A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Maughan, Tim. Limited Edition

Tim Maughan, "Limited Edition" (2012). Features the gamification of robbery. You log onto Smash/Grab, a sort of gambling / gaming / social media thing, and get points for smashing stuff and nicking stuff In Real Life. In other words, what counts as a breakdown of the legitimate circulation of values within one sphere is a completely legitimate phase in the circulation of values within another sphere. There's a faint suggestion that somewhere in the shadows these spheres are reconciled: perhaps powerful corporate interests don't exactly run the Smash/Grab servers, but they may be in no hurry to see them shut down. Story online at Arcfinity.

(JLW)

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)

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.

Mitchison, Naomi. Not By Bread Alone

Naomi Mitchison, Not By Bread Alone (1983). Mitchison's entry in SFE. Review by Kate Macdonald.

Moon, Elizabeth. Once A Hero

Elizabeth Moon, Once A Hero (1997). Entry in ISFDB. Elizabeth Moon's entry in SFE.

Review by Kate Macdonald.

McDuck, Scrooge.

Duck Tales. Gazillionaire Scrooge McDuck is a nexus of proverbs: not only a faintly racist caricature -- the miserly Scot who cannot bear to part with the tiniest fraction of his wealth -- he also takes to the practice of accumulative brutality like a duck to water, literally paddling around in his gold, which he keeps in an enormous vault resembling a water tower. The hard coins which by rights should brain Scrooge instead flow from his feathers like water off a duck's back. So there's a utopianism here: money is stripped of its exchange function (he wouldnae spend it), and reduced to use value of a peculiarly sensuous and primal sort, a pool of instinctive pleasure which perhaps existed even in the womb (though Scrooge, of course, hatched). Scrooge McDuck negates money by wanting it only as itself, yet crucially, preserving its essential character as that which flows; whereas when nemesis Flintheart Glomgold finally (and temporarily, thanks to the gang) gets his greedy wings on Scrooge's riches, he fails to replicate Scooge's customary high-dive. The hoard, as if knowing its master, acts as a solid and rejects the interloper duck.

In connection with flow it's also worth thinking about proto-Smithian images of economic concordia discors, in particular the notion that misers and their characteristically profligate sons inadvertently collaborate to irrigate even the most out-of-the-way nooks and crannies (the burst-out effect, rather than today's more modest trickle-down effect).

There is far too much to really unpack here: even the name Scrooge McDuck inevitably recalls both the political economies of Smith and Hume, and Charles Dickens' passive aggressive sparring with Malthusianism; there is the connection with dragons' heaps of gold (the word drake can mean both dragon and duck); plus there are links among (a) the homogenising "duckface" we in the West characteristically adopt in any photograph, (b) the head of the sovereign stamped on coinage, (c) the role of slavery and virtual death in the primal origins of money, in particular the transition of what David Graeber calls "human economies" into commercial economies, which establishes humans as quantifiable, calculable and commensurable vectors, and (d) Scrooge's beak as the myth of the inexpressive "wedge" visage capable of supernatural entry into a submerged realm of merged exchange and use values. We can leave it for now but not forever.

Augusto Boal writes briefly of Scrooge McDuck in Theatre of the Oppressed:

The universe of Donald Duck's Uncle Scrooge is filled with money, with problems caused by money, ad with the eagerness to acquire and keep money. Uncle Scrooge, being a likable character, establishes an empathic relation with the readers or with the spectators of the films (cartoons) in which he appears. Because of that empathy, because of the phenomenon of the juxtaposition of two universes, the spectators begin to experience as real, as their own, those desires for profit, that propensity to sacrifice everything for money. The audience adopts the rules of the game, as it does in playing any game.