Josiah Warren operated a very popular and successful 'Time Store' between 1827 and 1830, with other stores set up elsewhere later. As he describes in the Plan for the Cincinnati Labour for Labour Store:
All Labour is valued by the Time employed in it. Much might be said to show that, as Time is above all things most Valuable, that Time is the real and natural standard of value. But we will not now undertake to prove, that which upon reflection no one will undertake to deny. We will rather proceed to, give the arrangements which have been made to carry this principle into effect.
PRESENT ARRANGEMENT OF THE MAGAZINE.
Here upon this single and simple principle, any exchanges of articles and personal services are made, so that he who employs five or ten hours of his time, in the service of another, receives five or ten hours labour of the other in return. The estimates of the time cost, of articles having been obtained from those whose business it is to produce them, are always exposed to view, so that it may be readily ascertained, at what rate any article will be given and received. He who deposits an article which by our estimate costs ten hours labour, receives any other articles, which, together with the labour of the keeper in receiving and delivering them, costs ten hours, or if the person making the deposit does not wish at that time, to draw out any article, he receives a Labour Note for the amount; with this note he will draw out articles, or obtain the labour of the keeper, whenever he may wish to do so.
Some snippets from Ezra Heywood's essay 'Hard Cash' in Old and New, which proposes 'free' money with an unlimited commodity basis. Living in an era of derivative markets, we might imagine unregulated finance as a space where exchange value and use value drift apart, where their relationships become more complex and multiple and opaque. Heywood had the opposite instinct: if unregulated, those two things would converge. The problem was government, acting in the interest of usurers, artificially preventing the full range and variety of really valuable stuff from being used to issue money ...
On money as a unit of account:
You are actually much better acquainted with the mental dollar, than you are with the material dollar. If a merchant reviews his business, for a single year he will find that he uses the mental conception a million times where he employs its concrete expression once.
(16)
Heywood comparing the production of money (and its regulation) to the production of shoes:
Enterprise and self-reliance, liberty to create values and unrestricted exchanges are the conditions of success in "other trades." Government does not say to a set of men "You shall make the shoes and all restrictions upon your monopoly, through competiton, are forbidden by sufficient penalties." Nor does it say to the people, "In order that you may be protected against fraud we have appointed these men to shoe you at their own-price; and efforts of other parties to contract with you, on more favorable terms, are hereby pronounced penal offences." [...] industry prospers in proportion as men are left to manage their own affairs.
(20)
For Heywood, all government regulation is bound up with usury. Zingers:
Labor-reform asks only that the recognized principles of property and trade which are the life of business, may be applied to money. If we want "protection" we will contract for it. Abhorring favoritism we think that one privilege only should be guaranteed to usurers equally with other classes -- the beneficent privilege of earning their own living. Rich people have been subjects of charity long enough. Money covers a multitute of sins in which too many take stock.
(20)
A production theory of value underlies his conviction that money is not inherently usurious (against the suggestion that it will not circulate unless it steals value). What does it mean for enterprise to be unrestricted? Could we imagine it differently to how Heywood does, yet guided by that idea that it is whatever set of circumstances that would allow a production theory of value to become more-or-less true?
If enterprise is unrestricted the price of money, as of other commodities, must ultimately be regulated by the cost of production. Usury like chattel bondage is upheld by local statute law; and, as the best way to protect slaves was to destroy mastership, so now we need only to repeal all laws which restrict the natural right of people to provide their own medium of exchange. The usurer is a legal thief whose occupation will be gone when his victims cease to furnish courts and constables to enforce his unrighteous claims.
(21)
Heywood on money as credit-debt:
But there is another species of property, in much greater demand, more easily portable and, if it can be obtained, always chosen in preference to coin -- negotiable debt,-- which is already the medium of exchange in 95 per cent. of the world's business. [...] If the means of payment were restricted to specie, interested parties could monopolize it, hoard it, send it broad and deprive us of currency, thus compelling working people to pay them tribute. The specie-basis scheme is an effort to lock the laboring classes of all nations into one chain-gang, and hold them perpetually obedient to the merciless scourge of usury. But, fortunately, the laws of trade rebel against these narrow-minded extortionists; for, since whatever is salable discharges debt, all property can be drawn upon as means of payment. (18)
On the failures of wildcat banks, which fall short of entirely unregulated free money:
The genuineness of debts is assured only by the soundness of debtors, by unquestionable evidence of their ability and willingness to pay. Those who create more value than they consume are the most reliable debtors; for if one begs, or steals, or subsists on what comes of friendship or kinship he is a negative factor. The legerdemain of government currencies, the high sounding platitudes of financiers who preach the specie basis delusion create no value, and therefore lack the essential element of reliableness. It was this effort to substitute political jugglery, and speculative deception, for useful industry, which afflicted our people with what were called "wild-cat banks". In 1838 the legislature of the State of New York passed "An act to authorize the business of banking" which provided 1st., that it should be free under the provisions of a general statue; 2nd., that nine-tenths of a bank's capital ( consisting of approved bonds and stocks ) should be deposited with the State Superintendent of Banks to remain in pledge for the redemption of its notes; 3rd, that these notes should bear upon their face the nature and amount of stock pledged, together with the usual signatures. These plausable provisions ( which were proposed in 1821 by John McVickar Professor in Columbia College ) furnished important suggestions to Sir Robert Peel which were incorporated into the English Bank Act of 1844, and formed the basis of the present National Banking Law of the United States.* Prof. McVickar claimed that his methods to secure liberty and safety in banking were “not untried novelties, but already established by the experience of other trades.” It was undoubtedly one ofthe best schemes for state banking ever devised, for monopoly never took a fairer form. But that it made money free and reliable in the sense in which those words apply to “other trades” is not true. It did not honestly demand free banking, (that is liberty for individuals or associations to exercise their natural right to manufacture and issue currency on their own responsibility and at their own cost ) but, leaving all of the old statutes which prohibit free competition in the production of money in full force, it undertook to provide new conditions under which people were to be “permitted” to do what they have a natural right to do ! Precisely in this way did not the Pope permit Protestants to be free under conditions prescribed by his infallible self ? Was not George III, willing the Colonies should be governed as he thought best ? What slave is not free within the circle described by his driver’s lash ? The Act did indeed provide freedom for usurers, but subjection and extortion for their victims, the producers. Under the fair seeming pretense of protecting the people from fraud it robbed them of their natural right to protect themselves, at once arming the banks with power to enforce usury, and leaving them abundant opportunities to escape from the just obligations to redeem their notes. Simon Cameron, U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania can tell how fortunes were “made” by “wild-cat banking;” for he is reported to be one of many “friends of the people” who acquired large wealth through the stately imposition. Under the legal forms prescribed it was very easy to start a bank, issue bills and send them far away, West or South; because apparently “secured by the state” people would take them in exchange for property, thus enabling the bankers to get possession of real value when they had no intention of redeeming their false promises to pay. Defenders of the national bank monopoly now bring it as an objection, to the old state-banks, that their bills came back for redemption with inconvenient frequency, and in embarrassing quantities ! A banking system whose notes are rarely returned for payment, the issuers of which, while drawing semi-annual interest on their bonds, also receive interest constantly on their notes in circulation, thus getting a double rate of usury without ever being called upon to redeem their promises to pay, is especially “perfect” ! Who would not undertake to “protect” the people on these lucrative terms ! The epithet “wild-cat” was invented by usurers to scare their profit yielding victims into consenting to be “protected;” but the feline animal in their employ is noted for ferocity as well as irresponsibleness, and people are beginning to learn that systematic extortion, in comparison with which the instincts of savage beasts are merciful, is a kind of “protection” a little too expensive to be much longer desirable. Liberty may be perilous to victims of traditional subjection, but the “wild-cat” warnings of our usurious masters will be worth heeding when we have some evidence that their solicitude is disinterested.
(19-20)
Heywood on fiat money:
The scheme [of Edward Kellogg / endorsed by the National Labor Union], as now before the public, is at once a denial of liberty and of equity; for while it proposes to make usury perpetual, through political monopoly and dictation, it sees no better basis of financial values than the treacherous quicksands of "national faith."
Next, some snippets from William Greene's Mutual Banking (1850).
From the intro:
The object of the mutualist bank is to advance money on sound personal guarantee on their future earning or production, even without the mortgage of property at the rate of one percent interest per annum. This amount of interest covers the whole expenditure of the establishment and leaves something to be carried forward to reserve funds. Besides, loans on low interest would give impetus to honest industry and it will also help to increase employment by creating efficient demand. It is very difficult in these days to borrow money from banks on high interest for honest and enterprising concerns; even on pawning the securities or estates and so what to talk of owners of small workshops and craftsmen, who have very little of fluid capital and hardly sufficient capital to pledge securities.
Capital:
Money is disengaged capital, and disengaged capital is money.
Labour, capital, money, happiness (and a bit more implicitly, justice):
The community is happy and prosperous when all professions of men easily exchange with each other the products of their labor; that is, the community is happy and prosperous when money circulates freely, and each man is able with facility to transform his product into disengaged capital, for with disengaged capital, or money, men may command such of the products of labor as they desire, to the extent, at least, of the purchasing power of their money.
Liquidity, demand, something similar to what was later called the [double] coincidence of wants:
The community is unhappy, unprosperous, miserable, when money is scarce, when exchanges are effected with difficulty. For notice, that, in the present state of the world, there is never real over-production to any appreciable extent; for, whenever the baker has too much bread, there are always laborers who could produce that of which the baker has too little, and who are themselves in want of bread. It is when the tailor and baker cannot exchange, that there is want and over-production on both sides.
Types of money:
But all money is not the same money. There is one money of gold, another of silver, another of brass, another of leather, and another of paper: and there is a difference in the glory of these different kinds of money. There is one money that is a commodity, having its exchangeable value determined by the law of supply and demand, which money may be called (though somewhat barbarously) merchandise-money; as for instance, gold, silver, brass, bank-bills, etc.; there is another money, which is not a commodity, whose exchangeable value is altogether independent of the law of supply and demand, and which may be called mutual money.
This was originally given as a paper at the London Science Fiction Community's Activism and Resistance conference in 2021.
By money, of course, I don’t just mean coins and banknotes. I mean money itself. This paper is, like much science fiction studies, and much science fiction, about what is unthinkable, and what is thinkable. And it's about what conditions sustain the thinkability of the thinkable, and how those conditions transform over time.
I propose that until quite recently, the abolition of money has been unthinkable.
This may come as a surprise to some of us. For instance, to Fredric Jameson, whose genealogy of Utopia begins with the fact that Thomas More could fantasize the complete elimination of money from social life: money for Jameson leading an “enclave existence” in More’s early modern moment.
I don’t think this is quite right, because I suspect Jameson exaggerates the limited and sporadic presence of money in early modern rural England, if we identify money not only with coin, but more broadly with transferable credit.
But also, more significantly, I don't think this is quite right, because I'm not convinced that money really is completely erased from More’s Utopia.
More represents Utopia within a world system, and he states pretty straightforwardly that the Utopians keep reserves of gold and silver to pay for mercenaries, to place bounties on the heads of belligerent princes, or to bribe those princes. Within Utopia, gold and silver are prominent in the material infrastructure that extracts forced labor from incarcerated bodies, since it is from these precious metals that the Utopians fashion the fetters for their slaves. Out-of-town Utopian merchants also enslave and import condemned criminals, and More is quite clear that they pick up a bargain or two.
So is this money erased? Or is this money demystified? Money shown, very clearly, doing what money does?
More, I think, could not think the abolition of money, though it’s true he tried. This pattern of fudged and bungled and half-hearted abolition appears again and again in utopian literature and then in speculative fiction.
I want to give you some examples. In Edward Bellamy’s late nineteenth century Looking Backward: 2000-1887, a time traveller visits a future United States where all forms of production and distribution are governed as one big commons. In Bellamy’s post-capitalist economy, each of us contributes equally onerous labor, and each of us receives an equal credit allowance, to claim from the national cornucopia. ‘Prices’ are algorithmically generated, as a rough estimate of the relative difficulty of producing each good. So is this a post-money future?
The more closely you inspect Bellamy’s credit book system, the more you suspect that this is not money abolished, but money metamorphosed. For example:
“By the way,” said I, “talking of literature, how are books published now? Is that also done by the nation?”
Any author, it turns out, if they self-publish from their allocated credit, may collect and live off royalties. But Bellamy did not anticipate buyer motives beyond aesthetic pleasure, and so he let slip into his design the seeds of an entire regime of speculation and accumulation based on the legal form of the literary work. Just to give you a glimpse, imagine the oligarch who can buy 10,000 copies of any book to welcome its author to join their elite stratum, and who plies this power to string along hundreds of thousands of readers slash budding authors slash investors.
Or take Samuel R. Delany’s 1970s ambiguous heterotopia, Trouble on Triton, which is very consciously and explicitly post-money. Yet what Delany calls “money” turns out to be more or less “cash,” coins and banknotes. The protagonist receives digital “credit” which they seem to be able to transfer freely for goods and services. The material shift from money objects strewn throughout the hands and coats and sofas of users, to a digital infrastructure where users have far less control over the legibility of their transactions to powerful actors (including but not limited to the state), is certainly not incidental, but it does not amount to money abolition. Consider that most money, upward of 90%, is already numbers on bank spreadsheets.
Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents are near future dystopian works which I think are notable for their portrayal of money’s resilience even amidst the collapse of rule of law.
On the one hand, Butler verges on the absurdity of a video game where in the midst of hyperviolent Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes you can always stumble over to a friendly shopkeeper with a stock of context-appropriate healing potions. Putting Parable uncomfortably close not to right libertarianism per se, but to sharing right libertarianism’s rejection of money as a creature of the state.
On the other hand, Butler’s work is still keenly aware of money as set of tools within history, whose significance is not predetermined. Money is never transcendentalized as a feature all functioning human societies above a certain complexity threshold. This awareness comes money’s mixed relationship with one of the duology’s main concerns -- slavery, both of the chattel kind, and indentured servitude whereby slaves formally receive wages which go right back to their ‘employers’ for room, board, and interest on unpayably large debt.
In Iain M. Banks’s post-scarcity Culture series I would suggest that drones and ship’s avatars allegorically enact monetary logic, and in his Look to Windward as soon as there is a scarce resource, coveted tickets to a music concert, a system of liquidity suspiciously like money is immediately invented.
These many noble failures to fully imagine the end of money find their counterparts in mainstream macroeconomics’s more ignoble failure even to fully imagine what money is. In brief, money is (a) elucidated via three or four functions, which conflate is and ought, behavior and purpose; (b) defined to exclude innumerable more-than-capitalist indigenous moneys, media, and social technologies; (c) given an incoherent origin story which smuggles capitalist subjectivities and norms into a conjectural primordial barter society.
Money abolition is becoming more thinkable in Cory Doctorow’s 2003 Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which imagines a modest and limited economic hierarchy based on techno-magically mutualized knowledge of how grateful everyone is to everyone else; a sort of ideal meritocracy. But it is on the one hand, quite rightly, a very ambiguous utopia, with prescient reservations about surveillance, and about generalized incentive to cultivate a personal brand. And secondly, what fascinates me, is one moment, a key plot point, when it breaks its own rules and portrays its fantastical system temporarily behaving just like money.
Still, I think something profound is shifting here. More recently Karen Lord’s The Galaxy Game, Adam Roberts’s By The Pricking of Her Thumb, and Tochi Onyebuchi’s ‘How to Pay Reparations: A Documentary’ work at similar points of tension; Lord envisioning a dual sphere gift economy which fails to feel at all liberating, Roberts picturing incumbent elites scheming to find a new source of scarcity and therefore money and power, as Virtual Reality threatens us with peace and paradise; Onyebuchi imagining not a failed attempt to abolish money but something nearby: an attempt to recode money’s circulation to complete the abolition of slavery via algorithmic reparations.
So why might money abolition be becoming more thinkable? In a moment I will propose why. But first, I wonder if you are wondering: Why should money be abolished? How can money be abolished?
Why should money be abolished?
Money should be abolished because it unfairly favors the wealthy over the poor.
But that sounds a little flippant. Let's try again. Why should money be abolished?
Maybe I don’t want to answer this question right now. But I do want to resist answering it in two quite distinct ways.
First I want to reject thinking of money abolition as any kind of panacea. There are certainly post-money futures which are straightforwardly dystopian.
But second, I'd argue that motives for abolishing money are incredibly pervasive. Money has been subject to fierce moral criticism for centuries. But because money abolition has been for so long unthinkable, we steer these criticisms, expressively and interpretatively, in a different direction.
Why not fund global access to Covid vaccines? Why do the cleaners get paid less than I do? Why fund fossil fuels exploration, instead of renewables, negative emissions technologies, and mitigation and resilience initiatives? I’d encourage us, for the moment, to think of money as a technological tool. It is a tool whose specific uses are frequently criticized. Did you actually buy that sweater? Did you actually commission those nuclear warheads? The point is that any of these criticisms can be reimagined: not, “Is the tool being used incorrectly?” but “Is this even the right tool?” Dissatisfaction with the tool is so widespread, across the political spectrum, I suspect that it is usually not.
How should money be abolished? I can try to do it by myself, but I’m very busy. But three points.
One, let’s acknowledge the more-than-capitalist world. Gift economies, kinship economies, mutual aid, more or less democratic and/or deliberative bureaucracies, material balances accounting, decision support tools, alternative and complementary moneys, time banks and LETS schemes, Indigenous moneys, the accounting practices of Net Zero transitions and the biometric practices of wellbeing interventions, the speculative currencies of science fiction, the avant-garde financial experiments of artists and activists.
In connection with this first point I can offer, in a bewitching concoction of euphoria and grumpiness, two challenges. I would like speculative fiction writers to weave their futures with a greater variety of mechanisms for organising desires and resources. Would like to see more post-money and more alternative money futures. And I would like to see more utopian and SF studies scholars take advantage of the extraordinary leeway our discipline gives us, to surface and strengthen the radical post-money potentials in books and media and in everyday experience. For example, every game is a miniature economic system, and harbors potential that can be subjected to design and scaling. Too often, in practice, SF studies simply observes how a science fiction text exemplifies some theory, supposedly estranging or questioning some hierarchy or norm or binary.
Two, let us acknowledge reversibility. Things can be done in more-or-less monetised ways, with complex implications; captured in the difference between driving yourself or cadging a lift with a friend or hitchhiking vs. calling a taxi or an uber. So when areas of social life have been financialised, they can be de-financialised, perhaps not back to what they were, but to new forms.
Sticking with money as a technology, there is already a rich body of literature exploring how we might step back from harmful technologies; for example, Langdon Winner’s epistemological Luddism and Ivan Illich’s tools for conviviality are starting points for practical analyses of the use of money in a given context. Maybe money has, all along, been a kind of AI. That opens the possibility of reprogramming it.
Three, let us acknowledge the possibility of incremental progress. Police abolition theorists and activists encounter plenty of hostility and disbelief from folk who have simply never considered that the safeguarding functions that police are supposed to do and sometimes do do can be distributed in different ways across society. Post-work gets scoffed at by those who have not yet discovered, altering the culture of shame around non-monetised. Money abolition, like police abolition and like work abolition, is not so much about subtracting something from the world, as multiplying and cultivating what already exists in the more-than-capitalist world around us. Indeed I suspect these are all aspects of the same project.
So finally, why do I think that money abolition has become more thinkable? Well, because perhaps it is happening. I’m not sure whether it’s useful to contest whether techno-capital’s recent changes represent a radical break, a new regime of accumulation, or merely an inflection or intensification of post-Fordist or post-industrial or neoliberal dynamics. The specific labels aren’t that important. But there are certainly features of contemporary capitalism, with its myriad digital value forms including cryptocurrency and commodified big data, with its ongoing data-driven wave of AI and automation, that are not well-captured by, say, earlier critical theory’s emphasis on reification and alienation. The archetypal subject of capitalism is not homo economicus the isolated, atomic, utility-maximising agent whose inner life can only be vaguely inferred from its economic behavior, but rather a richly connected and reflective social being whose inner life and sociability are at least ostensibly legible in the vast amounts of available data. We cannot straightforwardly call the decisive steering media of contemporary capitalism ‘de-linguistified,’ as Jurgen Habermas did almost half a century ago. In short, perhaps capitalism no longer needs money.
We might say, then, we need to abolish money, before it abolishes itself.
Didja miss me don't even answer that shut up you're not even that funny okay you are. There is a snippet below about labour theories of value in the era of Quantified Self.
Here's the context (or skip to the snippet): I've been finishing up a Creative Writing PhD, which is a funny sort of thing. Actually, it's several funny sorts of things, because there's a fair bit of formal variation from university to university, and from PhD to PhD. Which is a good thing. I understand in Coventry, evaluation of the practice component focuses quite heavily on your performance, with respect to the other PGRs in your intake, within a vast verdant combat arena tucked full of traps, weaponry, intrigue and heartbreak. But in every practice-led PhD, there's always a 'practice' component -- for me, that means some fiction, including "Froggy" and Marta-- and then a critical/reflective component.
I initially found that critical/reflective bit quite difficult, since it wasn't a mode of writing I was familiar with / fruitfully unfamiliar with when I got started. But I think I more or less have got it now, which is pretty cool because I'm supposed to hand it in next week.
One aspiration for afterwards, BTW, is to spin off my two cents on practice-led research (also known as practice-as-research or practice-based research, although each phrase has its own connotations) and especially on how it formally relates to speculative fiction.
Speculative fiction may sometimes aspire to 'lead' research, offering to shift our technoscientific imaginary, and opening spaces which stricter R&D methodologies may explore (shout out DARPA you avant-garde murderous fucks).
'Hard' speculative fiction may also be implicated with expert discourses (whether that's physics or sociology), in a way which resembles the dialectic between the creative and the critical/reflective components of practice-led research.
Both speculative fiction and practice-led research are prone to adopting a slightly tricksterish attitude toward external evaluation, eluding or deferring judgment by a kind of bait-and-switch which insists that you've usually evaluated the wrong thing, and that they know more than they're letting on. Speculative fiction's version of this is, of course: "oh no, of course I don't claim to predict the future, ha ha ha" (zooms meaningfully away on hoverboard with fixed wide-eyed stare).
In a nutshell, I feel like practice-led research and speculative fiction have stuff in common, which means things can actually get quite awkward (but interesting) when you try to do both of them at once.
All of this serves as a kind of apology for various aspects of the following snippet (which probably bug only me anyway), which is a fragment of reflective commentary, about a very brief passage in the mini-novel Marta and the Demons.
(So it's me talking about some fiction I wrote. But in this bit, the themes of money, labour, and Quantified Self predominate. The yys are because I haven't done the page numbering yet and/or because I generously "allow readers to decide for themselves". Also, I've shouted it out before, but Tim Maughan's sf-ish vignette "Zero Hours" is great and still really relevant here).
Work as Money [...] This scene [a drunken conversation between Myeong and Carly, about trying to invent a labor-based currency,] was partly inspired by schemes such as Local Exchange Trading
Systems and time‑based currencies.[1]
Under such systems, a member might earn one credit by working for one hour,
which can be spent to hire an hour’s labor from another member. It was easy to imagine
Carly thinking along these lines; at this moment in Carly and Myeong’s
relationship, it felt right that Carly might have recently re-calibrated her
speculative faculties, and be eager to support inchoate wishes, while still ready to feel like the grounded pragmatist of the pair.
Carly comes up with the name “WorkCoin,” and envisions WorkCoin’s value
deriving from “the number of hours [worked]” (M: yy). But for Myeong, whose entrepreneurial obliviousness is reaching its peak, the word ‘hours’ is already enough to cut
Carly short.
One objection to time‑based currencies is that every hour of work
is qualitatively different to every other hour. Of course, flattening such
heterogeneity according to egalitarian principles, rather than market
mechanisms, may be part of the appeal of time-based currencies. But I wanted
Myeong to focus on something different. Myeong wants to preserve the qualitative heterogeneity of work, conceived primarily as a phenomenological heterogeneity, but with gestures toward the importance of third-person perspectives.
My second inspiration for this scene was Viviana Zelizer’s account of money’s own
heterogeneity. Zelizer contests money’s reputation as a uniform, impersonal,
and fungible social relation. For Zelizer, “people are constantly creating new
monies, and they do so by segregating different streams of legal tender into
funds for distinct activities and relations” (Zelizer 2011: 89). Money “may
well ‘corrupt’ values into numbers, but values and sentiment reciprocally
corrupt money by investing it with moral, social, and religious meaning”
(Zelizer 2011: 97). Myeong, Zelizer, and I conspired to flesh out Myeong's aspiration, barely acknowledging Carly's contributions. Instead, Myeong would aspire to use technology to accentuate, extend, and rationalize money’s existing heterogeneity, in order to reflect the heterogeneity of
work. Every hour of work is different from every other. Every penny is different from every other. Why shouldn’t we map one set of differences onto the other?
Myeong’s vision is probably ultimately incoherent. Formulating it coherently certainly offers a challenge. First, how should work be demarcated from non-work
(cf. §2.5.2)? We certainly cannot get by, in this context, with the approximation that paid work is ‘real’ work (not without begging the question). Nor should we really want to. Nancy Hartsock tersely invokes the theme of what
counts as ‘real’ work by describing “a third person, not specifically present
in Marx’s account of transactions between capitalist and worker (both of whom
are male),” who “follows timidly behind, carrying groceries, baby, and diapers”
(Hartsock 1983: 234). Second, since any sum of WorkCoin will have passed through
many hands, whose work should count
as “what real people [have] really done, to make that money exist” (M: yy)? Third, even if work could
somehow be legitimately demarcated and documented, how can WorkCoin legibly
represent such data for human subjects? Who could experience something like
WorkCoin, and what would they experience? How could WorkCoin’s quantifications
be visualized, aestheticized, and perhaps – given Myeong’s desire for a
WorkCoin in which “you could see the workers” (M: yy) – embodied and personified? Fourth, even if a legible WorkCoin were
possible, why should that materially alter labor’s subjugation within some
interlocking “matrix of domination” (Collins 2000: yy)? In other words, a
fine-grained mapping of labor to value may sometimes lead to fairer
compensation. But it can also – as the example of Amazon shortly shows – lead
to something else entirely. On a larger historical timescale, the questions multiply.
How would Myeong’s WorkCoin reflect the particularity of work, when that work
is implicated with events – such as the production of the means of production –
which have taken place long before WorkCoin came into being? Or when some properties
of today’s work may take months or centuries to surface? How would something
like WorkCoin function as a transferable IOU (cf. §3.4.2, §4.1), connected not
only with past labor, but also with promises of future labor? Whenever I tried
to extend the quantification of labor deep into the past and future, I felt it
lost its particularity again. It became more nebulous and colorable, more manipulable
by existing power hierarchies. Beyond these questions lay further concerns about access and exclusion, about privacy, and about energy and sustainability.
While I tried to position WorkCoin as a wild and impractical fancy, it is also “essential that estrangement
leads to the realization that things do not have to be the way they are”
(Spiegel 2008: 370). I expected WorkCoin could create a space for
speculation about more practical implementations of a labor-based currency,
both in terms of its enticements and its dangers.
One precedent is the Quantified Self phenomenon – loosely what Myeong
has in mind when she refers to “fuddy-duddy, gamified, making-flossing-fun,
improve-the-way-you-sit bullcrap” (M:
yy). Quantified Selves are people who aim to improve their self-knowledge and
autonomy through “novel ways of self-tracking with the help of digital
technologies” (Lupton 2016: 9).[2]
Gary Wolf, one popularizer of the term, describes his fine-grained
self-tracking in a work context:
Taking
advantage of the explosion of self-tracking services available on the Web, I
started analyzing my workday at a finer level. Every time I moved to a new
activity – picked up the phone, opened a Web browser, answered e-mail – I made
a couple of clicks with my mouse, which recorded the change. After a few weeks
I looked at the data and marveled.
(Wolf 2010: n.p.)
Similar tracking technology is also used in factories, warehouses, and other
workplaces; a high-profile example is Amazon’s avant‑garde brutalizing of its workforce, “in the use of
monitoring technologies to track the minute-by-minute movements and performance
of employees” (Head 2014: n.p.):
With this twenty-first-century Taylorism, management
experts, scientific managers, take
the basic workplace tasks at Amazon, such as the movement, shelving, and
packaging of goods, and break down these tasks into their subtasks, usually
measured in seconds; then rely on time and motion studies to find the fastest
way to perform each subtask; and then reassemble the subtasks and make this
“one best way” the process that employees must follow.
(ibid. n.p.)
While such monitoring technologies come nowhere near to disentangling “real
people” or “[o]ur own true selves” (M:
yy) from the abstract figure of the worker, they do enrich that figure with
fine‑grained data. They suggest how Myeong’s first bold vision of WorkCoin, as
a marvellous money inscribed with all
the heterogeneity of work, might yield to something more practicable. Instead
of expressing “[o]ur true selves,” a WorkCoin analogue might simply express some salient data about the work which
underlies it.[3]
Some time later, after attending a workshop involving time-based currencies, and speculatively exploring hybrid forms of monetary value– with price determined by interactions of supply, demand, and labor time–I did consider fleshing out WorkCoin further, perhaps in a later story. At the same time, I was wary that, merely seeking
to estrange money, I might inadvertently glamorize, celebrate, normalize or naturalize the use of such intimately oppressive tracking
technologies; or I might point to unlikely ways of appeasing, containing, or mitigating technologies that are hungrily bent on coercing workers “to squeeze every last drop of labour-power
from their bodies” (Moore and Robinson 2015: 7). For the time being at least, I decided to let WorkCoin, like the incomes
perceived by Li Shu (M: yy), and like
Encarl’s Smartgularity (M: yy), remain
a faintly implied shape, only partly jutting into story cycle’s representational
field.
The difficulty of
theoretically demarcating work from non-work, and the brutal and exploitative
history of such demarcation as it has practically occurred, could be no
security against the possibility that technologically accomplished quantifications
of work might in principle gain legal backing or widespread social acceptance. Stock
prices already make a resounding claim to quantify the future flourishing of
firms; the reputation metrics of digital matching platforms such as Uber and
Airbnb make a fairly resounding claim to render precise and legible the
trustworthiness of taxi drivers or holidaymakers. It seemed important to
confront the possibility of some specific socio‑technological ecology of data collection,
extraction, warehousing, analysis, and visualization and gamification, making a
resounding claim to render ‘work’ – or perhaps ‘smart work,’ ‘hard work,’ or even
‘happy work’ – as precise and legible data.
The stories Moneykins, and
perhaps especially ‘Alice,’ often feature imagery of bodies surfacing and
stretching free from the media in which they have been obscured and imprisoned,
and even in which they have been constituted. For instance, the Weaver breaks
free from her cloud and its enigmatic Chesses, and the leprecoins from their
magic metal (M: yy, yy). These images
arrived in my writing of their own accord, but I started to think of them as
small, scattered allegories about humans disentangling themselves from money,
whether partly or fully, temporarily or for good.
At the same time, as
explored in §2.1-§2.5, money can be tenacious, adaptable, and stealthy. It can
linger in the places it has explicitly been banished from. Bewitchingly
detailed representational regimes – such as Quantified Self technologies, the
reputation metrics of the sharing economy, Doctorow’s Whuffie, or Myeong’s
WorkCoin – may promise to extricate humans from money’s power, to create
alternative ways of organizing collective action, and to in effect “render gold
and silver of no esteem” (More 1997 [1516]: 44). Yet they may actually end up
extending the power of money, in new forms, deeper into human lives. [...]
[1]See e.g. The Economy of Hours (www.economyofhours.com)
and TimeRepublik (www.timerepublik.com); for historical background cf. Warren
(1852).
[2] I prefer to say
‘Quantified Selves’ because I am a little reluctant to call Quantified Self a
‘movement’ with ‘members.’ There is an awkwardness around the term, perhaps because it tends to emphasize the agency and knowledge of the quantified individual, and downplays the way in which, even in the most sanguine circumstances, the Quantified Self is inevitably also a Quantified Other. But the term has widespread recognition, and I find even the awkwardness itself sometimes useful, a constant reminder of the unwieldiness and counterintuitivity of the subject matter.
[3]For instance, a few important dimensions of
distinction might include tedium, discomfort, and other affective states;
freedom and constraint; the ‘embedded labor’ of prior training and experience;
the ‘quality’ of the work as measured by innumerable metrics; the danger and
luck involved; and of course the work’s financial productivity. These evade
tracking technologies to different degrees and in different ways. “WSTT [Wearables and other Self-Tracking Technologies] measure only users, creating an illusion that the precarian
worker – constructed by a particular affective and social field of which these technologies
are a part – is identical with humanity,” and the illusion that this worker figure is also “the defining point of human bodily
capabilities and the point from which we should start – an outer limit of ‘human nature’
which restricts political and social possibility” (Moore and Robinson 2015: 5; cf. also Maughan 2013).
ECONOMIST: Imagine I have some economic lectures, and you have some animal skins. Now what? Unless you happen to want what I have, and I happen to want what you have, we can't trade!
ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: That would never happen although you're right about not wanting the economics lecture
ECONOMIST: In primitive society, it must have been pretty inconvenient to get what you want!
ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: I mean no more inconvenient than this. Look I'll just give you the skins. We can remember or write it down. I'll give them to you
ECONOMIST: Nowadays, economists like to say
ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: They like to say "economists like to say"
ECONOMIST: that a barter society would have "high transaction costs."
ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: You guys really like to say that, waaay more than economic sociologists like to say "economic sociologists like to say" anyway. Although I kind of liked saying that just now.
ECONOMIST: But not only that!
ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: Oh God.
ECONOMIST: Not all commodities are easy to carry or divide. If you have to cut one of your skins in half
ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: I won't do that. It's not a problem. Do you want the skins? Take my skin. Take my actual skin.
ECONOMIST: it might be worth a lot less!
ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: Please don't say Jevons. Please don't say double co
ECONOMIST: What Jevons called "the double coincidence of wants"
ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: He didn't invent that idea and he didn't call it that.
ECONOMIST: prompted barter societies
ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: He did say "coincidence between persons wanting and persons possessing"
ECONOMIST: to eventually agree to use
ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: "Agree"? Wait Menger basically made up you guys's commodity theory and Menger would have hated that. And he was being a bit literal but he almost had a point, it wasn't like one day in the olden days the olden day guys all sat down and agreed
ECONOMIST: some intrinsically valuable commodity
ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: But it's funny you should say agree because you know what economic historians and anthropologists and sociologists agree on they agree there have never been barter societies that is a thing they agree
ECONOMIST: such as tea, or beads, cowrie shells
ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: That reminds me we're almost out of cowrie shells sorry I will shut up and listen what is next
ECONOMIST: or, of course, gold!
ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: Never has been a "barter society" in the way you mean it anyway. Wait, what, gold?
ECONOMIST: What we then see is the gradual evolution of money, from some intrinsically valuable commodity
ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: Gold is not intrinsically valuable -- I'm like right here, why do you never, why are you, why
ECONOMIST: to coinage, to paper money backed by precious metal, to what
ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: Why are you doing this. Gold is not intrinsically valuable it's not even intrinsically pretty
ECONOMIST: we have today
ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: I don't
ECONOMIST: namely, fiat money.
ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: Phew cool well that was quite a ride now maybe we can
ECONOMIST: This progression, from barter, to commodity money, to modern fiat money, took a long time.
ECONOMIST SOCIOLOGIST: thousands of years of diverse and complex monetary systems, their transformations and their collapses, all ignored, so not that long
ECONOMIST: But it had to! It had to be gradual in order to build up the necessary trust
ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: Okay cool so the stability of the dollar is at least partly because of the confidence of the Babylonians had in their priest class I totally get that cool, cool, cool
ECONOMIST: since today it is really only trust that makes money valuable.
ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: Nothing to do with the law then? And, like, what taxes are denominated in and
ECONOMIST: Money is backed by trust. If we lose our trust in money, money has no value!
ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: You know what, for what its worth? Trust is a weird sentiment to be privileging here. I know what you're getting at, but your language is loose and misleading. By saying that money is "backed" by trust, you make it sound like using money is an efficient way of trusting each other -- just like using money backed by gold is an efficient way of reassigning claims to that gold. Whereas in reality, just the opposite is true. Money doesn't require that we trust each other. If anything, it requires that we don't.What money is really good at is co-ordinating the activity of people without those people having to gain any intimate knowledge of each other. Here's Henry Peacham telling a kind of joke about that in The Worth of a Penny, or, A Caution to Keep Money (1667):
ECONOMIST: What?
ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: What?
ECONOMIST: I feel like you're being a bit nit-picky. This is an ideal model. Of course it has lots of assumptions, but it also has explanatory force.
ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGIST: So where did money really come from?
ECONOMIST: You should just trust me on this stuff. So yeah anyways how about a cheeky wee animal skin? I can pay you back Monday.
I came across the intriguing notion of the "passive control rights" of bondholders, which strikes me as one way in which the strict distinction between debt and equity need not always be as strict as we tend to think.
I'm gathering evidence to support the unpopular opinion that money, which is sometimes seen as a form of debt, might also be fruitfully approached as a special form of equity. This aspiration belongs to my broad sense that more needs to be done before money comes properly into focus as, in Geoffrey Ingham's words, a social relation. Ingham writes in The Nature of Money:
by a ‘sociology of money’ I intend more than the self-evident assertion that money is produced socially, is accepted by convention, is underpinned by trust, has definite social and cultural
consequences and so on. Rather, I shall argue that money is itself a social relation; that is to say, money is a ‘claim’ or ‘credit’ that is constituted by social relations that exist independently
of the production and exchange of commodities
Anyway, the rather dry excerpt about passive control rights is over at the Economic Humanities blog.
Another case where debt and equity may become blurred, by the way, is in the case of very short term money market securities, especially where issuers are continually rolling over their commercial paper-type debt. Such relationships can be short-term in one sense and long-term in another: that is, a company borrows money, pays it back, borrows it again, pays it back again, perhaps even on a daily basis, perhaps for years. So the lenders may not have any voting rights or collateral, but they may still be respected and even feared stakeholders with influence over the company's dealings. One thing I don't really understand yet is the extent to which a group of lenders in an arrangement like this really can be thought of as an agent or actor or even a continuous (albeit evolving) entity over long spans of time.
It's also interesting that whereas "debt" always implies "credit" -- to the extent that in certain contexts the terms become interchangeable, although always with distinct nuance -- there doesn't seem to be any equivalent language that differentiates equity as either owning or being owned by. Or perhaps there is but I just don't know about it?
Meanwhile, here's a random thought about the economist Carl Menger and the real economy. In one sense Menger’s commodity theory of money needs no defenders. It became foundational to the attitudes which still prevail within mainstream modern economics. It has not only been influential, but pernicious. By trying to show how money could emerge from self-interested bartering individuals “without convention, without legal compulsion, nay, even without any regard to the common interest” (Menger 1892), Menger contributed to the dogmatic neoclassical notion that “all phenomena must be explained as a result of their utility for the maximizing individual” (Ingham 2004).
If money-ness really is, as Menger suggests, woven into all kinds of commodities, how would it appear if it were quantified directly? That is, if its presence were perceived rather than imperfectly inferred from scattered exchanges of commodities? Menger is also famous for his subjective theory of value, and it's in this vein that Menger shrewdly observes how the sale of an article at a specific price does tell us everything about the money-ness wrapped up in that article, since “it does not lie within our power, when we have bought an article for a certain price, to sell it again forthwith at the same price” (Menger 1892).
Furthermore, Menger’s caution that “the nature of that process would be but very incompletely explained if we were to call it ‘organic’ or denote money as something ‘primordial’” has proved less influential, as has his later work, which reinscribes a role for the state. The theme of spontaneous, commodity money from ‘On the Origin of Money,’ mingled into quantity theory, has instead been used to simplify and sideline the role of money. “The most startling paradox [...] is the fact that the mainstream, or orthodox, tradition of modern economics does not attach much theoretical importance to money” (Ingham 2004).
Even the power of financial derivatives markets may be downplayed, despite their size being far greater than that of commodity markets. Derivatives markets are said to be merely a sophisticated superstructure representing relationships within the real global economy, and managing risks within that volume of real value.
This is reflected in some of the language of finance. Derivatives are ‘derived’ from a pre-existing essence of financial value. Similarly, any large drop in stock price – regardless whether it is traced to a hurricane; to the outbreak of war; to a disappointing quarterly report; to an emergent anomaly in high frequency trading algorithms; or to powerful investors dumping their holdings to force the price down and repurchase the stock more cheaply later on – is always a ‘correction,’ as if it were a re-alignment to an essence of financial value which was there all along. But there are no corrections, no re-alignments to pre-existing monetary essences.
But. Although Menger’s commodity theory lends itself to misapplication, it is not in itself guilty of this kind of reification. Menger recognizes, as many who borrow opportunistically from him do not, that the financial value which he sees as inextricable from commodities is a social construct. That is to say, for Menger, financial value is socially constructed in a sense continuous with the social construction of the commodities themselves.
I'm not saying we should give the guy a break, or anything.
ONCE upon a time, there lived a very rich man, and a king besides, whose name was King Midas; and he had a little daughter, whom nobody but myself ever heard of, and whose name I either never knew, or have entirely forgotten. So, because I love odd names for little girls, I choose to call her DANG!-ADJUTANCY!-CLOTH!-LATTICE!-REAL-TALK!-NOCTAMBULIST!-LIGHTNING-STRIKE!-DOOGY-WOOFY-YOOYY-MISSY-GIRL-NAME-ENVELOPE-TRICE-ANKLES-NNNOW!-NOW!-ALICE!-ARABRONCHIUM!-THE-ENVIRONMENTAL-HUMANITIES!-ONLY-FANCIER!-SPARAH!-PRECEPTORY!-MOUNTWEAZELS!
This King Midas was fonder of gold than of anything else in the world.
It is not beyond imagining. But it is more difficult to imagine than any crosshatched space or object.
And this difficulty speaks to something about the nature of money. It tells us that money is closer in its nature to the one phenomenon which absolutely cannot accommodate crosshatching, the one thing which must be in Besźel, or in Ul Qoma, or in Breach.
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.
