Adams, Douglas. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980). How easy is it to distinguish socially useful labour from activities which are pointless, parasitic, counterproductive, or downright violent? 

Perhaps not that easy. In Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018), David Graeber offers an elegant approach to distinguishing "bullshit jobs." Does the person doing the job believe it has any social value? Graeber acknowledges this  approach isn't perfect -- for instance, sometimes tasks are broken up and distributed in ways which disguise what they are really about. But it's probably good enough. The person doing the job probably is in the best position of anyone to know. Nobody has really worked out a convincing way to measure the social value of work (as opposed to the mere market value), so what else do we have to go on?

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe contains a sort of cautionary tale about bullshit jobs. Long ago, on a distant planet, a plan was devised to get rid of all the pointless jobs ... as well as the people who performed them. Oddly enough, this plan involved a poet, who told a tale of the coming apocalypse. The people with the pointless jobs -- mostly management types, although also some telephone-sanitizers etc. -- were packed off to colonize a backwater planet. "We'll be right behind you," everybody else shouted into space, and of course they weren't. Ha ha ha! There was no apocalypse coming after all! ... or was there?

Perhaps you can guess which planet was colonized? That's right, prehistoric Earth. And yes, we humans are the descendants of the pointless jobs people. This is demonstrated not so much by shared genetics, so much as by shared attitudes and agendas.

Pratchett, Terry. Making Money

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.

In part, Making Money is inspired by the founding of the Bank of England (though the differences are instructive). 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 educational, 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.

(JLW)

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)

Stross, Charles. 'Lobsters'

Charles Stross, "Lobsters" (2003). (Later expanded into Accelerando). 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).