The Mandibles - a realistic view of the future

I am currently reading The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver. The author is best known for her book about a Columbine-style killer, We Need to Talk About Kevin, and for getting into trouble for her politically incorrect speech last year to a Brisbane writer's festival about 'cultural appropriation' (which I discussed here). I think she is one of the best writers on the planet today and her latest work has only confirmed my view.

The Mandibles is set in the future - between 2029 and 2047 - and tells the story of four generations of the eponymous family. You could describe it as a dystopian novel but unlike most other novels of that genre, the dire future it describes is only too realistic and inevitable given the current economic policies of Western governments. The United States has lost its position as the issuer of the world's reserve currency - the huge deficits, borrowing and currency production (i.e. 'quantitative easing') of successive governments have finally come home to roost and the U.S. defaults on its debts. A consortium of international governments - including a Russia still led by Vladimir Putin - replaces the Dollar as the currency of international exchange with a new commodity-backed unit called the 'bancor'.

The story doesn't focus on the 'macro' however, it describes the aftermath of these events through the eyes of a well-off American family whose lives are transformed when they lose everything they own. A populist Hispanic president, who seems cast in the image of Barack Obama, invokes emergency economic powers along the lines of those used by Franklin Roosevelt to seize privately owned gold - even wedding rings (which were exempted by Roosevelt) - and sends the Army to conduct door-to-door searches to collect it. The American future it portrays is the lives of Venezuelans todays - empty supermarket shelves, shortages of basic medicines, sky-high inflation and an increasingly oppressive government response to civil unrest.

There is no Big Brother in this story, no Fahrenheit 451-style burning of books (although books are largely obsolete in the digital culture) and no genetic-engineering of humans à la Brave New World. It is just American society today, projected twelve years into the future. That it is so realistic makes it all the more frightening. I hope at least a few of the members of the dysfunctional US Congress, which is once again debating raising the debt ceiling, reads it and considers the implications of their current spend-and-hope policies.

Big Data, Big Brother and Donald Sterling

This week I read an article about a Princeton sociology professor, Janet Vertesi, who tried to hide the fact that she was pregnant from those who use 'big data', which sounds really scary but is really just a silly neologism for an old concept - trawling databases to find correlations that are useful to marketing people, researchers, intelligence agencies and the like. This woman seemed to be most concerned about marketers targeting her with product offers, but that is not something that particularly worries me. The worst that can result from receiving emails or telephone calls from people trying to sell you things is that you buy something.

The real concern is not big data but Big Brother, such as when Vertesi's husband tried to buy $500 worth of Amazon gift vouchers on her behalf and was told the transaction would be reported to the authorities. I am aware that in New Zealand any financial transaction of more than $10,000 is required to be reported to government under the AML-CFT (Anti-Money Laundering - Counter-Financing of Terrorism) laws and I understand this is the same in most Western countries, but obviously in America the threshold is now so low it covers transactions that are the equivalent of a modestly-priced suit of clothing or a good restaurant dinner.

Why would the government be interested in such trivial transactions? In this case it was clearly the anonymity of the transaction that led to the government's interest. The purpose of AML-CFT laws, as the name suggests, is terrorism and money laundering, but as we know from the recent revelations of the likes of Edward Snowden the US Government has used the powers it has garnered under anti-terrorism laws for all manner of purposes. Initially the expanded purview of such laws was serious crime such as drug trafficking, but ultimately governments cannot resist using such powers for any purpose they deem fit. In the case of Kim Dotcom, we saw the full power of New Zealand's state security apparatus including our GCSB spy agency used in a case of alleged copyright infringement.

Another interesting case this week was that of Donald Sterling, the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team. Sterling came to our attention because his mistress released private communications in which Sterling objected to her bringing black men to Clippers' games. Clearly Sterling is a racist and, by all accounts, a sterling asshole, but as Mark Steyn points out in his blog, as bad as the comments Sterling made were, what the National Basketball Association has done to him is worse. Sterling made the comments in private and the NBA (which has fined him $2.5m and banned him from attending his own team's games for life) should have no interest in the matter. Neither should the media, especially the New Zealand media (many of which ran the story as their lead).

In the novel 1984, Winston Smith discovered that there is no freedom without privacy. If you cannot express your thoughts even to those whom you most trust without fear that you will be subject to a public witchhunt, or make a small, innocent purchase without inviting the surveillance of the authorities, then you don't have the freedom to think at all. And everything follows from that.

1984 is coming

I'm going through a George Orwell phase at the moment, rediscovering his books that I first read as a high school student. Perhaps it is the fact that I am re-reading them with an additional 30 years of experience of the world, or perhaps it is that the world has changed considerably since the first reading, but Orwell's books now resonate with a prescience that they did not back then. 1984, in particular, is scary in its parallels to life in the Western world today.

We have all heard of the comparison of Newspeak, the redacted language of the fictitious state of Oceania, with modern politically-correct language and its euphemistic elimination of any words considered to be insensitive or too permissive (e.g. "differently-abled" for disabled, "Afro-American" for Negro, etc.) But this is the least of the similarities.

The constant electronic surveillance by which Big Brother watches his subjects is reality today.  In the book the surveillance is conducted by the somewhat primitive means of two-way television sets, whereas today it is conducted much more surreptitiously by the likes of the US National Security Agency (which surely would be part of the antonymically named Ministry of Love in the book) simply by demanding all the telephone and internet records of every American be handed over for scrutiny. The fact that the NSA does this it in complete disregard of the law (as indeed did New Zealand's own Government Communications Security Bureau did in the Kim Dotcom case) is, again, portended in the book when the protanganist Winston Smith points out, "nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws".

The scariest part of the absolute totalitarianism portrayed in the book is Big Brother's ability to not only rewrite history but to recreate the "truth" by erasing any information that is contrary to its view of the world.  In New Zealand we have an obvious example of this in Treaty of Waitangi settlements for historic Maori grievances that include the government's agreement to issue an official version of the historical facts in issue that suit the claimants' version of events.  Government bureaucrats decide what history should be and then attempt to create an accepted version.  Anyone who tries to maintain a contrary version is branded a racist, just as in 1984 anyone who contradicts the official version of events is guilty of thoughtcrime.

Fortunately, we still live in a world that is at worst a very diluted version of 1984, but the trend in most Western countries is very much towards a more concentrated version of Orwell's distopia.