As the world becomes increasingly dystopian in certain respects, people are starting to recognise the significance of sci-fi as an important tool for testing ‘what-if’ scenarios, speculating on what the future might bring. This is not just from a technological point-of-view, though Clarke came up with the concept of satellites; mentioned what would now be considered cloud computing, computers working together and thinking as one giant robot brain; and Star Trek helped to normalise the idea of putting computers in people’s homes. But sci-fi as a whole tends to have moved away from just being about the technology. It has transitioned to become a vehicle for discussing people; the space ships are secondary to the fact we are more interested in the human condition. Sci-fi is an imaginative and speculative framework that considers the nature of being human. It is very useful to look beyond just academic literature, because often academia can become disconnected from the real world. Now sci-fi, written by people reacting to the world around them, is becoming more recognised, especially within the social sciences, than it has been in the past. The work of Frederik Pohl, an American writer and editor, and one of the most significant names in sci-fi but without the recognition of Clarke or Robert Heinlein, provides a wealth of examples around consumer culture. His worlds of hyper-consumption, robot workers and ecological disaster are even more pertinent today than when they were written in the 1950s. These works include worlds where advertising firms are in charge, exploiting customers for profit and priding themselves on their ability to shape human desire, and where social status and consumption are intrinsically entwined. One of the most significant implications of Pohl’s work is the everincreasing robotisation of consumers. Pohl came from an advertising background, with a fear of consumerism becoming mass production. He describes advertising agencies and marketers effectively programming and manipulating people’s behaviour. This work pre-empted the real-world criticism by Vance Packard, who depicted a dystopia where marketers use psychological techniques to influence human behaviour to the point where consumers do not realise they are being influenced. Pohl’s work foresees workers who produce the very content they consume. In The Space Merchants (1952), protagonist Mitchell Courtenay is forced to spend his low wages on goods to help make work bearable, creating an ongoing cycle of debt. Producer and consumer are blurred, so that someone who consumes a product also plays a part in its creation. In The Midas Plague (1954), social status is linked to consumption, the more you consume, the ‘better’ you are, and robots are employed to do it for the elite. It is easy to draw parallels with many modern companies. Facebook and Instagram, in particular, serve to both create and sustain a never-ending cycle of robotic prosumption, where users gain social status by sharing their latest purchases alongside holidays and other symbols of ‘success’. All the while, social media firms sell their data and target them with ads that feed back into the cycle. Airbnb act as a broker for users who are both the producers, renting out their homes or rooms, and consumers, paying to rent those same rooms. Uber 38 | The examination of our relationship with technology, which is going to become more significant over time, is deeprooted in sci-fi. ʻʻ ʼʼ
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