Banks, Iain M. The Culture series

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).

I wrote about this a little bit in the reflective part of my PhD. I said:

"This episode suggests a technologically privileged and sexually liberal version of commodity theory, with the same progression from inconvenient, illiquid, spot-trade barters to more conveniently liquid transactions. The tenacity of money in the Culture series, flourishing inside its homines economici like gut microbiomes [...] suggests a failure to fully erase money."

(JLW)

Chapman, Stepan. How Alex Became a Machine

Stepan Chapman, "How Alex Became a Machine" (1996?).

Here's a brief mention by Tobias Carroll.

Maughan, Tim. 'Zero Hours'

Tim Maughan, "Zero Hours" (2013). A short, sharp shock about the interface of emerging technologies and low skilled labour (or supposedly low skilled labour, perhaps).

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, hello extreme precarity, 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.

Also see "Four Days of Christmas" at Motherboard.

(JLW)

Mitchell, Lisa Swope. Rena in the Desert

Lisa Swope Mitchell, 'Rena in the Desert' (2020)

Parched in the desert, Rena stumbles upon an automated motel, apparently empty apart from a little girl. It is an elegant slice of near future Americana with the feel of a haunted house story, or a fable, perhaps an island in The Odyssey or one of those enchanted castles from the Matter of Britain. There is a fair bit of worldbuilding woven in: ecological and economic catastrophe, crumbling rule of law. And there is something interesting going on to do with English, Spanish, labour, automation, and the nuclear family: Although homeless and arguably an internally displaced person, Rena is also a sort of deranged figure of privilege, a gun-wielding consumer whose collapsed US dollars and high school Spanish somehow is able to command, at least for a few hours, the tawdry dream of a domestic space where somebody else or something else does all your cooking and cleaning.

Here Rena checks in:

“You have selected: one single room. For: one night,” affirmed the AutoMotel. A slot on the desk blinked red. “Please insert cash or card to select your currency.” 

Rena expected the bills to come spitting back at her, but the AutoMotel sucked them in and informed her of the increasing total. At eighty-nine, another slot lit green, and a card popped out. The girl pounced on it, then slid it ceremonially across the desk.  

“Your room is: 2B,” the AutoMotel said. “Please take your keycard.”  

Rena stared. Something wasn’t right. Little girls did not run motels alone—not even an automated system like this one—little girls did not face unknown travelers alone, and they sure as shit didn’t control large supplies of fresh water, currently one of the more valuable commodities in this part of the North American continent. Not by themselves. And even if they did, they wouldn’t sell that water, or anything else, for paper money issued by a failing government with no authority in this region. Hell, even in Chicago the black market ran on CAD. Somewhere, there must be somebody else. A mother or father, hiding, waiting to catch her off guard.  

Alarm bells should have been jangling down her spine, sirens blaring through her subconscious, but somehow all was quiet. She took the keycard.

Penny, Laurie. 'Real Girls'

Laurie Penny, 'Real Girls' (2018)

A brief and beautifully buffed tale of digital sex work of the very near future.

Some comments on the story's portrayal of automation over at Vector.

Pohl, Frederik. 'The Midas Plague'

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.

Pohl, Frederik. The Midas Plague

Frederik 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).

Mild spoiler: in the future, the rich have the luxury of living modest lifestyles, while the "poor" have to constantly consume.

(JLW)

Roddenberry, Gene. Star Trek

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. 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.

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:



Trekonomics from Inkshares on Vimeo.

Stross, Charles. Singularity Sky

Charles Stross, Singularity Sky (2003). Entry in ISFDB. Stross's entry in SFE.