ABSTRACT
Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s dialectical method in “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” the conclusion moves beyond the book’s technoclasms and investigates the utopian impulse in business sf’s enchanted objects and in leftist utopian speculation. This does not mean simply to toggle from a negative critique of automation myths’ “bad” side to an affirmative appreciation of their “good” side, but rather to capture the movement of the good in the bad and vice versa. Business sf’s utopian traces are enmeshed in its failures and its failures are the condition of possibility of its utopianism. While leftist speculation adds an important political dimension to automation discourse that is largely missing in business sf, it ultimately remains within the business sf paradigm. To develop an alternative to the master’s stories about his tools, leftist utopian speculation needs to move laterally across business sf’s extrapolative methods and reimagine the starting coordinates of technosocial dreaming.
