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Drawing on Boltanski and Chiapello\u2019s\n                    <jats:italic>The New Spirit of Capitalism<\/jats:italic>\n                    and Boltanski\u2019s investigation into\n                    <jats:italic>Mysteries and Conspiracies<\/jats:italic>\n                    , this paper reads Neal Stephenson\u2019s\n                    <jats:italic>Reamde<\/jats:italic>\n                    (2011) and Thomas Pynchon\u2019s\n                    <jats:italic>Bleeding Edge<\/jats:italic>\n                    (2013) as critical tests of the reconfigured spirit of capitalism in digital economies. This hybrid regime justifies value through narratives of magical freedom, emotional intensity, and player agency while obscuring parasitic control, exploitation, and neo-colonial extraction. Stephenson constructs this justification through libertarian hacker immersion and reputational capital, framing disruption as justificatory. Pynchon exposes that myth as a vehicle for crime, terror, and predation: Hackers warn of surveillance and its fateful implications, but they ultimately fail to solve the problem. Gaming spaces slowly overtake reality as a hopeful but illusory way to rebuild trust, revealing divergent escapes\u2014into either a domesticated nature or the memory archives of the past as projective maps of a digital future. By comparison, the texts reveal how the emotional turn in digital value erases historical and collective memory while sustaining the illusions of digital regimes. Their critical tests expose a mystery economy in a simulated theater of time interrogating how the ethics of digital economies shape the future of social trust depending on the availability of opacity and privacy.\n                  <\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1007\/s12115-026-01196-y","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,30]],"date-time":"2026-04-30T16:42:03Z","timestamp":1777567323000},"page":"308-318","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/springer_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Magic Money\u2019s Theater of Time: Games, Fiction, and the Ethics of Digital Economies"],"prefix":"10.1007","volume":"63","author":[{"given":"Dorothea Rebecca","family":"Sch\u00f6nsee","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"297","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,30]]},"reference":[{"key":"1196_CR1","unstructured":"Adams, J. J., & Kirtley, D. B. (2012, February 12). 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