I was delighted last week when at the last minute I learned that Malka Older, the author of Infomocracy (2016) would be dropping in at this month's Amsterdam SciFi bookclub. As you can imagine this generated quite a lot of excitement.
From my perspective, the last few years have been tough for old fashioned liberals, social democrats, and progressives. The center ground seems to be strangely squeezed between the harder left i.e. the Corbynistas in the UK, and the harder right (Brexit, Trump, Boris …).
Everyone seems to be still talking about the creepy side of the 2016 elections. For example, this week Jill Lepore was discussing "The Destructive Power of Tech" with David Runciman on Talking Politics, giving a historical background of algorithms to predict and influence politics over the last 50 years. She was particularly critical of the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2016 in a jocular manner, although David did qualify that there is also a lot of hucksterism out there amongst the data-driven political algorithms:
"holy crap this is completely unethical… this could break democracy… we could make a lot of money"
I did particularly enjoy all her references to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the farcical side of much of this work. However, she tells a pretty bleak portrait of how "wildly out of control technology" is and influencing our national politics.
So getting back to Infomocracy, this was surprisingly much more a vision of the future of politics. I was surprised by reviewers who tagged this book as dystopian, and so I was pleased when Malka emphasized that it is much more utopian. Yes, surveillance is scary, but this isn't Sci-Fi... it's a modern reality. We read The Age of Surveillance Capitalis (2018) by Shoshana Zuboff for the Amsterdam non-fiction book club last year. One idea which I particularly liked about Malka's political future, is that political power seems to have been somewhat rebalanced back to local centenals (blocks 100,000 units of voters). I believe people would feel more connected to their politicals leaders if more key resources and choices were made locally.
Infomocracy is not a light read. It is quite involved, and I found myself looking at Goodreads to see if other people had comments, difficulties, or inspirations. This was probably my favourite review:
"I feel like a good portion of this book went over my head, and it took me several weeks to finish it. That's several weeks of googling political and economic terms side-by-side with the novel. That DOES NOT MEAN I DIDN'T LOVE IT. I love working hard for an enjoyable reading experience if the experience is actually worth it, which this was."
Yes it is not always to follow, and yes, I would like a little more clarity, and for certain elements of these new world's political systems and machinations to be more spelled out. Still, it is well worth the extra effort, and I'm keen to read further into her "brave new world". But getting back to the heavy emphasis on more local democracy, one of my questions to Malka was the relationship they would have with larger states. I like the idea of people voting along more fluid dimensions i.e. business, practical and focused parties, heritage and conservative, but does this mean the end of the traditional nation-states? How does this work? Local political divisions are aggregated up into a super-majority but it was not clear to me how these larger political structures worked. Malka responded that she gets this sort of question a lot and that she factored that into her 2nd and 3rd volumes, i.e. to help flesh out this new political world for the reader.
The other significant political event of my last week was organized by Wadham College for its alumni. Over the years I have tended to skip over such Oxford alumni, based on the famous Groucho Marx line "I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member." However, as I get older and more sentimental, my attitudes are softening, plus I was really interested in the two speakers:
- Lissa Muscatine was Chief Speechwriter for Hillary Clinton.
- Ambassador James Warlick who has walked away from serving under a Trump administration but still runs a very successful legal practice.
It was an interesting evening. The speaker laid out the talks with great clarity. She detailed why the Democrats appear to be ahead and should win a "fair fight", but expressed concern about voter suppression and the possibility of chaos this November. There is a significant chance that we are heading towards a 2000 electoral situation, where Florida voter suppression was a hot topic for the New Yorker politics podcast earlier this week. The question I wished I had asked after that alumni event was around "crooked Hilary" and the largely bogus, but very effective smear campaign which Trump and his affiliates ran in 2016. I'm expecting the same sort of hard-hitting smear campaign in 2020. They will probably be saved for the run-up. Things are going to get ugly again.
Returning to Infomocracy, I would also highlight these three GoodRead comments and reviews:
"I hate election years, and I know I’m not alone. I hate them because every day brings horrible new campaigning, the good guys are often indistinguishable from the bad guys, and social media is a 24/7 garbage fire."
"Malka Older is a prescient über educated marvel and her debut novel reflects this. A tale of election fraud released in 2016? Genius."
"So...great ideas, but... the story is heavy on show don't tell to the point where I still don't understand how the multitude of micro-democracies--most countries no longer exist--work. Or when or how often elections like the one taking place in the novel, occur. Clearly several "governments" are vying for Supermajority."
The one question I wish I'd asked Malka was around her choice of locations: I liked all the exotic locations in the novel. In this near-future world, the balance of power hangs in key geographical locations, some of which I had to google e.g. Ulaanbaatar (Mongolia) & Ryukyu Islands (Japan). However, the location which intrigued me the most was Chennai, a vibrant and very rapidly growing Indian city that I frequently visit for my job. I always enjoy visiting Chennai which is the most intensely busy and noisy major city I've ever visited, but I do worry about the future of this city, with its pollution and water shortages. I'm glad to see Malka painting a positive perspective, and I can buy into her vision of the middle-class technocrats slowly taking over. The world would then become an efficient and well-organized democracy where the political powers are rebalanced and we have far greater local democracy and power.
