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.

What is money? What gives it value, and how is it changing in the digital age? The project investigated how contemporary fiction anticipated and contributed to the emergence of digital money. It traced a transatlantic exchange between American and Austrian fiction on the historical ideas that continue to inform contemporary discussions about cryptocurrencies. To examine how literary texts imagined new forms of value, monetary exchange, and economic organization, the project drew on the philosophy of technology, literary analysis, and the sociology of finance. A central discovery was that fiction provided models for imagining digital technologies before they existed. The project identified a previously underexamined connection between Thomas Pynchon's writing and early cypherpunk thought, shedding new light on the literary prehistory of digital culture. Early cypherpunks explicitly credited speculative fiction and Pynchon with inspiring ideas about cryptographic anonymity, remailers, and digital cash. The project also examined Elfriede Jelinek's translations of Pynchon and her economic fiction, which offer a vital feminist perspective on the ethical impact of financial systems on social exclusion and memory cultures. The research showed how transatlantic literary dialogue registered the temporal and experiential dimensions of financial systems, with sound emerging as a counter-register to digital finance that makes audible the ethical and theological tensions underlying monetary change. The project demonstrated that digital cash is never purely a technical or financial phenomenon: through the concept of "Magic Money's Theater of Time," the research showed how cryptocurrencies and digital assets still depend on collective acts of trust, speculation, desire, and emotional investment. Contemporary fiction reveals how these systems stage mystery, promise liberation, and turn monetary exchange into a form of collective performance, showing how digital currencies intersect with video games, fandoms, and betting markets. An unexpected finding concerned the connection between digital economic imaginaries and fantasies of digital immortality. The project examined how visions of privacy through digital cash intersect with attempts to overcome ageing and the limitations of the human body through technological transcendence. The research on "ageing with a vengeance" exposed the unresolved costs of these apparently dematerialized futures, in which vulnerable, ageing and gendered bodies risk being rendered disposable. By bringing questions of mourning, memory and embodied vulnerability into the discussion of digital economies, the project showed how literary fiction can reveal the cultural and ethical tensions underlying future money. By connecting economics with the humanities, the project developed new approaches to examining how fiction shaped the rise of cryptocurrencies, and the cultural imaginaries of money, value, and technological innovation. Ultimately, to understand the future of money, we must look at the stories that helped invent its most powerful fantasies and at those that continue to critically test their promises and shadows.