1. A thread on William Gibson's novel Agency, summarizing this crookedtimber.org/2020/04/06/age… and explaining/partly disagreeing with its implicit thesis (which is very plausibly distinct from Gibson's own views, novels being novels and not political tracts).
2. Gibson invents a world a century or so into our future, after a series of linked catastrophes called the jackpot, which have resulted in massive human die-off. Somehow, people in this future learn how to create 'stubs' - alternative worlds branching from our present/future.
3. "The Peripheral" was about the interactions between the far future and a future a couple of decades ahead of us, where rural America's economy has cratered. Agency, a sort of sequel, presents a new stub, that has branched off our own, where HRC won in 2016.
4. What this allows Gibson to do is to investigate the relationship between human agency and structure. The structure of the argument, as I read it, is as follows. First, that the globalized economy is creating all sorts of nasty mutually reinforcing feedback loops
5. including global warming, contagions, plasticized Sargassoes etc. Rather creepily, the novel notes in an aside that the HRC stub started at a point where “the drivers for the jackpot are still in place … They’re still a bit in advance of the pandemics at least.”
6. Second, that this will accentuate the bad side of globalization rather than the good. The banking structures where kleptocracy meets the City of London will metastasize and gobble up whatever limited capacities for global problem solving and cooperation we have
7., consuming national level democracy as a side order. Third, that we have little or no real capacity for agency anyway. Very few actors have anything approaching agency in the book - mostly it's the kleptocrats versus Lowbeer, the terrifying enforcer whom they've accepted
8. as a necessary evil to prevent their own selfishness from spinning out of control. And even Lowbeer doesn't have much autonomy - her agency is within clearly specified bounds, and she is only able to get away with helping the stubs, because the kleptocrats consider them toys.
9. As for the rest - it is politicians being manipulated by Lowbeer, or everyone being manipulated by Eunice, a nascent AI who is a somewhat more benign version of the self-aware surveillance machine depicted by Gibson/Sterling's Difference Engine.
10. Verity - the novel's nominal protagonist, appears increasingly incapable of taking decisions for herself as she is manipulated by Eunice and her daughter intelligences. Verity appears to be happier not having to make choices of her own.
11. So what this adds up to is a thesis that liberal democracy - of the kind that we aspire to - is a patina of illusion covering over either benign or malign manipulations. We don't have the agency that it requires. We actually plausibly don't want it.
12. And in any event the material conditions which made it seem possible for a while are disappearing as plague, heat and environmental crises begin to overwhelm us (again: I am not saying this is Gibson's own view, but it is what the novel appears to me to be organized about)
13. Notably, Gibson suggests that the reason why the stub where HRC is elected splits off our own reality is because manipulative efforts by Russian bots were thwarted. So - is this plausibly a distorted reflection of where we are now, in fictional form?
14. Yes and no. Yes - in the emphasis on mutually reinforcing crises in a global economic and political system that is generating mutually interactive feedback loops that it can't dampen down. No, I think, in the suggestion that agency is implausible.
15. The story that Gibson uses as an organizing substrate is a common one on the US liberal left. Russian bots. Cambridge Analytica type manipulations. Zuboff's NYT version of it has the headline - "You Are Now Remotely Controlled" nytimes.com/2020/01/24/opi…
16. But even if this story is widely shared, it isn't necessarily right. There isn't much evidence that Russian bots were particularly efficacious in changing people's minds or getting them to do stuff that they otherwise wouldn't have done. See e.g. @BrendanNyhan
17. Manipulative online techniques employed by Google, Facebook etc might have some effects on the margins, but they aren't nearly as universally efficacious as the mythology suggests.
18. In short - the material conditions are getting worse, but there is more scope for human agency than the novel's thesis might be read to suggest. We are not all being manipulated. It is really hard to manipulate us in the systematic ways that Agency implies.
19. In some ways, Agency's intellectual ancestor is the classic 'advertising will destroy us' stories and novels of Fredrik Pohl at his intellectual peak in the 1950s. The Tunnel Under the World. The Wizards of Pung's Corner. The Space Merchants.
20. They captured something very important about the world (as does Agency), but we're not trapped in the manipulations of something vaster than us and more inexorable. We have some agency. The problems that we face are dire, but the politics is not impossible. Finis.
