(2023-05-15) Fix Red Team Blues Cory Doctorows Antifinance Thriller

Blair Fix on Red Team Blues: Cory Doctorow's Anti-Finance Thriller. Finance crime is a necessary component of violent crime. Even the most devoted sadist needs a business model, or he will have to get a real job.

As countries become more plutocratic, do you know what goes up? Murders. (plutocracy)

Now, the problem with your standard noir detective is that their storyline is often one dimensional

the detective navigates a violently unequal world, but with no idea how that world came to exist.

What prompted writers to imagine societies with a strange mix of high tech and social decay? And why did this genre become popular in the 1980s? Hmm. Could it be because the 1980s were a weird decade — a period when computers spread, yet Americans embarked on a project of mass incarceration?

Speaking of cyberpunk, Doctorow calls Red Team Blues a post-cyberpunk, anti-finance finance thriller. In my mind, here’s what that means.

If you can’t tell a good story about something, it’s hard to get the average person to care about it. Sure, their lives may be worsened in direct proportion to how fast Goldman Sachs loots the world. But put a camera inside Goldman Sachs, and all you’ll see is pencil pushers. Exciting it is not. And really, that’s how we got to our current predicament. Elites looted the world while telling stories about how they were tough on crime.