There’s a race on to see what ideology succeeds capitalism. Nan Craig wonders why anarchism is running so slowly

The Democracy Project
David Graeber
Allen Lane, PPB £14.99

The one SF trope embraced more than any other by the mainstream in recent years is the dystopia. From Wool to The Hunger Games, it seems like everyone’s looking ahead to a world of scarcity, drastic inequality and state brutality. The societies of most Western countries have been operating in crisis mode – and it’s a very long, drawn-out crisis – for the past few years, and perhaps there’s something to be said for throwing up a worst-case scenario and trying to shock people out of their complacency with the threat of Big Brother. Then again, maybe it’s time for another view of the social future. One that suggests a direction we might want to go in, rather than what we should be desperate to avoid.

David Graeber’s twitter bio begs, “stop calling me the anarchist anthropologist”, because anarchism is “something you do, not an identity”. Helpfully, much of The Democracy Project is about how to do it.

The first half is an account of the origins and the course of Occupy Wall Street, and as a central figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement, Graeber is no doubt well-placed to give a first-hand account of how it came to be. Although the story drags at times, he tries to address what he perceives as misconceptions about Occupy – for instance, that the lack of specified demands was a weakness. It might surprise some people that there’s a whole section on why Occupy was successful. The definition of success turns out to be very much an activist’s definition: Occupy was a success because people actually turned up. Graeber’s argument is that Occupy Wall Street changed individual people by creating an opportunity for them to experience proper democracy (direct democracy) for the first time. That’s admirable, but in that case it’s a very limited success, because the number of people affected by it needs to be far bigger to create mass change.

The second half of the book begins to take apart US political culture and the idea of democracy generally, challenging the idea that what exists in the US (and in other apparently “democratic” countries) relates in any way to real democratic principles. It does this well, and, though it’s clearly aimed at a US audience, it ranges fairly widely across cultures and history, picking out examples of people using consensus and direct democracy. It’s also far more interesting than the in-depth discussion of Occupy; if anything, there’s potentially a whole other book in this section, trying to get out. Graeber goes on to talk about how direct democracy and the anarchist organisation of society could come about, and what – broadly – it might look like.

It might frustrate political scientists and philosophers with its appeals to practicality and commonsense, but I suspect that’s for the best. Let’s get more anthropologists into politics and we’d probably be much better off: they tend to have a better and more expansive understanding of the possibilities of human culture. This is something SF tends to have, as well. And we all need more of it.

Read Nan Craig’s story Scrapmetal in Arc 1.3: Afterparty Overdrive, out now for phones, screens and tablets.

Tim Maughan topples down the rabbit hole into a parallel Bristol

When I met Circumstance’s Duncan Speakman in the middle of Bristol’s busy town centre on a Friday evening he was standing in the middle of the road, holding an open MacBook Air. It was the night before These Pages Fall Like Ash, the latest collaboration between Circumstance and academic Tom Abba, was set to go live and he was making the final touches - in this case, wirelessly uploading text files on to a Raspberry Pi mini-computer hidden inside the window of an artisan coffee shop near Bristol’s St Nicholas market.

It wasn’t the first time I’d met Speakman - he’d introduced himself to me at the Sonic Acts festival in Amsterdam back in February after I’d shown a rough cut of the Paintwork short film, and for obvious reasons I was fascinated to hear that he was working on a locative art project based in my adopted home town. More than just a piece of installation art, its main aim was to be a piece of experimental research into the future of the book in the digital age.

“The initial idea was Tom’s,” Duncan told me; “a ‘dead drop city’ of artfully discarded USB sticks with the story on.”

A £10 ticket for These Pages Fall Like Ash got you a physical product as a kicking off point; a handcrafted, wooden bound book that actually contained two volumes. The first was called Here and was about Bristol, presenting the reader with a series of stories, myths, questions and riddles about their home town. The second, There, was based around a fictitious, parallel city known as Portus, that inhabited the same physical space as Bristol but whose historical and cultural differences had been created to allow exploration of the relationship between the real and the imagined, the analogue and the digital, the printed and the remembered. “The fictional culture of Portus is one that values memory over documentation, since all documentation, whether photos or text, can be tampered with. For example, when you get a photo, you just look at it and delete it. The memory of the image is more important than the image itself.”

The stories in There were intentionally incomplete - following clues and instructions in ‘Here’ led you to various locations around the city, where more Raspberry Pi computers were installed. Using just a basic browser on a smartphone or tablet, you could view these invisible, hidden depositories and retrieve text files and images that filled in some of the blanks in the physical book.

“We restricted ourselves mainly to text, as a creative restraint more than anything, because in a digital space you can go anywhere. We decided to ‘do a book’, otherwise we would have spent too long considering all the other options - augmented reality, layered photos - and we’d never have got around to finishing anything.” Duncan went on: “We had this debate early on about how form leads content and content leads form, and we decided we wanted to do something where the technology was led by the story. More than anything it was about trying to come up with characters that live inside your head as you live your life in the city, so that you start to imagine their views of your home. The character in Portus starts seeing bits of Bristol appear in her city, and the hope is that as you go around you might start seeing bits of Portus - a parallel Bristol you didn’t know was there.”

There was also an important temporal aspect to the work, with new content coming online over the project’s three week installation. The hard drives were opened up so users could add their own content, though this wasn’t the research’s principal aim. “In early stages we were thinking, Yeah, it’ll be really open to user contribution. Then we thought, Everything is already open to user contribution - people do that everyday, and that’s not actually the the focus of the project. The focus is the physical/digital relationship. So even as we open up to digital contributions, we try and encourage analogue contributions too. You get pencil with your book and the first thing the book says is. ‘Make a mark on this page’. We want people to feel that it’s OK to do that. In both books, the last page is torn out. None of the content is locked off. Everything is open, hackable - you could copy and paste the text, re-mix it, upload it again. But we’ve not told anyone about any of that. We want to see if it just happens organically.”

It’s this experimental spirit - the fact that this was a research exercise as much as a complete piece of art - that’s perhaps the most important thing to remember when discussing These Pages Fall Like Ash. Dipping in to the project over the following weeks, it was hard not to be left with the impression that while the concept and technology were fascinating, the content itself was often less than compelling. Often, there was just too much of it: accessing each wireless point inundated you with numerous files to explore, many of them simply too long to comfortably absorb on a smartphone screen while stood in a busy street. The project’s temporal dimension was tricky, too: not fully consuming the content in the right order led to an unstructured, unsatisfying narrative experience. It’s an issue Speakman is aware of. “We’re putting it out there as a learning process for us as creators too, which is why the hype has been a bit scary. It’s an experiment guys, it might go terribly wrong! We haven’t done this before, and we don’t know any other examples of it. What we’ve learnt is what works well, what works as more than just words on the page. It was meant to be a short story, but with just the first two clusters we’re already up to 12,000 words. How people navigate this landscape will inform what we do next time.”

And next time does promise to be interesting. While These Pages Fall Like Ash might have failed to fully engage with its audience, it’s impossible not to be excited by its potential. “So the plan,” says Duncan, “is to do another physical book with digital experiences, working with established writers, to create something, a book that somehow - whether it’s via sound or text or whatever - lives off the page.”

Tom Abba and Duncan Speakman are planning to release similar projects over the coming year. Visit http://pagesfall.com/ for the latest news.

Tim Maughan’s story Limited Edition appears in Arc 1.3: Afterparty Overdrive, out now for Kindles, tablets, phones and screens.

Alastair Reynolds spots a rising star.

The Falling Sky
Pippa Goldschmidt
Freight Books, PPB £8.99

Pippa Goldschmidt’s The Falling Sky is that rare thing: a literary novel that gets under the hood of science as a social enterprise, done by real and fallible people. It’s an extremely accomplished debut and the best evocation of the actual life of an astronomer I’ve ever read. It’s a study both of the haphazard process of uncovering scientific knowledge, and the mental disintegration of a human being trying to balance the professional and the personal.

Jeanette is a young researcher in Edinburgh, studying cosmology: the structure and origin of the large-scale universe. Against a backdrop of petty academic power games and rivalry, Jeanette makes a startling observational discovery. She has found a pair of galaxies with different redshifts (and which therefore ought to be located at very different distances) and they appear to be physically connected. If Jeanette’s result is validated, it could mean the end for Big Bang cosmology. But for the moment all Jeanette has to go on is a smudge of ambiguous pixels. They seem to imply a connection, but is it enough to justify publication? If she’s wrong, it could ruin her reputation almost before she’s had a career. Seeking to bolster her analysis, Jeanette makes a professional miscalculation by referencing a second data set which is not hers to use. This lapse embarrasses a colleague and damages a fragile professional relationship. But was it still the right thing to do? Jeanette’s data, after all, could be of vital significance, and it will be a long time before it can be independently verified by other means.

If professional headaches were all Jeanette had to worry about, her life would be complicated enough. But the astronomy is only half the book. Jeanette has a profoundly troubled background. She is haunted by the death of her sister in unexplained circumstances, and the silence which has accreted around this loss has chilled Jeanette’s relationship with her own equally troubled parents. To add to her woes, Jeanette, who has never acknowledged her sexuality to her parents, is in the end stages of a failing relationship with the enigmatic artist Paula. As the professional pressures intensify – a lot hinges on Jeanette’s data, and battle-lines are being drawn – Jeanette slowly begins to lose her grip on reality. She has made life difficult for herself by pursuing a largely solitary research path – would she have been better off surrendering herself to the relative anonymity of a large research consortium? Is there still room for the lone researcher, doggedly pursuing an obsession? Late in the novel, on the threshold of a breakdown, Jeanette delivers a comically silent lecture illustrated only with images of totally empty cosmic voids – forty five minutes of slides of identical black rectangles. Can she pull herself back from the brink?

The Falling Sky is beautifully written, uniting the cosmological and personal with effortless grace. On the anniversary of her sister’s death, Jeanette reflects: “No matter how many times the earth orbits the sun, it always has to go through this same bit of bruised space, exposing them to the same pain.” The Falling Sky is a triumph of scientific fiction and it will be fascinating to see where Pippa Goldschmidt goes next.

Read Alastair Reynolds’s story The Water Thief in Arc 1.1: The Future Always Wins, out now for phones, tablets and screens.

Brighton’s HOUSE Festival continues this Thursday with a special screening of Mike Magidson’s award-winning feature Inuk, dramatising the cultural and social changes transforming the Arctic.

The screening is at the Sallis Benney Theatre, University of Brighton, on the Grand Parade. Click here for further details and tickets.

Thursday will also be our last chance, more or less, to pop round to The Regency Town House, 13 Brunswick Square, to catch the festival’s resident artist Mariele Neudecker, who’s been conducting her own exploration of the far north, Heterotopias and other domestic landscapes.

(She’s also been doing brass rubbings of decommissioned nuclear missiles.)

Earlier this month, Panama’s highly-anticipated Biomuseo project completed Phase One. Jeff Campagna goes on a hard-hat tour of the construction site.

For isolationists and zombie-apocalypse fanboys, the future of architecture may mean buildings will resemble designer-fortresses, like The Safe House by Polish Architectural firm KWK Promes. Impenetrable blocks of concrete plug up the windows, steel shutters come slamming down over the glass front door and a drawbridge entrance is hoisted up — and all this with the push of a single button.

To conservationists and green-libertarians, structures yet to come may take engineering cues from nature, like the Green School complex in Bali, Indonesia. Bamboo chalkboards, compost toilets, cotton tents deployed to keep classrooms cool and water-vortexes that produce 8,000 watts of electricity, day and night, help to keep the complex off the grid.

Now, thanks to Canadian-born architect Frank Gehry, there is a new way of looking at the future of building design. Durable, industrial-strength engineering without the apocalyptic nuances of a concrete stronghold. Low-footprint construction that’s considerate of the surrounding eco-system without asking visitors to politely turn their shit into plant food. Originally sketched out by Gehry as a schoolhouse scribble in 2002, Panama’s new biodiversity museum is on track to becoming one of Latin America’s most sophisticated structures.

Photo: Kara Patrick

Fifteen million years ago, chains of volcanoes dotted the Central American Seaway where the Pacific and Atlantic waters mingled. About twelve million years later, the isthmus of Panama rose from the deep. The flow of water between the two oceans was severed by the new land bridge, creating the Gulf Stream. The Atlantic grew saltier. And ancestors of racoons, dogs, horses, llamas, porcupines and cats used the new link as a means of migration from one continent to the other.

Some scientists claim this tectonic event was one of the most important geologic happenings in the last 60 million years. Gehry agrees. The Pritzker Prize-winning architect made this transformation the cornerstone of his hundred-million dollar design.

Photo: Aaron Sosa

Passing over the Bridge of the Americas into Panama City, it’s impossible to miss Gehry’s jagged technicolor beast lazing on the banks of the Amador Causeway, at the mouth of the canal: a crumpled-up candy wrapper tossed away by gods.

Shallow pools of rainwater against the sides of the structure’s exposed concrete foundations give the casual bystander the impression that the building is emerging from the water right before their eyes.

In fact, the entire structure, from peak to footing, reflects the culture, the history, the geology and the biodiversity of its home country.

The steel roof panels that jut out harshly in every direction represent the angular formations of a rocky landmass as it ascends from the sea. The kaleidoscopic facades underscore the country’s tropical biodiversity. The two elements, steel and colour, come together to reflect the thousands of painted shipping containers that pass by the museum daily on the backs of ocean liners passing through the canal.

The roof is as sophisticated as it is symbolic. The many tangled panels work together to divert harsh tropical winds and, much like leaves in a dense jungle canopy, to transport rainwater to rocky filtration beds, to be stored for septic use. The panels also function as instruments for climate control, reflecting the sun’s heat so effectively that the difference in temperature between the the surface of a panel and its underside can vary by as much as 100 degrees. The museum has air conditioning, but hardly uses it.

Photo: Victoria Murillo

But the most future-facing detail of the structure is not architectural at all.

Fifteen years ago, the entire causeway was part of the American Canal Zone; it was against the law for Panamanians to enter the area. One of Gehry’s original stipulations when he took on this job was for a large public outdoor space to snake around and throughout the museum grounds, completely open and free for everyone - including skateboarders and buskers.

Gehry’s Biomuseo realises a conceptual symmetry between man and nature. It will be open to the public sometime in 2014 and completely finished by 2015. A beautiful equilibrium is forming: futurism without the doom and gloom, environmentalism without the nuts and berries.

Debut science fiction novels are not uncommon, but there’s one thing that immediately sets Seattle-born Tim Armstrong’s On a Glittering Black Sea apart from all other science fiction published this year in the UK. It’s not necessarily the worlds his characters inhabit — an advanced autocratic and hyper-capitalist civilisation, linking several planets and space stations. Nor is it the feel of the novel, which Tim suggests “shifts between whimsy and menace, with elements of space-opera adventure, dark cyberpunk, romance, and rock-band road trip all mixed together.” No, it’s much simpler than that: it’s that the title on the cover reads Air Cuan Dubh Drilseach, and you won’t be able to read the novel unless you have a pretty good understanding of Scottish Gaelic. Paul Cockburn spoke to Tim before his book launch at the recent Aye Write! Book Festival in Glasgow.

Air Cuan Dubh Drilseach
Tim Armstrong
Clàr, PPB £9.99

Paul F Cockburn: The obvious question is, why write a science fiction novel in Gaelic?

Tim Armstrong: About ten years ago, I was in a Gaelic punk rock band. I didn’t go into that thinking: “Oh, I’m going to make a punk rock band in Gaelic.” I’d been listening and playing punk since I was a kid, I was learning Gaelic… it just seemed natural. With the novel, it’s kind of the same equation. Living and working on Skye I speak and use Gaelic every day, and I’ve written a lot of non-fiction in Gaelic. First and foremost I just wanted to write a science fiction novel, but it seemed right to do so in Gaelic.

What’s your interest in the genre?

I had problems with reading when I was younger, so I came to reading late. I was about twelve; in one year, I went from pre-kindergarten to Advanced High School level. They threw me in the advance reading class, and they were reading Frank Herbert’s Dune; that was the first adult book I ever read. I’ve been a science fiction reader ever since. Just now, my favourite author is Iain M Banks. I love the anarcho-socialist paradise he created in his Culture novels — it makes me so happy and hopeful to read about the Culture and its silly/wise ships, though actually my favourite novel by Banks is The Algebraist, which doesn’t feature the Culture at all. I am particularly interested in how technology alters the power equation in society and challenges our understanding of the human condition. That challenge is ever accelerating and, in that respect, I believe that science fiction is the most relevant genre of literature in the 21st century.

Is your novel set in a Gaelic future, or is it just a future being described in Gaelic?

One of the conceits in the novel is that everybody speaks Gaelic. I grew up with sci-fi movies in which everyone spoke with my dialect of English — they spoke West Coast urban American English, so for me it’s no less weird an idea to imagine Hans Solo at the controls of the Millennium Falcon speaking in Gaelic than in West Coast American English. That’s one of the fun things sci-fi has allowed me to do. When you write a realistic novel set in the present, you have to deal with the language question; will you write the dialogue as if everyone’s speaking Gaelic when, realistically, it would be mostly in English, and then just write the scaffolding language in Gaelic? In this novel, I was able to create world where Gaelic is the default language.

Did you face problems when it came to scientific terminology?

It wasn’t as big a challenge as I expected; because of the work being done in schools, teaching scientific subjects in Gaelic. The language is naturally acquiring a scientific vocabulary. I did a small amount of creation as well, specifically the sort of things you find in space opera. How do you say “Let’s go to Warp Speed!” in Gaelic? But it’s a judgement call. While it may seem more authentic to work from Gaelic roots, it’s actually better on occasion to borrow from the international vocabulary of science and technology, which is based on two “dead” languages, Greek and Latin. But it is tough for Gaelic speakers because we have the bad luck of our neighbour language being the giant international language of communication about science and technology. Even though you know these terms come from Greek and Latin, they feel like borrowings from English.

What would you say science fiction can bring to the Gaelic language? And, indeed, what can Gaelic offer science fiction?

I hope I’m not overstating my case, but I really believe that, in the post-modern, 21st century world, it’s very hard for a minority language to stay vital without a vital literary scene, and specifically without science fiction. In English, a lot of the most common terminology we use for science and technology often came into the language first through science fiction. It’s important to Gaelic for the same reason. I also think that, for a language that’s threatened as much as Gaelic, having a genre that’s explicitly talking about the future and taking Gaelic into that future is also really important. As for what Gaelic brings to science fiction, maybe I’ll answer that by broadening it out to what multilingualism brings to the world? I think it would be a very sad world if we were all reduced down to English language speakers. I think that it’s great that the world is multilingual. It would be great if science fiction became more multilingual; that’s got to be healthy and interesting, so I would hope that, just in general, there would be more science fiction appearing in minority languages. It’s a big ask, but it’s also a healthy thing.

What’s the difference between a magician and a crook? Liz Sourbut looks for answers in a novel of London’s underworld

The Monster’s Lament
Robert Edric
Doubleday, HB £17.99

In a London staggering towards the end of World War Two, a group of interconnected characters pursue a series of unrealistic dreams. Robert Edric’s novels often focus on the underbelly of life – gangsters, prostitutes, low-lifes of various kinds – and The Monster’s Lament is no exception. In this, the third of his ‘occult’ novels, the central character is an ageing and increasingly desperate Aleister Crowley, magician and self-proclaimed Antichrist, now ill and living in squalor, but still working towards one last shot at immortality. His magick requires knowing the exact time of a man’s death, and in condemned murderer Peter Tait, awaiting hanging in Pentonville Prison, he believes he has found exactly what he needs.

Edric has brought the streets of wartime London expertly to life. The milieu is entirely convincing and the characters are solid, vulnerable flesh and blood as they trudge around the rubble-heaps, scanning the skies for rockets and trying to figure out how to stay one step ahead, or at least not to fall too far behind in their struggle with the forces shaping their lives.

Crowley has used his influence over gangland boss Tommy Fowler to send Tait a small bible, imprinted with invisible incantations, as part of his immortality ritual. The boy himself, only 19 years old, isn’t sure if he fired the fatal bullet or not because he was knocked unconscious during the crime, but he thinks he’s innocent. He seems the least tortured person in the whole book as he sits in his cell, reading this bible, and waiting calmly for death.

As Tait sits and reads, infuriating his sympathetic gaoler with his passivity, everyone else in the book twists and turns: minor hoodlums try to free themselves from Tommy Fowler; Detective Pye tries to link Tait and the shooting with Fowler; Crowley himself clings to life as he awaits the apparently inevitable moment of Tait’s hanging. And everybody hopes they can dodge the last few bombs still falling on London as the war draws to its close. The thought of dying now, so close to the end, haunts everyone. Perhaps, amidst all this chaos, it’s reassuring for Tait to know the exact manner and moment of his death. It’s this certainty that Crowley needs for his ritual. He has pointed out how rare it is for anyone to have such knowledge; and in the course of the novel, death comes very unexpectedly to some.

Is Crowley the monster of the title? Many of the other characters could vie with him: Tommy Fowler the gangster, ruling the lives of his employees through fear and killing those who cross him; Frankie Doll, his messenger boy, who cares for no-one but himself; not to mention Hitler, hiding in a bunker somewhere in Germany and still sending over the bombers to kill civilians at random.

The occult is certainly a theme, though not perhaps the dominant one. The mystic Veronica makes her living pretending to channel messages from dead loved ones for the multitude of bereaved Londoners, while Crowley can only bore those around him with endless tales of the ritualistic debaucheries he used to enjoy in his prime. Now there’s not much he can do, although he tries his best with working girl Ruby Nolan, who wants the notoriety of having been associated with him.

It is much more a book about death. In a world where millions of innocents have been slaughtered, Peter Tait has been caught, tried, found guilty and sentenced to hang for the murder of one man. It seems to be less important that the right man has been sentenced than that justice is seen to be done. Sometimes, amidst the rubble-strewn streets of this dark and dingy London, it seems as though the devil has consumed us all. Not a book to read before bedtime.

Queensberry rules be damned: Paul Graham Raven reckons it’s high time the tech pundit and critic Jaron Lanier took his gloves off.

Who Owns the Future?
Jaron Lanier
Allen Lane, HB £20.00 / Simon & Schuster, HB $28.00

So, you wanna know who owns the future? That’s an easy one: the Siren Servers own the future, at least for now.

Named for their ability to seduce us onto the rocks with false promises, rather than for any intrinsic lethality, Siren Servers have some similarities to Bruce Sterling’s “Stacks”: Big Data ecosystems that have eviscerated whole market sectors like saprophytes hollowing out a sequoia. Siren Servers include any business model that hoovers up “free” data and monetises it without sharing the profits with the data creators; any business model that radiates away all risk (e.g. through highway-length EULAs and other T&C click-wrap crapola) while it centralises and leverages as much data (and profit) as it can. These aren’t just your Gorgles and your Farceborks, but also your Craigslists and Wikipedias (being a non-profit doesn’t get you off this hook). Slso your Enrons and your HFT agencies.

The problem, you see, is rooted in the free-wheelin’, free-sharin’ culture of our increasingly information-centred economy; hoodwinked by our own misplaced network idealism, we’ve cheerfully strewn a billion billion tiny nuggets of data around the net, thinking they’re worthless – and with some justification, as we don’t yet have an information economics able to (or willing to) add the value of those intangible data-crumbs into the ledgers. But we do have businesses – the Siren Servers – capable of monetising that data, and they do, getting richer off stuff that they’re keen for us to keep thinking is worthless, promising us the opportunity to be “found” by “our audience” if we’ll just surrender the crumbtrail to their almighty indexes.

The result is the colonisation and shrinkage of market sectors (which is what that euphemistic SilVal buzzword “disruption” really means) by monopolies. Not monopolies of the strict sock-‘em-with-an-Antitrust-suit sort, but monopolies based on first-comer’s advantage – monopolies that are not just too big to beat, but increasingly too big to fail, too. (How many web services would be fucked to a fare-thee-well if they suddenly couldn’t use Facebook as a log-in authorisation proxy, for instance?) Informational monopolies, siloing away all the advantage in black holes of economic value, sucking everything into their insatiable maws and spewing out beams of planet-sterilising risk.

As far as the diagnosis goes, Lanier is measured, lucid and logical – even if he takes a rather rigid approach to the Siren Server thing that doesn’t take into account the social good that comes out of a site like, say, Wikipedia, where the contributions of work and/or data may be free, but are made in fairly thorough knowledge of where the contributor stands economically. I found Lanier’s unpacking of information economics enlightening, as he strips it of quant shibboleths and recouches it in the sort of comp-sci/engineering models and metaphors I’m more familiar with. And he links it up with recent technological history and a little bit of sociopolitics. Good work, and long overdue.

After so good a diagnosis, it’s hard not to be disappointed by the prescription, which verges on the homeopathic. Basically, if Lanier can just convince his fellow technologists of the wrongness of an early wrong-turn in the principles of networking (namely the copy function, which on a true network would be redundant, because the whole point of a network is you can all access that one original file from any machine on said network), then they’ll leap to work and get everything fixed up nicely.

What we need, says Lanier, is a “humanistic information economics”; on this point, I certainly agree. Such a set-up requires a few basic planks: duplex attributional linking (to replace the copy function; you can remix, mash up or cite what you like, but there is always a link back to the original work); a universal and frictionless micropayments system (no small order in and of itself, but long overdue; this ensures that the person whose stuff you remixed automagically gets a cut of any profits you make); and a universal single identity system that ties each person to their online activity, and hence to their payments and earnings as they create and consume data in the digital world.

It all makes a great deal of sense, even coming from a guy whose employment history makes him look deeply complicit in the status quo. Lanier is bothered enough by this to feel the need to defend himself in the text. (Lanier currently works for Microsoft, who – while perhaps not “evil” in the sense that FOSS nerds use the term – have had a hand in projects like the NYPD’s infamous and still-expanding ubiquitous surveillance system; that’s about as far from humanistic as it gets.)

That said, I’ve not read a book out of the Valley like this one in a long, long time, if ever. How many folk from the SilVal/Techcrunch/VenCap circlejerk would dare publish a book which showed support – even qualified and cautious support, as here – for unions, universal healthcare, a state-provided safety net and a sort of “cyberKeynsian” form of economic intervention? Furthermore, how many would dare waggle a politely disapproving finger at the Jobsian Cult of I, at the venal immortalists and brainfreezers of the Singularitarian Church of Kurzweil? Oh, it’s very polite – more a head-shaking “gee, you crazy guys!” than pitchforks and torches outside Castle Frankenstein – but it’s there, almost as if he knew none of them would be paying much attention.

And therein lies the problem.

The central riff of the book is “How can we shore up and revive the squeezed middle classes with humanistic information economics?” It’s also the central riff of contemporary Western politics, even if in many cases it’s a mask for the question “How little can we get away with conceding to the squeezed middle classes before they start getting angry enough to vote for someone else?” After all, everyone knows the working classes don’t read books or vote (or count; delete as appropriate). Lanier waves away the fate of the underclass in his supposedly humanistic utopia with a half-page “they’ll always be with us” schtuck which suggests that the lazy buggers will be able to get subsidised access to the fruits of the new pay-to-play information superhighway through charities and churches and so forth. He spends at least as many words (if not more) on tilting at the windmill of commandeconomysocialismOMFG!!! On both sides of the pond, this has become such a standard dogwhistle that you’d think there’d be at least one major political force actually advocating in favour of such a thing, while back in reality the soi-disant Left is so scared of getting its fingers slammed in the Overton window that it’s selling the same neoliberalism under a hasty chop-shop spray job. (Even the Red’n’Yellow Peril is rocking a Cantopop remix of capitalism these days…)

The point is, Lanier – again, possibly as a way of avoiding the social-safety-net bugbear, possibly as a genuine oversight – elides the very obvious fact that the best way to protect and shore up the squeezed middle class is to make sure that they don’t drop into street-sleeping poverty when they get downsized out of their job by a Siren Server. The safety-net of a universal welfare’n’healthcare system that looks after the very poorest is the only solid foundation on which a secure middle class can ever be built - which is why watching the middle classes baying for the blood of welfare recipients is one of the saddest ironies of our times.

The rest of the book makes it abundantly clear that, absent one of those nasty populist-socialist revolutions that no one wants to happen (myself included, to be absolutely clear), the power to change things lies in the hands of government lobbyists, technologists and the CEOs and majority shareholders of big multinational corporations… which is to say, in the hands of those already benefitting the most from the rent-seeking business models Lanier so decries.

Lanier is quite open in describing his humanistic future as utopian in character, and argues that perhaps we’re a little hard on utopian thinking; after all, is it so wrong to aspire toward a better, fairer world? He has a bit of a dig at science fiction here, too, arguing that basically everything’s been rubbish since Star Trek TOS<.em> because writers are too busy celebrating the dark mass of dystopia, which is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Lanier’s mistake (which, to be fair, is an error that a certain sort of science fiction writer does little to assuage, and that a lot of readers make as well) is to assume that science fiction is a blueprint for the future rather than a mirror held up to the present, but that’s an argument for another day. The point is that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with aspiring to a better, fairer future – but if you’re doing so without a realistic roadmap for getting from here to there, then it really is οὐτόπος: no place.

There is no clear route to a humanistic information economics. Meanwhile the road to dystopia becomes clearer every day. It’s certainly clearer after reading Lanier’s book, which I’m only ragging on so hard because it comes so frustratingly close to being something vital and important. It doesn’t take a science fiction writer to realise that a few more decades of business-as-usual will leave no middle class left to save. This will leave us with either a global-corporate feudalist drone-boot stamping on a human face for ever, or a bunch of messy, doomed-to-fail populist-socialist uprisings that never work and no one wants. Lanier reckons that things should have sorted themselves out by the last third of the century, once the Boomers and most of the Xers have died off, and maybe the Millennials too.

Call me a pessimist, but I don’t think we have that long.

Right now, I’m not sure we have even a decade. There are few (if any) historical precedents for powerful oligarchies going gracefully into that good night. If we’re hanging our hopes on a change of heart in SilVal boardrooms and other technologist enclaves, it won’t be ushering in the cuddly techno-hippie wootopia of Star Trek, but rather the Dickensian techno-neoliberalism of David Marusek’s Counting Heads.

Lanier has at least described an Eldorado we can start orienteering towards. So grab your compass and hiking pole; there’s some nasty big mountains ahead, and the residents aren’t keen on uninvited visitors.

Arc’s editor Simon Ings went along to London’s Design Museum to catch the opening of United Micro Kingdoms (UMK): A Design Fiction. The exhibition, conceived and curated by design studio Dunne & Raby, uses elements of industrial design, architecture, politics and science to explore the future of design. Anthony Dunne talked to us about his four fictional kingdoms, his love of science fiction, and the value of dystopic thinking.

United Micro Kingdoms runs until 26 August 2013 at the Design Museum, Shad Thames, London SE1 2YD.

Martin McGrath goes out of his mind

Strange Bodies
Marcel Theroux
Faber, HC £14.99, ebook £12.99

Nicholas Slopen, the protagonist of Marcel Theroux’s fourth novel, Strange Bodies, is a middle-aged academic whose once-promising career specialising in the work of Samuel Johnson has stalled, his wife is cheating on him and he has difficulty connecting with his children. But these are not his biggest problems. Slopen’s real difficulty is that he is dead, horribly mangled beneath the wheels of a truck. The man who is walking around with his memories, emotions and personality is encased in the body of a Russian thug and has recently escaped from a high security psychiatric hospital.

The plot, told through Slopen’s recovered memoir, begins as he receives an invitation to review some previously unpublished letters by Samuel Johnson. Although the documents are obvious fakes, they uncannily capture the voice of the great dictionary compiler (for the non-expert this can be verified by the fact that they unerringly evoke the voice of Robbie Coltrane from Blackadder the Third). This leads Slopen to the strangely troubled Jack, the author of the letters, his keeper Vera and a conspiracy of the powerful that is determined to live forever through the application of some Soviet-era weird science.

There’s lots of interesting material in Strange Bodies. I liked Slopen, even though he, and everyone who knows him, tells us he’s a bit of a self-obsessed prig. Through the course of the novel he is instinctively drawn to do the decent thing – even when the risks are obvious – without, at any point, coming across as heroic and he develops along a subtle but satisfying arc. Theroux’s writing is neatly evocative throughout, locations, people and emotions take shape on the page with a pleasing precision. Theroux is also good at working in his background material – there is exposition, but it is interesting exposition.

Using doubles and replicas as a means of exploring what defines us as human is hardly a new idea. Doppelgangers are a staple of myth and folklore and they thread through literature and popular culture from Borges to Star Trek, where evil doubles are usually helpfully identified by a surplus of facial hair. Theroux’s take is interesting, however. He builds on the ideas of the soviet scientist and mystic Nikolai Federov – John Gray’s non-fiction study, The Immortalization Commission, is referenced throughout the novel – who genuinely believed that science could, indeed was duty-bound to, reanimate all those who had died. As befits an English graduate and novelist, Theroux invests words and language with the power to capture the core of human personality – the soul, for want of a better word. These ideas are cleverly wound through the novel, using texts and books as the key to the mysteries that face his characters.

Not everything works perfectly. Most notably, the great conspiracy at the heart of the plot is a little James Bondish and feels uncomfortable in this book – as though Theroux had tried to jam something slightly too large between the covers.

Any missteps are small, however, and do not detract from what is generally an excellent novel. Theroux’s previous work, Far North, was nominated for the Arthur C Clarke Award, amongst others, in 2009 and Strange Bodies is a significantly more successful work that deserves at least as much attention and praise. It is an impressive achievement.