ABSTRACT
The introduction, “On Technoclasm,” explains how the book modifies Roland Barthes’s “semioclastic” study of mythology for its own “technoclastic” critique of contemporary automation discourse. Because myth has automated how American culture imagines technosocial futures, we need a cultural studies approach to contemporary automation debates that refuses the beguiling simplicity of the question “Will robots take our jobs?” and instead foregrounds the speculative cultural codes, narratives, and objects that stabilize the meanings and uses of contingent technical possibilities. In the third era of American automation discourse that has coalesced around the Great Recession of 2008, business science fiction has become the dominant speculative genre of automation. The introduction explains the book’s central critiques of business science fiction and the ways in which the genre is a “ruse.”
