Several years ago, a photo was widely shared on social media showing a CCTV camera outside 22 Portobello Road, George Orwell’s first London home. The image had been created by artist and photographer Steve Ullathorne, as part of his series Restyles of the Dead and Famous, in which he tweaked images of homes of the dead and famous. Here’s the dystopian image as shared:
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A little while ago, I read Claire North’s 84K (Orbit; Little, Brown Book Group, London, 2018) (cover left). It is a stunning novel, vividly conceived and brilliantly executed, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. But my reasons for mentioning the novel here concern not so much its literary merits, but also how best to describe the world so chillingly realized within its pages.
Published after the Brexit referendum, but before the UK had left the EU, it is set in a post-Brexit England of the very-near future, where (a man called) Theo Miller works in the Criminal Audit Office. His job is to assess crimes and calculate the indemnity that the perpetrators must pay to ensure their debts to society are paid in full. Those unable to pay the indemnity are set to forced-labour in prison. The indemnity system is regularly described in the book as much more efficient than the alternatives. Moreover, everything is run by a company that’s owned by a company that’s owned by THE Company. In the ultimate example of business efficiency taking over from creaking public authorities, the government has licensed the Company to collect taxes: the Company pays the government £400b and keeps any profit above and beyond that.…
Veteran Irish journalist Vincent Browne presented the late-night political talk show Tonight with Vincent Browne on what was then TV3 from 2007 to 2017 (the programme is now The Tonight Show hosted by Ivan Yates and Matt Cooper on Virgin Media One). His famously waspish and curmudgeonly demeanour permitted him to adopt a technophobic persona, dismissing the considerable (almost cult) online following as “the twitter machine” (the twitter hashtag was #vinb; from small beginnings, it grew to become a vital part of the show; and nostalgia still drives some traffic).
Those halcyon days of Irish political twitter came back to me reading a review of Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine (Indigo Press, 2019) by Peter Conrad in The Observer the weekend before last. Here are some extracts, which give a sense of the review and a flavour of the book, as well as an explanation both of the book’s title and of the Klee painting (above left):
…The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour review – our descent into a digital dystopia
A stark polemic argues that social media may have unleashed an age of nihilism from which there is little hope of escape
Technology, as Richard Seymour says, always boasts of possessing superhuman powers, which is why it arouses our wary paranoia.
The Great Hack has just dropped on Netflix (IMDB | Rotten Tomatoes | wikipedia | poster left). It is a documentary that explores “how a data company named Cambridge Analytica came to symbolize the dark side of social media in the wake of the 2016 US presidential election”. Much has already been written about the Cambridge Analytica scandal (eg ICO here and here (pdfs) | Carole Cadwalladr in The Guardian), and a great deal more will be written as the movie is reviewed in the coming days. I don’t propose to add to those torrents here. Rather, I simply want to observe that there is a word for a company that symbolizes the dark side of social media.
Reacting to Thomas More’s coinage of “utopia” as the “perfect state”, from the Greek “eu” meaning “good”, and “topos” meaning “place”, John Stuart Mill coined “dystopia” as the “frightening state”, from the Greek “dys” meaning “bad”, and (again) “topos” meaning “place”. But, whilst “dystopia” is perfect to describe a “frightening state” and its frightened society, it is not particularly apt to describe a “frightening company” and its frightened society. Indeed, we don’t really have the words for when a corporate society goes bad; “dystopia” and “dystopian” have been pressed into service (even in the context of reviewing The Great Hack: “Watching this film, you literally start to wonder if history has been warped towards a sickening dystopia”); but the warped society in that movie is very different to the warped society in classic dystopian fiction (such as, to take the obvious example, Orwell’s 1984).…
Pictured left is Alexander Skarsgård (imdb | wikipedia) in the new Duncan Jones (imdb | wikipedia | blog) movie Mute (imdb | Netflix).
Skarsgård plays Leo, a mute bartender searching for girlfriend who has inexplicably disappeared in Berlin in 2052. In an interview in last Sunday’s Observer, he takes up the story:
… [Leo’s] search takes him deep into a neon-saturated underworld, populated by gangsters and a pair of anarchic American field surgeons (Paul Rudd and Justin Theroux) … “It’s very dystopian, but not that far-fetched unfortunately, because it’s a society run by corporations,” says Skarsgård. “You subscribe to a corporation and then they will provide everything for you – housing, healthcare, food – but they basically own you. …”. …
So we could be looking at the future then? Skarsgård looks a little traumatised and then sighs: “Hopefully not.”
I’m looking forward to the movie; but I’m not sure I agree that the best adjective to describe it is “dystopian”. It is entirely appropriate when a state goes bad; but it is not a good adjective to describe “a society run by corporations”. In fact, we don’t have a word for when a corporate society goes bad, so I’ve suggested “dysaguria”, as a noun meaning “frightening company”, and “dysagurian” as the adjective to describe that frightening company and the associated society run by frightening companies (see here | here | here).…
I have commented on this blog in the past how much I love libraries (eg here | here | here | here). I walk to my local library regularly to borrow books. Quite often, I will borrow recent arrivals by authors unknown to me. It’s pot luck, and I take the rough with the smooth; sometimes I unearth a diamond, and it makes it all worthwhile. Last week, I borrowed Ken Liu The Paper Menagerie and other stories (Head of Zeus, 2106 | Amazon). As its title suggests, it is a book of short stories; and, en route to the International Association of Privacy Professionals conference in London later in the week, I read some of them. The title story is the first work of fiction to win all three of SF’s major awards: the Hugo, the Nebula and the World Fantasy Award; it is a magical and profound mediation on books and love, you can read it here; and, in fact, you should!
Other than the title story, another, in particular, piqued my interest. Entitled “The Perfect Match”, it concerned a ubiquitous social media company called Centillion, whose motto is “make things better”, and whose modus operandi is to acquire as much information about people as possible, the better to provide the most appropriate personalized information and advice to its users.…
The mockumentary-style tv comedy series Parks and Recreation, according to Wikipedia, is “an American comedy on the NBC television network, starring Amy Poehler as Leslie Knope, a perky, mid-level bureaucrat in the parks department of Pawnee, a fictional town in Indiana”. According to IMDB, the series relates the “absurd antics of an Indiana town’s public officials as they pursue sundry projects to make their city a better place”. In Ireland, at least one season has been shown RTÉ Two; and in the UK, three seasons have been shown on BBC4. Alert: so, for Irish and UK readers of the blog who are fans of the show (and the Daily Edge recently gave 7 reasons why we should be), the remainder of this post is a great big spoiler.
At the end of series 6, Pawnee thinks they’ve struck gold when Gryzzl, an internet company marketing itself as “the cloud for your cloud”, sets up in town. But, in the farewell series 7, all is not well between Leslie and Gryzzl. …
I spoke yesterday evening at a Data Protection Day event in Trinity College Dublin. The theme was “What does the Internet say about you?”. It was organized by the Information Compliance Office and the Science Gallery in Trinity. Jessica Kelly of Newstalk introduced and chaired the event. You can download audio of my talk here (via SoundCloud), and you can download slides for my talk here (via SlideShare).
I was full of my usual caffeine-deprived doom about the challenges which technology pose for privacy. Jeanne Kelly, a partner in Dublin solicitors firm of Mason Hayes & Curran, spoke about the still-pending EU Data Protection Regulation. Conor Flynn, principal of Information Security Assurance Services, spoke about our digital footprints. And Sinéad McSweeney, Director of Public Policy for Europe, the Middle East and Aisa, at Twitter, talked about Twitter’s foundational commitments to freedom of expression and individual privacy. The evening was recorded for podcast, and I’ll blog about those presentations when the podcast is available.
In this post, I want to mention one point which I made near the end of my talk. I coined a new word – the last word in the title to this blogpost.…
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