The Future is Soon: a review of Burn-in by Peter Singer and August Cole
Today’s journalism, art, literature, and music are rife with depictions of techno-dystopia and techno-utopia. The battle lines seem more clearly drawn than ever before between pessimists and techno-optimists of all political shades. Perhaps we’ve thrown off the rose-tinted glasses we once used to examine Silicon Valley’s contributions to society, but the debate about the role of technology in our future economy, social order, and personal lives still rages on.
Burn-in, a novel by Peter W Singer and August Cole, looks to extrapolate current trends in technology, to imagine a near-future where technology has penetrated into every space of human existence. In it, we follow Lara Keegan, an ex-marine turned FBI agent, and her android sidekick on their hunt to catch a group of terrorists targeting Washington DC. Every single scene, plot point, or interaction is mediated through some kind of device or algorithm. The novel is full of details based on extensive research into emerging technologies. Every new device or service our authors imagine has an end-note attached, referencing an existing technology or company. Some developments are predictable: drones and robots have become ubiquitous in warfare, policing, customer service, delivery, and households. Others are more surprising, both terrifying and fascinating. Burn-in’s writers are uniquely well-positioned to be the Nostradamuses of the national security world, with their first novel, Ghost Fleet, receiving acclaim from defense policy wonks for its obsessive attention to detail and realism in depicting a future great power conflict.
What struck me most about Burn-in wasn’t its impressive wonkishness, nor even its fantastical yet realistic technologies. It was its pessimism. The world-building in the novel is extensive, painting a near future where current trends are exacerbated, positive and negative alike.
The future depicted in the novel is one of extreme economic inequality, social disorder, and individual alienation. Climate change wasn’t fixed by some silver bullet green innovation, it’s proceeded more or less as science has foretold. As a result coastal cities experience regular floods and four seasons in a single day. Automation has caused rampant job destruction across a whole slew of industries, from warehouse workers to Ivy League-educated lawyers. Mass unemployment has birthed a society-wide mental health crisis. The book is permeated by a sense that all its characters have a chronic form of ‘millennial burnout’ — though the exact year is never mentioned, evidence points to Millennials being the Boomers of the novel’s future. The much-touted emerging “care economy” has been optimized into a platform of micro-commodification of human emotions, where a gig economy of ultra-precarious semi-professional empaths comfort the elderly, the mentally ill, and the sick. Public services have increasingly been privatized: intercity rail, metro systems, utilities, and even the national security policy-making process itself. Perhaps worst of all, absolutely every solitary human being in America wears Google Glasses. The irony of the novel is creating a world in which the Luddites of our time were proven absolutely correct.
Long story short: for Singer and Cole, today’s pessimists are right. It really is going to be that bad. In 1985, TV pessimist Neil Postman argued that, in the battle of totalitarian literature, Orwell was wrong and Huxley was right. Our future dystopia wouldn’t need banned books or political repression: “As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny ‘failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distraction.’…We’re a culture whose information, ideas and epistemology, are now given form by TV, not by the printed word.” Sean Illing argues that Postman’s now 30-year-old claims have mostly held up. The ways in which he predicted television would alter society largely came to pass. But it wasn’t the end of the world, necessarily: we’re still here, but we live in the reality this technology created.
In Burn-in’s future, medicine is ultra-advanced, consumer goods are plentiful and cheap, and logistics networks have been completely optimized, with drone pads on every roof. However, in order for these positive developments to have occurred, humanity itself has largely been left by the wayside. Contemporary calls for a universal basic income were either ignored, or it wasn’t the cure-all the YangGangers believe it to be. It’s also clear that the privacy advocates and anti-social media addiction agitators have been resoundingly defeated — security has been subjugated to needs of the algorithm.
As Yuji Develle has argued in this publication, technology is neutral. It isn’t a force for good by default. We can wield innovation to make our lives better and our society more just, but this must be done deliberately. Tech needs to be accountable to democratically-controlled institutions representing the interests of the republic. The future cannot be the sole reserve of the boy-kings of Silicon Valley — a broader cross-section of civil society has to get involved before it’s too late.
Burn-in by P W Singer and August Cole / May 2020 / HMH / $28
Jackson Webster is a security analyst focused on cybersecurity, social media and information warfare, and is a regular columnist at Wonk Bridge. Follow him on Twitter @joliverwebster
