engleski

Automating Economic Revolution: Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

A completely automated world, combined with a Universal Basic Income, has been suggested as one total rethinking of the economic future (Srnicek and Williams). However, what would happen if economic revolution were itself automated? This is the question Robert Heinlein asks in his science fiction novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966). In the novel, the moon has been turned into a prison labor camp for criminals from Earth. When the central lunar computer becomes sentient, it soon takes on the role of the leader of a revolutionary group. The computer, named Mike, both plans the revolution and the economic structure that follows. While novels like Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952) portray a fully automated future as a dystopia, Mike works with the human revolutionaries in order to develop an alternative future. However, the plan of libertarian economics that Mike develops is not the point. Rather, by using a number of thinkers loosely tied to Speculative Realism and leftist economics, this essay focuses on how automating an economic revolution has the potential to generate alternatives which go beyond the dead-end of capitalist realism (Jameson, Fischer, Chang). Graham Harman’s reading of way design generates fundamental alternatives is repurposed into one key feature of automated change. In addition, although Heinlein’s novel is from the 1960s, it is used to suggest the possibility that today’s blockchains, decentralized applications and high frequency trading could be the beginning of our own automated economic revolution.

Science Fiction ; Economics ; Robert Heinlein ; Blockchain

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