Future Money: Cryptocurrencies in Contemporary Fiction

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 Jelineks reading of Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis, as well as Don DeLillos 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 todays 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.