Beukes, Lauren. Moxyland

Lauren Beukes, Moxyland (2008). Review originally appeared on Aargh and doesn't just focus on the economic aspects.

If you are going to write an archetypically bursting-at-the-seams first novel, then cyberpunk is an excellent genre in which (and bursting slightly out of which) to write it.

We get four narrators: Kendra, a Z-list schleb photographer, interested in the aesthetics of both obsolete and prototype technologies; Toby, a vile trustafarian with a magic vlogcaster suit; Tendeka, a slightly naïve community organizer and political activist; and Lerato, an AIDS orphan done good as a hacker with a snazzy corporate day-job. They roll around, exemplifying themselves and their world, occasionally explicitly brushing against each other, occasionally suggesting some more obscure, behind-the-scenes connections, until a horrific police crack-down on a rather intricate scene of civil disorder draws their four narratives together for the final act.

One of them melts.

Maughan, Tim. Special Economic Zone

Tim Maughan, "Special Economic Zone" (2015). Not strictly science fiction. Not strictly not. About working in quality assurance for GPS tracking and vehicle monitoring units for retrofitting buses for smart cities. There is something stylistically clever about this story, something which becomes obvious early on in the story, as do the reasons for it. That leads to a choice, for the reader, about how they should read, and if they should read at all. However, part of its cleverness is that it resists being admired as clever, and part of what makes the choice difficult is that it's impossible to think of it as important. On Medium.com.

(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).