Cory Doctorow, science fiction as a weapon against the metaverse: “We are not free and we don’t know it” | Culture

Write in a garage. He wants to be safe from all eyes. Also virtual ones. Cory Doctorow (Toronto, 51 years old), science fiction writer, zuckervegan and digital rights activist, you can’t believe the rest of the world lives like it’s not a collection of data being bought and sold behind your back all the time. “We are not free and we don’t know it,” says the writer, for whom Mark Zuckerberg and his virtual conglomerate —his budding metaverse— at their head tirelessly trample on a new type of human rights that is not talked about enough. “There may be changes in the world, but, deep down, there is a current that we do not control, that is imposing a default reality, that tries to reimpose what is being fought against while keeping us entertained,” he says.

If her daughter’s name—Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow—is almost as endless as that of the protagonist of her latest novel, the powerful and dystopian walk away (Captain Swing), a juicy cross between Bret Easton Ellis, Douglas Coupland and Dave Eggers, is because he wants to be able to throw off data collectors as much as possible. “The longer your name is, the more untraceable you become. Somehow, with a name like that, you’re hacking the system. You are complicating things for all those white, heterosexual, rich men, the usual elites, who are still behind everything we consider the world today,” says Doctorow, who recalls — from his home in Los Angeles, through a video call — that it is the mechanisms of the system that end up deciding, for example, what is and what is not a family “when they only take into account those that they consider as such.”

Thus, he explains, when the DVD Forum —an organization founded in 1995 that included companies from hardware, software, the media and Hollywood itself— decided on which televisions the “spy” plates were installed to discover what content should be favored, prioritized or “directly only included families of at least four members, who lived in, for example, London, and could afford a screen in the car”. “If you were born in Manila and have a son building a stadium in Qatar, what you see on television doesn’t matter in the least to them because they don’t consider you family,” she adds. “There are people deciding what is and what is not true in our life based on data that they extract illegally, and that reinforce an idea of ​​the world that goes in the opposite direction to the one that is trying to be built”, he also says.

That is why it is so important to become aware, he assures. In walk away It so happens that Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Wilson —and so on until completing the 21 names of the protagonist of the story, better known as Etcetera precisely for this reason— and his best friend, Seth, decide to join Natalie, a wealthy heiress who is inevitably rebellious —they meet at a communist party, because that is the only thing left of communism in that apparently perfect future: supposedly solidarity parties—, and abandon what is known as “the default society”. The world that Doctorow imagines is so similar to ours that it could be none other, or be the same, but subtly sophisticated. In other words, restaurants automatically adapt their menus to the customer’s taste, and everything is “printed”, not “manufactured”: 3D printers do all the work.

The printers are, of course, remote controlled by an artificial intelligence that, if it is capable of x-raying its customers, it is because it is just one of those collections of data. Leaving a society like this can only be done if you start to walk away from the centers of power —and from everything that ties you to the system—, if you become what has been called andantes, luck of beatniks, or survivors of a dystopian reality that denies reality itself: far from those populated and controlled cities there is a desert, in which the devastating consequences of climate change prevent anything from growing. But where everything that exists is real, as it used to be. And it is here that Doctorow’s work points and shoots in the same direction and with the same effect as the classics by Aldous Huxley and Ursula K. Le Guin did at the time.

“I am accused of being a Luddite, and the Luddites were accused of something that had nothing to do with them. It is not that they were against technological advances, they were against the use that was made of them. That childhood could be eliminated, as it was, because children could be put to work, thanks to machines. I am not against technology. When I think back to how long it took me to paper up the neighborhood with flyers to fight for something when I was young, I can’t believe that one click is all it takes these days to let the whole world know what you’ve started. But we need a balance. The changes will only be real if we act analogically. In other words, the digital world must be a world of encounters, but we must continue on the street. It is the analog that produces the change ”, she exposes.

despite his zuckerveganism —that is, it does not use any technology that belongs to the creator of Facebook because Mark Zuckerberg, he says, “does not respect our digital rights”— confesses to being addicted to Twitter. “It is a mistake not to take virtual relationships into account. They saved us during the pandemic! We cannot deny that they have made our lives easier. My wife and I met when she was still living in London and I was already in Canada. Part of our relationship, at first, took place virtually. Technology has enormous potential, it’s the way we’re being used while using it that’s not right. Or does it not make sense that we are saving fuel because we no longer have to physically meet anywhere? We should become aware, that’s all, ”he insists.

A devotee of Judith Merril, the science fiction writer who made him love the genre — a true creative hurricane, promoter of publications and literary workshops in his native Toronto — Doctorow believes that “the only way to win an ideological battle is to extinguish the imagination, and that is what neoliberalism is trying through technology.” “If I have wanted to be a science fiction writer from the beginning, it is because I believe that the genre presents alternatives, and is the only one that does, to the world in which we live. He tells us that things could be otherwise,” he says. And despite everything, he is optimistic. “My 15-year-old daughter knows that the system can’t offer her anything and, like her, the rest of the kids know it. None of them have a future in today’s system, and this is what the elites have not yet understood and what can defeat them, ”he concludes hopefully.