- Suarez, Daniel.
Freedom™.
New York: Signet, 2010.
ISBN 978-0-451-23189-5.
-
You'll see this book described as the sequel to the author's
breakthrough first novel Daemon
(August 2010), but in fact this is the second half of
a long novel which happened to be published in two volumes.
As such, if you pick up this book without
having read Daemon, you will have absolutely
no idea what is going on, who the characters are, and why
they are motivated to do the things they do. There is little
or no effort to fill in the back story or bring the reader
up to speed. So read Daemon first, then this book,
ideally not too long afterward so the story will remain fresh
in your mind. Since that's the way the author treats these two
books, I'm going to take the same liberty and assume you've
read my review of Daemon to
establish the context for these remarks.
The last two decades have demonstrated, again and again, just how
disruptive ubiquitous computing and broadband data networks can
be to long-established and deeply entrenched industries such as
book publishing and distribution, music recording and retailing,
newspapers, legacy broadcast media, domestic customer service call
centres, travel agencies, and a host of other businesses which have seen
their traditional business models supplanted by something faster,
more efficient, and with global reach. In this book the author
explores the question of whether the fundamental governance
and economic system of the last century may be next domino
to fall, rendered impotent and obsolete and swept away by a
fundamentally new way of doing things, impossible to imagine in
the pre-wired world, based on the principles used in massively
multiplayer online game engines and social networks.
Of course, governments and multinational corporations are not going
to go gently into the night, and the Daemon (a distributed mesh networked
game engine connected to the real world) and its minions on the
“darknet” demonstrate the ruthlessness of a machine
intelligence when threatened, which results in any number of scenes
just begging to be brought to the big screen. In essence, the Daemon
is creating a new operating system for humans,
allowing them to interact in ways less rigid, more decentralised and
resilient, and less hierarchical than the institutions they inherited
from an era when goods and information travelled no faster than a
horse.
In my estimation, this is a masterwork: the first compelling utopian/dystopian
(depending on how you look at it, which is part of its genius) novel of the Internet
era. It is as good, in its own way, as
Looking Backward,
Brave New World, or
1984, and it is a
much more thrilling read than any of them. Like those classics, Suarez
gets enough of the details right that you find yourself beginning
to think that things might actually turn out something like this, and
what kind of a world it would be to live in were that to happen.
Ray Kurzweil argues that
The Singularity Is Near. In this novel,
the author gets the reader to wonder whether it might not be a lot
closer than Kurzweil envisions, and not require the kind of
exponential increase in computing power he assumes to be the
prerequisite. Might the singularity—a phase transition in the
organisation of human society as profound as the discovery of
agriculture—actually be about to happen in the next few years,
not brought about by superhuman artificial intelligence but rather the
synthesis of and interconnection of billions of human intelligences
connected by a “social network” encompassing all of
society? (And if you think sudden transitions like that can't happen,
just ask anybody who used to own a record store or the boss of a major
newspaper.) Would this be a utopian solution to a system increasingly
perceived as unsustainable and inexorably crushing individuality and
creativity, or would it be a descent into a potentially irreversible
dark age in which humans would end up as peripherals in a vast
computing grid using them to accomplish its own incomprehensible
agenda? You'll probably close this book undecided on that question,
and spend a good deal of time afterward pondering it. That is what
makes this novel so great.
If the author can continue to rise to this standard in subsequent novels,
we have a new grandmaster on the scene.
January 2011 