Text page
william-davies-economic-science-fictions-2
"william-davies-economic-science-fictions-2" routes capital through finance, infrastructure, or modernity-writing to show how abstract systems rewrite historical time.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
These texts describe modernity as a field governed by capitalized abstraction, infrastructural redesign, and the pressures of finance. Historical time becomes inseparable from technical and monetary process.
They work by connecting money, architecture, infrastructure, and world-order narratives to a broader picture of runaway modernization. Finance is treated as a driver of temporal and social reformatting.
That matters because the section is trying to surface the archive's most concrete routes into abstraction. Capital becomes visible here through circuits of money, urban form, and historical reorganization.
How to read this text
Read for the material carriers of abstraction first: finance, architecture, protocol, or infrastructure. Those details keep the page from becoming a loose metaphor of speed.
Watch how the text narrates historical time under pressure from capitalized systems. That is where the section's larger stakes come into view.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 4
They can be machines for designing the future, and fictions about what, say, a new housing, healthcare or transport system might look like inev- itably also entail imagining what kind of society could house and facilitate these developments. Fictions, that is to say, can counter capitalist realism by rendering alternatives to capit- alism thinkable.
Definition · paragraph 4
Not only this; fictions are also simulations in which we can get some sense of what it would be like to live in a post-capitalist society. The task is to produce fictions that can be converted into effective virtualities – fictions that not only anticipate the future but that can already start to bring it into being.
Definition · paragraph 2
Collectivity is always stupid and dangerous; the market is able to work effectively only if it is a decorticated mass of individuals; only then can it give rise to emergent properties. Far from being a system liberated from fictions, capitalism should be seen as the system that liberates fictions to rule over the social.
Stakes · paragraph 3
As capital’s cheerleaders endlessly crow, anti-capitalists have not yet been able to articulate a coherent alternative. The pro- duction of new economic science fictions therefore becomes an urgent political imperative.
Stakes · paragraph 3
The pro- duction of new economic science fictions therefore becomes an urgent political imperative. Capital’s economic science fic- tions cannot simply be opposed; they need to be countered by economic science fictions that can exert pressure on capital’s current monopolisation of possible realities.
Appears in sections
Capital, Meltdown, and Cybernetic Modernity Primary section
Capitalist abstraction, deterritorialization, cybernetics, and the archive's account of runaway modernity.