This is a question really. I have written some fiction on the theme of algorithmic governance (algorithmic governmentality, algocracy). These stories try to explore the friction you experience living in automated processes that have a particular model of who and what you are, and create affordances and nudges based on that model. I'm sure there are lots of works like this out there (and / or exploring algorithmic governance in other ways) and I'd like to make a list. Suggestions welcome, and I'll try to remember to expand this when I come across more.
For example:
The novel If/Then by Matthew De Abaiuta (and here's a paper I co-wrote about that)
'Life's a Game' by Charles Stross (gamification theme) in Twelve Tomorrows
Tochi Onyebuchi, 'How to Pay Reparations: A Documentary' (explores algorithmic reparations ... mentioned briefly in a thing I wrote for Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities)
'The Internet of Things Your Mother Never Told You' in Twelve Tomorrows
'In Arms' in Gross Ideas (the alarm clock thing)
There is also another SFF trope that is adjacent to this, which you might call AI takeover, which is much more to do with automated processes behaving in unexpectedly anthropological ways. There are obviously overlaps, but I think mostly I'm interested in something else here. As Janelle Shane of AI Weirdness puts it (I'm paraphrasing), the risk is not that AI won't do what we ask, but that it will do exactly what we ask. I think what I'm looking for is Algorithmic Governance Weirdness, a subset of AI weirdness.
There's an obvious affinity between Algorithmic Governance Weirdness fiction and the technothriller, or postcyberpunk in a gritty five-minutes-into-the-future vein (see 'Science Friction'). But various contemporary techno-dystopias, such as Tlotlo Tsamaase’s ‘Virtual Snapshots’ (2016), Yoon Ha-Lee’s ‘Welcome to Triumph Band’ (2018) and ‘The Erasure Game’ (2019), and Catherine Lacey’s ‘Congratulations on Your Loss’ (2021), even if they venture into slightly more flamboyant and satirical worldbuilding, nevertheless still offering grimly comic images of life as a fungible human — intimately surveilled, measured, and groomed within regimes of absurd and unaccountable gamified power. In Lee’s ‘Welcome to Triumph Band,’ for example, the reader is inducted as a marching band cadet and informed, “You will be periodically tested at the firing range and expected to maintain acceptable aggregate scores. Be warned that, due to the variation in threat levels from terrorists and domestic threats, what constitutes an acceptable score may be revised periodically” (Lee, 2018).
Across many such works, automation is presented as disempowering people more than freeing people from toil. Loosely speaking, the delicate dance of data and human behavior also expresses the struggles of capital and labor, and so expresses proclivities of enclosure and extraction. Automation doesn’t only ‘steal jobs’ but also transforms relations of production in ways that might be described as “fauxtomation” (Taylor 2018) or “heteromation” (Ekbia and Nardi 2017). You can be made to work in new ways. You can be made to want or need new things, or be made to buy things you traditionally got for free. “Hadn’t I been in line yesterday to escape the rise in sunlight prices, effective today?” laments the protagonist of Tsamaase’s ‘Virtual Snapshots.’ Sometimes these new enclosures and extractions are narrated, as in ‘Welcome to Triumph Band,’ in a fascist bark; at other times, in the chirpy or soothing style of a wellness guru.
In a lot of these works, a residual classic dystopian imaginary is discernible. Catherine Lacey’s ‘Congratulations on Your Loss’ (2021) is an elegantly dreamlike account of the psychic damage of living in a regime of unaccountable algorithmic disciplinarity. Yet Lacey’s story doesn't really seem willing to seek beyond rote Orwellian rituals for the source and significance of the techno-social conditions it portrays. When the data dystopia speaks — a kind of Big Mother, sternly simpering that “we must understand that the integrity of society in general is of a greater importance than of society in specific, that is, people are more important than a person” (Lacey 2021) — what gets erased is the concrete history underpinning the rise of the contemporary surveillant smart city, as well as contemporary communities of resistance. Does the arrival of this dystopia really owe nothing to the gig economy’s promise of flexible work tailored to the needs of “a person,” you; to e-commerce and targeted ads tailored to your interests; to the imperative to develop your personal brand and monetize your lifestyle; to the algorithmic processing of populations for gentrification and incarceration via credit scoring, via recidivism analysis, and via police predictive analytics; to Google Search and Google Maps? To the obnoxiously individualistic ideology of hustle culture, and its claims that 'a person,' you, is always more important than 'people'? I think this becomes a story that makes not only its characters, but also its readers, question their perceptions, memory, and judgments.
10) Hsing's Spontaneous Self-Flaying Sarcoma, documented by Liz Williams in The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases, ed. Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts.
A day or so later, the outer layer of the epidermis splits at the temple into a series of lotus-like petals, apparently causing the victim to force his/her head into the nearest narrow gap (such as a window frame) rather in the manner of a snake attempting to aid the shedding of its skin. Rejecting all offers of help and attempts at restraint, the victim bloodlessly sloughs the skin, 'scrolling it down the torso and limbs in the manner of a tantalizingly unrolled silk stocking' (Mudthumper, p.1168).
OK, this one's not really contagious (as far as I know), so it only manages to scraape its way onto the top ten. But it can also be considered a calling card for Thackery's, which is a good source of plagues generally.
9) Black Death AND Influenza in Connie Willis's time travel tale The Doomsday Book. The time travel conceit allows Willis to compare social responses to epidemic centuries apart. A time traveller, washed up in a part of the past she never intended to visit, tries to summon up some advantage from her superior scientific understanding of events ...
She had tried to remember what remedies the contemps had tried while he was gone. They had carried nosegays of flowers and drunk powdered emeralds and applied leeches to the buboes, but all of those were worse than useless, and Dr Ahrens had said it wouldn't have mattered what they had tried, that nothing except antimicrobials like tetracycline and streptomycin would have worked, and those had not been discovered until the twentieth century.
8) The plague in Daniel Defoe's 1722 Journal of the Plague Year, a hugely formative work in the history of the Western novel.
Thomas. You will go away. Whither will you go, and what can you do? I would as willingly go away as you, if I knew whither. But we have no acquaintance, no friends. Here we were born, and here we must die. John. Look you, Tom, the whole kingdom is my native country as well as this town. You may as well say I must not go out of my house if it is on fire as that I must not go out of the town I was born in when it is infected with the plague. I was born in England, and have a right to live in it if I can. Thomas. But you know every vagrant person may by the laws of England be taken up, and passed back to their last legal settlement. John. But how shall they make me vagrant? I desire only to travel on, upon my lawful occasions. Thomas. What lawful occasions can we pretend to travel, or rather wander upon? They will not be put off with words. John. Is not flying to save our lives a lawful occasion?
7) TheMelding Plague in Alaistar Reynold's Revelation Space books. In a future where most folk are filled with cybernetic implants, this phenomenon fills those implants with a will to expand and go haywire. It tries to synthesise flesh and machine, and it affects both our bodies and our built environment. It's described as almost "purposeful" and almost "artistic."
The servitors lurched forwards, approaching the shattered angel of the Captain. More than ever he looked like something which had not so much crept with glacial slowness from his reefer, but had burst with volcanic ferocity, only to be frozen in a strobe flash. He radiated in every direction parallel to the wall, extending far into the corridor on either side, for dozens of metres. Nearest to him, his grawth consisted of trunk-thick cylinders, the colour of quicksilver, but with the texture of jewel-encrusted slurry, constantly shimmering and twinkling, hinting at phenomenally industrious buried activity. Further away, on his periphery, the branches subdivided into a bronchial-like mesh. At its very boundary, the mesh grew microscopically fine and blended seamlessly with the fabric of its substrate: the ship itself. It was glorious with diffraction patterns, like a membrane of oil on water.
HegSwarms in Iain M. Banks's Culture books, are more an example of grey goo, "self-replicating nanotech out of control" trope: a plague propagating through all kinds of physical systems, and not just biological ones. From Surface Detail:
Restoria was the part of Contact charged with taking care of hegemonising swarm outbreaks, when -- by accident or design -- a set of self-replicating entities ran out of control somewhere and started trying to turn the totality of the galaxy's matter into nothing but copies of themselves. It was a problem as old as life in the galaxy and arguably hegswarms were just that; another legitimate -- if rather over-enthusiastic -- galatic life-form type. [...] Even the most urbanely sophisticated, scrupulously empathic and excruciatingly polite civilisation, it had been suggested, was just a hegswarm with a sense of proportion.
Reynolds' Melding Plague is grey-goo-adjacent. It stands representative of those speculative sicknesses that are all about highly aestheticised kaleidescopic body horror: not grey goo so much as varicolored-crystalline-n-dimensional-irridescent-goo. There is a sense of a complex patterning logic for which we are the unfortunate substrate. See also Peter F. Hamilton's Zanth, Jeff VanderMeer's Area X (and Alex Garland et al.'s Annihilation adaptation). Compare Reynold's more grey goo-ish Greenfly Terraformers. Hegemonising goos and singularities of various kinds appear in fiction by Charles Stross, Greg Bear, Greg Egan, Rudy Rucker, Linda Nagata, and others.
6) The "bad luck," as Sparrowhawk calls it at one point: the mysterious disenchantment in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Farthest Shore. Once more not strictly a plague, though it reproduces some of its logic. There is also a Patient Zero of sorts. See also e.g. Larry Niven's The Magic Goes Away,the Nothing in Michael Ende's The Neverending Story, the Forge in Robin Hobb's Assassin's Apprentice, etc. Within fantasy fiction, sometimes the source of the contagion is something a bit more like a hellmouth. These myriad magical contagions can sometimes be read as oblique commentaries on depression, despair, loneliness, paranoia, and other forms of psychic ill-being, and on capitalism's entwined processes of atomisation, rationalisation, secularisation, and alienation.
5) The bacillusin Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (1954), which turns everyone into zombie-like vampires. A big influence on the filmmaker Romero and many a zombie story since. See also e.g. the Rage virus in 28 Days Later, the virus in Max Brooks's World War Z,the cordyceps infection in the Last of Us games, and the viruses in Mira Grant's Newsflesh books. But virus or no virus, these kinds of apocalyptic zombie narratives are almost always closely associated with pandemics. Whether your zombies are fast or slow, eldritch or techno-scientific, whether they are partial to brains or just mad as hell, it's the extreme contagiousness of the condition that is at the heart of this myth, and that differentiates the apocalyptic zombie from the "sorcerer's undead servant" style zombie. Spreading is the apocalyptic zombie's MO. Consider that vampirism and lycanthropy are also often supposed to be transmitted by a bite, yet vampires and werewolves -- Matheson's tale being a weird exception -- seldom swarm.
4) BlyssPluss in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (2003). Here's a working paper by Polina Levontin et al. about so-called "lone wolf" bioterrorism and apocalyptic science fiction.
No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour.
2) The eponymous plague of Albert Camus's existential novel The Plague.
Honorable mentions: Wuhan Flu documented by Eric Schaller, Download Syndrome documented by Steve Aylett, Jumping Monkworm documented by Sara Gwenllian Jones, and many, many more in Thackery T. Lambshead's Pocket Guide etc., the Plagues of Egypt in The Book of Exodus, the plague in Lucretius's On the Nature of Things, the pandemic in the game Pandemic, the plague in Plague Inc., Farmer's Tremors and billions of other procedurally generated Dungeons & Dragons diseases, the plague in Karen Lord's 'The Plague Doctors' (downloadable here), Andromeda in Michael Crichton's Andromeda Strain, the plague among livestock at Noricum in Virgil's Georgics (thanks Abi), children's voices in Ben Marcus's The Flame Alphabet (thanks Sam), the fast prion in Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora, Captain Trips from Stephen King's The Stand (thanks everybody), the plague described in Boccacio's Decameron, the notional plague on both your houses in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, the plague in Chaucer's 'Pardoner's Tale', the parasite in Octavia Butler's Clay's Ark, Georgia Flu in Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, Snow Crash in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, Buscard's Murrain aka Wormwood in China Mieville's 'Entry Taken from a Medical Journal' (also in Thackery's), Diseasemaker's Croup in Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things (and Thackery's), the femicidal plague in James Tiptree Jnr's 'The Screwfly Solution', the consumption 'plague' in Frederik Pohl's 'The Midas Plague,' the plague in Sandra Newman's The Country of Ice-Cream Star, the bioweapon Clarity in Cory Doctorow's 'Chicken Little', the Motaba virus in the movie Outbreak, the fog in the movie The Fog, the 'ST-Demon' in the movie It Follows, the Simian Flu in the Planet of the Apes movies, the mass infertility in P.D. James's Children of Men, the Hopping Cough in The Smurfs, the atavism-causing Barclay's Protomorphosis Syndrome in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation and various other Trekkie plagues and contagions (Tribbles maybe?), the (mass but non-contagious) blindness in John Wyndeham's Day of the Triffids, the blindness in H.G. Wells's 'Country of the Blind', the blindness in José Saramago's The Blindness, the Wandering Sickness in H.G. Wells's Shape of Things to Come, the Monte Carlo viruses in Greg Egan's 'Blood Sisters', the devastating Golgafrinchan plague transmitted via unsanitized telephone in Douglas Adams's Restaurant at the End of the Universe, cholera in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera,the plague in Anne McCaffrey's 'The Ship Who Mourned', smallpox etc. in Chelsea Quin Yarbro's Time of the Fourth Horseman, Dryditch Fever in Brian Jacques's Salamandastron, the Boston plague in Roger Zelazny's Damnation Alley,Amusica in Alaistar Reynolds's Century Rain, GuiltTrip in Peter Watts's Rifter books, Salt Plague in Kate Elliott's Spiritwalker books, Grayscale and Pale Mare and the Spring Sickness in G.R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones series, Spattergroit in the Harry Potter books by anonymous, the Forge in Robin Hobbes's Assassin's Apprentice and others in that series, Sevai and Vedet in Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home, the White Blindness (myxy) in Richard Adams's Watership Down, the noocytes in Greg Bear's Blood Music, the cult virus in Linda Nagata's Vast, and so on to ...
1) The plague in Samuel R. Delany's remarkable metafictional novella, The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals (1985, later expanded), which collages the swords-and-sorcery plague of Nevèrÿon into memoir, theory, and philosophy and poetics, wrestling with the 1980s AIDs epidemic in New York City.
"Listen to me." The actor pulled him back. "Rights, you say? You're not going to get the plague. You know that as well as I do! Me and my kind, we're the ones in danger. And do you think for a minute if I thought there was any right, reason, or efficacy to be gained by tearing down this bridge, I wouldn't have been here days ago with a hammer myself? But that's for us to decide. Not you -" The actor paused, because, from the bandy-legged worker's eyes, two very fat tears, first as glimmerings along his lower lids, then as irregular spills in the torchlight, moved down his dark cheeks toward his beard.
At one point Delany asks of characters of SFF, in what senses are their problems the same as his? And then: and in what senses are they different?
EDITS: Willis's Black Plague and Influenza double act added. Melding Plague added itself and incorporated Banks's HegSwarms.
I asked on Twitter for recommendations of SF writers interested in psychology, maybe with a slant toward hard sf (whatever that means). The thread still grows even though I have long since ceased feeding it heart. Here are some:
Alfred Bester (The Demolished Man)
Angela Carter (The Passion of New Eve)
Ann Leckie
Anne McCaffrey (Crystal Singers)
Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange)
B.A. Chepaiti (Fear books)
Brian Aldiss (The Primal Urge)
C.R. Dudley
Chris Beckett
Connie Willis (Crosstalk)
Cory Doctorow (Walkaway, 'Chicken Little')
Diana Wynne Jones ('Carol Oneir's Hundredth Dream')
Doris Lessing (Canopus in Argos)
Edgar Allan Poe
Elizabeth Moon (Speed of Dark)
Emma Newman
George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four)
Greg Bear (</Slant>)
Greg Egan
Gregory Benford (The Stars in Shroud)
Ian Watson (The Embedding)
Isaac Asimov (Foundation)
Jack Vance (Languages of Pao)
James Tiptree Jnr
Karen Ripley (Slow World)
Kingsley Amis ('Something Strange')
Linda Nagata
Matthew de Abaitua (The Red Men, etc.)
Michael Crichton (The Terminal Man)
Michael Swanwick (Vacuum Flowers)
N.K. Jemisin (Broken Earth)
Nancy Kress (Beggars in Spain)
Nicola Griffiths (Cherryh's Cyteen, Ammonite)
Pat Cadigan (Mindplayers)
Pat Murphy ('Rachel in Love')
Peter Watts (Blindsight, Into the Rift)
Philip K. Dick (The Alphane Moon, etc.)
Raphael Carter ('Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation')
Samuel R. Delaney (Babel 17)
Theodore Sturgeon (More Than Human)
Ursula Le Guin (Left Hand of Darkness, Lathe of Heaven, etc.)
For my own reference more than anything, a list of great / interesting graphic novels / manga / comics that I know or about or that were recently recommended to me:
A funny little article popped up in The Guardian today to say, "I haven't read any Terry Pratchett, but I know he's mediocre, not a genius. Everyone stop liking him!"
I don't think it's deliberate clickbait, really. It's more a sign of how saturated we are with clickbait: clickbait becomes a form through which you can channel a little temper-tantrum, whose shape would otherwise have been a harrumph, or going to wait in the car.
Anyway, if The Shepherd's Crown is one of the columnist's least favourite books he's never read, I thought I should share a listicle of my Top Ten Favourite Books I've Never Read:
1) Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain
2) John Crowley, Little, Big
3) Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
4) Stevie Smith, Novel on Yellow Paper
5) Flaubert, Bouvard et Pécuchet
6) Lydia Davis, The Collected Stories
7) Shea and Wilson, The Illuminatus! Trilogy
8) M. John Harrison, Nova Swing
9) Terry Pratchett, Going Postal
10) Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist
I can recommend them all unreservedly. Really unreservedly. I know you'd love them and I know I would too.
If we read them, they would change our lives. Everything does.
I want to be fair to Jonathan Jones. For reasons I won't frighten you with now, I actually think there's a lot to be said for exceptionally-fleeting engagements with books. There is an art of not-reading, just as there is an art of reading. Maybe there should be poetics, polemic and literary criticism of not-reading too.
But the article's silliest assumption (and Jones knows he's being a doofus) is its broad-brush division between "mediocre" and "genius," as if most people wouldn't want to place Pratchett somewhere in the middle.
And even if we do place him somewhere in the middle, that's only as a shorthand. Because literary value doesn't exist on some kind of spectrum or leader-board. There isn't a top spot. There isn't really any such thing as "genius." (Except maybe getting a double-headed blackbird to live on your hat: that's pure genius).
In 2005 Pratchett declined a Hugo nomination for Going Postal. Maybe it was because he wanted the Hugo Awards to be run as efficiently as Ankh-Morpork's postal service. Pratchett loved a well-run institution, and he didn't need that Hugo.
Literally a knight?
Pratchett also didn't really need literary criticism, but literary criticism does need him. It's worth talking about Pratchett's writing in an academic mode and/or in a fannish mode -- just not in a pontificating arbiter-of-taste mode. It's important to go beyond merely evaluating, and to really explore and interpret Pratchett's writing qualitatively. So with that in mind, here are some pointers to finish with, suggestions for both Further Reading and maybe even Further Writing.
The Pratchett meta-text is enormous, and bits of it are watchable, wearable, playable, etc. I have been a little surprised by how scant the core academic literature on Pratchett actually is, although I bet that's going to change. A lot of what's out there so far is also a bit . . . odd, idiosyncratic, rough-around-the-edges, though I really don't mean that pejoratively. I think this has to do with: (a) an oddness which always crops up in any literary criticism on comic writing; (b) academics who aren't primarily literary scholars, but who are Pratchett fans and manage to find a bridge to his work; (c) quite a lot of theses put online rather than adapted for publication, and quite a lot of undergraduate work.
L-Space maintains a link list of essays and analysis (and the L-Space wiki is itself an unremittingly dope apparatus criticus. I think these people have read the books). Discworld and the Disciplines: Critical Approaches to the Terry Pratchett Works, ed. Alton and Spruiell (2014) is a recent edited collection where you could also go to for a fairly comprehensive bibliography. Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature (2008) ed. Andrew Butler seems to be currently the only other literary-critical collection on Pratchett, although there are useful books I think aimed at slightly more general audiences, including The Folklore of Discworld (2008) by Pratchett and Jacqueline Simpson, The New Discworld Companion (2008) by Pratchett and Stephen Briggs, An Unofficial Companion to the Novels of Terry Pratchett (2007) by Andrew Butler, Philosophy and Terry Pratchett (2014) ed. Held and South, and Pratchett’s Women: The Unauthorized Essays, by Tansy Rayner Roberts (from these blog posts). There's also the excellent Science of the Discworld series (1999-2013) by Pratchett, Ian Stewart, and Jack Cohen. Pratchett's own 2000 article, "Imaginary Worlds, Real Stories," on the relationship of his writing to folklore, has some interesting critical reflection. Dorota Guttfeld's chapter in Ideological Battlegrounds: Constructions of Us and Them Before and After 9/11, ed. Joanna Witkowska and Uwe Zagratzki, feels like a much-needed examination of the politics of Pratchett's Ankh-Morpork strand. I don't think Discworld 'does' 9/11, does it? I also liked Janet Croft’s ‘The Golempunk Manifesto: Ownership of the Means of Production in Pratchett’s Discworld’ (2014), which you can read all of on Academia.edu. All these people are actually just getting on and having a conversation about Pratchett, not blustering about whether or not it's worthwhile having a conversation.
Any other suggestions, recommendations? If I don't find a proper sympathetic-but-critical overview of race throughout the Discworld series soonish, I may just have REF up my own QED-bike. I pray to all the spirits (but not too hard) that nobody ever feels it necessary to write about the relation of Pratchett's narrativium to Baudrillard's hyperreal.
Finally, here's one big, blunt question. Pratchett is a satirist and a moralist, whose villains are usually fundamentalists, and whose heroes often show devotion to the rule of law. So are the politics of his work simply classical liberalism, perhaps with a special love for civil society? Does anything complicate that label -- "Pratchett is a classical liberal"?
* * *
Mansfield Park is my favourite Jane Austen. "Sir Thomas in the house!"
"[...] online design that plays on people’s competitive instincts and often incorporates the use of rewards to drive action—these include virtual rewards such as points, payments, badges, discounts, and 'free' gifts; and status indicators such as friend counts, retweets, leader boards, achievement data, progress bars, and the ability to 'level up.'"
(1) Tim Maughan, "Zero Hours" (2013), free to read on Medium.com. "Zero Hours" is a spin-off of a collaborative project to imagine ten Londoners in ten years' time. The story presents a grim and eminently plausible vision of a young woman's typical day working in the retail sector, picking up a couple hours here, a couple hours there, and unlocking achievements like Shelf Stacker Pro Level 2 and Shop-Cop Pro.
(2) Charles Stross, "Life's a Game" (2015) in Twelve Tomorrows 2016. Minor spoilers ahead. "See, gamification is good!" It's somewhat expositional, but I think Stross is on form here: there is polymath erudition and cleversticks wit, and the kind of brio and drive that lets you hurtle over the speed-bumps without necessarily getting every reference or fully unpacking every dense little thesis. "Life's a Game" is full of zingers. "Tribalism is the ground state of identity politics in the network age." "What if Napoleon's, like, following from in front?" "Keep Britain British, for noncommunist values of British." "Hitler was the Boss Nazi in the Cross of Iron game. They don't teach history in British schools, we have real problems now, terrorists, class warfare. Nobody learns history and lands some expert job in history development. There's no business model for that." "You'll realize you'll lose all your guild followers if we do that?" (OK that one needs the context). The narrator is also a satirical portrait of the UK's answer to Red Piller gamer bro types, although I felt like Stross soft-pedals that aspect a bit.
As the story opens, we learn about Peelers, a monetized, massively multiplayer AR game (with integrated social currency) for snitching and vigilantism. Points for detaining shoplifters, points for helping drunk women home, points for persecuting the profane worshippers of Termagant ... you know, the kind of thing which would turn a racist kidnapper like the Farminator into the leader of the biggest guild in under a week.
But Peelers is just laying the groundwork for Stross's real thought experiment, the Movement, a universal gamification model. (The Movement supposedly implements Kant's categorical imperative, which something I would like to write about properly one day. Maybe once I've read Adam Roberts's new Kantfic too). The Movement mines your data footprint and assigns you clan membership and class features. (Or it lurks in wait next to the space where you should appear -- "If you didn't have a Facebook account, Facebook still knew about you from the hole in their network"). Then it starts to procedurally generate missions and scenarios, built out of the kinds of things you'd be doing anyway. Or perhaps, the kind of things you want to be doing or should be doing -- in fact the point of this gamification is to craftily blur together want to and should in all aspects of life, and ramp up the belligerence of that blurred motive. So your missions could involve anything from green activism to trade unionism to financial speculation to bringing back hanging one way or another.
I now almost feel like I could do with some more stories set in this same future history -- one of the most intriguing threads is all about how the Movement decides who you are in the first place. ("We went deep tribal on the players' media bubbles. We mined their search history to find out what pushed their outrage buttons. Then we went long on principal component analysis to model their micro-class identity.") If these identities really were built bottom-up from data, how closely would they coincide with the kind of taxonomies we already use? And could there be micro-classes with different kinds of reflexivity built into them, i.e. what motivates them is learning and changing per se? And/or an anti-tribalism tribe? And what would it be like if you were one of those people (almost everybody to some extent, right?) feeling like you haven't been perfectly modeled, that the essence which the Movement has inveigled from your digital footprint isn't the real you, and that the conditions you are being thrust into are uncannily awry, like a gargantuan circumambient targeted ad?
(3) Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games(1988), for its game Azad. "Whoever succeeds at the game succeeds in life; the same qualities are required in each to ensure dominance." See also Consider Phlebas(1987) for the game Damage, where play involves direct manipulation of players' moods. See also Feersum Endjinn(1994), especially the assaults on the princess in her tower. Earlier on this blog: a post about Banks and games.
You know, this is as good a place as any to ask a question I've yet to find any answers to: what is out there, or in the works, in terms of sophisticated computer modelling of human society, that doesn't take anything for granted, doesn't start with a fixed preconception of the human? Any suggestions, people?
(4) Cory Doctorow, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003). I suppose this is a rare example of -- more-or-less -- a positive presentation of gamification. In Doctorow's post-scarcity Bitchun Society, Whuffie, a kind of public esteem metric, has replaced money.
"[...] they called him Keep-A-Movin’ Dan [...] he somehow grew to take over every conversation I had for the next six months. I pinged his Whuffie a few times, and noticed that it was climbing steadily upward as he accumulated more esteem from the people he met. [...] I’d expended all the respect anyone had ever afforded me. All except Dan, who, for some reason, stood me to regular beers and meals and movies. [...] I think it came down to us having a good time needling each other. [...] I’d get him to concede that Whuffie recaptured the true essence of money: in the old days, if you were broke but respected, you wouldn’t starve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum could buy you security and peace."
(6) Bruce Sterling, "Maneki Neko" (1998), free reprint available at Lightspeed Magazine, or collected in A Good Old-Fashioned Future (2001). Included in the list mainly for the way it plays with crowdsourcing. "'I’ve been studying your outfit for a long time now. We computer cops have names for your kind of people. Digital panarchies. Segmented, polycephalous, integrated influence networks. What about all these free goods and services you’re getting all this time?'"
(7) Diana Wynne Jones, The Homeward Bounders(1981). Immortal hoodies nudging us around in some sort of cosmic Jenga or Carcassonne or Operation R2-D2 or Jellychess or cross-stitched Final Fantasy-themed limited edition Monopoly or whatever is a venerable and pervasive trope. Terry Pratchett's The Colour of Magic(1983), Neil Gaiman's Sandman(1989-1996), The Iliad etc. But perhaps we can only talk about gamification proper to the extent that there is a confusion between heavenly and worldly events -- when mortals are invited to pull up a chair and perhaps set a hand on their own shiny little head. See also Jones's Hexwood(1993).
(8) Adam Roberts, New Model Army (2010). When you think about the gamification of war, you probably think "drones" before you think "e-democracy." Perhaps what's going on in New Model Army is probably more like social soldiering (by analogy with social browsing etc.) than gamification per se. See Nader Elhefnawy's review (Strange Horizons), Jonathan McCalmont's review (Ruthless Culture), Lara Buckerton's review (PDF: originally in Vector).
For dronepunk BTW, see Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game (1985), Francis Crot, Hax (2011), & Miriam A. Cherry's essay on some legal implications of the gamification of work, which talks a bit about Ender's Game.
(9) Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady's Primer (1995). This seminal work of postcyberpunk and of steampunk is also a seminal work of gamification SF. All the ingredients of a utopian vision of a comprehensively gamified society are present in the story, but connected and motivated in messy, subtle and unexpected ways.
For instance, we've got these "ractors" (actors in interactive media entertainment), who receive work via a kind of ThespRabbit. An individual employment may go on for years, or be as brief as a few seconds. Crucially, the human inputs are mapped onto avatars: if you were to take over from Jennifer Lawrence for a bit in the portrayal of Katniss Everdeen, the media system would autocorrect your voice and perhaps your walrus mustache. (Apologies to the community who are Jennifer Lawrence, who must feel confused and left out by this example). Why is this so important? The general point is that what workers feel that they are doing, and what they are objectively doing in terms of the production chain, can be interfered with at an intimate grain. The necessary unity of any task can be interrogated: is there another way to tease this task apart, to give a bit more of it (or perhaps, a bit less of it) to the machines?
There's plenty more in the book related to gamification: Nell's Night Friends -- Dinosaur, Duck, Peter and Purple -- have an aura of a small primitive social media site; the ecstatic Drummers are a kind of grotesque example of "flow," of loss of ego through immersion in action; there's that stuff about the street vs. the telephone switchboard.
But. The altar piece is clearly the Primer itself -- a majestic technological tome, with shades of Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and a splendid illustration of Arthur C. Clarke's celebrated maxim that "Any sufficiently magical magic is indistinguishable from magic" -- which somehow floats into the hands of a poor and vulnerable four-year-old girl called Nell. The Primer mediates Nell's world for her, spinning her an epic interactive fairytale (starring "Princess Nell") which allegorises her various violent, abusive and increasingly philosophical predicaments, whilst teaching her all she needs to survive and existentially flourish (martial arts, decorum, hacking, obviously). As The Diamond Age progresses, Nell's book begins to feel more and more like a computer game (clearly influenced by 90s point-and-click adventure games). The convention of using a different font to represent the Primer's text becomes more scarce.
Like most good allegories, the Primer's allegory is a slippery one. The Primer's Queen of the Dark Castle is clearly a correlate of Nell's mother, but the Queen does plenty of significant stuff which doesn't seem inspired by Nell's mother, and vice-versa. Nell's brother Harv appears in the Primer as just Harv, but also seems to have a connection with Peter Rabbit (they disappear around the same time, for instance). There's not a one-to-one cipher: correlations come and go. You get the impression that the allegory might work a bit like the racting: 'let's see what's available at the moment.'
Likewise, Nell doesn't simply unlock achievements in her Primer or advance to the next story by demonstrating she has mastered some real world skill. Nor does the Primer elide its fairytale with her surroundings so that winning the game is indistinguishable from winning life. The Primer informs and incentivises, it provokes action, but it also comforts, cares, offers the solaces of shrouds and distortions, and immersive escapism. The relations between game and extra-game world can be just as slippery and mercurial as the relations of allegory.
(10) Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games(2008). Why Collins and not JK Rowling's Triwizard Tournament, for instance? What exactly is gamified here? Well, perhaps governmentality is. Extremely-high-stakes reality TV, and the gladiatorial model welfare state: that's another slippery slope into a huge list . . . compare perhaps Koushun Takami's Battle Royale(1999), Stephen King's The Running Man (1982) and The Long Walk (1979), Matthew Stover's Acts of Caine series, Edgar Rice Burrough's The Chessmen of Mars(1922).
& a few honourable mentions:
(11) Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer(1876). I mean the bit where Tom gets the fence painted. (Compare this essay (Quid PDF) on the poet John Wilkinson. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Tom sort of gamifies springing Jim from imprisonment).
(12) Hannu Rajaniemi, The Quantum Thief (2010). Game theory gets its own reality-mangling super-army. (Game theory seems to be SF's favourite piece of economics (Charles Stross's Singularity Sky and Peter Watts's Blindsight also spring to mind). Economists, typically, don't see fun as in any way essential to the concept of a game. For game theorist economists, a game is simply a class of multi-agent mathematical model within which all motivations must be axiomatic -- you can posit an agent who rationally pursues happiness, sure, or one who wants misery or funereal squalor all the time. GG economist dudes).
(13) Jane McGonigal, Reality is Broken(2011). This is futurism and polemic, not fiction. "What if we used everything we know about game design to fix what's wrong with reality? [...] I want all of us to be responsible for providing the world at large with a better and more immersive reality." The book fizzes with neologisms, some of which are probably useful. One of the great things about McGonigal's book is that it attempts a distinct account of what a game actually is for the purposes of gamification -- an account grounded in psychology and a bit of armchair (/ beanbag) anthropology of gamers. (Sorry, Prisoner's Dilemma, I don't think you qualify. Your fiero sucks).
(14)The Blog Monetiser's Daughter (2013). Not a real book though.
(15) Roberto Benigni's 1997 film Life is Beautiful. (16)Newb Maps of Hell (2014). Again, issue is this book doesn't exist. (UPDATE: OK, now it does, I made it). (17) Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency(1987), for Richard Macduff's all-singing, all-dancing spreadsheet software, capable of representing data as music. (18) Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (1953). Language-gamified philosophy. (19) Neil Strauss's The Game(2007). Sexually predatory misogyny is often fairly game-like to start with; the Pick Up Artist phenomenon pushes it a little further. (20) Joe Simpson's memoir about climbing down a gigantic mountain with a broken leg, Touching the Void (1988). Have a look at these excerpts. (21) Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game(1943). The Game is "a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual property -- on all this immense body of intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe."
(22) Yoon Ha Lee's "The Knight of Chains, the Deuce of Stars" (2013). I think it's a pretty splendid adventure fable, with a jewelly-type pistol you could whip out in any bar in Beerlight and everything. It has a really weird ontology to do with a continuum of wars, the sum war of which is fought for the universe's laws, and a tower which leads underground to every possible game -- games have to be mined before they can be played. I can't spot gamification per se, but there are themes (that you also get in a lot of Banks) which get pretty close: themes of linked games, of moves which exist in multiple games at once, of games which are themselves pieces nested inside larger games, etc.
(24) Rose Biggin's "A Game Proposition" (2014) collected in Irregularity. I like the voice here, and the way it keeps slightly telling you off for slightly wrongly imagining things. And I'm a little nervous to ever read it again, in case the text is different. "Now then, you haven't understood Reader Response Theory at all, dear reader," I think it begins. There is a board game which serves as a kind of control panel, kind of like Wynne Jones / Pratchett q.v., and there is a rather beautiful inter-nesting of games, or of interpretations of what "the game" is, which results in losing one of them perhaps being a element of winning another of them. It also makes me think that more instruments of command and control probably should be explicitly ludic objects.
(25) If something influences a game, and the game becomes very popular, does the original thing become more game-like, more gameful? See Advanced Readings in D&D.
(26) I've just bought Press Start to Play (2015) ed. John Joseph Adams and Daniel H. Wilson, so perhaps I'll get to add a few more tales of gamification soon. Cory Doctorow's "Anda's Game" isn't about gamification in a strict sense (this isn't a very strict listicle!), but it is about gaming, gold-farming, and those circuits of reality that integrate in-game and IRL components. Also, it's a subtle response to -- an updating of, maybe? -- Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. Ender, you may recall, thinks he's playing a game, but he's really a prodigal supergeneral conducting genocide on behalf of Mankind. It's a twist so obvious, you can't help but think Ender partly knows all along, but doesn't want to break the spell. In "Anda's Game," Anda and Lucy are even more actively complicit than Ender. They ignore the glaring signs that their in-game massacres have real-world consequences. (Eventually Anda wises up, and there's a kind of happy-ish ending. Kind of). The story made me wonder if you could apply game design principles (feedback loops etc.) to the analysis of ideology. Like a lot of Doctorow's near future stuff, it feels like science fiction, but sends you Googling to work out what, if anything, has actually been made up.
(30) "The Internet of Things Your Momma Never Told You" and "Marta and the Demons" by me. Cf. Jamie MacDonald's Movement in Stross's "Life's a Game" q.v. and Encarl's Smart Singularity from "The Internet of ..." in the same volume.
(31) The Uncanny Valley, a short film about VR addiction.
Hexwood (1993), Feersum Endjinn (1994), The Diamond Age (1995), Life is Beautiful (1997): is it just me, or does the mid-90s have a bumper crop of beautifully achieved, high-concept works about the endless possibilities of data visualisation, and about immersive fantasy which remains closely moored to an underlying reality, enabling acts whose significance unfolds in two realms simultaneously?
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.
