Materialized Science Fiction: Speculative Narratives as Infrastructure for Corporate Power and Governance
Join the Centre of Business and Society for a research seminar from Dr Ali Rıza Taşkale on the use of “materialized science fiction” to make sense of corporate power today.
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, labour 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 colonisation ventures, Ali examines 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 organisational blueprints.
The result is what Ali calls “reactionary futurism”: a business ideology that uses the language of innovation to justify the dismantling of democratic oversight, labour protections, and environmental regulations. By framing corporate ambitions as technologically inevitable, Silicon Valley converts choices – about workplace surveillance, algorithmic management, urban privatisation – 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 optimisation, the materialized science fictions of today determine the governance structures, labour conditions, and civic possibilities of tomorrow.
The central question for business scholars and practitioners is not whether speculative visions will shape organisational reality – that process is already underway – but whose materialisations will prevail, and what democratic mechanisms can ensure that corporate futures serve societal needs rather than elite fantasies.
About the speaker
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 weaponise speculative narratives to legitimise new organisational 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, analysing 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.