Anxiety of the Future #3: Online Apocalypses
A few years ago now (probably more like ten, shit), I started working on a short story idea set in the near, climate-ravaged future, in which one character worked as a remote reference librarian providing virtual research assistance to undergrads after the collapse of in-person campuses. It was then particularly surreal for me that, before I could finish my years-long tinkering on this futuristic tale, I would be taking on that exact role myself. I was living my own speculative fiction, it turned out, and all it took was a global pandemic.
I last discussed my interest in works drawing from the anxiety of the future during those first few strange months of 2020, turning towards them as a way to make sense of and engage with the weird, frightening place we found ourselves in and, through this tense beginning of the 2020s I have continued to seek them out. And, as my own attempt speaks to, I think, the way the internet intertwines into our physical lives during this period of increased political, ecological, social, and economic tensions is a topic of concern. I looked at a few novels recently that explore how the internet affects our reality now, but there has also been a lot that try to extrapolate these trends into the future.
The shift between a time when the internet was the World Wide Web, a novelty, a decentralized world of niche websites, forums, and blogs, and when social media has become nearly ubiquitous across the population came unsettlingly quickly, I feel. Such anxieties are not all in our heads. With social media and tech companies now dominating so much of online life, threatening our privacy and mining our identities for profit, building janky AI off of the art posted by millions online, drowning reality under misinformation and replicating bias, can the hopeful dreams be maintained? Will it only lead to an easier dystopia? Whether imagining the disappearance of the internet or an online world completely engulfing our offline lives, the works I’ll discuss in this essay explore in various ways how the ubiquity of this media in all of our lives and what this may mean for our future in both personal and communal terms.
An interesting place to begin, Reports on the Internet Apocalypse (2016) wraps up former Cracked.com commentator Wayne Gladstone’s satirical trilogy imagining what would happen if the internet disappeared with a bit of a whimper. Following a quixotic, drunken self-insert unreliable narrator who reluctantly becomes the “Internet Messiah” as geeks and spies alike hound him for what he may or may not know happened to the internet, I had a bit of an ambivalent feeling toward the first two works in the trilogy, echoing my own attitudes toward the internet, but returning to the series almost a decade later, it became evident it did not age well, making its final installment feel empty.
Gladstone’s work, glib and crude, represents a sort of complacent viewpoint of the internet during its years of transition from novelty to the dominant form of mass media. Highlighting the absurdity of people doing “internet” things in “reality,” joking on the sad white guys and pedantic nerds pop culture imagined the average internet user was like, even most straight male internet users, the Internet Apocalypse series has a generally silly ambiance that could not grasp what was most compelling, or important, or dangerous about online life, for good and ill.
In Reports, Gladstone is replaced as the narrator by one Aaron Rowsdower, a government agent trying to track him down, which is a bit of a bad move, I feel, as Rowsdower ends up feeling interchangeable in voice, highlighting flaws that the work had all along. Awash in ironic sexism and homophobia (you know, the internet!), the message is at once dismissive of and bullish towards the internet, painting it both as a place to get addicted to porn and cat pics and flame wars and something that “connects us to everything.” Even as he engages, however briefly, with such ideas as net neutrality, arguing that the “internet is people” but that we can’t become too trapped in our own bubbles, the message is all too stale for a book published November 1st, 2016, leaving the satire toothless and the points muddled.
English author Tim Maughan’s bleak but contemplative 2019 work of dystopia, Infinite Detail, envisions another world without the internet, though in this case, it brought much of society down with it. After the creation of an oppressive, all consuming global network, and its opposition by the Croft, a commune of British radical computer scientists, Maughan considers the ethical and practical ramifications of allowing tech to subsume all aspects of human life in the name of profit, and what might happen if such a system were to fail.
Infinite Detail weaves an intriguing if loosely connected story through the eyes of a diverse group of people through time, across post collapse Bristol and New York City at the height of the internet era, the ideas being explored in the novel felt a little more interesting than the rather basic characterizations, though I did enjoy the almost magical realist heart of the story, the young girl in the Bristol ruins who appears to possess impossible knowledge about the world before the collapse, who is sought out as a medium by those seeking their loved ones lost in the violence and chaos of those days. Maughan forces us to consider many of the issues of the datafication of humanity and the ways we could imagine a more equitable, free world and how the internet may not, in the end, serve this goal.
Taking on a more grounded, personal, and generally optimistic story, Naomi Kritzer’s thought provoking 2019 young adult sci-fi novel Catfishing on CatNet was among the strongest uses of the internet in fiction I’ve read, especially as worries about AI and chatbots have erupted in recent months. Set in a near future in which self-driving cars and robotic teachers have become commonplace, Kritzer considers the ramifications of growing up in a world in which tech is omnipresent, neither romanticizing nor rejecting this tech but using it as a wonderful jumping off point to explore identity.
Told from the alternating viewpoints of CheshireCat, a moderator at CatNet (a reddit-like chat forum devoted to sharing images of cats) and one of CatNet’s frequent users, LittleBrownBat (LBB), each has their own secrets that begin to entwine and involve sinister outside forces, building a thrilling level of suspense. The most interesting aspect of Catfishing on CatNet is how Kritzer uses the trope of the AI to explore ideas of gender identity, with the discussions between the diverse posters on CatNet exploring ideas together, everyone, even the algorithms, learn new things about the complexities of human life.
Musician and novelist Sarah Pinsker’s novel A Song for a New Day, also from 2019, is an interesting, introspective, and perceptive novel, especially striking during the heart of the pandemic. Pinsker envisions a near future beset by terrorism and deadly pandemics, forcing most people to stay home as much as possible, working and socializing virtually through a network of social media platforms and drone delivery services. Wait, this is supposed to be science fiction? Pinsker even refers to the period before these explosions of disease and violence necessitated an extreme universal lockdown as the “before times.” It was downright eerie.
Pinsker takes a very effective format in building this all too familiar mood by writing from the perspectives of two women who each experience the world of the After in different ways as they find themselves meeting and perhaps working together to change things for the better. Luce Cannon is a musician whose career was just taking off as a series of disasters, both natural and human, caused the US government to ban all gatherings of more than a few people. Rosemary Laws is a naive and isolated young virtual service industry worker who can barely remember a time in which people actually met in person.
Luce happened to play the last recorded official live concert and has reached a certain fame because of this, though over the years she has continued playing live concerts to crowds of fanatics as part of an underground fringe of illegal performances across the country. Rosemary, on the other hand, has never been more than a mile from her self-sufficient family farm. Working virtually for a familiar ubiquitous tech/retail giant, though, she is tasked to contract for another tech firm, StageHoloLive, a platform for live virtual concerts. As the two women’s worlds collide, each of their world views are challenged, at the same time that many of the things we as readers and music fans are called into question as well, complex questions that we have become all too familiar with.
A pair of graphic novels I read take this idea of living life completely online to some beautiful and surreal extremes, with their artwork proving ideal for capturing the strange feelings of living life virtually. Alienation, for instance, by Mexican cartoonist Inés Estrada is an evocative 2019 graphic novel that follows Elizabeth and Charly, a couple living in a distant (or not so distant) future of 2054, in a highrise off of Prudhoe Bay, Alaska.
Estrada tells a languid but vital story, her lush art full of weird detail, calling to mind a sort of retro underground comix vibe that suits this artificial, confined and yet compelling world, exploring such current topics as environmental collapse, sex work, and war. Both Elizabeth and Charlyn find themselves confused about and searching for their place in the world, escaping online through virtual reality yet questioning if they can do anything to make the world better. All in all, a very relatable work.
Prolific Canadian cartoonist Michael DeForge’s 2020 comic work Familiar Face is an enigmatic but affecting work that builds a very effective atmosphere reflecting the absurdity of contemporary life through his trademark surreal imagery and empathetic characterizations. His surreal little creatures and shapes become so relatable in spite of how strange they are, making it ideal for depicting our emotional relationship to these often difficult to grasp forces.
Like trying to parse the origins of a Twitter feud, Familiar Face can be a bit difficult to follow as its narrator, like everyone else in their social media-mediated world shifts and changes form often as the network changes and updates their lives. From daily commutes being shunted out of reality due to optimization to losing our very identities, DeForge makes literal what can happen to our memories now mediated through our virtual corporate-controlled social media. As the narrator goes about her business logging, but not responding to, complaints to the government department she works for, we can see parallels to our own chaotic world where the borders between our online lives and our “real” lives become ever more porous.
Of course, speaking of a work of science fiction imagining a future society dominated by corporate-controlled virtual social media, I must next discuss Ernest Cline’s Ready Player Two. I think it’s safe to say that we’re living in a much different world, culturally and technologically, than we were when Ready Player One was first published in 2011, which I talked about in my first Anxiety of the Future essay in early 2014. At the time, I enjoyed it as a fun but not especially deep romp through a plausibly grim 2040s US still mired in twentieth-century nostalgia. Cline’s gatekeepy, reference-heavy nerd hero plot, though, revolving around a quest for an Easter Egg granting anyone with the right obsessions with 1980s pop culture control over the entirety of the global corporation GSS’ metaverse OASIS, came across much differently after GamerGate.
This was the world into which Cline’s 2020 sequel, Ready Player Two, came, and despite his best efforts, what many readers saw as annoying, unfortunate, and downright creepy aspects of his plot remained. To Cline’s credit, he attempted to respond to these shortcomings, which follows the young Wade Watts (aka Percival) and his friends as they try to handle the massive GSS corporation and the massive wealth and influence that comes along with it.
Trying to wrestle with Watt’s, and GSS founder nerdking James Halliday’s unexamined assumptions and gaps in interests, Cline attempts to give more space to Watt’s women and POC companions and even introduces some trans allies! If anything, though, he falls even deeper into the rote listing of things which quickly grew tedious even if I found the topics more interesting this time around. Prince versus Rush, for instance. But this only scratches the surface of the unfortunate implications that Cline ends up building the sequel around as the crew once again finds themselves trying to solve a pop culture-based crossover extravaganza mystery across VR as once again the fate of OASIS (and by extension the majority of humanity’s continued existence) hangs in the balance.
It seems that a secret GSS initiative in building fully immersive VR pods has some strange side effects that could doom or save a quickly collapsing planet, but all in all, it’s like a story about the horrors of Amazon in which Jeff Bezos is the hero. The horrific implications of the conclusion are barely even brooked as our heroes sail into the virtual sunset, leaving the thought crimes, the ultimate invasion of privacy, and the fact you are the product, literally to the reader. We own you! In the case of GSS, we mean this literally. That big red button is looking more and more appealing. What Cline seems to see as an inspiring, even utopian ending feels more like the lyrics “St. Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go, I owe my soul to the company store,” to make a pointless retro cultural reference, the cover of Sixteen Tons as played by the 1990 Tom Hank’s classic, Joe Versus the Volcano.
In the end, whatever interesting ideas and fun romps that Cline tries working with here would have been far better served by looking at it all from someone else’ point of view, like maybe L0hengrin, but I think we all know he does not have the range to pull that off.
Finally, Adam Wilson’s 2020 novel Sensation Machines is a good place to end this discussion, being amongst the works closest to reality and most depressing. The Mixters, Wendy and Micheal, having recently lost their infant daughter, are at a rough place in their lives. Living in a stifling unseasonably hot Brooklyn teeming with people on the edge as the stock market collapses again (as Michael knows all too well, having lost the family’s savings in ill-advised deals), both are connected to a financial and technological conspiracy that may bring about a situation not unlike the Before Times in Maughan’s novel. With the US political and social life for the taking, murder is certainly not too small a price to pay.
Like Maughan’s novel, I feel Wilson is working with some pretty compelling ideas here but, even with Michael and Wendy’s surplus of witty asides and dry escalations, Sensation Machines is a bit heavy in its themes, its humor serving as a distraction as much as a compliment. In certain ways, it all feels too plausible, but perhaps Wendy and Michael Mixter again make for poor viewpoint characters.
The main takeaway from these works is, I feel, an ambiguity about how this technology exists in our lives. Such a new force becoming a necessity for life in our modern world in the space of a decade is unsettling, especially when it can often seem like you barely noticed it at the time. I mean, this is a space that’s as real to us as any others in our lives, and it will, I think, become only more necessary. I write this as my city has some of the worst air quality in the world as the forests to the north burn, making going outside actually hazardous, a situation which will only become more common as the climate warms.
As the internet shifts from a decentralized kind of scary space for unbridled self expression to the domains of mega corporations intent on harvesting its users’ freely shared personal data to push the most profitable ideas through dystopian AI or Metaverse monopolies, it’s easy to imagine some horrifying scenarios. In that, though, it is no different than any other technology that humanity has come to terms with, and we only have our own sense of community and hope to rely on.
In my next entry, I’ll discuss some books in which authors wrestle with the strange apocalyptic zeitgeist of the last few years, expressed throughout the diverse genres of literature, which I’ve been pondering under the working title of Trumpocalypse.