ABSTRACT
Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee are two of the most widely cited contemporary writers of business science fiction. This chapter offers a close analysis of their book The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. In the text, Brynjolfsson and McAfee depoliticize the Great Recession and seek to bend expectations toward a future that preserves and strengthens the hierarchies of innovation. As exemplary business science fiction, The Second Machine is a vision of a technocratic future in which managers and their allies are left alone to design a world that enriches them more automatically—a world in which their fictions take on a more material, because technological, form.
