Douglas Coupland's Post-Capitalist Desire

In this chapter, I expand critical perspectives on Douglas Coupland’s politics, by comparing his work to post-capitalism, the idea that information technology has reshaped political economy to an extent where it no longer resembles traditional capitalism. My argument is positioned against characterizations of Coupland’s work as either pro- or anti-capitalist and favours a perspective that is open to exploring the author’s ambivalence as an enabling factor for forms of political speculation, or what Mark Fisher refers to as a ‘politics-to-come’. I develop this argument by comparing three of Coupland’s Bit-Rot (2016) essays, ‘Bulk Memory’, ‘Grexit’, and ‘iF-iW eerF’, to Fisher’s 2012 article ‘Post-Capitalist Desire’. I argue that each of Coupland’s essays aligns with a particular element of Fisher’s. First, I explore how ‘Bulk Memory’ articulates a relationship between contemporary technologies and desire. Second, I consider how ‘Grexit’ shares a similar focus on branding and re-branding to Fisher, while also connecting this to ideas of productivity. Third, I outline how ‘iF-iW eerF’ shares a post-capitalist advocacy for the appropriation of technologies from capitalist ends. Alongside these comparisons, I also demonstrate how the ambivalence of Coupland’s writings offer criticisms of post-capitalism. I argue that ‘Bulk Memory’ highlights the potential inefficacy of post-capitalism when it comes to challenging a capitalist monopoly on desire. I also highlight how Coupland’s conclusions in ‘Grexit’ reframe the relationship between online technologies and productivity central to post-capitalism. This chapter ultimately seeks to support the further application of post-capitalist ideas to Coupland’s fictional work, particularly his Silicon Valley novel Microserfs (1995).