Very Meta

Ed, picking up on your last theme of nefarious Big Tech, I’m reading Dave Eggers’ latest novel, The Every. It’s the sequel to his wonderful book The Circle, which was a hilarious and terrifying fictionalisation of a platform behemoth known as the Circle that was an awful squid-like combination of Google and Facebook.

The protagonist in that novel, a young woman who is hired as a junior employee and eventually used to prototype an always-on camera that turns her (and everyone in her life) into a tragic, 24/7 reality show, is now the chief executive of a new parent company. Nobody feels she’s added much value, but with network effects, who needs it?

The Every is the result of a merger between the Circle (which needed some rebranding following antitrust pressure) and “an ecommerce behemoth named after a South American jungle”, as Eggers tells us. The latter was eager for acquisition, since its once-rational and reliable marketplace had developed into a “chaotic wasteland of shady vendors, product knock-offs and outright fraud”. The Circle is only too happy to oblige. It engineers a stock takeover and the firm’s founder (distracted by numerous divorce and settlement cases) is “only too happy to cash out and devote his time to space exploration with his fourth spouse. They were planning to retire on the Moon.”

The merged company is a pseudo-sovereign power renamed The Every. Its acquisition target is subsequently referred to only as “the jungle”, small J by employees, who are known as Everyones. Many of them are busy acquiring companies like Ol Factory, a scent app for gaming. Its “most successful release, Stench of War, brought the smells of diesel, dust and decaying flesh into the homes of teenage boys worldwide”. Like many of the other multibillion-dollar targets (if it ain’t worth paying a billion, it ain’t worth it), the founders are now waiting out their five-year vesting period before leaving to start family foundations.

I could go on, but suffice to say that this is the best piece of art imitating life that I’ve read in some time. Eggers so has Palo Alto’s number. But what’s most disturbing is that unlike The Circle, which still felt a bit science fiction when he wrote it, The Every isn’t telling us about anything that isn’t already happening. In the age of surveillance capitalism, indeed.

Ed, last week, you raised the question of why Silicon Valley is able to continue monetising websites that actually encourage teens to kill themselves (among other truly horrible things). I think this is down to two things.

First, we are numbed by the technology itself. Last week I was part of a very good Intelligence Squared debate on the motion “Amazon is Good for Small Business” (I argued the con side with the fabulous Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance — check it out here, and please vote!). One of the questioners in the second part of the debate raised the point that a lot of people simply don’t care how Big Tech is degrading our economic, social and political ecosystem if they can get anything they want with one click. This may well be true.

Second, I think part of that is because they don’t have the metrics to understand just what the costs are. And on that, I urge Swamp Notes readers to check out my latest column. It has an exclusive first look at what I believe will be a very impactful report from University College London, showing how platform tech is skirting around Securities and Exchange Commission rules to avoid revealing the true value of data and the various divisions that use it, in order to make things harder for regulators, antitrust investors, and competitors. Read it carefully. I’m betting Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission; Jonathan Kanter, the Justice Department’s top antitrust official; Tim Wu, White House adviser on competition policy, and Gary Gensler, SEC chair, will be.

Ed, on a gentler note, my question for you this week is this — given that you are a beautiful writer who has covered business and politics for ages, have you ever considered doing a satirical novel on the same, and if so, what would it be about? Readers: send in your thoughts on this question too, including titles!

Edward Luce responds

Haha. I read somewhere that when The Guardian’s intranet system (called Atex, I believe) briefly went down sometime in the late 1990s, the IT department discovered 45 unfinished novels in there. Whether it was apocryphal or not, it deserved to be true. Had the same thing happened at the FT, my guess is they would have found fewer novels but a lot of satirical portraits of powerful figures, including ones that worked in the newspaper’s upper echelons. I am no romancier manqué, so I do not consider journalism a second best to my true calling. I have always puzzled over the phrase “truth is stranger than fiction”, since I do not read fiction in some thrilling pursuit of strangeness but to illuminate the familiar and discover more about those weird things that philosophers call “other minds”.

But you have asked me a question so I’ll answer it. My never-to-be-attempted novel would be entitled Friends and it would be about how access to power works in the real world. It would draw on my observations of power elites in cities like New Delhi, London and most of all Washington and their routine daily homicide of the meaning of the word “friend”. Such an account could only be rendered in fictional form as I would lose most of my “friends” if I recounted journalistically how power and socialising really work. I would have to name names, which would be career suicide. The guiding spirit of the novel is that true friendships are not utilitarian. Their sole purpose is the intrinsic delight of the companionship of others. By that yardstick, the world’s most powerful people are a deeply impoverished tribe — as well as being very strange people. Some of them don’t even have dogs.

Your feedback

And now a word from our Swampians . . .

In response to ‘For the love of our children — end social media’s immunity!’:

“Naïveté. Innocent disregard. Willful blindness. Call it what you want, our society’s acceptance of ‘social media’ in all its forms is causing a slow painful death to life as we have known it. A death to decency, cultural norms, respect, science, truth, unity, shared values — the list is long. The damage to children should be the clarion call for action to start to fix the many problems. Endless testimony (otherwise described as pitches and positioning) gives the appearance of action, but, in reality, these sessions only serve to maintain the status quo. Scepticism as the response just doesn’t cut it.” — Nancy Knowlton, Calgary, Canada

“Like Ed Luce, I find the idea of the social media platforms self-policing to be ridiculous. We have now reached a stage where the majority of economies have progressed through primary, secondary and tertiary stages to reach a fourth stage — where information and entertainment seamlessly intermix and the customer becomes simultaneously the feedstock. Companies like Facebook and Instagram have assiduously cultivated a special term for themselves, “social media platforms”, which we have now all been bamboozled into using. But if we described them correctly, the problem would be soluble. Rather than tinkering around at the edges, such social platforms must be described as what they are — publishers.” — Stephen Bloomfield, Essex, England

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