Against Automation Mythologies: Business Science Fiction and the Ruse of the Robots by J. Jesse Ramírez

Abstract

Reviewed by: Against Automation Mythologies: Business Science Fiction and the Ruse of the Robotsby J. Jesse Ramírez Miguel Sebastián-Martín De-Automating Capitalist Automation. J. Jesse Ramírez. Against Automation Mythologies: Business Science Fiction and the Ruse of the Robots. Routledge, 2021. 116 pp. $21.95 pbk, $59.95 hc, $20.65 ebk. [End Page 191] A specter is haunting the world—the specter of imminent, impending, inevitable automation. All theorists, critics, and commentators across the political spectrum have gathered to exorcise this specter in their own ways: Silicon Valley gurus, Wiredmagazine, techno-utopian liberal theorists, and even—albeit from a distance—proponents of one form or another of so-called Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Against the common belief that full automation is imminent, impending, or at least inevitable at some point, J. Jesse Ramírez's brief monograph presents itself as a "technoclasm" and—like my previous paragraph—it is inspired and driven by the anti-capitalist impetus and the critical provocation of Marxian and Marxist thinking. Self-consciously updating Roland Barthes's mode of critique—the "semioclasm" of his classic Mythologies—Ramírez's book approaches contemporary (post-2008) automation discourses as a mythological "business sf" that mystifies the functioning of capitalism under the promise of an imminent technological singularity: "Extrapolating from the premise of capitalism's technological dynamism, today's leading prophets of automation foresee a civilization-changing redistribution of mental and manual labor through robots, artificial intelligences, and myriad other automated systems" (3). Thus, by untangling the ideological framework of automation mythologies, Ramírez—joining efforts with critics such as Aaron Benanav—shows that whether or not this transformation is welcome, and whether it is imagined as a utopia or as a dystopia, the underlying telos and the associated assumptions about contemporary technologies all fall under the same mythological structure—and it is the structure of these automation mythologies that becomes the main target of the book's "technoclasm." Dividing his book into three parts, Ramírez moves from a definition of "Business Science Fiction" in part I, to a story of "Original Automation" in part II, and finally a collection of critical analyses of "Disenchanted Objects" in part III. It must be said, although it may have already been inferred by the reader, that even though Ramírez's focus may be broadly cultural and technological—especially as it draws from a considerable variety of fields of inquiry, from academic, journalistic, and marketing materials—his book is envisioned as "most importantly … a work of science fiction studies," a work focused on what Istvan Csicsery-Ronay's The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction(2008) defined as "science-fictionality" (2). In this manner, Ramírez's definition of "business sf" will clearly resonate with other approaches that are interested in the recuperation of sf tropes, forms, and discourses by capitalist corporations. It is precisely by examining automation discourses as sf that Ramírez insists and clarifies that "the future of automation is not a fact; it is an economic science fiction seeking to create facts" (7). Singling out the works of Martin Ford, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Jerry Kaplan, and Nicholas Carr, the first part of the book makes the argument that "Some of the most widely read and cited treatises on contemporary automation are works of business science fiction—they are just not labelled as such" (17). Ramírez's idea here is that, once we "unlock the sf side of automation discourse" (19), we may recognize how "business sf" [End Page 192]functions as a discursive attempt to foreclose futures alternative to those dictated by capitalism. A couple of details will be highly illustrative of Ramírez's propositions here. On the one hand, he interestingly proposes that "Moore's Law can be understood as thebusiness sf, the genre's ur-myth" (22), insofar as it is based on speculation and sustained by corporate make-believe. Moore's Law's function would therefore be that of naturalizing the market logic of compounding growth, thus turning a political-economic project into a seemingly unavoidable technological "evolution." On the other hand, Ramírez proposes that "business sf" also has a...