Renay (@renay) on the relationship between book blogging and the publishing industry, and especially the etiquette of authors dropping in on fan spaces.
"Because I'm aware of how badly things can go when fans seek to engage with creators, I'm intensely dubious that some creators think it's acceptable to walk into book blogger fan spaces featuring their work and argue about intentions and readings without an explicit invitation.
"[...] After watching many of my favorite book bloggers shift from primarily fanwork toward the industry, I contextualized what I see happening in book blogging amid all the debates about where book bloggers fit. Book bloggers are fans, but as book blogger culture has grown and the ability of blogs to create 'buzz' for books has increased, they've continued to grow closer to the publishing industry, which can be a detriment to the fan community around those blogs."
In the comments thread (and in the surface crackle on the Twitterorb) the focus is mostly on the authors-in-fan-spaces aspect. (Update: also check out Renay's follow-up on the fall-out, and Larry Nolen making some decent points about not conflating fans and book bloggers).
I don't exactly have a stance on this, but I do have a sort of extended twitchy pose, as though you're pretending to take a photo of me, but actually filming. That disintegrating rictus is as follows.
(a) Obviously it's possible for an author to join a conversation about their writing without kindling a flamewar (like this short bracing but friendly discussion of Tim Maughan's 2012 "Limited Edition"). Renay's article is a great reminder that any author who wishes to do so should probably arrive with an abasing forward-roll, rather than with a seismic strut, just to try and level the power dynamic a bit.
@booksmugglers My whole point was not to say "never interact" but "interact with kindness and respect". And that seems to be happening.
— Renay (@renay) September 16, 2013
Of course kindness and respect won't always be met with kindness and respect (see note 1). Perhaps the legitimacy of authors mingling with readers is such a tricky area because it is really primarily a form for conflict, rather than an object of conflict? Online animosity is an abundant, naturally occurring resource, and when it happens to include readers and an author, a probable shape for it to take is an argument about the legitimacy of the author's presence in the first place!
So perhaps the legitimacy of authorial interaction can't be determined very well outside of these particular contestations? (See note 2). If it can't, that's small one argument against pinning your blog with a "No Authors Allowed!" (or an "Authors Welcome!") sign -- at least insofar as your policy could be prevent, by baseless decree, the very process through which an authorial interaction reveals its legitimacy.
I really hate that "Authors Welcome" graphic. It skeeves me out.
— Natalie Luhrs (@eilatan) September 17, 2013
(b) OK. But even so, we can still think in general terms about these authors who paradrop in deep behind enemy (well, behind their own lines, I guess). For instance: perhaps authors don't necessarily have as much power in such situations as first appears?
For starters they are of course dead. It's by now very widely accepted that authors don't have final say over the meaning of their words. Before Barthes' death of the author thesis, there was Wimsatt and Beardsley's Intentional Fallacy. A patient and careful reader should be able to provide an interpretation which is more authoritative than the author's interpretation. Emotionally, the stakes are higher for the author.
It may actually be easier to do this with the author included in the conversation: they can often play the part of the textual expert, who will point out possible pitfalls as the interpretation develops and strengthens. If it turns into a struggle for the soul of the story, authors will often have a home field advantage. But just as a skrik vir niks gamer can beat a programmer at their own game, so you can beat an author at their own book. (See note 3).
Secondly, one stance which is common to a great many authors -- that of wanting desperately to be loved -- is not a very strong position to begin from. Of course a great deal depends on the magnitude of the particular author. Certainly a small-to-middling author probably has fewer fans to choose from than those fans have small-to-middling authors to choose from. (Compare Jonathan McCalmont on everyone being a writer and other things). Whereas celebrities who nudge hordes (knowingly or negligently) to advocate on their behalf are another matter.
The real problem here is that popular authors can't say anything online without their fans acting on it. That's the power dynamic.
— Jonathan McCalmont (@RuthlessCult) September 16, 2013
(c) Then again, perhaps the power of readers in such situations isn't quite so secure either! Because although authors don't have final say over the meaning of their words, they may well have a continuous say over the words themselves.
There could be a murmur of excitement just here. I mean, it's OK if you feel like excitedly murmuring.
I'm talking of course about ebooks (and to some extent print-on-demand). And at the moment I am thinking in particular of indie publishing -- electronic and print-on-demand, but the possibility could certainly spread to legacy publishing. In most cases the advantage of authors over readers is that authors possess the legal right plus the technical capabilities to revise their work. Revisions can be done on the basis of readers' criticisms, and criticisms can thereby be made obsolete or otherwise transformed. Book bloggers could become one of the ways in which an author hones whatever it is they really want to say. Book bloggers could be co-opted as junior collaborators in pursuit of that will-o'-the-wisp, authorial intent. (See notes 6 and 7). So that's another form of interaction: wait, watch, gather intelligence, and if necessary, revise.
"It's always a sobering moment," writes Alastair Reynolds, "the first time you hold the end product. Months or years of work, distilled into a rectangle of card and paper. This is it -- no more changes now." Perhaps in the future, many writers won't be aspiring to get published, but to get closure.
(d) All that being said, it seems pretty likely that the direct involvement of authors and publishers in the textual record of reception and dissemination is a pretty malign thing on the whole. (See note 8). While there is something very intriguing about a fan becoming, as it were, the dominant scriptor in a dense nexus of text -- determining how an authorship function emerges as an effect of that nexus -- and likewise while there is something cool about the notion of author-turned-conduit -- so that whatever rewriting is tacitly embodied in every surveilled squee and critique can actually be continually realised -- there is also a lot to be said for the more familiar ideal: a relatively independent network of people who think about and talk about fiction, without too much interference from the people who produce it.
*
Note 1: A quick glance at the Ben Aaronovitch thread suggests that despite mumbling a caveat ("commenting on reviews is usually a mistake,") with a mouthful of humble tart ("I also miscalculated [...] in hindsight [...] probably where I went wrong [...] those who are broken and disappointed all I can say is sorry") Aaronovitch very quickly annoys his reviewer; his next two posts (and last, I think) mostly try to clarify, do some damage limitation, apologise and escape.
Note 2: Imagine no author had ever supplied their two pennies' worth. What superstitions might we develop around the possibility of authors and readers meeting? What hocus pocus might be unleashed? (Beware note 9). Or indeed what might be dispelled -- perhaps the spell of fiction itself. The reason the authors are kept on that mountain is that if they were ever to speak directly to their audiences, in their own person, society would at a stroke lose all ability to suspend disbelief and immerse ourselves in narrative fiction.
Note 3: I bet it's not that common to find a big argy-bargy between someone who believes that authors controls the meanings of their works, and someone who believes that those meanings are public property. (See note 4). What are probably more common are argy-bargies over different ways of construing that "publicness." Perhaps one pernicious species of argy-bargiest is a sort of extravagant subjectivist, who believes all interpretations are equally good, simply because they're rooted in the sanctity of individual experiences. We've probably all come across this. "My interpretation is my right, I don't have to defend it!" A book blogger who believes that might have more cause to quake at the appearance of an author (see note 5), because they're not used to supporting their own interpretations with evidence, arguments, comparisons and so on. Perhaps the sense that authors should stay away is actually sustained by these extravagant subjectivists? People who, ironically, commit a kind of intentional fallacy about their own reviews, believing them to necessarily correspond to their experience of reading?
Note 4: Dunno, but ... maybe an exception is kids? Maybe kids are more likely to believe that authors control the meaning of their works? If so, how does this understanding eventually change? (It doesn't necessarily involve reading a bunch of Barthes, right?) I wonder if the psychological foundations of the extreme subjectivism I just mentioned might already be laid down in children's author-idolatry? Perhaps there is sometimes simply a shift: meaning is a feeling which happens to me; when I was a child, I thought it was a feeling that an author could make me have, but now I know it is a feeling I make myself have, using an author (and/or consuming a commodity)?
Note 5: Maybe it's worth prodding the "OMG GROSS GET OUT OF MY ROOM" analogy? I feel like the vehemence of a stereotypical angsty privacy has something to do with shame, or more precisely, with irritation that a realm has been unnecessarily opened up in which shame is now a possibility. The intense desire for privacy is not really about protecting any superior activity. Not necessarily, anyway. It can easily be about the sanctity of the bathetic.
Also: a good first post for any author could just be, "Knock knock." (Thread continues. "WHAT?!" "I just -- can we talk?" "GO AWAY!" "We never see each other any more! I miss you. Can I come in?" *pause*)
Note 6: It is not a common practice, and it could be totally scandalous at first. I think this is particularly interesting with respect to calling out a piece of writing for retrograde identity politics. How will fans react to authors who try to fix whatever problems they spot? If a sentence in a love scene, flagged up by some bloggers as rapey, were to discreetly disappear -- is that more or less creepy?
Perhaps we'll soon be forced into a problematique of "the problematic": why exactly do we try to decipher the masked ideological content of all the cultural stuff we consume for fun? To what extent are we safety-labeling presumed subliminal propaganda, for instance? To what extent are we reading the ideology of cultural products as symptoms of their producers, as a kind of system of incentives and disincentives to become better people? To what extent are we training ourselves for other analytic and rhetorical battles (perhaps battles that are endlessly rescheduled)?
There is a sense in which an author, by revision, may better achieve his original intention. But it is a very abstract sense. He intended to write a better
work, or a better work of a certain kind, and now has done it. But it follows
that his former concrete intention was not his intention. “He’s the man we
were in search of, that’s true,” says Hardy’s rustic constable, “and yet he’s not
the man we were in search of. For the man we were in search of was not the
man we wanted.”
Note 8: It doesn't follow necessarily that individual authors heroically restraining themselves from meddling will necessarily improve matters.
Note 9: Can authors write fanfic of their own canons, I wonder? Would responsive authors who change their books on the basis of fan discussion lead to cabals of secretive book bloggers? Would authors have to go undercover to find out how many stars they've received? Also -- beware! -- see note 9. Now you are mine.
A recent report from the Institute for Business in the Global Context looks at how cash stacks up (lol) against other forms of money. A snippet from the introduction.
"Money is an abstraction built on trust. As such, alternatives to the most tangible form of money—currency or cash—and its replacement with cashless payments have become possible. Such an ecosystem is one where no transaction requires money in the form of notes and coins, and where value can be exchanged through the transfer of information between transacting parties.
There have been multiple waves of such alternatives. Established alternatives to cash include checks, credit cards, debit cards, and prepaid debit cards. More recently, innovative options have sprung up that not only threaten to imperil the ubiquity of cash but also upend the traditional payment ecosystem. These include smartphone-enabled credit card acquirers, such as Square, and Automated Clearing House or ACH acquirers, such as PayPal and Dwolla. And then there are even more ambitious alternatives to cash that have been proposed, such as Bitcoin, a web-based cryptocurrency. Unlike traditional money, such alternatives do not derive their value from government fiat. Each of these alternatives have evolved networks within which they are uniformly accepted as a means of payment; the more established alternatives, of course, have the widest networks.
This study starts from a simple observation: cash derives its value from the information it contains and is a classic information good, which can be replaced by a digital substitute [...] Today most information goods with a sufficiently developed digital substitute have been disrupted and displaced. Cash, however, is different from the usual examples that spring to mind: communication, music, movies, and, increasingly, books. Money in the form of cash is a tangible embodiment of value. Cash is itself nothing more than a promise to pay: a completely interchangeable, transferable promise to pay the bearer. The purpose of money is to have stored wealth on hand for purchases today and tomorrow. Individuals derive a certain utility from holding cash that stems from many factors combining rational, behavioral, institutional and emotional drivers. That said, cash must be held in physical form, counted, guarded, and accounted for. It can be difficult to transport and send. Being possibly the last thing you can expect to recover from a stolen wallet, acceptable everywhere, and anonymous, it is inherently insecure. In any serious quantity, most legitimate businesses prefer some other party, such as a bank, to handle cash on their behalf. In other words, cash satisfies two of the most significant criteria of digital disruption: there are viable digital alternatives with wide networks of adopters and cash presents the carrier with multiple forms of disutility or costs.
This begs the questions: why has cash not been completely displaced, what are the costs and benefits of its continued use, and what are the implications for innovation in the use of cash and its alternatives?"
(1) Steve Aylett's Fain the Sorcerer (2006). I don't remember exactly how useful or useless time travel is in Fain, but I do remember a jester being strangled over and over again, which at least gives the impression not everyone's needs are always met all of the time. Pointlessness is moreover a significant theme in Aylett's writing; or perhaps more precisely, the theme is people, events, words and things that point towards co-ordinates outside legitimate, intelligible spacetime. See also Aylett's And Your Point Is?(2006); Patrick Hudson's review of Fainat Pointless Philosophical Asides; Benny Glass's pointless review of Fain.
Make some dal
(2) Arthur C. Clarke's "All the Time in the World" (1952). For one art thief, the power to freeze time turns out less useful than it at first appears. What's so special about this story is its form-content reciprocity: though it may exist as a short story somewhere, it mainly manifests as a permanent radio broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Extra's 7th Dimension between 18:00 and 19:00 (and "then again at midnight"). It is permanently on because the 7th Dimension seems to be one of those "curled up" dimensions we learn of from M-theory: there is simply no room for budget or for a wide range of programmes. A special smidge of genius has listener (who has a repertoire of "small Latin and less Greek") frozen in time making a quorn bolognese sauce or some thing with chickpeas and a bit of lemon.
The BBC's Auntie gardism is firmly in the tradition of Wells & Welles' notorious 1938 CBS War of the Worlds broadcast, which caused widespread panic by telling everyone aliens were coming. Though I could quite happily float, pendant with Vincent Price, Mau and Daphne, a few stray triffids and a couple of Doctors, till the twilight of forever, I can't help but feel there's some mismatch between the BBC's pointless time travel into its archives and the enormous wealth and variety of free genre content available digitally.
Original tantweetrum:
ӝ@BBCRadio4Extra I have an idea. The 7th dimension has some very great content. But it obviously doesn't have very much of it. We get...
I bet there are legal, regulatory and self-esteem obstacles to syndicating/cadging content from, say, Pseudopod, Podcastle and Escape Pod, but the BBC is in a phase of flux, when a reasonable proposal may stand a reasonable chance of realisation.
Awkwardness of trying to be vocal stakeholder driving change in something which is basically without actually admitting it for children.
Here's a quick side-universe (to prevent this entire point from tacitly being about how there's not really enough room on my kitchen surfaces for a laptop).
Heavy reliance on archival revival may create friction with the BBC's role as an ambassador and a publicist for the UK, with its public purposes related to citizenship and diversity (see especially parts 6, 9 and 10 of the Agreement, and perhaps even 83), and with its general remit to inform, educate and entertain.
Many listeners tune in in media res, and/or only absorb fragments and snippets of background noise. We can all agree Jane Garvey's voice is completely unrecognisable unless it is mingled with whistling kettle and buzzing toothbrush. With depressing frequency (no pun intended! Total fluke!) I find myself tuning in in the middle of outdated attitudes or language -- writing which would be considered offensive if it were new. The BBC need to think responsibly and carefully about the fact that many listeners do not listen responsibly and carefully.
I don't think it's a matter of excluding problematic material entirely, nor of trying to attach warning labels. It's a matter of proportion, and of not inadvertently brainwashing the British public with masses of subliminal vintage racism, sexism and homophobia.
(3) Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" (1952), which is caught in its own time loop (it is a top contender for most republished SF story). The premise is that a time traveler who changes one small detail in the distant past may produce many large and strange changes in the present. The changes Bradbury depicts seem ridiculous (a sign hangs in just in the same place and says just the same thing, but with different spelling), and there is some special pleading to explaining why they think they can have a T-Rex safari in the first place, but it is a beloved and influential story.
There is also a fortuitous link between Bradbury's crushed butterfly and Edward Lorenz's seagull butterfly effect, which gives robust mathematical foundations to its be-careful-what-you-squish-for SF staple. Because the weather is a nonlinear system, outputs may be successively exponentially related to inputs, and today's hurricane/zephyr sitch could be contingent on whether a foreign butterfly got into a bit of a flap earlier that week. (Lorenz's first illustration featured a seagull, which he apparently changed to a butterfly at the suggestion of a colleague -- who knows? -- perhaps a Bradbury fan).
Such sensitive dependence to initial conditions is also a way of understanding the long-term unpredictability of nonlinear systems: since little things can count for so much, the only model which definitely captures a fine enough grain to predict the system's behaviour is the system itself. (It's for this reason I don't think Greg Egan's ingenious butterfly harnesses in Permutation City(1994) are feasible).
What's a bit unsettling here is that the time travel aspect could, in a way, be superfluous. If time travel is constitutively useless, because you can't predict the long term outcomes of your acts, and if it's the long term outcomes which are the really important ones . . . well, by that logic it's just human agency which is useless, time travel or no time travel. Bummer! See my recent snippet about Iain M. Banks and games. "One sensible-seeming route is to try to carve a small, resistant enclave within the universe’s grand complexity, for which and within which it is possible to take moral responsibility [...]"
Of course, in some fictional universes, the trick would be to nip back and forth in your time capsule crushing different butterflies till you get your ideal future (Hilary you can still count on me!!). Story Idea Guyz!!?!
(4) Tim Travel. My friend Dr Timothy Button suggested he might be up for the Edinburgh festival but didn't make it in the end. Why not check out his book, The Limits of Realism(2013)?
(5) Have derailed against BBC reruns, here's a rerun of my own, from June's Executive Summary. Social Media Time Travel would not necessarily be useless, but at least it would probably be a massive waste of time [travel]:
"Twitter has hinted at a feature under development to let users 'jump back in time,' synching their Twitter timelines with on-demand TV. 'Mr Costolo suggested that watching a major event without Twitter was like watching TV "with the volume off"' (BBC Newsbeat).
There are a couple interesting things implied by this, roughly summed up as Social Media Time Travel. First, why not figure out how to allow new tweets in this retro mode? They'd have to be timestamped with the 'actual' moment when they were tweeted, but they could appear in the virtual past. You'd want to be able to hide tweets by people from the future, of course (spoilers etc.), and some more advanced app might let you filter what you see on the basis of both when other twerps tweeted and what filters they had active at the time. Perhaps another app would allow you to re-do your own tweets. All this would create a sort of branching structure: 'quit blowing up my alternate timeline,' etc. (Perhaps something clever could be done to associate competing versions of the past with different branches of BitCoin blocks, to extend this indeterminate, flickery ontology into the economic realm). Furthermore, in principle, we could start to extend Twitter backwards in time. Everyone from my generation remembers where we were during the moon landings: on Twitter. The extent of possibilities isn't completely clear to me; what's clear is that Costolo, Zuckerberg et al. should be studying stuff like Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself and Carruth's Primer, and assessing the risk of the downside scenario in which they were never born at all."
(6) Francis Crot and Nrou Mrobaak's Xena: Warrior Princess & The Seven Curses (2008). The poet of Ketchivan gets his fondest wish, for his mind to travel back in time to occupy his youthful body and circumstances, but he doesn't like it. You may also be able to discern a catastrophic time travel subplot in FC's Hax(2011). It stars Blood Diaper (who also did some of the illustrations for Xena).
(7) Paper Dino Software's Save the Dateis a splendid little indie CYOA type game, where foreknowledge is never quite as useful as it should be. "This is actually kind of hard. I know what I think the game is about, but the game is kind of weird and experimental, even by my standards, and I don’t really want to say too much in advance. Probably best for people to play it without knowing what they’re getting into."
A new and slightly strange current & non-current affairs initiative. From a quick scan, it looks like a great idea. It seems like its approach mixes cold case investigation, coverage of neglected aftermaths, and some exploration of the wider sociological and historical context of news production.
"How often does a great story dominate the headlines, only to be dropped from the news cycle? How often do journalists tell us of a looming danger or important discovery – only to move quickly to the next new thing? What really happened? How did these events change us? And what are the lingering consequences that may affect our society to this day?
These are the questions we are answering at Retro Report, an innovative documentary news organization launched in 2013 as a timely online counterweight to today’s 24/7 news cycle. Combining documentary techniques with shoe-leather reporting, we peel back the layers of some of the most perplexing news stories of our past with the goal of encouraging the public to think more critically about current events and the media."
Epistemologically robust production and consumption of news seems a bit under-imagined to me. Maybe Retro Report might offer some inspiration.
Three things really stick out for me. (a) The first is Scott's metaphor of financial instruments as high level code, and money itself as machine code. A bit more on that in a minute. (b) The second is his suggestion that the problem with general purpose money is that it is too efficient!
"[...] Part of the essence of the Brixton Pound is its deliberate inconvenience. We’re used to thinking that absence of friction must be a virtue in any transaction, but a local economy thrives on inconvenience. Chance encounters in the street market help to bind a community together and give it richness of character. We lose all that when we opt for the robotic mediocrity of the automatic till and debit-card reader. It’s a fine balance, of course, and the Brixton Pound recently added a pay-by-text system that combines the ease of electronic payment with the richness of local exchange. I still have to hand-deliver the books I sell that way — knocking on the door of a guy called Rico who writes a food blog, having a chat, getting to know someone I didn’t know before. The inconvenience is where the connection comes in [...]" (See note 4).
Of course we may be dealing with more than a "fine balance." We may be dealing with a sort of contradiction: forms of friction which are socially desirable overall could be unsustainably irritating at the level of the individual. Over on Brixton Pound's site, even Scott himself wistfully appspirates (appspirate, v.: The feeling of wishing there were an app for something), "I’d love a swish new mobile phone app to further streamline the pay-by-text system and that could alert me to shops that accept B£."
(c) The third thing which sticks out is the optimism. I'm optimistic too! But many people's main contact with alternative currencies -- loyalty card reward points, company scrip -- is anything but liberating. The right friction may be okay, but too much friction sloughs your skin right off.
Besides, at its origins standardised currency is already entangled with special purpose money. (See note 1).
At the Brixton Pound site again, Scott explains that there are "two sides to starting an alternative currency. Firstly, you need vendors who will accept it. Secondly, you need people who will use it to buy things. Ideally, over time, you want those two to form a close-ended loop".
One important kind of close-ended loop is between farmers and soldiers. Imagine that you live on a farm, exchanging with your neighbours via gift, favour and IOU. One day the news comes that you, or your male relative, must pay tax in official currency. But only the king's soldiers are salaried in official currency. So suddenly there is a pressing need for you to find something the soldiers want. (See note 2).
Or, of course, you could find something wanted by someone who has something the soldiers want . . . that is how an army and a mint (a rudimentary state, we might call it) can summon a market economy into the world. In a way, it's a bit like the Panoptican effect: instead of raping and pillaging every day, they only need to violently persecute a few tax dodgers about once a year. Perhaps this marvelous invention also solves the "double coincidence of pillages" problem, in which your family and farmstead get massacred and razed by latecomers who suspect you're holding out on them.
So just to be clear: I think Brixton Pound is a goodie. Soon as Kickbackstarter approve my "McDuck money bin skyscraper" project, I'm going to stack some Brix of my own. I just don't think alternative currencies are necessarily or categorically good, and I'm not sure I yet know what their risks and setbacks actually look like. Obviously if Tesco or News Corp found an alternative currency, we ought to be suspicious, but even then how do we formalise our suspicions into analysis and critique?
§
Now I'm once more on shaky ice. The three things I've mentioned -- money as code; money as friction; and the entanglement of alternative and standardised currency, the porousness of both to power and violence -- are certainly related. Perhaps together they can start to respond to that question.
I do also write in exchange for money. But ultimately it all gets spent on pastries.
— Damien Walter (@damiengwalter) September 17, 2013
I sometimes wonder if the world's net debt/credit situation could in principle be expressed without using numbers. After all, we frequently translate our finances into various qualitative formats: into narratives, desires, fears, complaints, counterfactuals ("if only we could afford..."), conditionals ("when I can afford..."), hypothecations ("baby, my salary covers the mortgage, yours covers the bills and groceries") and so on. I also know people who talk in a gripey, "First World Problem"-kind-of-way about incoming money as "already spent." The apotheosis of "already spent" money, and of a "close-ended loop," is in the "wages" "paid" to bonded laborers, where the arithmetic has become all but irrelevant: it is more a matter of order of magnitude of debt and repayments.
How precise and wide-ranging could such qualitative redescription of money become? Just as a thought experiment (or a sort of focus imaginarius): could money's whole influence within human life at a particular moment in history be expressed as magnificent library of interlaced legalistic contracts?
I suspect any attempt, as it progressed from quarter-serious to half-serious, would find that its qualitative redescriptions resembled legal contracts less and less, as they more and more resembled computer programs. Perhaps there'd be a lot of complicated if-then-else nesting. "If I do not grow enough surplus crops to sell to the soldiers" . . . well, human behaviour is complex, and the numbers, perhaps, would creep back in eventually -- but might be better-behaved, having spent some time in the doghouse.
I'm not a computer scientist (unless you count Klik & Play) or an anthropologist (unless I'm not telling), so maybe I'm fetishizing the intellectual resources of these disciplines a bit. What I'm groping for are ways of demystifying the "generality" of general purpose money. That is, models and heuristics which would let us trace, with unprecedented specificity, standardised currency's own special purposes, affinities, dispositions, limitations, etc. (See note 3). Such techniques would have to stand against (i) the dogmatic assertion that any unit of currency must count as a medium of exchange for all the goods and services denominated in the same currency -- even for those on which in practice (that is, when social, cultural, psychological and other factors are taken into account) it is unlikely to be spent -- and also (ii) against the dogmatic counter-assertion that all money is always already spent: that social relations among people are more intelligible when the illusion of money is stripped out of them, along with whatever mechanisms sustain that illusion.
Likewise, friction isn't just an inconvenience over which communities can bond emotionally. Scott also quickly starts talking about serendipity and networking opportunities, for instance. "Friction" is really just a starting point for thinking about all the social, cultural, psychological, geographic and other dimensions of the circulation of value.
Note 1: I am using "standardised currency" and "general purpose money" interchangeably; and "alternative currency" and "special purpose money" interchangeably. But I'm also trying to blur some boundaries between what's standard and what's alternative, between what's general purpose and special purpose, in the hope of eventually coming up with more robust and exacting categories.
Note 2: The IOUs of course could be denominated in whatever -- crops, animals, textiles, a hard currency no longer in circulation. Almost anything will do as a unit of account. And if the scenario is all a bit simplified and abstract, well: anthropologists complain that economists still trot out the thoroughly discredited myth that "money emerged to solve the double coincidence of wants problem inherent to barter economies"; economists retort that it's not a myth, it's more a sort of pedagogical parable, and so the anthropologists better provide a counter-parable or STFU; so maybe there's your counter-parable.
Note 3: Compare Scott again:
"[...] I don’t suggest that we start suspiciously eyeing the change handed back to us in shops. Coins are designed to be symbolic and abstract, and perhaps that’s required. What we need though, is the right kind of doublethink, a carefully managed form of cognitive dissonance that allows us to see the centuries of real technological change that lie behind them, the oil and dirt and oceanic dragnets, the limestone blast furnaces and neon lighting systems and chemicals synthesised from fossilised trees. Perhaps we can tinker with the word ‘money’ itself. It’s a mass noun, like you’d use for some kind of tangible substance, and it makes money sound like a ‘thing-in-itself’. As a kind of mental discipline, I prefer to use a different word: COGAS. It stands for ‘claims on goods and services’, which is all money really is. And now I have a word that describes itself, as opposed to one that actively hides its own reality. It sounds trivial, but the linguistic process works a subtle psychological loop, referring money to the world outside itself. It’s a simple way to start peeling back the façade.
"To go deeper, we need to start actually experimenting with alternatives. Money, we know, is a technology, and it can be designed for different purposes — always for exchange, of course, but with auxiliary characteristics. To uncover and experience these characteristics, I actively play around with as many esoteric currencies as possible [...]"
Note 4: Smofs of the Jürgen Habermas fandom will rapidly spot a certain coin lying glinting on its flip side. Rather than thinking about how money (a steering medium which allows people to co-ordinate their actions without necessarily understanding each other's motives) may actually be rooted in a shared lifeworld (a sphere in which communicative rationality has priority, in which action is oriented towards mutual understanding, and in which conflicting norms lead to deliberative resolutions), Scott is interested here in how aspects of a lifeworld may emerge from a particular form of money. Steering media embedded in lifeworld and lifeworld embedded in steering media . . . Note 5: Compare the poet Sean Bonney in "Letter Against Ritual":
"[...] How he couldn't tell the difference between his prison cell and the entire cluster of universes. How the stars were nothing but apocalypse routines, the constellations negative barricades. I was thinking about the work-ethic, how it's evoked obsessively, like an enemy ritual, some kind of barbaric, aristocratic superstition. About zero-hours contracts, anti-magnetic nebulae sucking the working day inside out. Negative-hours. Gruel shovelled into all the spinning pits of past and future centuries, spellbound in absolute gravity, an invisibility blocking every pavement I was walking down. I wanted to cry. In fact I think I did. Actually, no. I was laughing my head off. A grotesque, medieval cackle. No despair, just defiance and contempt. Ancient disturbances. Ghost towns and marching bands. Invisible factories. Nostalgia crackling into pain and pure noise. No sleep. No dreams. An endless, undifferentiated regime of ersatz work [...]"
A snippet from Jonathan McCalmont's column in the latest Interzone(248) (in which he talks about M. John Harrison, about decontextualising stuff as a sign of commodification, but also sometimes as a tactic of critique / resistance, and about imagining the future as often perhaps a historiographical practice masquerading as an extrapolative one).
"[...] To walk down a British high street is to drown in a thousand incongruous images: Shop windows are filled with suits designed to make office workers feel as though they are going to work in a contemporary TV producer’s idea of a 1960s advertising agency. Cafés staffed by men sporting the facial hair of Edwardian circus performers bring Ethiopian coffee to Filipino nurses in cups that were made in South Korea but inspired by a 1940s British fashion for ‘real’ China porcelain. Dead people write books, dead people release albums and every cinema is clogged with fifth-generation reinventions of intellectual properties made in different times for different people. Don’t like Captain Kirk and Superman returning to the 1980s to re-fight the same old villains? Don’t worry… give it enough time and someone will come along and reimagine Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Frank Miller’s response to the campy 1960s TV adaptation of a 1930s comic book. The odd thing about the incoherent deluge of contemporary culture is not that it is filled with old ideas but that so many of these ideas appear to have been lifted directly from other times and places. The problem is not a surplus of old ideas but a lack of interest in the broader cultural stories that once made these objects meaningful. [...]"
Oisin Murphy-Lawless has written a piece for the Scottish Book Trust about Iain Banks and games, prompting me to excavate this nugget on the same topic. It comes from a paper at the Crime Scotland conference in Göttingen last year, where the chat was all banging and the lanyards were all recycled at the end.
If “Nobody is [God]” (Complicity (1996) p. 303), nobody has reliable knowledge of whether their actions will matter, or how they will matter, in the long run. One sensible-seeming route is to try to carve a small, resistant enclave within the universe’s grand complexity, for which and within which it is possible to take moral responsibility.
The importance of games to an author with the materialist predilections and preoccupations which I’ve already outlined may relate to the contrast that games provide to matter: overt abstraction, rather than mystifying reduction; a small scale, not a grand historical one; and a hermetic system of incontrovertible values. Once a point within a game within is won, it stays won, whereas any commendable action may be controverted into a reprehensible action retrospectively, when seen against a grand historical sweep.
But if games are a counterpoint to matter, Banks takes pains to ensure they’re an untidy one. Games in Banks's books frequently disregard their boundaries, and refuse to have outcomes which can only be internally adjudicated.
In Surface Detail (2010), for instance, issues over which wars might otherwise be fought are settled in immersive simulated realities, with suffering but without loss of life. As it happens, the party with whom the reader is likely to sympathise break the convention during the course of the novel, escalating the war into the material world.
More subtly, in Inversions (1998), DeWar and Perrund, a royal bodyguard and concubine respectively, form a friendship and indeed perhaps conduct a kind of courtship not only over but through countless bouts of a board game called Leader’s Dispute. Here, styles of play may be psychologically revelatory: for instance, as in Perrund’s charge that DeWar over-prioritises a particular piece, or her hearsay with respect to the dissembling hustler YetAmidous.
Player of Games (1988) portrays a civilisation whose political system is almost entirely encapsulated within a complicated game, evolved over millenia. The escalation of politics beyond this game’s boundaries seems unlikely, insofar as ideological deliberation is one dimension of gameplay. For individuals of this civilisation it is difficult to conceive of a political argument being stronger or weaker, more or less worthy of passionate loyalty, except in the context of its deployment within the game. The eponymous protagonist is a visitor from another civilisation, who overthrows the political system with an unprecedented style of play.
Untidy and spookily efficacious games are not, of course, confined to Iain M[aterialist] Banks's work. Iain Banks's Stonemouth (2012) includes the example of a Wee Malky, whose life is ended by a paintball bullet. Alban, the protagonist of The Steep Approach to Gabardale (2007), seeks to persuade his family's Extraordinary General Meeting not to sell their business to a voracious American corporation. Their business is based on a board game, Empire!, but Alban's behaviour itself, for all that it manifests an authentic moral dialectic, also has a distinctly gamified feel to it. (And Alban's mission to win (over) the EGM is in turn, in good family saga fashion, the occasion for all manner of intrigue, emotion, lust, vendetta, manipulation, revelation, and allegory of US oil imperialism).
The translation of psychological and other norms confirmed within games into other realms is likewise unpredictable.
For instance, another character in Stonemouth, Phelpie, is known is for taking excruciatingly long over his Poker moves. One possibility raised is that Phelpie is rather ponderously working through some probability mathematics, instead of playing instinctively; but there is a countersuggestion that Phelpie’s style of play is grounded sentimentally in extra-game factors: he likes to slow down the whole social situation, to blur and broaden what can be a macho, narrow competitive focus on the game. Either way, when he leaps on a gunsel in the novel’s dénouement, Phelpie’s transposition of his technique of card-counting into the more dangerous game of counting the number of rounds fired does not go as planned.
Indeed, one gets the sense with Banks that a game is not necessarily a rule-governed practice so much an area in which various practices overlap and support each other with sufficient density to give rise to rules, which thereafter have a reflexive but always provisional effect on the zone of overlap. What is necessary for a game to exist is not consensus, but certain forms of family resemblance among the various normative regimes inhabited by different players. Any move is by definition a move in several different games at once.
In this sense I think Banks’s games are archetypal of a whole suite of imperfect models, heuristics and dynamic idealisations with which the complications of materiality are necessarily confronted, but which that materiality inevitably exceeds.
I would include the resources of genre in this category . . .
The paper went on to discuss genre, which was an okay direction to take it, but perhaps a better progression would be to explore Banks's coding and decoding conceits: messages manifest in pelvic squeezes, guano, gangster dentistry, laser scars, etc. I feel like there's an exciting nexus in Banks's books involving codes, games, chaos, and the space operatic grand scale. Maybe I'll get round to it eventually. In 2010, speaking at Transgressions & Its Limits at Stirling University, Banks was asked about the possibility of Culture movie. His response was that that would be fine and everything, but he'd probably be more interested in a game.
NOVEL John Scalzi, Redshirts.
NOVELLA Brandon Sanderson, The Emperor's Soul.
NOVELETTE Pat Cadigan, 'The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi' (Edge of Infinity).
SHORT Ken Liu, 'Mono no Aware' (The Future is Japanese).
RELATED WORK Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, Howard Tayler & Jordan Sanderson, Writing Excuses, Season Seven.
GRAPHIC STORY Brian K. Vaughan & Fiona Staples, Saga, Volume One.
DRAMATIC – LONG The Avengers.
DRAMATIC – SHORT Game of Thrones: 'Blackwater'.
EDITOR – SHORT Stanley Schmidt.
EDITOR – LONG Patrick Nielsen Hayden.
PRO ARTIST John Picacio.
SEMIPROZINE Clarkesworld.
FANZINE SF Signal.
FANCAST SF Squeecast.
FAN WRITER Tansy Rayner Roberts.
FAN ARTIST Galen Dara.
JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD Mur Lafferty.
In The Guardian, @davidmbarnett comments, "Personally, I've always liked the Hugos purely because they do follow the populist line. The SF world is richly represented by awards that honour different works for different reasons. The Clarkes go for the big, cerebral SF novels of the year. The Kitschies give a nod to the edgy and unconventional. The Hugos celebrate the popular. In a genre whose fanbase is often seen as elitist, this is a very good thing – especially when it comes to perhaps opening it up to a wider, mainstream audience." The Hugo awards: 'beauty contest' or prize of the people?
"The problem with all simulations is that the laws of physics, which appear continuous, have to be superimposed onto a discrete three dimensional lattice which advances in steps of time. [..] The question that Beane and co ask is whether the lattice spacing imposes any kind of limitation on the physical processes we see in the universe." The Matrix hypothesis, simulations of tiny bits of reality that go to the finest grain we can possibly access and so are in a sense actually real, cutting edge anthropic reasoning, and developing the empirical tests: seriously, are we living in a simulation?(MIT Technology Review).
"But making a ‘hole’ in my spacesuit really would be a last resort." What's more, astronaut Luca Parmitano lived to blog the tale!
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The Invocation paperback is now (sort of) available on Amazon. For Edinburgh folk, there may also be a few cut-price copies in Pulp Fiction. Still way cheaper on Kindle. You backed the fun run, now back the fam ram. I mean, I suppose I would recommend supporting Steve Aylett's Heart of the Original (Unbound).
Recently I've been thinking a bit about the relationship between the avant-garde impetus in today's speculative fiction and poetry (a division which, BTW, Aylett sprawls across noncommitally). This here is the speculative fiction blog and there will be no mission creep . . . but readers curious about the poetic state of the art could do worse than to check out Hix Eros (PDF), a shiny new reviews sheet with a focus on small press, political and experimental poetry.
Who pays if an autonomous car gets ticketed? The vehicles themselves? Presumably they can moonlight as cabs? Autonomous Nissans, Volvos(Engadget) and GoogleWhips (Wired), on our roads within a decade.
The oligopilistic imperative to simultaneously hit the shelv-- no, they won't hit anything,that's their whole point. Still, each make of self-driving car will be separately developed and tested only in the context of human-driven traffic. Then they'll all zoom out onto the roads at once: could the various systems interact in unforeseen ways? Whatever: telly that watches itself.
"It is not quite enough to argue, as Kincaid does, that there is no 'unique, common origin' for the genre (415); the collective and accretive social process by which SF has been constructed does not have the kind of coherent form or causality that allows one to talk about origins at all. Even without reference to Wittgenstein's anti-essentialism, the historical approach to genre proposed in Hans-Robert Jauss's reception theory exposes the logical problem with identifying the moment of origin for a genre insofar as, for Jauss, the notion of genre is based on repetition and is strictly opposed to his notion of originality. In Jauss's reception theory, there cannot be a first example of a genre, because the generic character of a text is precisely what is repeated and conventional in it. A text can violate established generic expectations, but it can only be said to have established new expectations when other texts, in imitating its strategies, solidify them into the features of a genre. In order for a text to be recognized as having generic features, it must allude to a set of strategies, images, or themes that has already emerged into the visibility of a conventional or at least repeatable gesture. Genre, therefore, is always found in the middle of things, never at the beginning of them."
The essay is filled with sensible and subtle perspectives -- if perhaps a little given to that pragmatism / post-structuralism lite tic of playing off a "come all ye" pluralism against the insistence that some things (often it's a centre, an origin) do not exist here, as though everybody assumed that they did, and as though these assumptions of ours are moreover magnificently literal, rather than provisional manners of speaking which we can suspend when we feel like it.
(Maybe John Frow's idea that texts use genres instead of belonging to them does not really belong to the single true heart of Rieder's essay's essence: I don't see why science fiction texts can't both use and belong to science fiction, particularly since one of the ways in which science fiction texts use science fiction is by confronting readers with richly equivocal relationships of belonging to it: set membership, ownership, lineage, constitution, rhizomic pathfinding etc.).
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"Science fiction fandom presents itself as a friendly and inclusive space and is so desperate to believe in its own myth of inclusivity that the myth now serves as a barrier to reform." Jonathan McCulmont on fandom and racefail. See also, from September 2011, Rachael of Social Justice League on How to be a Fan of Problematic Things.
"The DABs were written in standard DoD memorandum format and addressed the commander US SOUTHCOM. Each memorandum gave basic and background information about a specific detainee held at some point by Joint Task Force Guantanamo. [...] I have always been interested on the issue of the moral efficacy of our actions surrounding Joint Task Force Guantanamo. On the one hand, I have always understood the need to detain and interrogate individuals who might wish to harm the United States and our allies, however, I felt that's what we were trying to do at Joint Task Force Guantanamo. [...] However, the more I became educated on the topic, it seemed that we found ourselves holding an increasing number of individuals indefinitely that we believed or knew to be innocent, low level foot soldiers that did not have useful intelligence and would be released if they were still held in theater. [...] I also recall that in early 2009 the, then newly elected president, Barack Obama, stated that he would close Joint Task Force Guantanamo, and that the facility compromised our standing over all, and diminished our quote 'moral authority' unquote".
Private Manning's Statement for the Providence Inquiry.
Following Snowden's leak of NSA slides, Facebook has started disclosing information about government surveillance requests.Global Government Requests Report.
"The organizations are now running into outside contractors who grew up in the globalized, liquid labor world of Generation X and Generation Y, with Generation Z fast approaching." Charles Stross on why some demographics just can't keep a secret (ForeignPolicy.com). See also Stross on the prospect of Western intervention in Syria.
ForeignPolicy.com, BTW, bills Charles Stross as a sci-fi visionary. Have they seen his visions?
"Brains, fresh brains for Baby Jesus," crooned the farm in a warm contralto, startling Joe half out of his skin. "Buy my brains!" Half a dozen disturbing cauliflower shapes poked suggestively out of the farm's back and then retracted again, coyly. ("Rogue Farm," 2003)
"Generally speaking, 80 percent of the information one needs to form judgments on key intelligence targets or issues is available in open media." Ray McGovern, quoted by Arthur Silber in You Too Can, & Should Be an Intelligence Analyst.
Fans of Justin Belieber fail in their brute force attack on his Twitter account, presumably mostly because they just laughingly tweeted their password guesses to one another and didn't try inputting them.
Tim Maughan has all the latest, juiciest celebrity rumors: why just the other day Hannah Montana twerked, waggled tongue. How to Manufacture Outrage Online in 10 Easy Steps (Pop of Culture). Perhaps responding to the linkbait impasse, the fact that it's nearly impossible to quell a marketing eruption like this -- since even dismissive exposure of its mechanisms is likely to fan its flames / inflame its fans -- Maughan does the next best thing and gets a plug in for his own stuff. See also: The Onion, where Odo Meredith Artley has a similarly frank take (rising paywall alert) on why Cyrus counts as big news; Radius of Gyration (Real World Physics Problems); Paolo Bacigalupi's short story "The Gambler," (Fast Forward 2) in which a certain kind of commodification of the news leads to a society incapable of understanding or governing itself. "Marty does a pelvic grind of victory, then waves at everyone for their attention."
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Just for fun, here's some recent marketing from Paolo Bacigalupi himself:
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"While supreme willpower is a common trait among ultrarunners, Karnazes first realised that he was actually biologically different when preparing to run 50 marathons in 50 days across the US back in 2006." In honour of Dean Karnazes' running factor (via @DamienGWalter), here's Rob Bricken on The 12 Most Pointless X-men.Some prudent commentary. "Let's be nerds here, okay? / Shall we be nerds? / I feel like you're arguing two points here: useless characters, and useless powers. The two are not the same" (HLHPattison). "As much as I love stories about playground brawls, and would never want superhero stories to abandon them entirely, superheroes have to be able to transcend violent fantasy-fulfillment if they want to remain relevant to people that fantasize about things other than violence" (Daybreaker).
David Langford's Ansible 314, the usual rich miscellany of genre-related events, notices, news and snippets.
One of the summer's most hotly anticipated relysiums. "It's [...] particularly impossible to name a superhero flick that wasn’t supporting what Rajan Khanna calls “the narrative of war”—our caped heroes coming to terms with their own destructive powers and doubting their own roles, even, but never coming to any conclusion apart from that defeating the enemy must be done at any cost, even if that is in the form of massive collateral computer generated damage. And, in the case of The Avengers, that it’s fine to demolish as many New York skyscrapers as you like as long as there’s someone on your team that is literally cosplaying as the American flag." Tim Maughan on Elysium (Tor.com).
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.
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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.
