Abstract
Jean Baudrillard’s critique of Marxist theory, which he came to view as inadequate to the task of theorizing revolutionary politics, is the starting point for Chapter 7’s treatment of postcyberpunk economics. Baudrillard offers a loose prescription for ‘symbolic exchange’ as a revolutionary alternative to political economy, but later abandons it as his thinking is increasingly dominated by the totalizing ‘code of signification.’ Postcyberpunk sf – along with closely aligned hacker and Free Culture movements in nonfictional reality – revives and revises Baudrillard’s notion by imagining various alternative, sub-, and counter-economies predicated upon Singularitarian technologies that obviate scarcity, affirming the social relation through rituals of gift exchange. In so doing, they sketch out a technological basis for something like Georges Bataille’s ‘general economy.’
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