Naomi Alderman, Author at ��è��Ƶ

Why I explored the corrupting power of tech billionaires in The Future

Naomi Alderman — Fri, 05 Jan 2024 11:15:59 +0000

New York City parks commissioner Robert Moses in 1958.

Getty Images

We are always forgetting the truth about power. Every generation needs to be reminded again that it’s not the person, it’s not the office, it’s power that eventually corrupts and warps even the best personality with the greatest of intentions beyond repair.

I thought a lot about this in writing my novel . I have always been interested in writing about power – most of my books are about how systems of power change us, and how we change them. The Future is about arguably the most powerful individuals on the planet today: the technology billionaires who operate without taxation and government restraint in large part, without term limits, without having to answer to those of us who are the “citizens” of their online territories. How did they get there? Why is it so hard to live outside the infrastructure they’ve made? And how has it changed them to be the centre of so much power?

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There was one book that made all the difference in my thinking.

In 1974, Robert Caro published an incomparable, extraordinary book, , which lifted the lid on Robert Moses, the great builder of infrastructure – roads and bridges, parks and tunnels and public buildings – of New York City. People who knew him personally had known he was a tyrant and a bully, a man whose plans had long since stopped making sense except as a way to accrue him yet more power.

The Power Broker is 1100 pages long, yet it is so gripping and so fascinating that one would be glad of a few hundred pages more. It shows Moses beginning as an idealist – a man who, at the start of his career, yearned to build baby-changing stations in New York parks – but who was so changed by power that he ended up stifling vital infrastructure projects because he couldn’t be in charge of them. Written in the back of my copy are the questions that I’m sure most readers asked themselves as they made their way through: “How could this have been stopped? What would it have taken?” Behind that is another question: how can we spot this early enough, and act soon enough now?

It happens, one learns from Caro, at first with a great fanfare. A person does a thing that is an unalloyed good for the community. Moses built a wonderful leisure facility at Jones Beach, something that revolutionised the lives of ordinary people. It’s the same with the tech billionaires. The benefits of the past 20 years of communications technology have been extraordinary. To list them all would take too long, but some things that were science fiction when I was a child are: free video calls; moving maps that tell you exactly where you are; instant access to books, music, art, ideas from billions of people around the world. The ability to make connections, to share thoughts without boundaries, to track down any item you need… these things are extraordinary. And good. Well, that’s where it starts.

From The Power Broker too, we learn that it never ends there. People who have made popular things – important, wonderful things – will have a lot of leeway in the public’s mind. More than they should. So when the next thing, and the next, and the next, aren’t quite as good, it is easy for the public to forgive them. People loved contacting friends on Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, but not the data mining. Oh well. People enjoyed the vision of the Tesla, so many of Elon Musk’s online cheerleaders can’t accept the expert criticism of The Boring Company or that he’s making Twitter/X increasingly cringe, or that OpenAI, a company he helped found, is among firms positioned to make thousands, if not millions, of jobs redundant. If Jeff Bezos’s Amazon gets things done – or at least sent out extremely rapidly – then the public imagination glances off the fact that the company has become a virtual monopoly in so many key areas.

Well, this is how it goes. This isn’t – again – about the personality of the individual. It’s about power. I wouldn’t be able to think straight if I had that amount of power and money, and nor would you. I would start to believe that I’d achieved that power and wealth through my own exceptional brilliance with no luck whatsoever and that my interests and ideas aligned best with the needs of the whole world. My personality flaws would be magnified, my brittle self grown monstrous. Those are the effects of power toxicity.

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Robert Moses knew that one way to gain power was a simple land-grab: start to build something and then it would seem too difficult, too unpopular, too wasteful to tear it down and start again. This is the “move fast and break things” philosophy of Silicon Valley too. Many things have been built before the laws that could have governed them could be conceived, let alone written, let alone passed by the legislature.

What one learns from Robert Caro’s The Power Broker is that the only way to stop this is through the checks and balances that come with laws. No one is important enough that the law should be made solely for them. And if the laws we have turn out not to accord with our sense of fairness and right in new situations, then we need new laws.

If it seems unfair that companies that make services we need are able to insist we agree to give them all our data before we use them, then we need new laws. If it doesn’t feel just that extremely useful online translators are being trained using the work of human translators, but with no financial compensation to those humans, then we need new laws. If it feels grossly wrong that, having invented the way for us to share our thoughts and ideas – having invented, in effect, a new kind of bag for holding ideas in – social media and other online companies are now claiming ownership of those thoughts to do with as they please… well, then we need new laws.

What one learns from reading The Power Broker is how far one man can go when the public looks at the great things he has built without examining the harms he has caused. If we are all caught up in media circuses, in culture wars, in hot takes… it would be worth considering who has ownership of the means of communication and who benefits when, instead of enacting the new laws that would control them, we are all mesmerised by their power of distraction.

Naomi Alderman’s The Future, published by 4th Estate, is the latest pick for the ��è��Ƶ Book Club. Sign up and read along with us here

Read an extract from The Future by Naomi Alderman

Naomi Alderman — Fri, 05 Jan 2024 11:15:38 +0000

An apocalyptic warning near Westminster’s parliament buildings in London.

Alamy Stock Photo

NORTH CALIFORNIA, NOVEMBER Action Now! Ecological Convention Lenk On the day the world ended, Lenk Sketlish – CEO and founder of the Fantail social network – sat at dawn beneath the redwoods in a designated location of natural beauty and attempted to inhale from his navel. The tops of the mountains in the distance were capped with snow, their curves and crevasses kindling the imagination. The trees near at hand were russet on fawn, grey-green on sage. The redwood trunks were solid, corded, patterned like twisted vines, their surfaces soft with mosses and growing grass; tiny insects whirred through the dense mass.

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The sky was the pale water-washed blue of the late autumn, mottled cloud visible through the spiral-set branches. And yet. The meditation teacher had a nose whistle. Each time she took yet another “deep belly breath”, the whine cut through the gentle whisper of the redwoods like a chain saw. She must hear it. She surely heard it. She did not seem to hear it. The redwoods shivered, the November leaves were about to drop, and all things must pass, as she could not cease reminding him. All things were not going to pass from Lenk Sketlish if he had anything to do with it. “Let your belly be soft as you inhale,” the teacher said. Her tongue lingered on the double l in “belly,” as if she were Italian. She wasn’t Italian. Lenk had asked Martha Einkorn, his executive assistant, to check after the first day. The meditation instructor came from Wisconsin, the home of squeaky cheese. She kept saying “belly”. He should hold light in his belly, feel the warmth in his belly, crawl inside his own belly, and dwell forever in her adenoidal whine and her infinitely elongated l. What was growing inside Lenk Sketlish’s belly was an acidic roiling, churning wrath. The redwoods. Back to the redwoods. The majesty of nature, simple beauty. The worn path up the hillside, the tumbling brook. Breathing in, breathing out. The world as it comes moment by moment and he, too, a part of it. Not scattered, not wrathful, not thinking of the Fantail expansion deals in Uruguay and in Myanmar even though someone was definitely going to fuck something up in his absence. Be present. Here. Feeling his breath in his navel, the centre of his body, yes, good, the navel rising and falling and . . . the nose whistle added a new note. Slightly lower than the first. Baritone? Alto? Couldn’t she hear it? Why didn’t she blow her nose before she came to the sessions? Hadn’t Martha or anyone on his board or a single one of Martha’s minions found out whether this gold-star, top-of-the-line meditation teacher had a nose whistle? Did they just take everything on trust? “Breathe within the body” – her voice low and lilting – “nothing is needed from you in this moment.” This was obviously not true, given that he had to be there, given that his board had told him quite some time ago that if he couldn’t get his anger under control, there were real questions over whether he had a future at Fantail, which was in itself as nonsensical as this woman with a full orchestral wind section in her nose passing herself off as a source of calm. He’d gone along with it; he’d played the game. If they thought they were going to do to him what Ellen Bywater had done to Albert Dabrowski at Medlar, shuffle him out of his own company, well, they had another think coming. But they would do it – they’d tell him his leadership style wasn’t working, he wasn’t on a learning journey; they’d edge him out slowly at first and then very fast. He’d seen it. Albert Dabrowski was a cautionary tale. Ellen Bywater ran Medlar now. Where the fuck was Albert Dabrowski? Who the fuck even cared? “Be truly present in this moment,” the mucosal trumpets murmured. “Allow yourself to meet the moment with trust.” He was there to show his willingness. He wasn’t an immature baby; he’d run Fantail successfully for nearly two decades, built it from nothing but an idea and the sense of a wave building far out in the ocean. In 127 countries across the world now, if you wanted to talk to a mass audience, you started with FantailStream; if you wanted to sell something, you set up FantailStore; if you wanted to trade across borders, you used FantailSeamless to pay in FantailCoin. When nation spoke unto nation, they did it via Fantail. And Lenk could do this next part, the public-facing making-nice part. The antitrust hearings, this dumb Action Now! ecological conference with Anvil and Medlar – he could do it. He’d keep his cool, not throw expensive ceramic sculptures through expensive engraved-glass partitions, and no one would have to go to the hospital with a glass shard in her eye ever again. That was a mistake. He regretted it. Meditation is hokey but it works – just breathe from the navel. Focus on the in-breath. The out-breath. He used to be into this stuff at Harvard. One of his roommates had given him a playlist. Long nights coding, then ten minutes of this and you go from strung-out exhaustion to blissful deep sleep. There was something to it. Zimri Nommik of Anvil went to some pod in the desert every year to do ten days of silence and fasting and pouring water up his nose. Or up his arse. One of those. Zimri Nommik, building warehouses and distribution networks, shipping everything old and new under the sun, already on his heels with AnvilChat and AnvilParty, trying to snap up everything in his all-consuming maw and – “If you find your thoughts have wandered” – the instructor inhaled deeply with an accordion wheeze – “don’t be surprised. Simply return gently to the breath. This moment is all you need.” But this had never been the case. This moment was gone as soon as it was noticed. There could be no prize and no possession there. It was the glimmering he needed, the beckoning force of time, the wave gathering in the distant ocean. “Take a deep belly breath. Remember that we are only ever anxious about things that might happen in the future. But the future is not here. The future is imaginary and all its promises and fears are imagined. We can rest in this moment,” she said. “What is happening is OK.” But often what was happening was not OK. It was almost never OK. It needed constant nudging and tending, fixing and pushing. Without his intervention the moment would be lost, and the next, and the next, each wave passing and him still bobbing in the cold sea, the warmth leaching from his bones, death rising to swallow him whole. Without keeping his eyes on what might happen, an entire life could be eaten up, and most people’s were. “There’s no way to really know what’s going to arise next,” the instructor said. Well, then it was all a shit show. There was no way to know. The next moment might hold anything. There could be opportunities, new ideas caught by someone else, a competitor ready to usurp his fortune. There could be Ellen Bywater, the company stealer, turning the all-seeing eye of Medlar in his direction, her gleaming, elegant pieces of hardware the aspirational alternative to workaday Fantail. The Medlar Torc was her new thing, all your communication needs dealt with by this stylish device. She always seemed one step ahead of him now, tempting away his key demographics like she stole Medlar. There could be new products from her, but of course there could be an earthquake, a sudden heart attack, a deadly bomb loosed far away by an unstable dictator, a global pandemic. Anything. Lenk Sketlish was a powerful man who had built his career on the future, on knowing it, smelling it, feeling it more present around him than the present. The future was his home and his consolation; the urgency of tomorrow, the next decade, the next century pressed in on him and pushed him forward. “There’s no way to really know what’s going to happen even one second into the future.” No, thought Lenk Sketlish, that’s not going to work for me. The thinscreen on his wrist gave out a low but urgent beep. The meditation instructor creased her brow, and a satisfying thought flashed through Lenk’s mind: Ah, you see, there’s no way to really know what’s going to happen, is there? He glanced at the thinscreen; it would be an emergency in Albania or in Thailand, a decision to be made and a problem to be solved, some wonderful and financially unarguable excuse to end the session early. But it wasn’t. The skin of his face tightened; his eyes narrowed as he looked at the notification. It was no minor escape. It was the end of days. Extract taken from by Naomi Alderman, published by 4th Estate. The Future is the latest pick for the ��è��Ƶ Book Club. Sign up and read along with us here

Naomi Alderman, Author at ��è����Ƶ

Why I explored the corrupting power of tech billionaires in The Future

Read an extract from The Future by Naomi Alderman

Naomi Alderman, Author at ��è��Ƶ