Materialized Science Fiction: Speculative Narratives as Infrastructure

The Centre for Business and Society at the Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge are happy to invite you to one of two research seminars in March with Dr Ali Rıza Taşkale. Taking place on our Cambridge campus in room LAB 216, 16:00-17:00

Title

Materialized Science Fiction: Speculative Narratives as Infrastructure for Corporate Power and Governance

Abstract

This talk introduces “materialized science fiction” as a framework for understanding a fundamental transformation in how corporate power operates today. Tech elites are no longer content with disrupting markets; they are systematically redesigning governance, labor relations, and civic infrastructure by converting speculative narratives into concrete business models and political projects.

Drawing on cases from Palantir’s surveillance capitalism to Musk’s Mars colonization ventures, I examine how figures like Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Jeff Bezos engage in strategic “looting” of the science fiction archive. They extract aesthetics and power fantasies - frontier myths, libertarian governance, techno-solutionism - while deliberately discarding the genre’s critiques of corporate feudalism and social inequality. This selective reading transforms dystopian warnings into investment prospectuses and organizational blueprints.

The result is what I call “reactionary futurism”: a business ideology that uses the language of innovation to justify the dismantling of democratic oversight, labor protections, and environmental regulations. By framing corporate ambitions as technologically inevitable, Silicon Valley converts choices - about workplace surveillance, algorithmic management, urban privatization - into foregone conclusions that bypass stakeholder participation and public deliberation.

This matters for business and society because the “hype economy” now operates as a form of narrative capital that shapes which futures receive funding, regulatory approval, and social legitimacy. From “smart cities” that enable unprecedented surveillance to AI systems that codify bias as optimization, the materialized science fictions of today determine the governance structures, labor conditions, and civic possibilities of tomorrow.

The central question for business scholars and practitioners is not whether speculative visions will shape organizational reality - that process is already underway - but whose materializations will prevail, and what democratic mechanisms can ensure that corporate futures serve societal needs rather than elite fantasies.

Bio

Ali Rıza Taşkale is External Lecturer at Roskilde University’s Department of Social Sciences and Business. He recently completed a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowship (2022-2025) examining how financial and technological elites weaponize speculative narratives to legitimize new organizational forms and governance models. His research bridges cultural economy, science fiction studies, and science and technology studies, with publications in International Political Sociology, Urban Studies, Theory, Culture & Society, and Global Studies Quarterly. Recent work includes “Manufacturing the Leviathan” in Science as Culture, analyzing Palantir’s corporate ideology and the forthcoming monograph Fictional Worlds and Financial Realities in Speculative Literature and Film (Palgrave, 2026). He serves on the editorial board of Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory and contributes to public debates on tech oligarchy, corporate governance, and speculative finance and fiction.

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