“We require a different battlefield.”

Nobody expected the war to last three hours, let alone three years. The star system of Archangel holds the line against invading corporate fleets, but a quarter of its territory is already lost. The navy can’t hang on much longer. Faced with this grim truth, Archangel’s leaders shift their strategy to diplomacy and espionage. For both arenas, they call upon a reluctant weapon: a frontline grunt named Tanner Malone.

These days Tanner doesn’t aspire to win the war. He merely wants to survive it. Now he’ll be thrust into the center of events once again, pulled back and forth from covert missions to the media spotlight. Yet with every battle, he gets closer to the old enemy hidden in the shadows and the ugly truth about the war that could unravel everything Archangel might hope to win.

Dead Pledges is the first book to explore the ways that U.S. culture—from novels and poems to photojournalism and horror movies—has responded to the collapse of the financialized consumer credit economy in 2008. Connecting debt theory to questions of cultural form, this book argues that artists, filmmakers, and writers have re-imagined what it means to owe and to own in a period when debt is what makes our economic lives possible. Encompassing both popular entertainment and avant-garde art, the post-crisis productions examined here help to map the landscape of contemporary debt: from foreclosure to credit scoring, student debt to securitized risk, microeconomic theory to anti-eviction activism. A searing critique of the ideology of debt, Dead Pledges dismantles the discourse of moral obligation so often invoked to make us repay. Debt is no longer a source of economic credibility, it contends, but is a system of dispossession that threatens the basic fabric of social life.

“WE REQUIRE A DIFFERENT BATTLEFIELD.” Nobody expected the war to last three hours, let alone three years. The star system of Archangel holds the line against invading corporate fleets, but a quarter of its territory is already lost. The navy can’t hang on much longer. Faced with this grim truth, Archangel’s leaders shift their strategy to diplomacy and espionage. For both arenas, they call upon a reluctant weapon: a frontline grunt named Tanner Malone. These days, Tanner doesn’t aspire to win the war. He merely wants to survive it. Now he’ll be thrust into the center of events once again, pulled back and forth from covert missions to the media spotlight. Yet with every battle, he gets closer to the old enemy hidden in the shadows, and the ugly truth about the war that could unravel everything Archangel might hope to win.