Overview
Cryptoeconomics may well be the future. Yet our ability to forecast future developments and crises in the financial sector has proven to be limited. Literary fiction provides an experimental space to test out different scenarios of financial futures. It offers an imaginary field in which to explore the impact of changing economic systems on cultural settings, shared agency, and identity construction. This study seeks to analyze, from a specifically transatlantic perspective, how literary portrayals of cryptoeconomics asses the transformation of financial intermediation.
The project aims to reveal anthropological and semiotic implications involved in the shift from trust-based financial systems to code-based operations such as blockchain. Central to this research is the core assumption that literary models, which assess cryptoeconomics and their adjacent concepts as open-work structures, connectivity, and complexity, are of assistance in evaluating and forecasting processes within the field of digitalized capital markets. The study examines how contemporary fiction portrays the transition to a different and new monetary and financial regime and the risks involved.
The research project focuses on exemplary texts that participate in discourses about the future of financial systems by an intertextual encounter between Austrian and American literature from the 1960s onward, that is from the advent of informational theory and systems theory to post-millennial literature across all genres, including theater, narrative fiction, and post-dramatic opera. Given that money transform into a shifting medium and traditional institutions lose their footing, the project critically inquires how the new role of information within systems of financial transaction plays out in a digital age.
Through selected examples of seminal texts both from American and Austrian postmodern writers this project aims to examine a transatlantic literary dialogue with regard to early visions of future financial systems and the cultural concepts embedded within. The study pays particular attention to the specific dynamics of language criticism, as well as the anthropological, semiotic, and mythological figures evolving from modern financial markets and the advent of a digitally driven finance economy.
The project is guided by the main thesis that literature offers a series of narrative and rhetorical discourses to describe dynamics that would be hard to grasp as financial concepts alone.
Objectives
- Describe key issues of cryptoeconomics, such as moments of disruptive innovation and/or creative destruction, and entropy as a measure of risk assessment
- Evaluate how in the fictitious space of contemporary Austrian and American literature financial change and assess how its effects on representations of value and immateriality play out
- Enhance an understanding of opportunities and risks involved in changes brought about by cryptoeconomics and blockchain technology, especially in terms of its global social impact on wealth inequality and the construction and/or deconstruction of national identities
- Deliver a profound understanding of how the literary models of crypto-currencies and the future of financial systems contribute to changing personal relations and communication
- Find out how the transfer of risk to less informed market participants is evaluated within literary works in order to better address these participants in the future.
Project Summary
Geld der Zukunft
Deutsch
Das Projekt erforscht die Auswirkungen von digitalen Währungen auf Kultur und Gesellschaft. Dazu nimmt die Studie exemplarische literarische Fallbeispiele in den Fokus, die sich um die vielfältigen Transformationen auf den Finanzmärkten und wirtschaftliche Innovation drehen.
Die Studie ist am Schnittpunkt von Finanzen, Fiktionen und aufkommenden digitalen Technologien positioniert. Sie arbeitet folglich Ansätze heraus, wie mit Hilfe literarischer Modelle die sich überschlagenden Veränderungsprozesse auf dem Gebiet der digitalisierten Kapitalmärkte bewertet und reflektiert werden können.
Strukturell rückt das Projekt den transatlantischen Dialog zwischen der österreichischen und amerikanischen Literatur über das Geld der Zukunft ins Zentrum. Die Studie analysiert Texte, die auf die disruptiven Innovationen im ökonomischen Denken reagieren, nämliches Thema variieren und durchspielen, dabei in einen gegenseitigen Austausch treten. Fallbeispiele sind u.a. Elfriede Jelineks Lektüren von Thomas Pynchon und William Gaddis, Don DeLillos Leseerfahrung der Bücher Peter Handkes, dazu Texte Oswald Wieners und Elias Canettis.
Die Studienergebnisse sollen über die Literaturwissenschaft hinaus anschlussfähig sein an andere Forschungsdisziplinen, unter anderem an Wirtschaft, Ethik, Philosophie der Technik. Die Untersuchung verfolgt im Besonderen die Frage, inwiefern sich der transatlantische Literaturdialog über das Finanzwesen sowie künftige Kapitalsysteme kritisch mit Vorgängerkonzepten dieser Art auseinandersetzt, die in Österreich-Ungarn zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts entstanden sind. Denn diese Ideen haben die Rhetorik des Finanzdenkens der 1960er- und 1970er-Jahre stark beeinflusst. Sie sind für die Thematik neuer Zahlungssysteme sowie für die Diskussion über ihre geldpolitische Wirkung weiterhin von großer Bedeutung.
Die Studie möchte Erkenntnisse darüber gewinnen, wie die Literatur Innovationen im ökonomischen Denken, unter anderem eben in Form von Kryptowährungen, vorwegnimmt, wie die Gegenwartsprosa unsere digital-ökonomische Umwelt bewertet. Deshalb untersucht die Studie auch, wie die vorgestellten literarischen Darstellungen mit dem Konzept der schöpferischen Zerstörung verknüpft sind. Die Studie zielt mittels sprachlicher Analyse darauf ab, den gesellschaftlichen Wandel im sozioökonomischen Kontext digitalisierter Märkte tiefgreifender zu verstehen.
Das Projekt will neue Perspektiven auf die komplexen Veränderungsprozesse in zukünftigen Finanzsystemen bieten und dessen Kommunikationsmechanismen analysieren. Das Projekt will die Frage beantworten, welche neuen Erkenntnisse Literatur darüber liefert, wie wir Geld zukünftig definieren wollen und wie so ihre literarischen Anregungen unsere finanzielle Zukunft mitbestimmen werden.
Future Money
Accessible Summary
This project aims to explore the impact that digital currencies have on culture and society by analyzing exemplary works of fiction, which deal with the topic of economic innovation and the transformation of financial markets. By examining the intersection of finance, fiction, and emerging digital technologies, the study seeks to understand how literary models can help to evaluate and forecast processes of change within the field of digitalized capital markets.
The project focuses on a transatlantic dialogue on future money, mapping how exchanges between American and Austrian writers have played out in their fiction on economic thought and disruptive innovation. Exemplary texts include but are not limited to Elfriede Jelinek's reading of Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis, as well as Don DeLillo's reading of Peter Handke, and works by Oswald Wiener and Elias Canetti.
The investigation is particularly interested in the ways in which their respective dialogues on the language of finance and future capital systems critically engages with previous concepts that were evolving in the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the opening decades of the 20th century. These ideas continued to influence the rhetoric on financial thought of the 1960s and the 1970s. They are of vital importance in today's discussion on global politics of money and the rise of digital currencies.
The study aims to provide insights on how early novels presage innovation in economic thought such as cryptocurrencies and retrospective applications. It examines how their respective literary portrayals are interlinked with the concept of creative destruction and strives to better analyze moments of change in cultural and socio-economic contexts.
Overall, this project offers new and fresh perspectives on complex processes of change in the financial system of the future and its mechanisms of communication. The study connects with scholarship in economics, ethics, and the philosophy of technology. It addresses the core question how fiction may provide new insights into how we can re-think the definition of money and how it affects our financial futures.