Zed by Joanna Kavenna
This is a timely bit of slapstick, savaging a near future world ruled by the dystopian vision (and corp-speak) of the tech monopoly, ‘Beetle’. Kavenna means to be brutally satirical—and heaven knows she has a big enough target, and heaven knows they deserve anything they get—but I think she falls short in her ambition.
The target is obvious: ubiquitous corporate surveillance, not to mention hubris. One company owns everything, including the money, the government, all the jobs, all the media. You must wear the watch, the implants. Your refrigerator is connected to the company, as is your tooth brush. Even the free internet encyclopedia is available only by subscription and permission. “It’s your choice”, of course. Though not playing their game means having no money, no job, no recognized existence.
The company also is obsessed with predictive AI, herein called “lifechain”. These predictions are held to be perfect, to the point that people are routinely prosecuted for future crimes. The running joke is that the AI is perfect, so any error must be ‘human error’. I.e., when humans erroneously don’t behave as predicted. If you die at the hands of the robot cops, that is deemed a “suicide”, since you obviously did something wrong to make the perfect AI kill you. Etc.
The titular “Zed” refers to the residual uncertainty in such predictive systems. The company insists that their predictions are nearly perfect, and Zed is very small. But whatever small unpredictability remains—and that may be a lot more than they assume—seems to be bursting out all over.
Through some technically implausible events, the monopolistic system is hacked and brought down in implausibly cartoonish fashion. It is true that a monocropped digital infrastructure is going to be vulnerable, but the specific story is silly; implausibly cracking encryption and somehow “restoring the memory” of complicated AIs, who then promptly “go mad” and start lipping off to their masters. Idiotic, but highly symbolic.
Somewhat more plausibly, the corporately controlled fake news is flooded with both real and even more fake news. Kavenna uses symbolizes this hacking with the tale of defacing “original [digital] reproductions of original [physical] works of art”. this hacking is apparently in retribution for declaring the digital reproductions of the “authentic” reproductions ‘illegal’ and making them to be acts of ‘terrorism’.
And so on. It’s not wrong, but it’s unsophisticated slapstick.
Perhaps you see my point. As I said, all these things deserve criticism. Indeed, they deserve satire, as savage as possible.
Unfortunately, this book is dull and preachy. The supposed near future isn’t particularly advanced, and the technology and corporate culture is more caricature than a satire.
“Cartoonish.” That might be a good description.
As such, it really didn’t live up to my hopes for it. Frankly, it was a chore to read all the way to the end.
I think we are still looking for the “1984” or, better yet, “The Great Dictator” of the early twenty first Internet.
- Joanna Kavenna, Zed, New York, Doubleday, 2019.
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