“Fuck you Elon Musk.” In this forceful way Michel Nieva (Buenos Aires, 1988) closes his unappealable essay capitalist science fiction (Anagrama, 2024), a precise dissection of the correlations between some of the most ambitious projects of magnates such as Elon Musk (X, Tesla, SpaceX), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Richard Branson (ex Virgin) or Paul Allen (ex Microsoft ) – all of them prophets of the new capitalism 2.0 – and many of the most famous science fiction novels of the 20th century.
Nieva, who currently works as an associate professor at New York University, from where he talks to elDiario.es, became popular in 2013 as a writer of alternative science fiction (let’s call it) for his novel Do Gauchoids dream of electric rheas? (Colmena Editores, 2021), a vindication, not without humor, of science fiction from the Latin south, narrative decolonization and an acidic perspective on Argentine society.
“As a science fiction writer, while researching a novel that had to do with climate change and corporate solutions to the global warming crisis, I realized that capitalism itself draws on the narrative of science fiction to produce utopian solutions to the problems it is creating,” explains the author about what motivated him to write capitalist science fiction.
He illustrates this influence of the genre in Silicon Valley by citing from the aesthetics of companies like SpaceX, “whose ships and suits are designed by a Hollywood movie specialist,” to the supposed invention of concepts by tycoons, as happens with the “metaverse”, which does not come from Mark Zuckerberg’s head “but from a book by Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash”. It also reveals that all of these companies have a special position, that of futurologist, which is often occupied by a science fiction writer.
Classic science fiction as a carrier of Western imperialist values
Nieve holds brilliantly in capitalist science fiction that the bulk of science fiction novels written in the 20th century suffer from a clearly white, Anglo-Saxon and one could even say sexist bias. “The golden age of the genre coincides with the 50s and 60s of the 20th century, a time when many writers were physicists or engineers, all men and white, at a time of expansion, in addition, of Anglo-Saxon capitalism throughout the world,” points out the Argentine essayist.
And of course colonial: the essay offers us a vision from the first world conqueror and subjugator of cultures, in which the assumed European and Anglo-Saxon moral superiority is maintained thanks to technology. “It is enough to remember Jeff Bezos upon returning from his space trip [en una nave en forma de falo] putting on a cowboy hat with a buckle, like a cowboy conquering the wild west,” says Nieva.
From this perspective, capitalist science fiction recounts the most risky dreams of the Silicon Valley tycoons, such as the immortality preached by the English physicist and geneticist – with a Rasputinesque beard – Aubrey de Grey, the space tourism business that both Musk, Allen, Branson and Bezos have tried to build, or the colonization of other planets after leaving ours in ruins, Elon Musk’s most cherished dream.
There is also room for “daring” proposals such as that of the large landowner of transgenic soybeans, the Argentine Gustavo Grobocopatel, who fantasizes a future in which a plant will be designed like someone who designs a car. Grobocopatel – the global south version of the Anglo-Saxon technomagnates – believes that the world’s production of plastics, and even machinery, could be replaced with soy fibre. Of course he is the one who would produce it…
The readings of Elon Musk and company
But beyond exposing these multimillion-dollar ambitions, to which surely only 1% of the world’s population would have access, Nieva reveals the weight of the authors of traditional science fiction – from Jules Verne to HG Wells or Isaac Asimov, passing through Philip K. Dick, Neil Stephneson or Douglas Adams – in this kind of magical thinking that leads Musk and company to believe that technology will even allow them to overcome the obvious ecological catastrophe towards which the planet is sliding and of which they are largely responsible. manner responsible.
They are the owners of the internet platforms where everyone is informed and communicates, and from there they have given scope to people like Trump or Milei, who seek to establish fascism.
Michael Nieva
— Writer
“They are the owners of the internet platforms where everyone is informed and communicates, and from there they have given scope to people like Trump, Milei or Bolsonaro, who intend to establish fascism in their countries,” Nieva adds. The objective is to perpetuate the race towards the abyss of the capitalist model: “Capitalism is not going to stop CO2 emissions and it is not going to seek the redistribution of wealth, so it places people in governments who support its utopias, with those who believe they will be able to continue plundering and contaminating.”
Many of the books by these authors, he explains, constitute a kind of bible for the owners of Facebook, Instagram, X, Amazon and so many other platforms and services that we all feed every day by letting them do business with our data and our privacy. And far from being a tempering and reflective reading, white science fiction has fueled in them the delirium of being able to escape from this planet – instead of trying to stop the disaster – to go to others in the same way that the Spanish conquistadors of the 16th century the Atlantic and invaded the American continent. “The conquest of America is something that captivates, a very great fantasy of humanity that also has to do with the destruction of colonized habitats,” says the writer.
Not content with these dreams of conquest, the final intention, Nieva assures, is to convert planets without an atmosphere, and, therefore, icy and uninhabitable, into replicas of the Earth. They can’t think of a better way to do it, says Nieva, than to contaminate the new planet! “They dream of the colonization of Mars as a space to accelerate the destructive mechanisms of capitalism,” he emphasizes. The theory they defend, according to him, is that this would create an atmosphere with enough gases and heat to make Mars habitable. To generate such gases, the formula suggested is none other than a combination of fully burning fossil fuels and ruminant cattle in large quantities, so that they belch methane freely.
J. Posadas and the Marxists of outer space
But there is also space in capitalist science fiction for anti-capitalism and its belief that there are other extraterrestrial societies in which communist ideology is dominant. Nieva talks about the meeting between HG Wells, author of war of the worldsand Lenin in 1920, during which the leader of the October Revolution presented his comments on the reading of this science fiction classic.
“Lenin made a Marxist literary criticism of war of the worlds to Wells and told him that, according to the thesis of the advancement of history, if there are extraterrestrial civilizations more advanced than ours, they must inexorably have already reached communism and an egalitarian way of life,” clarifies Nieva, who also quotes the Mexican Zapatistas, and especially the legendary Argentine Trotskyist unionist J. Posadas, as defenders of an interplanetary Marxist equality.
Finally, Michel Nieva concludes capitalist science fiction with a practical example of his commitment to another science fiction far from the classical canons. It is a short and hooligan story that, as a coda, closes the book in an extremely ingenious way and of which the only thing that can be revealed – so as not to fall into spoilers – is its final phrase: “Fuck you Elon Musk.”
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