The Startup Wife

 

What is 'dude-bro'? It is a damaging social construct of maleness that, in moments of unreflective white male privilege, I sometimes uncritically accept, which is to say, I question whether it exists at all.  I have similar experience when watching, for example, "The Office" or "The Mindy Project", two tv shows I actually really like.  But I have also had to stop watching those tv shows when they started to make me really uncomfortable. I'm not sure if the creators of these shows are intentional in how they stereotype the 'dude-bro', the guy that is super-cool and if you have a problem with him it's you, not him, because he's so cool and laid-back, how could you not like him.  But then, for example, in The Mindy Project, a bunch of the characters (all dude-bros) will start hooting because they all went to Dartmouth, and they refer to themselves and 'D-bags', which is short for douchebags. So, you see, they are taking the piss, and it is aimed at themselves.  But this is a bit of superficial (and therefore gaslighting) reflexivity.  It only serves to strengthen the dude-bro into a position of unassailable hegemony.

The wife in question in this novel is married a real sensitive guy who is not in it for the money.  He ends up, of course, with a Zuckerberg-level of power, influence, and, of course, money, that he doesn't want, but takes anyway.  This uber-guru, the husband of our main protagonist, is an expert in world religions, is self-taught, and is hyper-technical to boot.  He leverages a team together to create the next big tech startup, one that allows users to craft bespoke rituals and religious ceremonies by piecing together the bits and pieces of various spiritual traditions into, for example, burial rites for their dog. 

This novel is really not about the site, which is a bit unlikely. It is about the dude-broishness and how it is a hegemonic feature of the tech world.  It is about what it is like to be a woman in such a world, full of sensitive new age guys who also happen to be hyper-capable capitalists.  Being the dude-bro means you get to over-ride, you get to decide, and you do it by always being the coolest guy in the room, the one who makes convincing the rest of us to do your idea look so easy. The dude-bro, however, in his hubris, overreaches, and the tragedy lies therein. People, in this book, die because of the social media site that the cool guy made. It's next-level messed up where the users take this site, which eventually, like the marriage, needs to be shut down.  So, the startup wife is just that: the experimental trial that you can mess up before you move onto the 'forever' wife/site, consequences be damned.  For the dude-bro, it's all in a day's work.

Under the Blue

 

This has been my favourite read of the summer, and I'm trying to figure out why.  A couple of things come to mind, but first it's a great story, very well told, and that is reason enough in itself to read this novel.  But what makes it exceptional for me is how it builds upon two strands of literature. The first is obviously genre, science fiction, and I thought here of Day of the Triffids, but without the plants. The irony here is that the clear blue skies of the title pervade the book and should bring happiness (both to plants and to people) where there is only sadness.  That being said, this is a great beach read, which I know from having enjoyed my hardback copy on the beach in Bournemouth.

The second strand is post-apocalyptic, but without so much of the genre elements, in which I place the work alongside Camus and Saramago.  Specifically coming to mind are The Plague and Blindness.  The only problem with this placement is that Under the Blue is science fiction, and an excellent example at that.  The novums revolve around AI and drones, and how these two technologies are inextricably intertwined in the vision (and perhaps future reality) of societies of power and control (see my previous review of Attack Surface on this blog as well).

Patrick Meier, in a humanitarian vein, discusses drones in terms of intelligent flying robots.  The AI in Under the Blue is disembodied and remains just a voice in the lab of characters that inhabit one structural half of the narrative.  It is this half in which we observe, along with some scientists, the evolving intelligence of the AI that is being 'trained'.  The way these sections are set off is almost like bare reportage, giving it a very authentically 'scientific' feel. But other sections here, with odd line-breaks, make very much akin to poetry at the same time.  A poetics of science and artificial intelligence emerges that is unlike anything I've ever seen in fiction.

One thing I questioned was how little of humanity seemed to remain alive, but this is also in keeping with the main character's (an artist) isolated, misanthropic, existence, one with which we become intimately involved in the novel's opening scenes. Here we inhabit the artist's world, and see how little time he has for a humanity he almost seems to see as separate, outside, of his own self.  At one level, this book is very much about creation and the isolation of the artist, and the necessity of such in order to maintain the 'purity' of the vision.  But the artist's life is anything but pure, from the materiality of his apartment, to the entanglements (romantic and otherwise) that we follow as the characters (more than one from the artist's apartment building) develop. 

A romantic entanglement evolves, and is complicated, as a road trip unfolds, a wonderfully evoked sense of constraint that allows certain freedoms amid catastrophic failure of the lifeworlds of humanity; and in this we have a flipped, and counter-mapped, 'road trip' paradigm that is another of this novel's many innovative features.  For so many reasons, and for the way the AI/drone nexus is represented, quite believably and subtly, this book is compelling and, I would say, a 'must-read'.  I haven't read Station Eleven yet, maybe it should be the next novel I pick up, as I've seen comparisons to it in reviews of Under the Blue. 

Attack Surface

Do I have anything intelligent to say about zero days or self-driving cars? Cory Doctorow does, and after reading his book Attack Surface, I feel more confident in speaking about the social implications of these technologies. When speaking about technical aspects of hacking and coding there's always someone better than we are: hacking is in this way a lot like running.  None of us are Eliud Kipchoge.  But what we often do is overestimate how technical we are, and Attack Surface abounds with self-deluded hackers who think they are more technical or are better hackers than they actually are. Your code must be perfect.  Otherwise you are open to attack.  This is the principal driver of the idea of 'zero days' which are exploitable bugs that the programmers don't yet know about, and that allow a hacker into the program, within which it can be hijacked.  

Such a scenario plays out around the hijacking of self-driving cars which through such hacking activities become driven by interests of police control in a non-democratic state.  The targets of the now non-self-driven cars are protestors, and a scenario come in which this kind of activity is translated into Oakland, and protesting around the acquisition and use of surveillance software by its police force.  Cars are literally being driven into the protest groups.  

The main character, Masha, is the best, and she is perfect.  But she is playing both sides, initially because she can: her ability to generate revenue for herself is a product of her truly superlative knowledge of programming and the systems in which various surveillance and control tools are embedded.  But Masha's friends happen to be very savvy professional protesters with legitimate grounds for grievance.  The evolution of Masha revolves around how the weight of her loyalty shifts, over 500 pages of breathless narrative, from the power/control group to the radical democratic one.  

A fictional country, Slovstakia, offers a kind of foil, a usefully corrupt and easy-to-loathe totalitarian state for whom Masha initially works.  But through the evolution of her story, we come to see that the totalitarianism is being adopted closer to home, that the dodgy banana republic has become the model for the so-called developed territory. In fact map and territory are flipping as one becomes the other, as all subject positions come to be suspect, as Slovstakian activists become themselves totalitarian control freaks; and power/control hackers in 'democratic' states are bled into the radically-distributed ideologies of the do-good left.  

That I could be convinced of the validity of becoming a professional protester, of going on your gut, and protesting 'just because' it 'feels right' is a change that I did not foresee in myself.  Doctorow convinces me, and he has also made me just that little bit more technically intelligent, and less self-deluded about my own level of technicality.  Unless you're Masha, who is literally a fictional construct, an unobtainable essence, then forget about competing at this level.  Go out, instead, and protest the all-pervasive power of the police state; the permeation of AI into everyday lives; the indiscriminate use of databases; the squashing of the immanence of collective power of the crowd, of labour, and mutual aid.  Read this book 'just because' it's great!

The Fortune Men

Nadifa Mohamed's Booker longlisted novel is my favourite for the prize, and I enjoyed it even more than the Ishiguro novel that also appears on the list.  Set in Cardiff, we follow the lives of Mahmood who is accused of a murder he did not commit, and the lives of a shopkeeper and her family, in the aftermath of the shopkeeper's murder.  The thing I take from this novel has overwhelmingly to do with race, and the spaces in which others are judged according to dominant and hegemonic norms of the coloniser.  

The Fortune Men is a postcolonial novel that examines the impacts and ongoing effects of damaging colonial legacies on one man's life and family. Critically, Mahmood has married a Welsh woman, a fact that he believes has led to his harsh treatment by the police and the witnesses they call in Mahmood's trial. It is also a tragedy in the sense that the outcomes have a fatalistic yet entirely avoidable (in the sense of possible worlds in which Mahmood's innocence would have been recognised), yet not by hair-thin margins.  Mahmood's fate is a brutally predetermined outcome as we see by the actions of individual police as well as institutional sense of generalised policing and surveillance of race as a whole in postwar Wales and England.  

We are there with Mahmood at the end when he loses all hope, then regains it, and loses it again as his hopes fade and both appeals and pardons fail. His wife and children seemingly remain loyal and yet they feel very far away, even through visits to the jail, which is situated only across the street from the family residence.  One of the most touching scenes is when Mahmood arranges for his family to stand at the edge of their property so that he can see them and signal to them that while he cannot be with them, he is ok.  As the action moves forward we increasingly see how not ok Mahmood is, and how the various institutions with which he interacts are designed to keep him in a state of agitated subjugation.

We also go into the lives of the family members of the murdered shopkeeper, and we are helped into sympathies with the white people populating this novel. But critically we see that race is itself a tool of oppression, one that is used to its full extent and power by those that wield it, including those whose loss of a sister or aunt, feel so poignantly.  The reader here is ineluctably drawn to think about recent events that have led to raised consciousness around race and critical race theory, and the Black Lives Matter activities and visibilities that have circulated on various media platforms recently.  From the 1950s in Cardiff, with its Somali and West Indian residents; to present day US; these would seem to be overly wide in time and space, and yet, it is race that brings them together, and this novel is therefore both very timely and very much a toolbox for thinking about race, space, and power in new ways.  

It is also a beautifully written novel that is full of poetry of the places described from Somalian cities of Mahmood's earliest years; to the alternatingly bright and dreary Cardiff byways and docks in which the primary action of the novel occurs. There is such depth in the characterisation and sympathy that loses none of its effect in the critical treatment of how the prisoner is treated; of how he has lived his life imperfectly and yet is so much more believable for all that: Mahmood is deeply flawed and very human; the breadth of his knowledge of the world outstrips those whose narrow circumscribed lives end up stripping him of his humanity, of his intelligence, his sense of self. This is the tragedy at the heart of British life, and here is a unique evocation of how the tragedy continues to play out through and despite complexities of class, race, and their intersections.