utopia (think Le Guin's Dispossessed), and don't write it from an anarcho-capitalist perspective.
Research (or find somebody who knows about) an extremely intricate, dull, and complicated episode of economic history. For instance, research rail fares in the UK 1970-2020. In what ways have they changed? Why? What choices were made? What lessons have been learned? What models are in operation? What challenges are now being faced? Now try to tell the most exciting science fictional story you can, preserving the underlying economic logic. You may want to change the subject matter entirely, but try to preserve (in particular) any insights into the design of policies, institutions and incentives, and/or the counter-intuitive, emergent behaviour of systems whose wholes are greater than the sum of their parts.
Imagine the transition to full communism from the perspective of someone working in a particular role in a particular organisation (whether it's a business, a non-profit, something else). Try to include the detailed, mundane challenges in your story -- the kind of stuff the protagonist thinks would be too complicated to explain to anybody who didn't do the job they do.
A freak temporal storm transports Kim Stanley Robinson to 1900.
It's a highly networked society, and all payments are digital. When you pay for a good or service, there's a suggested price, but you can pay whatever you want for it. If a good or service is unavailable, you can state what price you would have paid for it. Periodically (every month, say) there is a Rebalancing in which a sort of version of a Vickrey auction is computed. The price of the good or service is set at that offered by the highest bidder who would have lost, if this had been a normal Vickrey auction. Everyone's bank balances are then adjusted according to the price (if they paid more, they get some money back; if they paid less, they are charged a top-up). But how does the system deal with the fact that some people have already consumed goods which, if this were a normal Vickrey auction, they would not have any right to? What incentives are there to pay higher rather than lower prices? And what are the wider economic, social, and cultural ramifications of this system?
The world is a computer simulation, and everyone knows it. It's also a democracy, and elections aren't just about choosing government officials, they're about choosing new realities. Between elections, the main form of currency is backed by story prompts for economic science fiction, and the economic science fiction based on those prompts.
A reading list of economics-related titles that may be of interest to researchers working in Science Fiction Studies and/or science fiction writers: Journals / Series
Vector is pleased to invite proposals for short articles (2,000-4,000 words) exploring science fiction and economics. CfP can be found here. Some ideas for topics include:
The economics and political economy of utopias and dystopias
Imagined systems of economic thought
The role of speculation about the future across SF and financial markets
Property and its alternatives in SF
Imagined collapses of and alternatives to capitalism
Near future SF and the socio-economic impacts of emergent technology
The idea of “rigor” in science fiction and the social sciences
Picturing and pitching the future: futurism, entrepreneurship, design fiction, and diegetic prototyping
Economic extrapolations of the novum
Fintech, cryptocurrency, blockchain
Debt in SF, e.g. Margaret Atwood’s Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth meets the speculative fiction of Margaret Atwood
Adhocracy, commoning, and self-governance, e.g. Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway (2017) meets Elinor Ostrom
“Adam Smith’s invisible great clomping foot of nerdism”: the economic dimension of worldbuilding
The corporation in cyberpunk, post-cyberpunk, and other SF
Malthus and immortality
Markets, data science, and algorithmic governance
Complexity economics and chaos, complexity, and non-linear dynamics in SF
Algorithmic governance and the socialist calculation debates
Commensurable and non-commensurable value, e.g. Viviana Zelizer meets Karl Schroeder’s Permanence (2012)
Economic models as science fiction; readings of the thought experiments and pedagogic narratives within political economy texts as science fiction, e.g. Georg Simmel meets Ruth Levitas
AI and economic decision-making. How should economic agency be understood when it is dispersed through digital constructs – including Intelligent Personal Assistants and financial investment robo-advisors – whose algorithmic ‘reasoning’ is intrinsically opaque?
Communism and alternate reality SF
SF and capitalist realism
Science fictional experience; SF as lived experience
Science fictional estrangements of markets and money
Alienation, reification, commodification, and estrangement
Unreal estate
Economics without economies, economies without economics
Subjective theories of value and the Quantified Self
Neural interfaces, affective computing, and the formation of economic demand and political will
Homo economicus, “xeno economicus”, and economic rationality in SF
Prisoners’ Dilemma and other game theory in SF
Platform capitalism and SF, e.g. Tim Maughan’s ‘Zero Hours’
SF and platform co-operativism: imagining just, democratic, and sustainable digitally-mediated labour relations
Division of labour in SF
Affective labour and technologies of quantification
Barter in SF
Interstellar trade
Money and the trees it grows on, e.g. Nalo Hopkinson’s ‘Money Tree’, Clifford D. Simak’s ‘The Money Tree’
SF and ecological economics
Quantifying, representing, and/or marketising the unquantifiable
Markets as computation, computation as markets
SF’s non-capitalist markets
Class in SF, e.g. Samuel R. Delaney’s Nova (1968)
Secular trends, e.g. Rosa Luxemburg meets Michael Swanwick’s ‘From Babel’s Fall’n Glory We Fled...’ (2008)
Social credit and financial credit in Karen Lord’s Galaxy Game (2015)
Gift economies and other non-market exchanges in SF, e.g. Erik Frank Russell’s ‘And Then There Were None’ (1953)
Economics and deep time, economics and galactic scale, economics of terraforming, economics of megaengineering
Markets and states on interstellar scale, e.g. Susan Strange meets Charles Stross’s Neptune’s Brood (2013)
Estranging money
Energy and value, e.g. Starhawk’s Fifth Sacred Thing (1993)
SF in relation to time banking: e.g. LETS, ECHO, time-based currencies, Falk Lee’s ‘Time is Money’ (1975)
I have a new story up at The Long+Short, which is about the future of collective intelligence, precarity, Intelligent Personal Assistants, augmented reality, Pokemon GO, cryptocurrency, payments technology, kawaii brands, fintech that attempts to visualize/gamify/humanize financial complexity, frogs, the gig economy, people powered healthcare, butts, the fragmentation and financialization of healthcare, pets, David Attenborough, and things like that.
That workshop was put together by Stir to Action, a community organisation who work around social and community enterprises, co-operatives, and campaigns, and innovative, alternative, progressive economics. They publish the magazine STIR, run workshop programmes and short courses, produces how-to resources, design financing to make things happen, and are generally great.
The Long+Short collective intelligence stories are all (I think -- mine definitely is) released under the Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license, which means you can do pretty much whatever you like with them (including commercially) so long as you attribute.
Chernoff Faces: a bold albeit dubious idea in dataviz, which informs the Pokemoney GOLD conceit.
Also see Twelve Tomorrows 2016 ed. Bruce Sterling, where I have a story touching on some of the same fintech visualization territory. I will be putting out an expanded version of that story as soon as I get some time. (Probably just on Medium, unless you are an editor of some excellent paywall-free site that would like to host it, in which case get in touch).
A little listicle I made one day featuring, I think, no more than Star Trek, Scrooge McDuck, Tim Maughan, David Graeber, grew and grew till I realized it was, like, a database. So there's now a dedicated tab for economics in science fiction and fantasy.
I will happily take suggestions for entries or links, or any ideas really. (Economics-in-SFF-wise it is kind of ridiculous I haven't read a bit more Atwood, Stephenson, Sterling, Stross, and Robinson, so if anyone wants to donate any reviews or posts they think are relevant, please get in touch! I can be found most days at the Cafe de Gmail, ask for josephclwalton).
A long-term goal is to start including topic articles as well. Currency, Credit, Scarcity, Supply and Demand, Malthusianism, Eugenics, Diegetic Prototyping, Families, Financial Performativity, Quantity Theory, Political Economy as Science Fiction, and Topsy-Turvy Worlds all come to mind.
Secondly, over at the SFWA, Setsu Uzumé talks about Lemonade Award, the Mixy Award, and some other badassed yet goodassed awards (including the Sputnik!).
PS: UPDATE: In fact, here's my provisional desiderata list.
Recommended to me & currently or recently on my TBR kang:
Kim Stanley Robinson, rest of The Mars Trilogy
G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen.
Ursula le Guin, The Telling.
Clifford D. Simak, "The Fence" (see this snippet)
Jack Vance, Demon Princes series (SVU)
Sarah Zettel, Fool's War.
Charles Stross, Accelerando & others.
Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
John Varley's Eight Worlds
Robert Heinlein, For Us The Living
Neal Asher, The Skinner (spline)
Anne McCaffrey
Max Gladstone
Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn: The Original Trilogy (coinshots, Atium)
Gene Wolfe's Book of the Short Sun (circuit board currency)
Gordon R. Dickson's Childe Cycle (exchange of expertise)
Henry Kuttner, "The Iron Standard"
Scott Westerfield's Uglies Trilogy (Smoke's food pack currencies)
Frank O'Rourke's "Instant Gold"
Geoff Ryman, Air.
Will Garth, "Men of Honor"
Neal Stephenson's Baroque cycle and Reamde
Cory Doctorow's For the Win
The rest of Margaret Atwood's Maddadam trilogy
Richard Morgan, Market Forces.
John Chu, "A Cost-Benefit Analysis of the Proposed Trade-Offs for the Overhaul of the Barrier."
Sergey Lukyanenko's Seekers of the Sky
Greg Costikyan, First Contract.
Hayford Peirce, Chap Foey Rider: Capitalist to the Stars.
Lester del Rey & Frederik Pohl, Preferred Risk
Weis & Hickman's Deathgate cycle (barls currency)
Henry Richardson Chamberlain, 6000 Tonnes of Gold Guess what? I'd be particularly interested in recommendations of economic science fiction and fantasy by women!
Over on Economic Humanities, another necessarily bonkers foray into economic sociology, trying to develop the notion of shallow markets. Inspired in the first place by trying to capture what is distinctive about the market structures of platform capitalism (Uber, Airbnb, the "sharing" economy, etc.), but in a way which can also be used to refine our understanding of "traditional" market structures.
Glancing over it now, I'm less confident about the centrality of negative externalities. Perhaps what I'm really interested in here is the old notion of a producer entering a market in expectation of profit, and leaving a market in response to losses. In this context, are there differences between platforms and markets? Platforms are designed to easily assimilate productive capital which was recently used for some other purpose, but is that really lowering barriers to entry, or is it cultivating a spectrum of market presence, where producers are neither completely in nor completely out of the market, but ghosts with a transparency slider, 0% to 100%? What is the status of a seller who has developed a good reputation profile, and still has all the productive capital necessary to compete on a particular platform, but just isn't bidding and/or checking that particular inbox any more? Have they exited the market or not? What if they start checking more frequently after a few months? Should this change the way we think about sunk costs / transitional costs / stranded costs?
Partly what I'm trying to capture is what these relatively new modes of provisional and flexible market participation mean for competition as it is traditionally conceived in mainstream economics. Okay, yes, platform capitalism has discovered devious new ways of continuing neoliberal trends of casualization and deregulation. But also: many of these markets are not only de facto extremely exploitative, they are also uncompetitive or only ambiguously competitive.
It is true that producers encounter pressure to improve the quality and cost of their offering, in ways which are favorable to the consumer. But other features of competition are not present. The relative ease with which producers may defer or offload costs, and may come and go from the market, means that the market does not cultivate technical innovation, robust structures of intangible capital, nor real growth. Instead of facing pressure to improve productivity, producers face pressure to begin their "going out of business, everything must go, big bargain sale" from the moment they enter the market.
(Some of these incentive dynamics may be obscured, at the moment, by the institutionally and culturally originated waves of innovation (and innovation marketing and rhetoric) which are a compulsory feature of any tech company's existence. The provisional, one-foot-in-and-one-foot-out quality of these microentrepreneur markets may also not entirely hold true in the case of flagship platforms like Uber and Airbnb, since there's a big physical capital investment involved: the situation of some Uber drivers if it were to continue would verge on indentured slavery. TaskRabbit et al. are slightly more clear-cut examples).
Perhaps an interesting model to play with would be a market in which all firms are loss-making, average total cost is greater than price, but marginal variable cost is less than price per unit. Barriers to entry are not low but negative.
(You could perhaps get clever and explain these negative barriers in terms of a kind of "grass is greener" epistemology of capital asset valuation. New producers do not literally have a monetary incentive to enter; they have a sort of accounting incentive to enter, in that by switching their underperforming capital, its value rises on the basis of anticipated returns. But underperformance is the rule across all platforms. The producer's incentive to enter a market is their own capital, which appears constantly undervalued in whatever market it is participating in, and overvalued in whatever markets it's not).
David D. Levine’s short story ‘Tk’tk’tk’ (which I read in Hartwell and Hayden's big Twenty-First Century Science Fiction) focuses on the tribulations of Walker, an interstellar salesman, as he struggles to understand local market conditions.
Walker trips up over a variety of linguistic and cultural caltrops. He does not realise that the deepest and darkest room in the hotel is the most desirable and expensive (duh). He falls for the extrastellar equivalent of downing a local liquor he really can’t handle (more literally, his shoulders are sprinkled with strange green rings, but the principle is the same, and even the chanting “Rings, dance! Rings, dance!” (p. 170) faintly echoes a frattish ‘Drink! Drink! Drink!’). He has difficulty distinguishing high and low denomination currency boluses, since figures are written in fragrances (p.162). Numbers have qualitative associations he is frequently forgets: one buyer is mortified at the idea of paying seventy for an item, but will happily pay seventy-three (p.162). Potential customers profess themselves, with elaborate humility, to be unworthy to take ownership of Walker’s exalted merchandise, calling it “beyond price” (p.161). They do hint at the possibility of compensating him for an “indefinite loan” (p.173, cf. p. 161), but seem to prefer endless, aimless, chinwagging (“did you come through Pthshksthpt or by way of Sthktpth” (p.163)) to talking turkey.
Detail by detail, Levine conjures an amusing and convincingly exotic setting, and only a heartless reader would blame Walker for his bewilderment. Nonetheless, at bottom, Walker’s experiences are just exaggerated versions of what a naive and insensitive late C20th North American (or "Westerner," maybe) might encounter, trying to hock their merch in Asia and East Asia, and perhaps particularly, in Japan.
That is: compared to Walker, the aliens belong to what the anthropologist Edward T. Hall influentially described as a “high-context culture” (Beyond Culture,1976), in which comparatively greater emphasis is placed on implicature, supported by shared context and experience. Walker’s frustration with meandering chit-chat – what he at best justify as “building rapport” (p.163) – recalls the reactions of some North Americans to a more informal style of decision-making common in Japanese organisations. That is, a style which exhibits a more flexible understanding of what might constitute ‘on-topic’ and ‘off-topic’ conversation, and which closely links the legitimacy of decisions to the social intimacy which has led up to them (cf. e.g. Haru Yamada Snr., Different Games, Different Rules, pp.55-59).
We must be wary of stereotyping, of course -- I'm pretty sure that golfing and drinking is part of work for London City bankers, every bit as much as it is for Tokyo salarymen -- but the broad distinctions are there, at least in the Business Studies and Linguistics literature. And in light of these connections, Walker’s eventual spiritual transformation, which sees him reforming his earlier striving attitudes, is not particularly difficult to understand – he is simply one more tourist-turned-Western Buddhist. Which is still good.
Is the story colonialist, orientalist? When I first wrote this post, I pussyfooted around the question a bit, because I like the story -- and also because I also think I need to try to take an author seriously when they tell me that somebody is a giant alien insect, or an orc, or whatever: and not simply unscramble the story in some way which suits me, and then critique the cleartext as if the ciphertext had never existed. But. The use of insect and swarm imagery, in the depiction of an inscrutable, indirect and exotic people? A people whose ways are a little more collectivist than our narrator's, and who offer him a mystical path to self-transcendence? This is definitely horrible territory.
Should no more pussyfooting. Levine should have used squidbears. And/or France.
2.
Doctorow’s novelette ‘Chicken Little’ appears in the same anthology, and also follows a salesman, Leon, into a difficult market. But here, I think, things manage to be genuinely a little stranger.
Leon works for Ate, a corporation whose opulent fortunes are entirely based on one previous sale, and are now looking to make their second. Nobody at Ate knows what they sold last time. It's a well-kept secret. Better than well-kept: deliberately lost, forever. They do have a general idea of the type of customer they sold it to:
The normal megarich got offered experiences [...] The people in the vat had done plenty of those things before they’d ended up in the vats. Now they were metastatic, these hyperrich, lumps of curdling meat in the pickling solution of a hundred vast machines that laboriously kept them alive amid their cancer blooms and myriad failures. Somewhere in that tangle of hoses and wires was something that was technically a person, and also techincally a corporation, and, in many cases, technically a sovereign state.
(p.535)
Here we encounter a connection, which crops up pretty frequently when fantastic literature thinks about economics: that is, a connection between capital and living, disaggregated bodies:
“The monster in the vat. Some skin, some meat. Tubes. Pinches of skin clamped between clear hard plastic squares, bathed in some kind of diagnostic light [...] Eyes everywhere else. [...] I looked away, couldn’t make contact with them, found I was looking at something wet. Liver. I think.”
(p.548).
Compare that with the many wriggly legs of Terry Pratchett's Luggage (a diabolic avatar of Echo-Gnomics) in the Discworld novels, or the mashed-up flesh which Marx points out is the real substance of which all commodities are made (“human labour in the abstract . . . mere congellations, semisolid, tremulous comestible mass, Gallarte, of homogeneous human labour” (Sutherland 2008)), or, of course, Adam Smith's monstrous Invisible Hand.
These immortal quadrillionaires are capital personified, referred to as monsters, gods, and at one point, “the fortunes in the vats” (p.533).
The equivocation in first of the above-quoted passages over sovereignty – “in many cases” (q.v.) – is also worth noting. “The last two decades of the twentieth century saw the shift from state power to market power” (Susan Strange, Mad Money,p.183). Somewhat distinct from the questions of how market power operates, and the ways in which they do or could serve human needs, there is controversy over the extent to which market power remains embedded in and limited by state power. The historical and ontological relationships between states and money is also complex and controversial: very briefly and broadly, chartalist accounts of money tend to emphasize money's unit of account function, and see the relationship between money and state as crucial, whereas the metallist accounts emphasize money’s function as a medium of exchange, and argue that money can emerge and operate independently of state action. These issues are complicated by the fact that the ingredients of sovereignty vary state-by-state: China, Greece, ISIS, Luxembourg, Somalia, and the United States of America, to pick a few, are not all states in the same way.
‘Chicken Little’ offers us a glimpse of Mammon, of the monetary sublime, of capital purified and personified, and so it confronts this difficult question: is what we see still mingled with state power? Is capital power by its very nature entangled with state power? Or does capital in its fiery, purest form finally shrug off the state altogether?
Finally, an answer!
Or . . .
One sharp approach is to allegorize all the ambivalence, equivocation, frustration and controversy itself -- which is what Doctorow goes ahead and does. 'Chicken Little' tells us that in many cases, the people in vats are "technically sovereign states" -- but not in all cases, and the assertion is in the same breath as an allusion to corporate personhood, something we all know to be at least a bit unsavory, and probably completely ludicrous.
There's also another reference to a person in a vat as a country unto himself, but it has a kind of metaphorical, "no man is an island, wait, this man is a big scary quadrillionaire island" vibe to it.
But the novelette's most interesting move in this respect involves a bit of wordplay, centred on the one way in which the people in vats (they're most frequently referred to in that way, "the people in vats," "the quadrillionaire in the vat," "the old thing in the vat") still somehow come across as vulnerable. Buhle, the one person in a vat whom we meet, is essentially on life support. Despite his no doubt endless state-of-the-art fail-safes and back-ups, he feels unpluggable. He may be pure money, but he's nothing without his vat.
Personified capital's continued reliance on the state is thus inscribed, punningly, into its very name -- PERSON IN A VAT -- through an allusion to one of the state's more subtle and pervasive forms of extrusion, which makes itself felt in every "pure" market dyad, if only by its conspicuous absence. VAT: Value Added Tax. Money is not really money without the support of the state's taxonomization and taxation of our material existence.
There is some thematic movement in the second part of the novelette. But Doctorow isn’t abandoning one set of themes for another, so much as rapidly orbiting to a new vantage point. And that’s something I’ll deal with, probably, in the next blog post.
3.
PS: Compare Jack Vance's 1961 story, 'The Moon Moth' . . .
Thissell came to a breathless halt in front of the hoslter. He reached for his kiv*, then hesitated. Could this be considered a casual personal encounter? The zachinko perhaps? But the statement of his needs hardly seemed to demand the formal approach. Better the kiv after all. He struck a chord, but by error found himself stroking the ganga. Beneath his mask Thissell grinned apologetically; his relationship with this hostler was by no means on an intimate basis. He hoped that the hostler was of sanguine disposition, and in any event the urgency of the occasion allowed no time to select an exactly appropriate instrument. He struck a second chord, and, playing as well as agitation, breathlessness and lack of skill allowed, sang out a request: "Ser Hostler, I have immediate need of a swift mount. Allow me to select from your herd."
The hostler wore a mask of considerable complexity which Thissell could not identify: a construction of varnished brown cloth, pleated gray leather and, high on the forehead, two large green and scarlet globes, minutely segmented like insect-eyes. He inspected Thissell a long moment, then, rather ostentatiously selecting his stimic,** executed a brilliant progression of trills and rounds, of an import Thissell failed to grasp. The hostler sang, "Ser Moon Moth, I fear that my steeds are unsuitable to a person of your distinction."
Thissell earnestly twanged at the ganga. "By no means; they all seem adequate. I am in great haste and will gladly accept any of the group."
The hostler played a brittle cascading crescendo. "Ser Moon Moth," he sang, "the steeds are ill and dirty. I am flattered that you consider them adequate to your use. I cannot accept the merit you offer me. And"—here, switching instruments, he struck a cool tinkle from his krodatch† —"somehow I fail to recognize the boon companion and co-craftsman who accosts me so familiarly with his ganga."
The implication was clear. Thissell would receive no mount. He turned, set off at a run for the landing field. Behind him sounded a clatter of the hostler's hymerkin— whether directed toward the hostler's slaves or toward himself Thissell did not pause to learn.
* Kiv: five banks of resilient metal strips, fourteen to the bank, played by touching, twisting, twanging.
** Stimic: three flutelike tubes equipped with plungers. Thumb and forefinger squeeze a bag to force air across the mouthpieces; the second, third and fourth little fingers manipulate the slide. The stimic is an instrument well adapted to the sentiments of cool withdrawal, or even disapproval.
† Krodatch: a small square sound-box strung with resined gut. The musician scratches the strings with his fingernail, or strokes them with his fingertips, to produce a variety of quietly formal sounds. The krodatch is also used as an instrument of insult.
It is not beyond imagining. But it is more difficult to imagine than any crosshatched space or object.
And this difficulty speaks to something about the nature of money. It tells us that money is closer in its nature to the one phenomenon which absolutely cannot accommodate crosshatching, the one thing which must be in Besźel, or in Ul Qoma, or in Breach.
So I continue to ponder Cory Doctorow's Whuffie, Charles Stross's fast/medium/slow money, and other exotic speculative currency.
But the one I'm thinking about this afternoon isn't from science fiction -- not as far as I know, anyway -- but from Georg Simmel's The Philosophy of Money(1900).
I'm interested in a somewhat adapted, purified and thinned-out version of what Simmel describes as "the system of unequal prices corresponding to the means of the consumer" (p.343). It is a kind of antithesis to the Thomist just price, and you can also hear echoes of a remark of Nietzsche's in Human, All Too Human:
[...] a shilling in the hand of a rich heir, a day-labourer, a shop-keeper, a student are quite different things: according to whether he did almost nothing or a great deal to get it, each ought to receive little or a great deal in exchange for it: in reality it is, of course, the other way round (§25)
I don't want to get into the Simmelian context too much, although it's worth mentioning that Simmel isn't proposing a reform: he is exploring an "ideal formation" (p.344) in which the antitheses between individual and society, and between object and subject are overcome. If you want a discussion which sticks closer to what Simmel actually wrote, look at the last chapter of Nigel Dodd's generally excellent The Social Life of Money(2014).
§
This is a rather persnickety and belaboured post, by the way. Don't be fooled by the mention of Doctorow and Stross at the top. They don't reappear and there's no fun.
§
So. Imagine a world in which the costs of all goods and services are expressed as proportions of the consumer's net wealth. Instead of a hotdog costing "$2," it might cost something like "0.0015%." For Bill Gates, that might translate to around $120m, and a little extra for onions.
(Let's also imagine that such a world is something of a #dataviz utopia -- and that consumers wouldn't have to calculate prices in dollar terms themselves, but would get to see each price displayed in both its percentage form (applicable to everyone) and its dollar form (applicable to that consumer specifically). I will use dollars throughout, by the way, although I could have picked any currency).
There is an intuitive egalitarian appeal to such a world. Fragments of it already exist, for example, in tiered prices for the waged and unwaged. Could we create such a world? Is it coherent?
(1) Unless a minimum price were established (denominated in the traditional way rather than as a percentage), each person might have technically inexhaustible purchasing power, after the fashion of Zeno's paradoxes. Whether you bought something costing 10% or 25%, your purchasing power would be the same afterwards.
(2) Even under the most generous assumptions about the transparency and reliability of banking information, the measurement of net wealth might be problematic. (In particular, people might tend to develop forms of value which lie just outside the sphere of official assets. In other words, people might develop sophisticated ways of looking poor. See also (6) below. It might also be difficult to calculate the value of interest-bearing assets and liabilities, if interest rates were considered to be prices, and therefore required adjustment according to the net worth of the borrower).
(3) There might be little or no incentive to accumulate wealth, since every increase in an individual's wealth would be perfectly cancelled out by corresponding increases in prices from that individual's perspective. You might even imagine people would stop working to the extent that society would fall apart.
(4) Prices might cease to signal information about supply and demand, and therefore fail as a mechanism for allocating productive resources. You might even imagine Soviet-style gluts and shortages.
(5) In particular, the profit or loss associated with any particular product might be extremely volatile. The sale of a hotdog to Bill Gates might involve a larger transfer of wealth than, for example, the sale of Microsoft to someone with very little money. Wealthy individuals might be pursued by swarms of hotdog vendors looking for that one big sale.
(6) If the system did last, it would be gamed by unscrupulous individuals like you and me. Let's assume that we trust each other or, at least, that we're in love. The first thing I might do is transfer 90% of my wealth to you as a gift. Thereafter, I would make all purchases for both of us, transferring things to you as gifts as appropriate. If necessary you could occasionally send me a tiny fraction of your wealth to top me up.
For example: assume a pogo-stick costs 1%. (Let's also set aside the Zeno's paradox aspect of (1) for the moment, by assuming that the percentages in this example lock in a dollar price at the time of the first purchase, and do not generate new dollar prices thereafter). Without this strategy, you and I could only buy 200 pogo-sticks at the cost of $1 each. Using this strategy, we could buy 2,000 pogo-sticks, which is more like it.
More generally, the issue of who was "actually" making any purchase would be a thorny one.
(7) For reasons similar to those brought up in (1) q.v., it would be complicated for people to pool together to buy things too expensive for them to afford individually, or to price anything at above 100%.
So it does not look good for our world of unequal prices.
But a little second-order thinking is also indicated. Here things get complicated and provisional. I'm sketching the barest outlines, which I hope to add to gradually (although I'll probably never get past a bit of crosshatching and shading).
For instance:
(1 + 2*) It just seems silly that unequal pricing should fall at the first hurdle, which is no taller than a comb.
So what if all your assets, not just financial ones, were counted in your net wealth? If each purchase automatically increased your net wealth by the same amount which you spent, then your purchasing power would not be inexhaustible. Rather, purchasing power would be a function of a kind of personal liquidity, rather than of wealth per se.
Let's say a peach costs 5% (because peaches are furry and gross) and a nectarine costs 99% (mmm), and you've got $100. Can you buy them both? It all depends how your net wealth is calculated. If your peach purchase reduces your net wealth to $95, then you can still have your nectarine (at the bargain price of $94.05). But if the value of the peach is added to your net wealth, then no you can't (the nectarine still costs $99 for you and you now only hold $95 in cash).
In this undiscerning form, unequal pricing involves some pretty unrealistic assumptions. Your peach asset will very quickly have depreciated into a gleaming peach-stone and a faint lingering smile: you won't be able to sell it on. In fact, depreciation becomes the central dynamic of resource allocation. So it might be worth investigating a range of procedures which would increase net wealth to only partly counterbalance expenditure, in order to reflect depreciation, or some concept like it. As an extremely simple example, however, there could be a fixed reduction across the board -- 50% of the price that you pay is added to your net wealth.
But let's set all that aside. Let's assume that assets are not added to your net wealth. Let's also assume that a price must legally be at least above zero: would purchasing power necessarily be inexhaustible?
Not if there were a minimum price, which could exceed your net wealth when it dropped to a very low level. A minimum price of 1c might emerge spontaneously. (Paradoxically, when you are down to your last cent, you can only buy the most lavish extravagances -- things which cost 100% -- otherwise the vendor won't be able to make change for you).
Alternatively, prices could be given by law a lower floor (e.g. $3). Or there could be a tiered system of price floors: for instance, groceries might cost a minimum of $1, durables might cost a minimum of $10, and big things like a Master of Science in Plant Biology or a prop from an Avril Lavigne music video might cost a minimum of $100. This more legislative approach raises the question of what should be allowed to count as single transaction: would there be a greater incentive to bundle multiple goods into a single good?
Even more important is how to determine such a taxonomy of goods and services (which price floors should apply to what) and at what levels the price floors should be set.
Perhaps those questions ought to be object of political struggle. (For instance, political struggle in a constitutional democratic form, so that more extreme changes require correspondingly stronger mandate, and changes to the system of struggle itself require the strongest mandate of all).
And/or perhaps price floor levels could be set to some extent outside of the political sphere -- that is, perhaps they could take on some of the flexibility associated with market-determined prices. They might thereby also take on some of their functions: to signal to producers to increase or decrease production, and to trigger mutations in consumers' preferences (e.g. innovations which modify the extent to which different goods are experienced as legitimate substitutes).
To take this a bit further: a completely deregulated scenario probably includes loopholes which cancel the whole unequal pricing conceit altogether: we might see producers setting extremely low "prices" (e.g. 0.0001% on all goods), and carefully differentiating the "price floors" to operate in exactly the same way as prices operate in our economies.
A weakly regulated scenario creates more interesting possibilities. For instance, producers might be free to price their goods (in percentage terms) however they like, and also free to choose their minimum floor (in absolute terms) but only from a fixed range of options, decided politically. A producer might have to decide whether a particular good belongs in the $1, $10 or $100 floor category. Or perhaps (if there were a few more tiers available, and a little closer together) producers might be able to compete not only on price, but on the interplay between percentage price and price floor.
There are also interesting lines of speculation in regards stronger regulation of price floors. One of these involves the data generated by price inquiries -- that is, the tailored calculation which confronts each individual consumer. This might be taken as a potentially useful estimate not of demand in the traditional sense, but of something resonant with demand -- consumer attention, or consumer preoccupation, perhaps. For example, you could envision the price floor of a particular good gradually rising, to help production meet rising consumer demand. It would of course be next to impossible to distinguish "real" attention to a potential purchase from "performed" attention, as part of an attempt to nudge price floors in a particular direction, without real intention to buy.
An alternative to the minimum floor(s) constraint is a periodicity constraint. Instead of the dollar cost of the good being calculated in relation to the consumer's net worth at the moment just before purchase, it could be calculated with reference to their average net wealth over some past period -- for instance, over the duration of the month prior to that in which the purchase is being contemplated. Prices would effectively be re-calibrated at the end of each month: if someone was impoverished before the end of the month, they would still face the same relatively high tailored prices that had been calculated and fixed at the beginning of that month. Structurally, unequal pricing might come to resemble a kind of automatic jubilee system. Depending on the details, the incentive structure could look very peculiar.
Or instead of discrete periods, the price could be continuously recalculated on the basis of, for example, the average net wealth of the consumer over the previous year. Large spikes and tanks might be smoothed out into a trend-line, to make the flickering leaps in prices a little less disconcerting. Thus someone who suddenly got rich (in dollar terms) would confront a manifold of steadily rising prices, whereas someone who suddenly lost a vast fortune (in dollar terms) would still find everyday items prohibitively exorbitant until they had spent some time in poverty.
(It would be interesting to think about such effects in relation to hedonic adaption; I also wonder if you could make a kind of liberal-moral argument in favour of them, since the poor would still feel the traditional liberal-conservative spur to creative autonomy in an economic mode, insofar as a vast fortune suddenly acquired would give significant power in the short term; should they ever become wealthy people in this way, they would eventually be encouraged to cultivate a good reputation and to invest in public works, not only as intrinsically good activities, but as the best kind of personal insurance against catastrophe. Perhaps).
Such refinements do not necessarily water down the principle of unequal pricing, since without something like them all prices would be completely equalized -- at zero -- by percentage-based pricing.
(3*) Significant changes in work patterns, and significant redistributions of production and consumption, would not have to involve the cessation or even reduction of work, production or consumption. As regards the labour market, see also (4*).
Furthermore, even without an incentive to accumulate wealth, a particular pattern of dollar-denominated "inequality" could persist. For example, relatively low-paid work could continue to be relatively low-paid, by sheer administrative, social and cultural momentum.
Furthermore, even under a system of unequal prices, there could be incentives to accumulate wealth in dollar terms. Wealth denominated in dollars could retain residual, unofficial purchasing power: those wielding larger sums could receive superior treatment on the noncontractable aspects of their transactions. Wealth denominated in dollars could continue to function in the articulation of sociological class and other cultural dynamics, for example.
(4*) Market spaces would not necessarily have to disintegrate. For one thing, insofar as the unequal pricing system would create a tendency to equalise net wealth, the percentage-denominated price of a good might not translate to so broad a spread of dollar-denominated prices as it would without this tendency. As an extreme benchmark, if everyone's level of net wealth were exactly the same, everyone would pay exactly the same price for each good, and the normal predictions and shortcomings of the price mechanism model would apply.
I'd like to do a lot more thinking on this point, however!
(5*) The profit margin on goods produced relatively cheaply and in high volume, and distributed evenly across different net worth cohorts, would not be particularly volatile. Specialised financing could be developed for different kinds of goods which necessitate smaller production runs and slower stock churn. The production costs of some goods could be highly flexible for the same reasons that their profit margins could be highly volatile.
If dollar-denominated "inequality" persisted, geographical, cultural and other factors might in practice create barriers to the purchase of certain goods and services by those who are poorer in absolute dollar terms.
(6*) The strategy described (you and me colluding, so that one of us hoards all our wealth, and the other one of us does all our buying) might attract effective normative censure. It also contains an internal tension insofar as it expresses strictly mercenary motives but relies on extra-economic trust. One possibility is that a counter-strategy of false alignment could emerge: you accept my gift of 90% of my wealth, but then you distribute it among good or hilarious causes as a rebuke.
Or there could be a simple fiscal disincentive: a tax on bank transfers. You and I would probably try to refine our strategy, perhaps acting as if we were in a commercial relationship, rather than a gifting one, to elude the transfer tax.
Alternatively, the strategy or one like it might be generally adopted. This could result in the world crumbling, or it could become incorporated into a relatively stable pattern of production and consumption. Prices for a particular good, in dollar terms, would converge greatly, since nearly all buyers would be the artificially impoverished member of a colluding dyad or cartel. They might however reflect differential levels of trust -- or coercion -- insofar as buyers might withhold a certain amount of wealth as a kind of insurance, even if it meant paying slightly higher prices. If the strategy were widespread, however, it can also be supposed that buyers would be less reliant on a particular hoarder, and if a particular buyer-hoarder dyad broke down, each party could shop around for a new partner. You could also suppose that the population won't divide neatly down the centre: one buyer could surely do the buying for several hoarders. One possibility is that there would often be slightly too many buyers chasing slightly too few hoarders, insofar as anyone losing all their money would be thrust into the buyer (under-?)class by default. But hoarders would also be heavily reliant on buyers, who would have the potential for significant power if they were able to organise politically. Indeed, you might expect a rather more complicated network of gradated strategic poverty to emerge, rather than just the two sharply distinguished classes of buyers and hoarders.
When storytellers tell you how great stories are, are they any different from any producer enthusing about their product? Why don't we give storytellers the same amused skepticism we give to someone selling a blender?
Here's a related question. Some right wing genre writers (Sad Puppies and that lot) will tell you that right wing science fiction and fantasy has the best stories. They may not always be subtle, they may not always have the most elegant writing, or the most thought-through politics, but they've got the best stories. What if it's true?
* * *
Eric S. Raymond has a genuinely-trying-to-be-balanced-and-thoughtful post about how science fiction is a bit better when it's written by fanatically right wing asshats. Real "Cursed Coloncornuthaum: -4 Charisma" types, according to the post, "can't lose," and are destined to inherit the canon, or at least the people's hearts. More-or-less. Raymond calls these guys the Evil League (nowadays I guess they might be called Puppies), and he calls everyone else the Rabbits.
It's obviously a whole heap of embleer hraka, but I wonder if there are whiffs of truth, to do with (a) "colonization by English majors" (but save that for another time) and (b) storytelling?
Pick up a Rabbit property like Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2014 and you’ll read large numbers of exquisitely crafted little numbers about nothing much. The likes of Correia, on the other hand, churn out primitive prose, simplistic plotting, at best serviceable characterization – and vastly more ability to engage the average reader.
I do sometimes have a sense that storytelling is more difficult if your politics aren't solidly conservative or reactionary. It means you face a slightly denser cloud of trade-offs to navigate through. Trade-offs between your political conscience and your viscerally gripping plot, I mean. With time and ingenuity and energy and Promethean artifice, you can probably still wiggle your way through without making any trade-offs. But betimes fuck wiggling. And/or: maybe you'll just pick a strategy that seduces the reader on some other level than plot, maybe you'll become a stylist or a wit?
Or to put it bluntly. Revolutionary stories are harder to tell than reactionary ones.
Is that too blunt? Is it nuts? To me, it sounds like a pretty modest conclusion to draw from the pretty widely-accepted principle that there is such a thing as ideology. That is: culture has a certain slow current in it, a kind of sludgy, slushy flow that -- overall, and in the long run-off -- tends to support wealth, privilege and power, and to betray, bewilder, atomise, marginalise and recuperate everything and everyone else.
Maybe that's why I've never been too sure about fetishizing stories as such, something which seems widespread in a lot of fantasy writing in particular. "Stories: aren't they totally fuckable?" "Hey you people who have self-selected as a constituency who like stories, you know what I think is really important? Do you want to know. Stories."
Authors I like -- Borges, Calvino, Živković, Pratchett, Pullman, me -- are guilty of this kind of faux folk pro-narrative populism. Constantly turning round to you with curly hair and huskily whispering, "The dream outlasts the dreamer, the story outlasts its teller!" with twinkles pulsing in their dead imaginative eyes.
Isn't the story-sludge, in its natural state, economically regressive, ecologically unsound, and a bit bigoted? Shouldn't the attitude to stories be a bit more, "Stories are here to stay, so we might as well make the best of them!" *grins* *falls dead with exhaustion*
(Neil Gaiman, to be fair, signed my Lane with "HI JOE [sic]! IT IS THE DISINGENUOUS CHAUVINISM OF THE CULTURAL PRODUCER TO PERMIT THE IMPLICATION THAT *ANY* STORY WILL DO TO PROPAGATE UNCHALLENGED XNG" while several people waited, but he should be more vocal about that stuff! (If it ever turned out that wasn't true: we owe it to each other to tell stories, Neil Gaiman)).
But say you were only interested in gratifying, escapist, and (probably) forgettable genre storytelling. Say you didn't want to be Evil League of Evil or Rabbit exactly, but to be somewhere in the middle, or to rise about the distinction, or sink below it, or something.
There's definitely a sweet-spot where your writing can sort of surf that story-sludge, so that your plot can deniably benefit from the fumes and spray of various pervasive stereotypes and fetishes -- you know, an ordinary girl with an extraordinary talent, or love at first sight, or a femme fatale, or a manic pixie dream girl, or a virgin, or a tart with a heart, or a butch chick who scrubs up chic, or a gritty underdog (triumphant), a knowingly retro damsel (in distress, subversible), an angry babymomma, a Meet Cute, a wicked CEO of a bad apple multinational corporation, a crooked politician (unmasked), a maverick detective (results), a plot voucher (elfin, redeemed), an already seven-foot stoic warrior-woman scowlingly consenting to wear heels, an exquisitely crafted little number, an uncle tom, a shrill do-gooder, a level head and a lantern jaw, a tonto, a jaleface minstrel, a complex relationship with dad, a svengali (with a Past, mind), some inscrutably slitted eyes, short grief, scars that make you interesting, Fate, bootstraps (own), bikini (chainmail), a savage (noble AF), a guido, a non-specific ethnic (kooky), an unflinching mercenary, a Latin (passionate), a Latin (proundly grandoise), revenge, revenge, the streets, the Real World, revenge, revenge, a hotbed mosque, ambient women, a shrill holier-than-thou hypocrite, Faery-bankrolled largesse for my dawgs, an amputation (inspiring, eventually), bros, a monocultural alien species, a perfectable humanity, an incorrigibly expansionist alien species (corriged the Hard Way), an Everyman confused by the confusingness of it all finally finding the answer ... in his heart, some hot, increasingly-consensual sex, a Chosen One, a sex cure, a deeply flawed anti-hero, a just law, an unjust law, a wicked utopian, a deus exneckbeard, the feelgood uniqueness of humans, a tainted individual redeemed by suicidal sacrifice, a make-over, nest defence, a totalising trauma explaining all behaviour, an orc, a haranguing mother-in-law, slavery as a sign of how exotic this setting is, a swineherd king, a thieves' guild, no unfamiliar ideologies, a lone inventor, a fat stupid gullible US tourist, a far future society terribly knowledgeable about (a small part of) 21st century society, the-bright-side-of-massacred-families-is-vigilante-dads, the incompetence of professional armies vs. ragtag pluck, a convenient suicide, a terrorist "refugee", good vs. evil, royal blood, a loopy hippy, being forced alas to commit genocide so that a magnitude more souls may be saved, vengeance, vengeance, a sniper, a tribesman's childlike wonder, a rich and pampered activist, some Darwin-made-me-badass shtick, all our nerves a-thrill to the harsh babble of the animate towelhead, the swelling relief of the pet running barking through the rubble and corpses, a natural genius, anybody who is steely in any way whatsoever, first contact as divine revelation, anybody who is simply evil, the lovely importance of ancestors, a crone, if-you-die-in-the-game-(/flamewar)-you-die-for-real, torture comeuppance, a human shield, twins (destined), a you-look-so-fetching-in-that-haze-of-gunsmoke-and-Stockholm-Syndrome romance, a HIDEOUSLY UGLY nurse see what I did there?, everything being a game, stories making us what we are, reneging your debt being evil, androgyny being untrustworthy, fat being evil, bureaucracy being evil, bureaucracy being myopic and counterproductive, darkness being evil, complexity being evil, ugliness being evil, the cheer of the street urchin wits-o-phage, deformity being evil, violence the solution, violence the solution, violence the solution, the pluck of lightly Americanised Tory heartlands the solution, an ultraviolent rape revenge the solution, swarms being evil, the pitilessness of the gnome moneylender, the stop-at-nothing nuclear defence of the nuclear family, or indeed just of your home, or some other ingot of ultra-compressed narrativium -- without actually slipping under the sludge, without actually being off-puttingly and distractingly offensive, not even to a readership of hearts of gold and eyes of steel.
Maybe -- I think -- it can be OK to do that.
(And/or to do other kinds of compromise. You can weigh one thing against of another, you can sort-of-cancel-out some dodgy indulgey technique you've used with some seriously vital political clarity somewhere in the same story).
But I think that, as fans and critics, we should try to acknowledge and appreciate the cunning of any gripping tale which doesn't rely on the standard-issue fetters and clamps to do all its gripping for it. The structures of storytelling are endlessly pliable to principled wit. And I also think that, more trickily, we should give credit to the tale that has permitted itself to contort into some weird, counterintuitive, and less-than-gripping shape, because of its fidelity to a principle of political resistance.
But above all, being alert to the semi-translucent, unpredictable play of political struggles within science fiction and fantasy means also means acknowledging that those struggles aren't ultimately decided in the cultural sphere at all.
It is easiest to get that point if you go up on your haunches, prick your ears and twitch your nose at the breeze. Even if we do sometimes run up against what feel like fixed, non-negotiable structures within storytelling -- against rules of (licked) thumb about what turns pages, about what readers care about and what they don't, about what gets pulses racing and what doesn't -- well, who wants to pander to power? It is an Evil League of Evil move to fixate and fawn on such structures, to mistake the rules of a game for the Rules of Life, to mistake the ball of a gag for the Sunrise on a Final Horizon of all Norms.
Battle songs are not written for Goodreads stars. Not mainly anyway. People whose lives are shaped by the desire for social justice and the hope of social justice -- I think this is usually true -- have other shit going on in those lives than writing science fiction and fantasy. They have other people's lives going on in their lives, for starters. And because whatever science fiction and fantasy they do write is neither the totality nor the centre of their political consciousness -- even better, their political agency -- it is rich and free, and it participates in the fullness of life, all its perpetual battle, passion, savvy, injury, hilarity, philosophy, acuity, solidarity, comprehension, emergence, tenderness, realism and optimism. How could it not?
* * *
Note 1: "... fetishizing of stories as such ..." Maybe the point is that the idea of a story is itself so rigorously recuperated, so ferociously defended in its ideological function, that all this feels faintly like the the wrong kind of sacrilege -- it feels kind of wrong to make that short step from (a) the idea that we are immersed in ideology to (b) the idea that the story form itself has picked a side. "In the enemy language it is necessary to lie" (Sean Bonney, Letter on Poetics (After Rimbaud)). You can take that idea in at least two ways: as a recommendation of tactics, and/or as a warning, that when the voices that are the most brutally silenced somehow struggle through to tell their stories, what they say isn't quite true. Not quite true because it is forced into story form. (Although cf. "with time and ingenuity and yadda yadda" q.v.).
Note 2: "... these battles aren't decided in the cultural sphere ..." -- that's the dialectic nature of ideology critique, I guess? Ideology critique is the interplay of (a) a ruthless examination of how our reality is constructed through culture, institutions, norms, mores, language, habitus; and (b) praxis, that is, getting stuck in wherever the will to struggle is getting diverted into the virtual, the abstract, the disconnectedly cultural, and orienting it to where it can do real good.
Note 3: "Eric S. Raymond has a ..." Dull disclosure plus hmm: I haven't read anything by these Evil League of Evil people yet. The drift of this post, translated into the vocab which inspired it: Rabbit fiction is probably much better than Evil League fiction, but even if it isn't (and maybe I will find out it isn't), by definition it doesn't matter in the least; even if the Rabbits were total roadkill fiction-wise, who wouldn't want to be a Rabbit? The way Raymond characterises Evil, it sounds like they needlessly restrict their revels to one cramped, lukewarm, strictly-defined bathtub. I have read a lil: dipped into the Hugo nominated Correia and Vox Day and want to give the former a proper read eventually, and there's a John C. Wright staring at me right now from the shelf . . . and possibly a Hoyt on the Kindle . . . I tend to really enjoy Neal Asher, but he's probably not evil enough. I always loved Heinlein as a kid, especially Job. Hmm.
Note 4: "Revolutionary stories are harder to tell than reactionary ones." This is broad-brush stuff, so perhaps it's not worth trying to make this discrimination, but . . . Thesis: revolutionary stories are harder to tell than progressive stories. Progressive stories are harder to tell than reactionary stories. Reactionary stories are harder to tell than conservative stories. Conservative stories are the easiest of all stories to tell. Note 5: I wonder if story-sludge is at all similar to what Terry Pratchett's wizards called narrativium.
Note 6: Gaimain and/or Pratchett: “Hell may have all the best composers, but heaven has all the best choreographers.”
In Clarkesworld, Jeremy L. C. Jones interviews six speculative fiction authors (Elizabeth Bear, N. K. Jemisin, Dani Kollin, Brian Francis Slattery, Charlie Stross, and John C. Wright) about economics.
At io9, Abhimanyu Das and Charlie Jane Anders, Post-Scarcity Societies (That Still Have Scarcity). (And my comment copy-pasted: Thanks for this great list! One common definition of “scarce” within economics is not “limited” or “finite” exactly, but rather either “less than everybody needs” or “less than everybody wants.” So economics invokes a concept of scarcity which bound up with who we are, and what we desire, and how our desires are created, expressed and legitimated. (It invokes a concept of scarcity which, frankly, I don’t think economics has the tools to handle adequately). Of course that’s not the only way of thinking about “scarcity,” but I do find it useful to remember whenever someone says, “Post-scarcity is impossible, because there will always be a shortage of such-and-such,” or “Such-and-such is not really a post-scarcity setting, because they don’t have infinite such-and-such.” In one sense that setting may not be post-scarcity. But in another, the criterion to fulfill [to count as a post-scarcity society] could instead be: do they have as much such-and-such as they want?) (Or to put it briefly: post-scarcity shouldn't be about having more, it should be about wanting less).
Diane Coyle at FT.com, on the gig economy, with a little bit of hobbit stuff.
§
Recommended to me & currently or recently on my TBR kang:
Kim Stanley Robinson, rest of The Mars Trilogy
Patrick Wilkins, "Money is the Root of All Good"
Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle.
Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring.
G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen.
Ursula le Guin, The Telling.
Clifford D. Simak, "The Fence" (see this snippet)
Jack Vance, Demon Princes series (SVU)
Sarah Zettel, Fool's War.
Charles Stross, Accelerando & others.
Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
John Varley's Eight Worlds
Bruce Sterling, Holy Fire
Robert Heinlein, For Us The Living
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Neal Asher, The Skinner (spline)
Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn: The Original Trilogy (coinshots, Atium)
Gene Wolfe's Book of the Short Sun (circuit board currency)
Gordon R. Dickson's Childe Cycle (exchange of expertise)
Henry Kuttner, "The Iron Standard"
Scott Westerfield's Uglies Trilogy (Smoke's food pack currencies)
Frank O'Rourke's "Instant Gold"
Geoff Ryman, Air.
Will Garth, "Men of Honor"
Neal Stephenson's Baroque cycle and Reamde
Cory Doctorow's For the Win
The rest of Margaret Atwood's Maddadam trilogy
Richard Morgan, Market Forces.
John Chu, "A Cost-Benefit Analysis of the Proposed Trade-Offs for the Overhaul of the Barrier."
Eric Frank Russell's "And Then There Were None"
Sergey Lukyanenko's Seekers of the Sky
Greg Costikyan, First Contract.
Hayford Peirce, Chap Foey Rider: Capitalist to the Stars.
Lester del Rey & Frederik Pohl, Preferred Risk
Weis & Hickman's Deathgate cycle (barls currency)
Henry Richardson Chamberlain, 6000 Tonnes of Gold Guess what? I'd be particularly interested in recommendations of economic science fiction and fantasy by women!
Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980).Long ago, some distant planet realizes it has quite a lot of what David Graeber might call bullshit jobs. A poet spins some apocalyptic yarns, and the people in those jobs -- mostly management types, although some telephone-sanitizers etc. -- are packed off to colonize a planet which, it turns out, is the prehistoric Earth. And yes, we are their descendants, as demonstrated not so much by shared DNA, but by shared agendas:
"[...] Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich."
Ford stared in disbelief at the crowd who were murmuring appreciatively at this and greedily fingering the wads of leaves with which their track suits were stuffed.
"But we have also," continued the management consultant, "run into a small inflation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability [...] we are about to embark on a massive defoliation campaign, and ... er, burn down all the forests. I think you'll all agree that's a sensible move under the circumstances."
For other money trees, see Nalo Hopkinson, Clifford D. Simak, and Adam Roberts.
There's another interesting bit earlier in the book, about another supposedly impractical currency:
"[...] Its exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu is simple enough, but since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles long each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Ningis are not negotiable currency, because the Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change. [...]"
A credit theory of money might say there's nothing wrong with the Ningi/Pu system, since owning a Ningi wouldn't have to involve re-locating a physical object: a record in a ledger should be enough. Compare the famous stone money of Yap.
Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake(2003). A novel which doggedly accumulates clever choices, and touches quite a lot on the reduction of humans to economic values. That there is a lot to nitpick over and call out is, in this case, a sign of what an excellent novel it is. Two clever choices pertinent to economics are: (a) the choice of an overdetermined apocalypse -- brought about through individual agency and economic crisis and ecological crisis and technological crisis, and if it hadn't been this particular apocalypse, it probably would have been a different apocalypse; (b) the decision to largely float the whole "reduction of humans to economic values" thing as a mansplainer (who has consumed his share of child pornography, sort-of-ironically of course) explaining to a woman the tragedy of her objectification. She is not convinced:
Of course (said Oryx), having a money value was no substitute for love. Every child should have love, every person should have it. [...] but love was undependable, it came and then it went, so it was good to have a money value, because then at least those who wanted to make a profit from you would make sure you were fed enough and not damaged too much. Also there were many who had neither love nor a money value, and having one of these things was better than having nothing.
Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. Non-fiction. Five linked lectures on debt. I found it entertaining and commendably sprawling but also weirdly elusive. Iain M. Banks's Culture series. Notable for its post-scarcity civilisation: anyone can have pretty much any good or service they want. Nobody has to work unless they want to. Work has more to do with self-expression, self-fulfillment and relaxation than with toil, coercion, duty and necessity. Banks outlines the Culture's democratically planned economy in "A Few Notes on the Culture" (1994). See also Gene Roddenberry.
Here's one interesting snippet: in Banks's Look to Windward (2000), a highly desirable ticketed music event leads to a "partial" reinvention of "money."
“Well, for tickets to Ziller’s concert [...] People who can’t stand other people are inviting them to dinner, booking deep-space cruises together —good grief —even agreeing to go camping with them. Camping! [...] People have traded sexual favors, they’ve agreed to pregnancies, they’ve altered their appearance to accommodate a partner’s desires, they’ve begun to change gender to please lovers; all just to get tickets [...] And they have indeed [...] come to agreements that go beyond barter to a form of liquidity regarding future considerations that sounds remarkably like money” (p.276).
Iain M. Banks, The Algebraist. A non-Culture novel (although barely, I reckon). In particular, it's on this list for its reputation currency kudos, which makes for some interesting comparisons with Cory Doctorow's Whuffie, Karen Lord's social credit, and the trust "currency" of Michael Swanwick's millies. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887. Bellamy's utopian novel-- it's the old-fashioned kind you might charitably call "heavy on worldbuilding" -- deals extensively with economics. Bellamy advocates an egalitarian command economy, with everyone taking an equal share of non-transferable credit. Bellamy may fudge many of the trickiest questions by tacit appeals to the presumed improved efficiency of more centralized and scientific production, the benign and wise judgments of authority, and to some extent (a lesser extent than William Morris) the sweet tempers and fraternal fellow-feeling of those raised under his system. But we should give him credit for raising those questions in the first place. "Fraternal fellow-feeling" is probably the right phrase: women are the formal equals of men, but women's emancipation has a strangely afterthought-ish feel to it; there's also a dose of "equal but separate" here, and the tedious loveliness, tenderness and trembling of Edith, the only utopian woman Bellamy gives us in any detail, is cause enough to withhold his Ally Pic-Nic Biscuit (7d a pound). (The way she conflates herself with a previous Edith deserves separate discussion). One interesting question about the economy of Looking Backward is whether it can truly be said to be post-money: it asserts that it is up front, and as it fills in more institutional detail, the assertion is eroded by special cases (literary and artistic production, foreign travel, inheritance, local government) where the value embodied by credit might become transferable, in a funny kind of way, and therefore start to look a bit more like money. At any rate, the final bulwark is the assumption that general prosperity will put an end to the kind of arbitraging and usurious behaviors without which money is not really money. Bellamy's criticisms of the waste of market competition still have some bite. One especially intriguing example is how his principles play out in education and professional training: no ignominy attaches to dropping out of a course, because people need to try things to find out if they're any good at them, and how could you possibly find out what you're really good at unless you can drop out of something you're not without cost? The real waste would be done by people sticking to careers they're no good at (and don't enjoy). Any serious understanding of the novel has to come to terms in some ways with its enormous popularity in its day. Was it a page-turner? It's worth comparing with William Morris's slightly less economics-focused utopia, which came out around the same time. If I had to live in one of them, I'd go for Morris's any time. But I do appreciate Bellamy's sense that unpleasant necessary work is sort of real. Morris wrote a review of it:
The only safe way of reading a utopia is to consider it as the expression of the temperament of its author. So looked at, Mr. Bellamy's utopia must be still called very interesting, as it is constructed with due economical knowledge, and with much adroitness; and of course his temperament is that of many thousands of people. This temperament may be called the unmixed modern one, unhistoric and unartistic; it makes its owner (if a Socialist) perfectly satisfied with modern civilisation, if only the injustice, misery, and waste of class society could be got rid of; which half-change seems possible to him.
Lauren Beukes, Moxyland. Hmm. Maybe not that obvious a choice, except in a kind of all-cyberpunky-stuff-is-a-bit-economoxy kind of way. But here, my review explains.
John Brunner, Total Eclipse(1974). Mess with eugenics and capitalism-like structures merged into one institution, y'all might wind up dead.
Cory Doctorow, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003). I talked a bit about this book and its quasi-magical reputation currency, Whuffie, in my review of Doctorow's Pirate Cinema. The TL;DR version is: maybe it's interesting to compare Whuffie and DRM (or at least, the things DRM would imagine itself doing in the best of all possible worlds). For another Doctorow entry, see under Paul Graham Raven below. For other trust-type media, see entries for Iain M. Banks, Karen Lord, and Michael Swanwick.
Lee Falk, 'Time Is Money' (1975). Fairly short and to the point, and online. A potential inspiration (idk) for Stephen Tolkin's The Price of Life (1987), which could very well have been an inspiration for Andrew Niccol's In Time (2011).
Duck Tales.Gazillionaire Scrooge McDuck is a nexus of proverbs: not only a faintly racist caricature -- the miserly Scot who cannot bear to part with the tiniest fraction of his wealth -- he also takes to the practice of accumulative brutality like a duck to water,literally paddling around in his gold, which he keeps in an enormous vault resembling a water tower. The hard coins which by rights should brain Scrooge instead flow from his feathers like water off a duck's back. So there's a utopianism here: money is stripped of its exchange function (he wouldnae spend it), and reduced to use value of a peculiarly sensuous and primal sort, a pool of instinctive pleasure which perhaps existed even in the womb (though Scrooge, of course, hatched). Scrooge McDuck negates money by wanting it only as itself, yet crucially, preserving its essential character as that which flows; whereas when nemesis Flintheart Glomgold finally (and temporarily, thanks to the gang) gets his greedy wings on Scrooge's riches, he fails to replicate Scooge's customary high-dive. The hoard, as if knowing its master, acts as a solid and rejects the interloper duck.
In connection with flow it's also worth thinking about proto-Smithian images of economic concordia discors, in particular the notion that misers and their characteristically profligate sons inadvertently collaborate to irrigate even the most out-of-the-way nooks and crannies (the burst-out effect, rather than today's more modest trickle-down effect). (See also note 2).
David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011). Not strictly speculative fiction, but a representative of all that "the truth is stranger (albeit less rigorously extrapolated) than fiction" anthropology out there. Jo Walton remarks in her review ("The Best Science Fiction Ideas in Any Non-Fiction Ever: David Graeber's Debt: The First Five Thousand Years") that a problem with writing SF and fantasy "is creating truly different societies. We tend to change things but keep other things at societal defaults. It’s really easy to see this in older SF, where we have moved on from those societal defaults and can thus laugh at seeing people in the future behaving like people in the fifties. But it’s very difficult to create genuinely innovative societies, and in genuinely different directions." Graeber's book is also a great reminder that many well-known facts (such as the fact that money was invented as an improvement over barter, solving the double coincidence of wants problem) are liable to reveal themselves as rather wild and far-fetched speculative fiction. You can also check out Graeber's 2009 article for Mute which condenses a few of his book's major arguments. And also see Graeber's On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs, which talks about something that several speculative fiction writers have noticed (Douglas Adams is one of them).
Nalo Hopkinson, "Money Tree" (1997), collected in Skin Folk (2002). "In Jamaica it was the other way around; the costly refined sugar was for guests, and the everyday brown sugar was cheap. Mummy would have been horrified at how expensive Demerara sugar was in Toronto." An unsettling, layered little allegory about value, liquidity, inheritance and family resemblance. There is the relievingly straightforward nugget of allegory if you want it: some people love money more than anything, even life. But though that's definitely there, I think it might have been plopped there for the sake of the twisting, Ovidian ripples it radiates, filled with glimpsables. For other money trees, see Douglas Adams, Adam Roberts, and Clifford D. Simak.
Sam Kriss, "Manifesto of the Committee to Abolish Space." I first came across this via the recommendation of Ethan Robinson, who's always worth perking your ears to. Maybe it was raised expectations, but I came away a little disappointed: it felt like it participated in a tradition of dialectic, perhaps aporetic, analysis and polemic, but instead of taking me to several unlikely and contradictory places, it ended up just reiterating (albeit forcefully and hilariously) a well-rehearsed argument about Space Exploration, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. But there are good bits! One of its more intriguing moves is creating a vision of paradoxical life-in-death not via a zoom-in to concrete particulars (as you might expect from work in this tradition), but via a zoom-out to a grand scale on which all human experience slips below the threshold of materiality, in the audit and accountancy sense of materiality, and simply gets rounded down to zero. The core proposal is obviously worth serious consideration. I am fairly certain that calls to abolish gravity are around a century old now (although admittedly I am unable to locate the quotation I am thinking of), why haven't such ideas got off the ground? Maybe a properly dialectical approach would be to twin abolition with projection; in which case, what should we replace space with? Another possibility is not to abolish outer space but to take revenge on it. Story online at The New Inquiry. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia(1974). Le Guin's fairly brilliant imagining of a well-established revolutionary anarcho-syndicalist society. Demonstrates why it makes sense to save your hardest criticisms for your own prescriptions. Books like these are really carrying the whole SFF team.
Karen Lord, Galaxy Game (2015). A sequel to The Best of All Possible Worlds. Features a world, Punartam, where resources are allocated by the interplay of two formal media, called "social credit" and "financial credit." There is a kind of mapping between divisions such as market and gift economy, or between money and social capital, onto the division between basic needs and wants/luxuries -- all suitably science fictionally estranged and disheveled, of course. (See Note 3). For other exotic trust currencies, see entries for Cory Doctorow, Iain M. Banks, and Michael Swanwick.
Tim Maughan, "Limited Edition" (2012). Features the gamification of robbery. You log onto Smash/Grab, a sort of gambling / gaming / social media thing, and get points for smashing stuff and nicking stuff In Real Life. In other words, what counts as a breakdown of the legitimate circulation of values within one sphere is a completely legitimate phase in the circulation of values within another sphere. There's a faint suggestion that somewhere in the shadows these spheres are reconciled: perhaps powerful corporate interests don't exactly run the Smash/Grab servers, but they may be in no hurry to see them shut down. Story online at Arcfinity. Other publications listed here.
Tim Maughan, "Zero Hours" (2013) and "Four Days of Christmas" (2014). Two short, sharp shocks about the interface of emerging technologies and low skilled labour. Compare John Maynard Keynes's prediction: "for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well." Instead, hello gig economy, and hello cognitive capitalism, which "no longer consists, as in the Fordist time, of investment in constant and variable capital (wage), but rather of investment in apparatuses of producing and capturing value produced outside directly productive processes" (Marazzi 2010: p.55). "Zero Hours" is online at Medium.com and "Four Days of Christmas" at Motherboard.
Tim Maughan, "Special Economic Zone" (2015). Not strictly science fiction. Not strictly not. About working in quality assurance for GPS tracking and vehicle monitoring units for retrofitting buses for smart cities. There is something stylistically clever about this story, something which becomes obvious early on in the story, as do the reasons for it. That leads to a choice, for the reader, about how they should read, and if they should read at all. However, part of its cleverness is that it resists being admired as clever, and part of what makes the choice difficult is that it's impossible to think of it as important. On Medium.com.
Linda Nagata, The Red: First Light (2013). Military sf. The Red itself is interestingly placed: in some ways it's an allegory for capital (and the cunning of capital), and in some ways it is an extrapolation of specific recent developments in capital's activities (algorithmic marketing, basically). Nagata's Vast is also notable from an economic perspective, though in an indirect way, in its representation of several interacting self-organizing systems, which entangle and qualitatively transform in interesting ways. Also see Nagata's Vast.
Terry Pratchett, Making Money (2007). 2007, you'll notice. Not 2009. Pratchett has really done his research, and in the course of a bristling, highly readable comic fantasy, he does a pretty good job of lampooning the commodity theory of money, especially in its more goldbuggish incarnations. It's a bit unfortunate that Pratchett so cozily aligns the interests of state and the commoners against the interests of the parasitic aristos. That means that his rival understanding of what money is -- not a commodity, but a network of credit, backed by state power -- isn't really tested as thoroughly as it should be. But the bulk of the novel is amusing and instructive, and by the end, things get more weird in a magical kind of way, until finally there's a really interesting thought experiment about value as it relates to banks, money, automation, "intrinsically" precious materials and (especially) labour. I've written a fair bit about this book, which will see light of day eventually.
Fredrik Pohl, "The Midas Plague" (1954). Online. A topsy-turvy world satire with a lot of very intriguing material in it. A great story for thinking about the fact that scarce, as a technical term of economics, is not the same as limited. Rather, scarce means limited in relation to demand (or desire), and "The Midas Plague" plays with the idea of of manipulating not only the production of resources, but the demand for them (via those eleven psychologists, and of course the bit at the end). Pohl doesn't r-e-a-l-l-y rationalize the initial conceit very rigorously, but perhaps in 2016, with the benefit of CAP surplus foodscapes, with the New Public Management of the 1980s onward and the attendant financialization (and therefore consumer-ification) of public and civic life, the case might be easier to make. Also see "The Waging of the Peace" (1959).
Adam Roberts, Stone (2002). The protagonist of Stone, on a visit to the world Rain, discovers a currency of leaves. The unspoken joke is that on Rain, money does grow on trees! Trees and their leaves are also abundant: a local explains that because of this shrewd choice of currency, everyone on Rain is rich! But the Rain-dwellers do take their currency very seriously: when the protagonist finds themself curiously leaf-bereft, they really cannot buy anything. The episode has a satirical, proto-sf "traveler's tale" type feel to it. But at the same time, it feels possible to reconstruct a kind of economic system that makes almost perfect sense.
Rain is part of a broadly post-scarcity and utopian civilization. In this civilization, the puzzles of resource allocation are probably not the big ones we're used to nowadays -- posers like, "healthcare or nuclear deterrents?" -- but rather, masses and masses of infinitesimal puzzles. They are infinitesimal puzzles about the most efficient and fair way to enjoy peace and luxury together which, a bit like Stone's ubiquitous swarming nanotech, might accumulate into something fairly formidable. On a world where there's always enough to go around, should it go around clockwise or what?
Gathering leaves introduces a modicum of inconvenience, and you might plan your activities between bouts of leaf-gathering. Leaf currency, we may imagine, allows the Rain-dwellers to sustain a smidge of the quantifying and calculative rationality of homo economicus. Thrift is comprehensible to them. In the rainy climate, leaves probably turn to soggy sludge pretty quickly, so there's also a kind of Gesellian Freigeld aspect to their leaf currency -- a dampening of liquidity preference, if you will -- so nobody would bother hoarding leaves. And nobody bothers trying to lend leaves at interest, or allows themselves to be exploited to get some leaves. They just go get some leaves. Nobody's opinions are given more weight just because they have a lot of leaves. Leaf-getting does not lend itself to Sisyphean graft nor entrepreneurial genius. If somebody has a lot of leaves, they're just somebody who has gone and got lots of leaves.
For other money trees, see Nalo Hopkinson, Clifford D. Simak, and Douglas Adams. Adams's proto-humans are strict quantity theorists with a match and a mission to control the money supply. That's what's clever about Rain, you see. It's always raining.
Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (1993). Worthy, solid, hard sf-ish epic which speaks very directly to speculative fiction's utopian tradition. Reasonably good at avoiding the worst pitfalls of hard sf by making time for social science and political theory, and by creating dialogues and controversies that aren't decisively settled one way or the other. It edges on cringe-worthy ethnic caricature, though at least it has an inclusive and cosmopolitan instinct. One particularly interesting section, as regards economics, is Arkady's conversation with Boon in Part 5, Chapter 8: "So far we have not been living in a money economy, that’s the way scientific stations are. It’s like winning a prize that frees you from the economic wheel." Arkady imagines the colonists as "scientist primitives" who have carved out an island utopia which appears free from the workings of global (stellar) capitalism, but is not really. Another is Marina and Vlad's eco-economics in Part 5, Chapter 6: "Everyone should make their living, so to speak, based on a calculation of their real contribution to the human ecology." As an attempt to rationalize economic value, Marina and Vlad's calorie-based proposals could probably stand to learn from historical experiments with time-based currencies (e.g. LETS), as well as the late 19Cth subjectivist critique (Menger et al.) of labor theories of value and cost-of-production theories of value. Marina and Vlad also propose a version of the Bullshit Jobs thesis (cf. e.g. Adams, Bellamy, Morris), that "there are whole categories of parasitical jobs that add nothing to the system by an ecologic accounting." But it is probably a good rule of thumb to think of economics as a "deformed offshoot" of ecology that is "like astrology." Marina and Vlad's eco-economics is soon compared with -- though it surely very different from -- the Sufis' aspiration for a "reverent economics" inspired by gift exchange. "We have studied the old cultures, before your global market netted everything, and in those ages there existed many different forms of exchange. Some of them were based on the giving of gifts." Mars's awkward and often ambiguous status at the edge of the Terran economy may offer some interesting comparisons, perhaps, with Charles Stross's Neptune's Brood. I am interested to see what happens in the next two books, and suspect the economics of longevity treatment may play a bit of a role? Red Mars, by the way, is another of those books that actually does many of the things science fiction is assumed as a matter of critical cliche to do: it imagines the future, it reasons extrapolatively, it respects science but also wiggles it a bit, it inspires, it cautions, it tries to invoke sensawunda. It does these things in a way which feels fairly straightforward, almost prosaically literal, if you have been spending your time trying to read, oh I don't know, Dune or Trouble on Triton or Neuromancer or Children of Men or The Hunger Games or Jack Glass or something through that lens. You can kind of make it work, and actually using slightly the wrong tool turns out to be pretty damn fruitful once you give it some oomph ... but then when you turn to Red Mars and the critical apparatus and the text slot together so neatly, you feel a bit nonplussed.
Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek. What's really fascinating about the economics of Star Trek is the inconsistency. The official line is that the Federation is post-money, and there are hints (replicators etc.) that it is more-or-less post-scarcity too.
Nevertheless, we also get references to rents, remittances, stakes, compensation and even the compulsory face of future finance, the credit. (See also note 1 below). I think the post-scarcity of Star Trek is worth comparing to that of Iain M. Banks's Culture, with which it has similarities.
There has been a fair bit written about Star Trek economics, most notably Manu Saadia's Trekonomics:
Paul Graham Raven, "Los Piratas del Mar de Plastico (The Pirates of the Plastic Sea)" and Cory Doctorow, "Petard: A Tale of Just Desserts." Collected in Twelve Tomorrows (2014), ed. Bruce Sterling. Two tales, very different in flavour and mood, but thematically complementary. Both explore the tensions and contradictions between what you could call capitalist ideology and entrepreneurial ideology (or "entrepreneurial-engineering stance," perhaps); both ferociously snuffle at the blurred line between market forces and the forces which shape markets (& here's PGR on infrastructure fiction).
Both stories are also interested in the way dynamics which pop up with an anti-capitalist belligerence, or at a tangent to capitalism, can get recuperated by capital. Including, perhaps, the appropriation of the ideology of "disrupting" itself: the last thing you'd expect of Doctorow's and Raven's arch market-disruptors Sergey and Niceday is any pinko sass.
Doctorow's title invites us to think of his Sergey as an extrapolation of the same logic embodied by his hero Lukasz; petard is a reference to the expression "hoisted on your own petard" (it's from Hamlet: "For tis the sport to haue the enginer / Hoist with his owne petar"), so there's a sense of Lukasz, in many ways a classic Doctorowian activist everyhacker, getting beaten at his own game, or gulping down a taste of his own medicine. (More specifically, the idiom is about being blown up by your own grenade. So perhaps it's a story about knowing just the right moment to let go of something?)
Both Doctorow's and Raven's story also contains more-or-less the same line, as nemesis (Sergey / Cedric) offers protagonist (Luckasz / Hope) the opportunity to join a thrilling and intellectually fulfilling, but morally dubious cutting-edge economic enterprise.
That line is: "I'll think about it."
Geoff Ryman, "Air." (Later expanded into a novel). Mae is a fashion consultant in a small and fairly isolated village, who makes a living (and a life) by trading information. Very beautifully scuffs out the boundaries between the social and the economic. I feel like the whole story is wrapped around a kind of tacit pun on "richness" and/or "impoverished."
Bruce Sterling, Holy Fire(1996). Notable for its two tier currency and stipulated "basic necessities" sphere of exchange. I think this is a trope that crops up in a few different incarnations: copmare e.g. Karen Lord's Galaxy Game ('"Economic credit is mere financial engineering," sneered his Academe guide. "Social credit is art"'), or the basic necessity makers in Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom or Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. Clifford D. Simak, 'The Money Tree' (1958).
'Why, Chuck, it's a twenty-dollar bill!'
'Look at that thing on the corner of it.'
She did, with some puzzlement.
'Why, it's a stem,' she cried. 'Just like an apple stem. And it's fastened to the bill.'
Winds up as a kind of cautionary satire about the profit motive / fetishistic miserly greed. For other money trees, see Nalo Hopkinson, Adam Roberts, and Douglas Adams.
Charles Stross, "Lobsters." (Later expanded into a novel). A sort of "bursting with ideas" piece of comic economic science fiction, partly to do with the legal rights of AIs (who are also sort of lobsters). Also, it's about consent and contract. (One quibble: I'm pretty sure in Europe Manfred wouldn't need to patent his ideas and give them away: it would be sufficient to publicize them so they form part of the prior art. By being a science fiction writer and a blogger, for instance. In the US, the approach is a bit closer to "let's all just patent the shit out of everything and let lawyers sort it out." I think. Sounds a bit like a stereotype).
But Stross is definitely not translating Graeber into fiction -- in fact, he thinks his ending kind of sucks, because he couldn't figure out an ending which "repudiated the entire framework of inherited debt without simultaneously getting all preachy on a soapbox."
On the other hand, Neptune's Brood does contain the rudiments of a very interesting critique of the notion of liquidity. Liquidity is the ease with which something can be converted into purchasing power. Cash is generally accepted so it is highly liquid, buyers for treasury bonds are usually plentiful so treasury bonds are pretty damn liquid, a pile of gold in a geopolitically unstable jungle might be somewhat less liquid (compare Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon), a stolen artwork might be even less liquid, etc.
But really, the "ease" with which something can be converted into something else isn't just a function of what the thing is: it's a function of who owns it, and in what ways, and what they want to convert it into, and what they want to convert that into, and many other factors. The problem with the notion of liquidity is that it collapses all these innumerable factors into a single scale.
In Neptune's Brood there are three kinds of money: fast, medium, and slow. There is a sense in which fast money is highly liquid, medium money is somewhat liquid, and slow money is scarcely liquid at all. Slow, in fact, sort of means illiquid. But what is striking about thinking through these currencies is the qualitative shifts involved. Slow money is essentially implicated with a different kind of activity. An economic anthropologist might say that it constitutes its own sphere of exchange or its own transactional order. That is, slow money is "the currency of world-builders," used for financing star ships and colonies.
It takes power and expert labor to run an interstellar communications laser beacon – lots of both. Nobody will point a laser at a new colony and beam libraries of design templates and cohorts of expert soul dumps at them without an expectation of getting something in return. All colonies must of necessity go deep into debt in the decades after their foundation: It costs a lot of slow money to acquire the vital new technologies and skills it needs to plug unforeseen gaps. Only once its population has increased enough to support a local education, research, and development infrastructure – which can take centuries – can it aspire to a trade surplus.
Stross plays on the relative causal isolation which exists on the vast interstellar scale to pose interesting questions about the nature and limits of liquidity. Is a currency zone encompassing worlds so far apart even an intelligible notion? Is slow money really money? Does it circulate? Does it have purchasing power? Is it really slow: that is, can its illiquidity really be meaningfully related to the system of light-speed-constrained, third-party-notarization banking which Stross imagines, which is what makes slow money transactions take so long? And does the "slowness" of slow money intuitively connote "stability" because we now strongly associate instability and speculation, including lightning fast automated High Frequency Trading? I suspect that, like many of science fiction's most useful extrapolative thought experiments, the value of Stross's model is in how interestingly it disintegrates when closely considered.
Here's a friendly critique of Neptune's Brood from Robin Hanson. See also entry for David Graeber.
Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon (1999). A sprawling hysterical-realist adventure techno-thriller that made me a bit sad, in a what-a-waste-of-enormous-talent kind of way. Although it did make me laugh a bit too. Perhaps the kindest thing you can say about its politics is that they dated rapidly? Bro? Anyway, the novel partly concerns the establishment of a kind of cryptocurrency, although it never gets the careful infodump treatment Stephenson gives to some other subjects. In general the presiding political economy of the book has a belligerent libertarian goldbug feel to it, though Stephenson wisely never quite commits himself. Trust goes a long way in establishing a currency, but eventually you're going to need something with intrinsic value, like shiny heavy yellow metal. (I'm exaggerating). Some of the bits that I enjoyed, from an economics perspective, include the long description of how it is possible to have some gold and yet not really have it (it's in the jungle, through miles and miles of geopolitics), and the final lines of the novel, in which a enormous cache of gold is literally dynamited into liquidity.
Michael Swanwick, "From Babel's Fall'n Glory We Fled..." (2008).Features a civilization, the millies, who use trust as currency. It is a maddenly subtle choice of buck. On the one hand, this could be a cosmetic alteration to our own economic system. Money is, after all, typically without intrinsic use value, and only functions as money insofar as it is trusted as a medium of exchange, store of value and unit of account. So perhaps these "millie-on-airs" unmask and demystify what goes on around us every day. On the other hand, trust is so deeply and intricately implicated in what money is, that it's not clear it could fulfill the role of money (at least, not in the ways we're used to). You can put your trust in shells or brass rods, but can you put your trust in trust itself? Story online at Clarkesworld.
Joseph Tomaras, "The Libidinal Economy of the Suburbs" (2016). Very tenuously about economics and not really speculative fiction. A brief exchange in a cafe is minutely explicated, except, of course, that it becomes more ambiguous rather than less. Is that really what "I'm just trying to drive my kids crazy" meant? Story online at Flapperhouse.
The phrase "fuck your brains out" is kind of intriguing in the context of the theme of the libidinal economy. Compare "fuck the shit out of me." Also compare Lyotard maybe:
"Now, here comes the question of symbolic exchange: this fear [of impotence, of things going nowhere, of nothing happening] is not, as we have thought, the fear of no longer being able to give. The category of the gift is a theatrical idea, it belongs to semiology, it presupposes a subject, a limit of his proper body and his property, and the generous transgression of this property. When Lacan says: to love is to give what one has not, he means: to forget that one is castrated. It should mean: one never has anything, there is no subject, and so there is nothing but love; not only is there never anything to give because one has nothing, but there is no-one to give, or to receive. It is in the theory of signs that donatory exchange (or the gift as the primitive form of exchange) may be represented as the attribution of devolution of an object charged with affects to someone who at the beginning of the cycle didn't have it: for the sign is just something which replaces something else, hides and manifests something else, for someone, for the addressee (and also for the sender). This problematic, coming from Jakobson to Lacan, that is to say the theory of communication, carries with it the entire philosophy of the subject, the philosophy of a body haunted by self-appropriation and property since the theory of communication is obviously just as much a piece of economic theory. Mauss must not be read as the discovery of a 'precapitalist', or at least a mercantilist, economy, but as the invention and the perfecting, in the heart of this economy, of its indespensable complement of anteriority-exteriority. Replace the gift with symbolic exchange and you remain in the same sphere, for exchange also takes place amongst unitary bodies or those destined to be unitary, even if they are prevented for ever (by the 'bar of the signifier') from bringing this unity about, and even if they are always driven by their splitting in two, by the Entzweiung, as Hegel used to say, to exchange something, even if only pieces of themselves; the exchangists remain perforated, like poles or ideas of (mercantilist) reason rather than as existants, it remains that exchange requires this polarization, this encephalization, and an in-and-out movement, a cycle of flows, the circle of a market and its central balance. Whether or not one exchanges affects does not modify this configuration, it simply dramatizes it. [...] Exchange is no less 'humanist' than production [...] Circulation is no less suspect than production, it is only, as Marx well knew, a particular case of production taken it the broad sense. Let's rather place oursilves in the sense of this production in the broad sense, which is the general metamorphosis of everything which takes place on bodies and inscribes itself into the social body, haunted by the idea of a ceaseless general metamorphosis, or of a general production without inscription, which is nothing other than the great skin; we wonder instead what are the characteristics of the figure which makes the passage from this latter to inscribed production, the characteristics of the dispostif of inscription which constitutes social voluminosity."
He goes on to talk about a urinal. Jack Vance, "The Moon Moth" (1961). Online. I'm not as convinced that strakh is as currency-like as people sometimes say. That sentence about medium-of-exchange is taken a bit too literally, perhaps. (Strakh also appears, by the way, to be Niven's Kzin's word for an honor, which also ambiguously takes the place of currency).
"Marta and the Demons" by me. Big time. Smashwords. Also "The Internet of Things Your Mother Never Told You" in Twelve Tomorrows 2016. As well as Pokemoney, there's something buried in that weird bit at the end which isn't totally dissimilar to Wilkins's conceit (see below). Also the forthcoming (maybe) "The Reduced Racine Yakuza Co." and also "Alice in the Sky with Demons," which is not quite finished yet.
Patrick Wilkins, "Money is the Root of All Good" (1954). This is really interesting, although pretty straightforward pulpy in its execution. It's interesting as well to remember that finance and stock markets in 1954 were not what they are today (the professionalization of stock analysis and the scientization of finance as an academic discipline pretty much took place in the 1960s and 70s). PDF in Archive.org. Here's an extended quotation:
"This sect maintained that an individual should not be paid on the basis of the work he did, but for the good deeds, or good thoughts he had. A small stipend was paid for actual work or production, to establish a workable basic economy and trade. This stipend was enough to cover all the basic wants of the individual. To procure luxuries, a citizen had to use the money he received for his good deeds or thoughts. Every time a man helped an old lady across the street, or came up with a bit of philosophical wisdom, he could record it with a central office and receive his luxury pay from the government. The purpose of the system was to make people emphasize virtue and quality in their lives. Instead of concentrating on profit for profit's sake, they would have to consider the inherent rightness and beauty of what they were doing.
"In such a system," Roald asked, "how could such a thing as a stock market possibly develop?"
"Very simple, sir. This luxury pay, issued in a different currency than the commodity pay, could
be used in any way a person saw
fit. Some people naturally developed
the idea of investing stock in
a particularly virtuous or intelligent
person. Every time that person
did a good deed, the stockholders
received a dividend from his luxury
pay. All of the scientists and
philosophers, therefore, became
corporations in themselves, with as
many as five thousand people holding
stock in one man."
"Sorry, Kim, but I don't get it.
How could these incorporated individuals
get any luxury pay for
themselves if they had to hand it
out to their stockholders?"
"The administration would allow
for that. A person received luxury
pay in proportion to the number
of stockholders that he claimed.
The government had to do this
since they indirectly were investing in these corporation men -- but
I'll explain that later. The corporation-man lived off
the original investments of stockholders, with some of the stock
solvent for sales. In this way, the
individual would profit from 'good doing' by receiving many new investments."
"What is the social makeup of
this Lyranc? It seems to me it
would be a lunatic fringe de luxe,
with every hack writer, thaumaturgist,
or evangelist climbing
aboard the gravy train."
§
Note 1: The equivocation is neatly captured in TOS Episode "The Apple," when Kirk snaps at Spock (and not for the first time I bet), "Do you know how much Starfleet has invested in you?" Spock responds something like, "Twenty-two thousand, two hun--" and is rather tellingly interrupted before he can finish, "--dred and forty three clams and eighty seven point one four pence, Captain. Why, what's up?" It's a discrepancy can be reconciled in various ways, which I hope to look at in some detail elsewhere.
Note 2: There is far too much to really unpack here: even the name Scrooge McDuck inevitably recalls both the political economies of Smith and Hume, and Charles Dickens' passive aggressive sparring with Malthusianism; there is the connection with dragons' heaps of gold (the word drake can mean both dragon and duck); plus there are links among (a) the homogenising "duckface" we in the West characteristically adopt in any photograph, (b) the head of the sovereign stamped on coinage, (c) the role of slavery and virtual death in the primal origins of money, in particular the transition of what David Graeber calls "human economies" into commercial economies, which establishes humans as quantifiable, calculable and commensurable vectors, and (d) Scrooge's beak as the myth of the inexpressive "wedge" visage capable of supernatural entry into a submerged realm of merged exchange and use values. We can leave it for now but not forever.
Note 3:
Haviranthiya told him very soberly that it appeared Academe Maenevastraya had registered a prior claim on his acquaintance and he could no longer provide Rafi with an Academe Surinastraya recommendation as a starting nexus for future Punartam interactions.
[...]
"And your essentials," Ntenman continued.
"There's nothing wrong with them. You should approve of that."
Essentials were harder to understand, but after Lian dumped a message and a quantity of voice-access credit into his channel, things became clearer. The credit was "a loan, not a gift", and the fact that Lian had extended it made Lian one of his primary essentials. "Stay neutral," Lian's message warned. "Do not accept credit from non-Cygnians."
[...]
"Your keys are your peers," Lian's message explained further. "I've introduced you to a couple of mine and I'll introduce you to more in time. I know your family and I shared food and drink with you in public, so I'm one of your first-tier keys. Keys you meet through me will be your second-tier keys. You will have to acquire more keys by your own efforts."
[...]
He quickly discovered that for every variant of the credit system, there were several academic interpretations and models on how they should work. "Economic credit is mere financial engineering," sneered his Academe guide. "Social credit is art."
[...]
"Yes, that's survival. But social credit determines what you will eat, and where, and with whom."
"And I get my financial credit from my essentials but social credit from my keys."
"More or less. That depends on where your nexus is located and the allegiance of your keys. Sometimes it's worthwhile to have a broad representation, but sometimes a nexus will refuse to acknowledge certain keys or networks, or will itself be shunned by other networks." Ntenman exhaled sharply, already frustrated. "It's a complex formula. The size, density and degree of overlap of your networks is measured, your net worth is calculated with reference to recommendations from your keys, and only a fully qualified Credit Assessor can work out the result."
"But good social credit makes my financial credit more valuable, is that right?"
"More or less. You're in a higher consumer bracket for some things."
"So this is good! I have a nexus and I'm making a start on my social credit. I'll be able to pay you back."
"Don't be rude," said Ntenman, only half-joking, and Rafi belatedly remembered that on Punartam, it was bad manners for anyone, be they creditor, debtor or completely uninvolved, to harp on an unpaid debt. "So, financial credit is what gets me food and shelter?" Rafi asked. He had discovered that teaching him the basics appeared to put Ntenman in a better mood, as if doing so re-established the correct order of things.
