In recent years, neoliberalism has become a tokenism used to explain every kind of social, political, or economic injustice. Caroline Alphin's 2021 book Neoliberalism and Cybernetic Science Fiction: Living on the Edge of Burnout takes the term in a productive new direction by rethinking how the ideology perpetuates itself across technology and media, and within the increasingly urbanized spaces and temporalities of contemporary Western experience. This book attempts to move beyond the populist claim that “yesterday's science fiction is today's fact” to issue a starker and more urgent critique of the contemporary moment (Kaczynski 2019). Moving away from “state-centered” (16) interpretations of neoliberalism, Alphin examines its more pernicious manifestations—in particular, those forms of neoliberal ideology that have infiltrated the “micro-practices of everyday living” (17).
For Alphin, the key term in understanding this phenomenon is emotional “burnout.” By this, she refers to what she sees as the modus operandi of our...
