Frederik Pohl, 'The Midas Plague' (1954).
A kind of world-turned-upside-down post-scarcity dystopia: available to read on Archive.org.
In 'Lessons from science fiction: Frederik Pohl and the robot prosumer' (2020), M.J. Ryder writes:
Drawing on his experience as an advertising copywriter, Pohl often introduces elements of marketing theory and psychology to demonstrate that humans don’t necessarily need machines in order to behave in a machine-like way. Three of his most important works in this regard are his co-authored novel The Space Merchants (1952), and his short stories, ‘The Midas Plague’ (1954), and ‘The Man Who Ate the World’ (1956). While each of these works shares Pohl’s central concern with human-machine relations, they also explore elements of Pohl’s environmentalism, and concern with the impacts of mass-consumption on human life – a key concern of the early post-war period with the dawn of the computer age heralding a raft of new technologies and consumer goods. While machines, robots and automated technologies play an important role in each of these three works, they each blur the boundaries between human and machine, and interrogate the role of humans and machines in the cycle of production and consumption. It is not enough that machines produce and humans consume, but rather that humans become more and more like machines, such that consumption itself becomes a mechanical process, stripping consumers of agency and creating a dystopian world in which the only ‘freedom’ is the freedom not to consume, and is a freedom limited to the very rich.
