This wiki originates in this discussion.
Please contribute to mapping out economic concepts in science fiction. In this wiki, we are going for short entries, focused on the economics surfacing in each sci-fi work. Other resources are more appropriate to discuss plot, characters, technology, etc. Though this post does not look like Wikimedia, it is a full wiki, with a version history and editable by any logged-in user. If you need any help, reach out to me. In fact, feel free to reach out even if you do not!
More info on using wikis in Discourse are here.
Economic Science Fiction proper
Novels
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The Dispossessed, by Ursula Leguin. Set between the two planets (or planet and moon) of Urras and Anarres. Urras is a planet on the edge of collapse under an unwieldy late-capitalism; Anarres is an anarcho-syndicalist state on a barren inhospitable moon. The story tells of a scientist from Anarres who has to travel back to the homeworld of Urras, and in the process ends up feeling isolated and disconnected from both worlds. Ecological economist Giorgos Kallis has used the economy of Anarres to illustrate what a degrowth-based society could look like (see). Phenomenologically, Anarres is an anarco-syndicalist world. There is no private property, no police, only a loose planning that consist in posting jobs that need to be done and free access to commons (kitchen, transport, housing, etc.). More details on Anarresâs economy can be found in this essay, also by Kallis. Mineral resources mostly stay in the ground, and humans on Anarres, though they live in a barren world with a much less rich ecosystem than Earthâs, are not headed for environmental collapse. The microeconomic theory supporting all this seems to rest on (a) hardwired social pressure to âdo your partâ, much as in human hunter-gatherers bands, and further encoded in the prevailing ideology (âOdonianâ); (b) Anarresti practice sharing, which engenders abundance (âis not that the Anarresti are not poor because nobody goes hungry. They are not poor because nobody goes hungry while another eatsâ), which in turns engender self-limitation. The paper also invokes Le Guinâs work to argue that degrowth economies (or maybe any economic system?) can only be achieved through conflict. This is a theoretical asset, because it implies that there is little point in trying to achieve a perfectly incentive-compatible static model.
Related work in economics. There is an essay collection, The New Politics of Ursula K. Le Guinâs The Dispossessed. @jolwalton has contributed to papers mentioning this book here (focusing on Divlab and computation) and here (contrasting it to Edward Bellamyâs state-socialist utopia). Ecological economics Giorgos Kallis discusses The Dispossed in a chapter of the book In defence of degrowth (see).
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Another Now, by Yanis Varoufakis. Varoufakis is not a professional sci-fi author, but an economist and politician, and a former finance minister of Greece (see). Costa, a scientist and technologist, opens a communication channel to an alternate present that forked from our timeline in 2008, when the fork (âOther Nowâ) reacted to the financial crisis with deep reform and comprehensive mobilization. The book is built as the correspondence between Costa and his friends Iris and Eva in Our Now with their doppelgĂ€ngers in the Other Now. Varoufakis, a game theorist, engineered some clever forms of collective struggle. Crowdshorters syncronize withholding of (heterogeneous) payments that form the different parts of the same securitized debt. This crashes the value of those securities, and brings chaos to financial markets. Solsourcers maintain a blacklist of evil companies, and organize mass withholdings of contribution payments to those pension funds that invest in those companies. Pension funds bow to the will of contributors, and divest from the companes on the blacklist. Bladerunners target Big Tech companies with consumer/user strikes: while the drops in revenue they cause are minimal, these strikes have a big effect on the price of those companiesâ shares, and that gives Bladerunners an edge. In general, the idea is to use the massive financialization of late-stage capitalism as an agent of chaos against capitalism itself. The book is not an easy read, but it contains many fresh ideas for new forms of, for lack of a better term, class struggle.
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The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson. A near-future fictional account of how human race managed a partial victory against climate change (partial because there are still mass extinctions, mass-lethal heat waves etc.). The novel dedicates a lot of attention to economic aspects, from carbon taxations to the subtraction of essentials like health, education and housing to the logic of the market. A special place is reserved for the largest central banks (Federal Reserve, ECB, Bank of China), who end up being the worldâs reluctant saviours. They do so by bailing out struggling banks against equity, which effectively nationalized most commercial banks, and by underwriting a currency that consists in tradeable tokens represented future disbursements against tons of carbon sequestered from the atmosphere. Transactions in this currency are blockchained and de-anonymized, which allows full financial transparency and even a takedown of the tax havens. Eco-terrorism also plays a significant role in driving the transition in the book. We discuss Ministry in this thread. @jolwalton wrote reviews here (focusing on political economy) and here.
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Walkaway, by Cory Doctorow. Depicts an economy entirely based on DIY production, in the book made cheap at an arbitrarily small scale by advanced 3D printing and biotech. Production is organized like a Wikipedia-style project. The book makes the argument that reputation bookkeeping (kudos, karma etc.) invites gaming of the system, and is an inferior way to organize production to a pure gift economy (given some key abundances). It also makes the case for defection from mainstream society (exit in Hirschmanâs terms) as a viable strategy when cheap, open tech is available. @jolwalton writes about it (and some other books) here. There is a good set of responses here.
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Distraction, by Bruce Sterling. This novel focuses on politics, but the action happens against a backdrop of economic semi-collapse, where only about a third of people participate into the mainstream economy, and many of them do so by forming parts of the retinues of rich people (âkrewsâ). Many people are nomads, and live on cheap-and-open tech and biotech. Nomad society is organized around âreputation serversâ storing reputation as a currency. The book also contains a funny (but chilly) conversation in which one of the character, a car industry executive, explains why radical innovation is bad for business.
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Makers, by Cory Doctorow. A near-future novel centered on Schumpeterian creative destruction, as enacted by a movement called New Work. New Work is all about very small, networked business units working as independent companies within large corporates (who no longer have a viable business model, but who do have viable plumbing and cash from the good old days). These companies dream up new products, build them on top of cheap, open source components, immediately get imitated and undercut by others, and move on to the next product, surfing the wave of novelty and high margins. The movement gets eventually busted by Wall Street pulling the plug on something it does not understand. Many ideas generated in economics are floating around Makers beside creative destruction: Bertrand competition, building-blocks technical innovation, Arrowâs paradox and others. @alberto wrote a complete review from the point of view of an economist.
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The Lost Cause, by Cory Doctorow. It is a depiction of a near-future America ravaged by climate change, where a progressive presidency (later defeated in presidential elections, after two terms) has instituted a robust Green New Deal. This comes with a Job guarantee, the flagship policy of Modern Monetary Theory: people in the novella always have the option to take a public sector job, which normally would be some sort of nature reclamation-, public housing-, or social work. This policy, however, is opposed by American conservatives. Several characters have served or currently serve in the the United Nationsâ Blue Helmets, which have taken on the purpose of a combat engineering corps, and deployed on large projects of relief from climate disasters or ecosystem regeneration. Discussion on the novella is here.
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Stealing Worlds, by Karl Schroeder. Both plot and worldbuilding of this novel are unusually rich. From an economic standpoint, the two main devices are (1) the rise of in-game economies, whereby people can earn virtual gold by working in mixed reality games, for example accepting to act as non-playing characters. Eventually these economies end up replacing the ârealâ one. And (2) fully trustable, pervasive blockchains, which anchor not only designer currencies (for example inflationary ones) but also smart contracts. This unlocks the possibility for non-human entities, like river basins or forests or glaciers, to spawn DAOs that work on their behalf with no human at the helm, and to have human-ish looking avatars and even personalities, via the game engines. Climate change has been contained, just about, by a strict social credit scoring that freely gives people necessities, but will only release luxuries to those that maintain a prosocial behavior. Ubiquitous surveillance means that the collectiveâs power to induce such behaviour is quite strong: human reproduction is regulated, pets are almost universally prohibited. The idea that the âreal economyâ is pushing more and more people into poverty and debt slavery is reminescent of Doctorowâs Walkaway. There is, however, a bit of an inconsistency: if the world is fighting disruptive climate change and restrictions on resources, where did the investments to create flawless mixed reality everywhere come from? Given the conflicts, where did the political goodwill to create harmonious technical standards that make everything interoperable with anything else, even to a full Internet of Things? In general, production is somewhat absent: things just appear, delivered by drones. Also, blockchains in this world have not gone scammy like in ours.
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Autonomous, by Annalee Newitz. Itâs a far future, earth-bound scenario with advanced biotech, under a corporate rulership primarily powered by extreme intellectural property rights. She goes deep in the debate between master-servant relationships, as the world features both classic human indebted servitude and autonomous artifically intelligent robots as well as into piracy, open knowledge, addiction and freedom.
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Freedom TM, by Daniel Suarez. Suarez imagines a market economy based on âdarknet creditsâ. It looks like prices of different things as denominated in darknet credits are determined by market mechanisms, but itâs hard to say. The darknet economy emerges in two steps: first, a complicated scheme enacted by a weak (but very effective) AI extracts money off large financial corporations, funding the transition to the new economy (a pretty bloody one, that entails eliminating some plutocrats and violently wiping out drug cartels). Second, the fledgling economy turns out to be very efficient, because it wastes much less energy in corporate bullshit and does not care about IPRs. The critique of the inefficiencies of late capitalism is sharp enough, but there is no real explanation for why the agents of the darknet economy do not become extractive and bullshitting like those of the mainstream economy.
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Webs of Varok (Cary Neeper, 2012). In the book a woman from Earth is adopted into an alien family on a world which has a green, steady-state economy. (Mild spoiler) The villain of the book is somebody who doesnât want to abide by the economic restrictions. Dr. Neeper (PhD in Microbiology, not Economics) uses the book to envisage what a steady state economy might be like unencumbered with Earthâs political history. She posts about her sources for the economics on her website at http://ArchivesOfVarok.com. The book interesting, but questions remain about how productivity growth (the economy of Varok devotes a large portion of is research to science) would effect the steady state economy.
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A Half-Built Garden, by Ruthanna Emrys. It features a post-climate change Earth where humans are divided into three blocs. Corporations have built and colonized artificial islands in an effort to escape the worst of the effects of climate change. The other two blocs, vestigial nation-states and polities called âwatershedsâ, share the same terrain but work along different principles. Watersheds are semi-sovereign entities created to steward the basins of each river on Earth. Since ecology interconnects everything â and the other two blocs have proven ineffective, or worse, at preserving survivable conditions, they end up in charge of most infrastructures and public services. The watershedsâ economy is not described in detail (the book focuses rather on their governance model), but it seems in line with most solarpunk fiction. The most salient economic fact is the presence of a planetary economy where late-stage capitalism co-exists (uneasily) with a commons-based economy of sorts.
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Gamechanger, by L. X. Beckett. It depicts a world trying, and mostly succeeding, to come back from the brink of climate- and civilizational collapse, as the backdrop to a very dense plot. Beckettâs economy has several radical elements: a dual system where basic goods and services are free, but luxuries are scarce, and many severely rationed (for example, almost no one is allowed to keep pets); a social credit scoring system; carbon as a currency. These elements, however, do not manage to feel like a coherent system. The main inconsistency I see is the comprehensive augmented-reality infosphere that seems to cover the entire planet. This kind of thing requires investments that would have competed with those needed to abate greenhouse gases emissions, revamp the Amazon and in general undo the damage done by the previous eras of profligacy.
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Memoirs of a Spacewoman, by Naomi Mitchinson
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The Final Circle of Paradise, by Strugatski Brothers
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Shockwave Rider, by John Brunner
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The Year 200, by Augustin de Roja
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Michaelmas, by Algis Budrys
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The Syndic, by C.M.Kornbluth
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The Space Merchants, by Pohl and Kornbluth
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Down and Out in the Magic Kindgom, by Cory Doctorow. Explores the idea of a reputation-based economy. @jolwalton wrote a paper about it here.
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Neptuneâs Brood, by Charles Stross (loose sequel to Saturnâs Children and inspired by Debt: The First Five Thousand Years). âNeptuneâs Brood invents an economic framework for space colonization, complete with fast, medium and slow cryptocurrencies. Because colonizing a star system is an insanely large investment that takes an insanely long time. Stross discusses his economic thinking on his blog.â
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Subspace Explorers, by E. E. Smith (âThe Principle of Enlightened Self Interestâ as the basis of an economy)
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Ring of Fire, by Eric Flint (Unions as the basis of commonwealth)
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Centenal Cycle series, by Malka Olders (more political than economic but placing here for high relevance)
Book 1: Infomocracy
Book 2: Null States
Book 3: State Tectonics -
New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson. It depicts a future New York City where see levels went up 15 meters, and submerged much of the city, including Lower Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. This drove real estate values to near-zero: as a result, capital withdrew inland and urban climate refugees (âwater ratsâ) were left to fend for themselves. The city becomes divided into above-water Uptown, home to second homes for the ultra-rich, and the Intertidal, the area between the low tide and and a high tide mark, which is (barely) inhabitable thanks to technological improvement in waterproofing and material science in general. In the Intertidal, the work of re-purposing and adapting the existing building stock is done by water rats, who organize according to a molteplicity of economic models (âin the years after the flooding there was a proliferation of cooperatives, neighborhood associations, communes, squats, barter, alternative currencies, gift economies, solar usufruct, fishing village cultures, mondragons, unions, Davyâs locker freemasonries, anarchist blather, and submarine technoculture, including aeration and aquafarming [âŠ]â). Notably, KSR sees this as a sort of controlled experiment, still in the hands of late-stage capitalist Ă©lites (âWait and see what those crazy people did with it, and if it was good, buy it. As always, right?â), This points to the risk of exploitation implicit in socially innovative practices.
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2312, by Kim Stanley Robinson. Set in a later epoch in the same future history as the Mars trilogy and New York 2140. It depicts a solar system economy, with a fully terraformed Mars, Venus, Titan and Triton well on their way to their own full terraforming, colonies on Mercury, Luna and other moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and plenty of hollowed out asteroids. The economy is dual. âSpaceâ, meaning everything except Earth and Mars, is run by the Mondragon Accord. This is a network of space settlements, which started out their economies as scientific stations (and so as planned economies). As these economies grew in size and complexity, they drew inspiration by Mondragon (âa small Basque town that ran an economic system of nested co-ops organized for mutual supportâ). The Mondragon Accord is characterized as a more sophisticated planned economy, run by quantum computers making real-time adjustments in production schedules. Markets and capitalism are still there, but they âtended to be private unregulated individual enterprises in nonessential goods. Capitalism was in effect relegated to the margin, and the necessities of life were a shared commons exchange between Earth and individual space colonies was on a national or treaty-association basis, thus a kind of colonial modelâ. Earth is still run by late-stage capitalism; Mars has withdrawn from the Mondragon Accord and is described as a âplanetary social democratic economyâ.
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Red Plenty, by Francis Spufford. A mix of history and fiction, it is a sort of docudrama on the Soviet Unionâs 1960s attempt to upgrade its economic planning using computers and scientific methods. The main economic concept called into play is that of shadow prices. These are estimates of the cost of a product or service based on the willingness to pay, that is, what the relevant economic actor is willing to give up to obtain that product or service. A group of Soviet economists attempts to reform the way the economy works: now factories are supposed to pursue a âshadow profitâ made by meeting their objectives while using preferentially those inputs that have a lower shadow price. The reform collides with the âfolkâ ways in which these decisions have traditionally been made, and finally fails. This book is rich in insight about the nuts-and-bolts of a deep economic reform. Also discussed in the thread below, especially this post.
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Numbercaste, by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne. A near-future novel where a Silicon Valley corporation replaces credit scoring with a quantification of their influence, scraped from social media. Sold with a bottom-up microservices model, the company integrates the use of this system into every customer-facing aspect of life - from restaurants to banks to nightclubs. Also examines a similar system being constructed in China but pushed using top-down methods. A key theme is how this quantification of social influence eventually cripples upward mobility (except in those who can game the system), due to children inheriting the social networks of their parents. A late-stage concept is how this âstickâ in turned into a âcarrotâ - by means of an app that will now tell people who to talk to, who to mingle with, who to know based on the likelihood of it increasing their Number.
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Utopia Five, by A. E. Currie. Depicts a post-event, capitalist surveillance economy, where surveillance data have become public record. Entrepreneurs like the main characters build profit-making applications on those data including games, search engines, social credit, and law enforcement systems. These are then operated under the constant threat of a form of nationalisation. The day-to-day operation of the world is loosely based on Cuba and its recovery from the special period of the 1990âs, which was characterised by sudden severe shortages of hydrocarbon energy sources and necessitated a complete overhaul of the countryâs agriculture, diet and transport. The novel is clearly influenced by the current high levels of private and state surveillance, particularly in the UK and China, and the uses to which that data is put.
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The Culture Series, by Iain Banks. These novels are set in the far future. The economy they depict is one of post-scarcity, sustained by technologies of inconceivable power (âhandwaviumâ). The Culture is a galactic polity whose citizens are both biological and non-biological sophonts. Humans predominate among biologicals. AIs, many of which embodied in ships, are vastly smarter and more powerful, and do most of the societal heavy lifting. The most important economic concept deployed is that a post-scarcity society which is leisure-oriented. Culture people (and AIs) focus on âserious funâ elaborated games, art forms, extreme sports, re-enactments of past events, and so on. In this sense, Banks is following up on the Keynesâ famous 1930 essay, Economic possibilities for our grandchildren. His contribution consists in giving an âarchitectâs renderingâ of what it would feel like to live in a post-scarcity world. He agrees with Keynesâ strategy of boosting the arts as a way to keep people engaged and happy in a world without work.
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MetaGame, by Sam Landstrom. It describes a world rebuilt on a more or less clean slate after a pandemic wiped out most of the population. As a new starting point, Landstrom has chosen Mihaly Cskiszentmihalyiâs idea of Flow. Since Flow is achieved in play, it follows that a total gamification of the economy leads to the maximally efficient outcome. For example, a minor character works (or rather âplaysâ) as an operator of small robots who clean public spaces such as tunnels and hallways. To him, he is playing a game (itself a part of the economy-wide Game), where he earns points for clean surfaces, but he has to spend points to rent the robots. Points are used as the systemâs currency. In a sense, this is a Coaseian world where hierarchies have no reason to exist, because the Game brokers between playersâ supply and demand schedules. On the other hand, he does imagine s form of collective production unit: the Great Houses, large families with thousands of members, that have replaced corporations. The author explains they grew out of civil unions, after some activists successfully fought for the right to have civil unions between more than two people.
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The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert A. Heinlein. The Moon is a former penal colony, where convicted criminals have been deported and left there with a skeletal surveillance crew. Escape being all but impossible, authorities are unconcerned about what prisoners and their descendants do, as long as they keep farming grain and shipping it to an overpopulated Earth. In this situation, a free market âRandianâ economy has evolved. Everything is purchased on the market, including health care, insurance (from bookmakers) and oxygen. The book has some an unusual attention for economic matters, but according to this editor (@alberto) its economic system is familiar (as an abstractiion) with anyone whoâs been through Economics 101.
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The Caryatids, by Bruce Sterling. The world of 2060 is divided into three spheres of influence, each fighting with the others over the resources of fallen nations and an environment degraded almost to the point of no return. There is the Dispensation, centered in Los Angeles, where entertainment and capitalism have fused with the highest of high-tech. There is the Acquis, a Green-centered collective that uses invasive neurological technology to create a networked utopia (at one point the author refers to it explicitly as a system based on âcommons-based peer productionâ. And there is China, the sole surviving nation-state, a dinosaur that has prospered only by pitilessly pruning its own population.
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The Maddaddam Trilogy, by Margaret Atwood.
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Our Shared Storm: A Movel of Five Climate Futures, by Andrew Dana Hudson. This novel builds five worlds, all centered in Buenos Aires in 2054 during COP, and each one based on one of the five Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) prepared by the IPCC for their Sixth Assessment Report. Some of the scenarios are heavy on economics, others less so. SSP5 is hyper-capitalistic, reminiscent of certain cyberpunk literature; SSP4 is defined by âdecarbonization for the richâ, where high inequality limits the emissions of the poor; and SSP1 is a more solarpunk future that has transitioned.
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The Terrformers by Annalee Newitz. Imagines a universe where FTL is travel, and exoplanets are terraformed either by a public-sector body, the Rangers, or by corporations as real estate investment. There are also mixed jurisdictions, where corporations do the work and reap the benefits, but the Rangers enforce some safeguards. The action is on such a mixed-jurisdiction planet. Terroforming is nearly complete, and the coproration in question is starting to sell the first lots to its clients.This creates a friction with the Rangers, as well as with a community of descendants on the early colonists, bio-engineered for a not-yet-terraformed planet. The whole thing is basically an anti-gentrification struggle blown to planetary proportion, with the Rangers being a potential deal broker in the process. It highlights the value of science fiction in making real-world economic and social dynamics such as gentrification.
Also see @petussingâs own list of pre-1968 works (uncommented).
Short stories
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The Unplugged, by Vinay Gupta. Short story, written in 2006 and speculating about 2030. Vinay (@hexayurt on Edgeryders) imagines a different form of saving (âthree months of salaryâ) as a switch towards a different âRicardianâ economy, underwritten by natural capital + labour. Quite some economics there, in a sense anticipating Walkaway without the conflict. Read it here.
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Green Days in Brunei, by Bruce Sterling. Features post-oil economic problems & politics. In here.
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Cost of Living, by Robert Sheckley. You get credit by mortaging your childâs future earnings. e-book.
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The Subliminal Man, by James Ballard. Hyperconsumerism forced upon people via technology, and planned obsolescence HTML
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Horatius and Clodia, by Charlie Anders. The M1 money supply of the U.S. is digitized and entrusted to a self-aware AI. More of a moral tale. HTML.
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The Writing Contest, by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne. A future where ML models can easily figure out story structures and replicate entire novels and the whole entertainment market is essentially written by bots (Shakespeare 2.0 et al). The last showcase left for human writers is a writing contest. Writing as a career is no longer viable.
Underlying economics / philosophy
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Capitalist Sorcery, Phillip Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers
âThis is a relatively short but potent, and highly thought-provoking book which reassesses capitalism as a âsystem of sorceryâ (40). It engages less with the labyrinths of Marxist theory than with the rhetorical attempt to persuade anti-capitalist fellow travellers and (crucially) potential neophytes, that critical and social progress consists in âinheritingâ Marx anewâŠâ
âStengers and Pignarre launch call to invention, against the spell of the infernal alternatives that bind us to the capitalist ârealistâ logic of choosing between the lesser of unliveable evils. To counter this capture, they propose a political âmagicâ capable of creating new possibilities. But do not be misled: the âmagicâ is all in the technique, and the technique is all in relation. Capitalist Sorcery is a veritable toolbox for an anticapitalist politics of collective empowerment, essential reading for all those interested in movement politics post-Seattle.â
@anique.yael held a reading group on this as a part of her aforementioned reading group on radical political economics and thinks reading a selection of chapters could offer inspiration for thinking of pragmatic and creative tools within Edgerydersâ as a collective. -
The Power at the End of the Economy, Brian Massumi
Rational self-interest is often seen as being at the heart of liberal economic theory. In The Power at the End of the Economy Brian Massumi provides an alternative explanation, arguing that neoliberalism is grounded in complex interactions between the rational and the emotional. Offering a new theory of political economy that refuses the liberal prioritization of individual choice, Massumi emphasizes the means through which an individualâs affective tendencies resonate with those of others on infra-individual and transindividual levels. This nonconscious dimension of social and political events plays out in ways that defy the traditional equation between affect and the irrational. Massumi uses the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement as examples to show how transformative action that exceeds self-interest takes place. Drawing from David Hume, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Niklas Luhmann and the field of nonconsciousness studies, Massumi urges a rethinking of the relationship between rational choice and affect, arguing for a reassessment of the role of sympathy in political and economic affairs.
@anique.yael worked closely with Brian as a part of my research prior to Edgeryders. While this isnât science fiction per say itâs a radical speculation and generous provocation around how to reclaim our power in late capitalism. -
Speculate This! uncertain commons
Speculate This! is a concise, provocative manifesto advocating practices of âaffirmative speculationâ over and against contemporary forms of speculation that quantify and contain risk to generate financial profit for a privileged few. This latter mode of speculation is predatory and familiar, its fallout evident in ongoing environmental degradation, in restrictive legal claims on natural resources in distant lands, and in the foreclosures, evictions, and unemployment resulting from the financial collapse of 2007â08. While such exploitive speculation seeks to reduce uncertainty and pin down the future, the affirmative practices championed by the authors of Speculate This! engage uncertainty, contingency, and difference, and they multiply, rather than reduce, possible futures. In these affirmative practices, social relations and the creation of goods and knowledge are not driven by the desire for financial gain or professional status. Whether manifest in open-source software, eco-communes, global activist movements, community credit networks, or experimental art, speculative living affirms our commonality. As a collaborative work coauthored by a group of anonymous scholars, Speculate This! argues for and embodies affirmative speculation.
@anique.yael read this as a part of a reading group leading up to a seminar with the Economic Space Agency (with whom I continue to collaborate). Itâs a dynamic, fun and accessible read that offers entry into the complex world of speculative finance and our options beyond it. -
Cybernetic Revolutionaries, by Eden Medina
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Economic Science Fictions, Edited by William Davies
Not specifically economic necessarily, but relevant sci-fi worth considering
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Foundation series, by Isaac Asimov
Book 1- Prelude to Foundation
Book 2: Forward the Foundation
Book 3: Foundation
Book 4: Foundation and Empire
Book 5: Second Foundation
Book 6: Foundationâs Edge
Book 7: Foundation and Earth -
Terra Ignota series, by Ada Palmer
Book 1: Too Like the Lightning
Book 2: Seven Surrenders
Book 3: The Will to Battle -
Dune, by Frank Herbert
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Ecotopia and Ecotopia Emerging, Ernest Callenbach
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The Fifth Season (Part of the Broken Earth Series), by N.K Jemisin