Beckbessinger, Sam. Undercurrency

Sam Beckbessinger, 'Undercurrency' (2021).

Part of a whole collection of financial futures. The story relates to a futuristic biofuel kelp farm pilot, located beyond the shallows with the help of drones that drag the kelp up to soak up the sun in the day, down to the sea bed to soak up nutrients in the night. In this new environment, a new subspecies of giant sea snail is thriving. The story explores the economics of environmental management, and in particular conflicts between decarbonisation and preserving biodiversity.

She believes in the market. How its invisible hand can solve the most complex problems, as long as everything has been priced in. Carbon tax treaties. Pollution fines. The costs your business doesn’t have to bear, the benefits they didn’t have to pay for. Her economics professor back in business school called them “externalities”. Her Ouma used to call it “leaving your mess for the fairies to pick up”.

Wole Talabi comments:

A brilliant story focused on climate change, energy transition and sustainable investment, “Undercurrency” follows a South African woman’s attempt to build her company, growing underwater kelp for biofuel on the coast while falling in love and learning about the complexity of doing the right thing in a world of complex and competing drivers. The voice in the story is strong, the description of the romance, while quick, feels natural and the descriptions of the science and the diving are vivid, accurate and wonderful. Full disclosure: I am an engineer in the energy industry and an avid diver, therefore naturally biased or as we say in Nigeria, I am the story’s target market. Consider me sold. Highly Recommended.

The choice of a giant sea snail offers a faint echo of the landmark snail darter conservation case of the 1970s. The Endangered Species Act is an intriguing mix of anthropocentric and ecocentric motivations. Kaitlin Bakken suggests: "If it were not for the human interest in protecting the land, the snail darter fish would not have been considered. [...] Conversely, where human interests are superior, wildlife species are generally unprotected."

The story is able to wrap up quickly and satisfyingly (in a way) with carbon credits as the deus ex machina. Instead of harvesting the kelp as biofuel, the fields are sold to the fossil fuel industry to offset carbon emissions. It works narratively, but it relies on a catastrophically rosy picture of how carbon credit trading has worked in practice.

“Prop up the oil companies?”

“That’s one way to see it.”

That is pretty much the correct way to see it.

Borenstein, Greg. @SpeculativeCash

Automatic text generation has been around since c.forever, and so has recombinant artwork. But both these things have turned a corner with the rise of Twitter bots. The critical language and tools for understanding Twitter bots, who are both poets and poems, both cultural producers and cultural products, is still pretty incipient. Nevertheless, if anything deserves entry to a database of economic speculative fiction, it's Greg Borenstein's @speculativecash bot. Borenstein's bot does one thing, constantly: invents new forms of money.

Disempowerment Wage
A digital currency based on the act of disempowering

— Speculative Currency (@speculativecash) October 2, 2016

Chambers, Becky. A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

Becky Chambers, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy (2022).

Here's an extract:

They ran a hand through their hair. They’d never had to explain pebs before. 

“Okay. Anytime you receive anything that involves some sort of craft or work or labor or whatever from someone else, you give them pebs in exchange. So, let’s say you start out with zero pebs.” 

“Which is true, for me.”

“Yes. Let’s also say you go to a farmer and get an apple, and let’s say that’s worth one peb to you.”

“What would I do with an apple?” 

“Just pretend you can eat apples.” 

“All right.” 

“Okay. You take the apple, and you give the farmer one peb.” 

“How?” Mosscap asked. 

“I’ll explain later,” Dex said. “Stick with the farmer for now.” 

“If you say so.” Mosscap’s eyes shifted in thought. “I currently have one hypothetical apple and negative-one hypothetical pebs.” 

“Right. The farmer’s work has benefited you, so now you need to provide something to benefit someone else.” 

“To the farmer, you mean.” 

“No.” Dex tried to explain. “It can be to the farmer, if you provide something the farmer wants. But exchanging pebs isn’t about bartering. It’s about benefit. You are a part of the community, and the farmer doing something for you means that they are, effectively, doing something for the group. So, you’ve got your negative-one-peb balance now. You’ve got to fill that up. Let’s say you’re … I don’t know. A musician. You go play some music in a town square, and five people come to listen. They now give you some pebs. If they each give you two pebs, now you’ve got nine pebs, which you can exchange for other things. Make sense?” 

“I believe so,” Mosscap said. “You’re saying that instead of a system of currency that tracks individual trade, you have one that facilitates exchange through the community. Because … all exchange benefits the community as a whole?” 

“Exactly.” 

“Do people give you pebs for tea?” 

“Yes.” 

“And then you give them pebs for…” 

“Food, or supplies, or whatever.” Mosscap’s head whirred softly. “The farmer feeds the musician, who brings music to the village.” It paused, the whirring growing louder. “The technician who took a break to enjoy the music now has the energy to go fix the communications tower. The communications tower enables the meteorologist to deliver the weather report, which helps the farmer grow more apples. I see.” The robot nodded. “And I’m not penalized for the debt I incurred at the start?” 

“Absolutely not,” Dex said firmly. “We don’t … we don’t do that. Or we don’t do that anymore, I guess.” Gods around, history class was a long time ago. “Nobody should be barred from necessities or comforts just because they don’t have the right number next to their name.” As they said this, they thought of their unease back at the hot spring—the feeling that had arisen at the thought they hadn’t earned this. The mismatch between these sentiments itched at them. They nudged it aside to deal with later. 

Mosscap nodded again at their explanation. “But if there’s no penalty for debt, what’s to stop you from taking without giving back?”

“It’s a bad feeling,” Dex said. “Everybody has a negative balance from time to time, for lots of reasons. That’s fine. That’s part of the ebb and flow. But if someone had a huge negative … well, that says they need help. Maybe they’re sick. Or stuck. Maybe they’ve got something going on at home. Or maybe it’s just one of those times when they need other people to carry them for a while. That’s okay. Everybody ends up there sometimes. If I saw a friend’s balance and it was way in the red, I’d make a point of checking in.” 

“You can see other people’s balances?” 

“Yeah, of course. It’s all public.” 

“Does that not get competitive?” 

Dex squinted. “Why would it?” 

Mosscap stared at Dex in silence for a moment, seemingly surprised at this but not elaborating as to why. It shrugged, then pointed at the paper in Dex’s hands. “So, these…” 

“Are the pebs people gave you for helping them out.” Dex handed the paper back. “You got twelve pebs for the door, eight pebs for the bike, and so on. Normally, we do this on a pocket computer—”

Dick, Philip K. Ubik

Philip K. Dick, Ubik (1969)

A snippet:

The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please." 

He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. 

"I'll pay you tomorrow," he told the door. Again it remained locked tight. "What I pay you," he informed it, "is in the nature of a gratuity; I don't have to pay you." 

"I think otherwise," the door said. "Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt." 

...he found the contract. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. 

"You discover I'm right," the door said. It sounded smug.

Ekpeki, Oghenechovwe Donald. O2 Arena

Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, 'O2 Arena' (2021).

Online here. Features what could be a kind of oxygen-based currency, the O2 credit. Payments are denominated in Os. Naming the currency in this way emphasises that drawing breath has become commodified, although roughly the same story could be told using naira or some other unit. We could speculate that perhaps the O currency is redeemable by the central bank for a certain quantity of oxygen.

Roberts, Adam. By the Pricking of Her Thumb

 Adam Roberts, By the Pricking of Her Thumb (2018).

“For thousands of years money has been a way of parsing scarcity—a way of allocating scarce resources. What happens to money when scarcity is no longer a thing?” By the Pricking of Her Thumb is about capital striving to reinvent itself in the early days of a post-scarcity utopia. Most people spend their days in relative delight in a simulated reality called the Shine. But four ultra-rich rivals are seeking to introduce scarcity to the Shine. Some new form of money is bound to arise soon, they all reason, and whoever defines it first may well find themselves ruling the world. 

Each of the Four has their own ingenious idea about some “resource” that they think is fundamentally, existentially scarce. Each of the Four hopes to use this “resource” as the basis for a radically new kind of money. In this way, they are trying to piece together the Shine-dwellers’ innumerable little heavens into a sensible, hard-nosed cosmology with a heaven on top and a hell below, and no such thing as a free launch. (I won't say what their ideas are, since it would be fairly spoilerish).

Some reviews: by Ian Mond; by Antony Jones; by Blue Book Balloon.

This novel helped me to reflect a little more on the relationship between money and scarcity. One thing we should remember is that, in economic terms, scarce very seldom means “finite.” The opposite of scarce should not be “infinite.” The opposite of scarce should be “enough.” Post-scarcity is not about having infinite resources, but about having enough resources. 

Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter

See Katherine DM Clover's article on inflation in the world of Harry Potter.
See also Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Chapter 4: The Efficient Markets Hypothesis.

Shriver, Lionel. The Mandibles

Lionel Shriver, The Mandibles (2016).

To its credit, The Mandibles does actually try to imagine in some detail what it would mean for US sovereign debt to reach a crisis level. The plausibility of the account is, of course, food for debate.

Constance Grady reviews The Mandibles on Vox.com:

In the near future of The Mandibles, Keynesian economics is revealed to be nothing more than “dodgy hocus-pocus” that has massively devalued the dollar. America’s national character has been diluted by the enormous political power of Latino immigrants who have, tellingly, changed the automated phone systems so that you have to dial one for Spanish and two for English.

You can’t trust anyone in power. University economics departments are filled with socialists who will tell you that “morally, your money does belong to everybody.” The president who defaults on the national debt was born in Oaxaca, and he only speaks Spanish at press conferences — so really, you can hardly be surprised when he confiscates the personal property of good, hardworking middle-class (and, it’s implied, white) Americans. The government has become a police state, and you can tell this not through its monopoly on sanctioned violence, but through its monopoly on gold.

Full review here.

See also my review at Goodreads, Ken Kalfus review at The Washington Post, and a blog post by Foz Meadows.

JLW

Sparham, Sophie. The Accountant

 Sophie Sparham, 'The Accountant' (2022)

A nice campy hardboiled vignette exploring the intersection of digital cash, surveillance, and disciplinarity. There are shades of Zhima / Sesame Credit, the Social Credit System, ration books, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Samuel R. Delany's Trouble on Triton.

The basic idea is: all expenditures are tagged with a category ('sex', 'alcohol', 'transportation', 'home' etc.), and this data can be accessed by third parties. The analogy seems to be with a credit report, so we might assume that all it takes is a fee to gain access to anyone's spending data. The story gives the examples of a job interview candidate and a candidate for public office. Of course, it turns out that skilled accountant-hackers can also edit this data for a fee, so any argument on the basis of transparency is on shaky ground. 

It's from the Cybersalon collection 22 Ideas About the Future, and very much in the futurist space -- just a flash of an idea, with enough atmosphere, character and incident to bring it to life -- and then it's over, hopefully leaving a interesting questions in its wake. I'm interested, for example, in (a) how different expenditures are categorised in the first place, (b) who might have access to the more granular data ('sex' can mean a lot of different things), (c) the kind of second order socio-financial engineering this might enable, e.g. discounts at point-of-sale based on credit profile, and (d) the impact on moral beliefs -- the unfortunate job interview candidate might be in a bad place right now, but might the long term record across society as a whole demonstrate that nobody is as perfect as they pretend? Could we imagine a parallel version where he doesn't get his record changed, and gets the job anyway on the basis of the bigger picture, including an onboarding process that will help him turn his life around? (And perhaps also, some strict clauses around his probationary period ...)

Further reading: Brett Scott's Cloudmoney (2022).