IW: Can you identify the genesis of the novel?
EM: There’s this genre that I love, you could call it, “the underdog revenge” genre. Or maybe “the little nobody taking revenge against the system that crushed them.” It’s maybe something we love in Scotland as we tend to see ourselves as underdogs. So, within this there’s all these classics like Dog Day Afternoon, Fight Club, Taxi Driver, Joker as well, and this crosses-over into classic outsider/anti-hero stories like Catcher in the Rye, Crime and Punishment, Trainspotting and American Psycho. So, I’ve been reading these for years, it’s pretty much the only genre I can relate to, being a bit of an outsider myself, and for a long time I wanted to write about a character who loses everything and decides: “Screw it all, I’m going to die for a cause because I’ve got nothing left to live for”. So, this is Josh, in the novel, father of a girl who dies in a Silicon Valley AI brain chip experiment and his act of revenge is homicide/suicide against the CEO of the Biotech company who was responsible and who covered it up with the help from government agencies. “I’ll take the bastard with me when I go,” Josh says. It’s his final act of love for Emma.
The genesis – there was definitely a much more personal element to this too and it came from the Covid pandemic. My wife has a serious heart condition, so we went pretty hard on the lockdown protocols and lived with a lot of fear and medical precautions during the pandemic, basically secreting ourselves away to a little cottage in the Scottish wilderness. From pretty early on, I worked out that we were not being told the truth about the origins and nature of the virus, and that it was being hidden for political reasons by our governments, and I got thinking, what would I do if this virus were to kill my wife?
How would I deal with the fact that governments and bio tech industries were working hand in hand to suppress the truth and to cover their asses? I worked out that I would probably exhaust myself on appeals to government agencies and law courts to get justice, but that ultimately, I would have to accept defeat, silencing, as a nobody whose little life is just part of the cover-up. I would most likely go insane. From obsessing about that, as I watched my wife walking round with a mask on all the time, I thought, I would do something, I would have to, I would have to strike back against the powers that be. Even if it would kill me. How would I do that, who would I attack, a bio tech company? The government? It’s like a flea attacking a mammoth. Pathetic, but a mind could get stuck in obsessing about that, just like Raskolnikov obsesses about the murder he feels he must commit in Crime and Punishment.
So, I thought the best (and safest) way to work this out was to make this character who has nothing left to lose and to see how far he can go and how he copes. And what loss would hurt me the most – my daughter, so I wrote about a little nobody of a man who loses his daughter to a secret experiment that is covered up by forces so much more vast than he can even grasp. And I started to care for him.
The book is also, I think, me finally coming to terms with the bi-annual depressions that I’ve been suffering from since the age of 17, and a deep dive into what depression, addiction and helplessness feel like and how they can motivate us to desperate acts, especially when we feel that our love and our lives have been stolen from us. The depressions, as you know, have seen me on the point of giving up writing more than once over the last decade, and if it hadn’t been for the support of your good self and few others, this book and the two before would never have come into existence.
So, the genesis was really the coming together of those personal things with the political. Yes, it’s all about the little nobody taking revenge against the system that’s crushed them and maybe that’s the story I’ve been trying to tell for a hell of a long time, and one that we maybe share in common.
IW: The themes are the rapacious, accelerationist nature of technology and our lack of control and agency in this process against the power of the corporate state, what people will do for love and revenge when utterly desperate. Is human progress inherently dystopian now?
EM: We do feel an increasing lack of control and agency, for sure, against the techno-state and its growth. It seems to want to control all our behaviours and reduce us to data that can be monitored and managed. This has been bothering me for a while and it came to a head when the Nostradamus-styled futurist, Yuval Noah Harari declared that a great mass of humans will lose their jobs as they’re replaced by AI and automation and they will become a “useless class” who will have to be kept “pacified” with distractions like virtual reality games, entertainment, and drugs.
Government administered heroin, or molly, or SOMA as Huxley said in Brave New World. The prediction seemed pretty far-fetched only a year ago, but now feels more like a description of our unfolding reality as AI has begun relentlessly culling jobs. Many of us have friends or folks we know who have suffered job loss or drastic loss of income due to AI. In the arts, I hear all these reports from folk who work in concept design, graphic arts and journalism, as employers have replaced them with cheap AI. Welcome to the Useless Class.
Some are throwing in the towel, like one graphic artist friend said, “I just can’t compete with these AIs that were built on scraping our art. I’m done. I’m out.” I know a journalist who is looking for a new career after having seen how well the new DeepSeek AI programme can write copy. A friend on X contacts me every week to ask if “it is over”- by this he means the hope of ever having a career as a scriptwriter. He’s twenty-three and feels lost and suicidal on-and-off with every news story that comes in about AIs developing the ability to write fiction. How can he get started if AI demonetises the entire sector and steals all the content?
It’s really fucking offensive to be told by people like Harari who get nicely paid to lecture at the World Economic Forum that you now belong to the ‘Useless Class.’ I think I’ve been in and out of the useless class most of my life, but for folks to realise they are no longer valuable or needed for the first time, replaced by machines – that’s going to hit very hard.
So, I think for many of us the future does seem dystopian, and it seems this is all being done just so the billionaire tech overlords can have even more control and power, and worse than that it does feel like technology is a runaway force, that ultimately this feedback loop of technological advance and state power is beyond the control of any one person or group. As the technologists love to say, progress can’t be stopped. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
The problem I should say, is not even that I believe in the coming of this vast AGI superintelligence that will have exponentially more intelligence and power than humans, like the transhumanists dream of. No, that’s just snake-oil hype talk and a techno investors wet dream. What worries me is that even with the limited narrow AI that we have today, this dumb AI that talks to you like a customer services bot, the technologists already have all the tools required to create very oppressive surveillance societies, with our health, money, mobility, relationships and language turned into data that is processed by surveillance algorithms that dish out micro-punishments and rewards. You see this already in the experimental Social Credit System in China and their system of 700 million surveillance cameras which they (it’s no joke) have named SKYNET. We’re not far from this “total care society” that reduces us all to spreadsheet data and there’s the powerlessness and lack of agency that comes from that. Your life micromanaged by narrow AI systems that don’t understand your need for questions and human contact and the unknown. Your language planned, your sexual partner pre-assessed, your food and travel limited. And on top of that you have the forced unemployment caused by AI.
That sense of being useless leads to learned helplessness and depression. I’ve been in that hole more times than I like to think about and what Harari warns about seems accurate to me – what will they do with a populace who no longer have meaningful work to do, when millions of jobs are replaced by advanced non-conscious algorithms that can perform faster and cheaper than humans. What will they do to stop the “useless class” bursting out into revolt, or acts or random violence. Yes, we will be kept pacified with games and drugs. Terrifying to think that governments might actually be considering universal drug pacification programmes. Renton in Trainspotting walks away from drugs for a reason, actually Renton walks away from the whole society. This is definitely an impulse that I and many others feel. We don’t want to be the pacified useless class. How can such a future not make us furious?
IW: How do we build a positive future for humanity when the main driving forces of change; capital, technology and the nation state are now all co-opted (and are assimilating) fewer people and simultaneously narrowing the emotional bandwidth of those people? Are we destined to become technoserfs in those great fiefdoms?
EM: I’ve been thinking a lot about what we can do in the face of this techno-dystopia just because the dangers of admitting defeat are huge, they take a toll on us, rob us of all energy. I spent a few years in bed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and I don’t have any time left for surrender. I suppose, part of the impetus behind writing the book was to see what little freedoms our anti-tech rebel, Josh, could discover along the way, even though he is destined to blow himself and maybe his enemy to pieces. What freedoms emerge unexpectedly when we accept the worst? It’s a pretty drastic but maybe liberating way to look at things, more empowering, if fatally, than accepting that we are fated to become technoserfs. And in his case, being forced to accept that his daughter’s death was just collateral damage to be swept under the carpet, in the ongoing unstoppable march of technology.
And why should we let the technologist be the only ones who get to talk optimistically about their positive future for humanity. Won’t it be amazing they say, when we are all implanted with brain chips and can contact each other telepathically. A kind of happy version of the Borg in Star Trek.
This happy utopian vision of the technologists and technocrats is quite terrifying and tone deaf. Even ‘thought leaders’ like Klaus Schwab of the WEF, in his talk of the amazing emancipation promised by full automation in the Fourth Industrial Revolution can’t help but use the metaphor of the tsunami to describe the coming flood of technology and our impending inundation. Don’t people drown in tsunamis? Crushed to death? Don’t they lose their homes and families and savings and livelihoods? The technocrats keep using these mass-death metaphors, with a smile. These are the same techno-thought-leaders of the WEF, who predict, in their Future of Jobs report that 85 million jobs may be displaced by AI and automation by the end of 2025.
So why not take them at their word – a technological tsunami is coming to destroy the useless class, so what do we do, those of us who know it’s coming? If you possess a tsunami/mass destruction early detection warning system, then, unlike everyone else, you’d be wise to get prepared, you will have ‘grab bags’ ready for the emergency, you will know where the high ground is and what the fastest possible evacuation route is to your second survival location, you will have stashes of medical and food supplies, alternative ways to contact people beyond the zone of damage, you will, yes, most of all be prepared. You will not go paddling or swimming or sailing in the waters of the new technology while hoping for the best.
This is what I’ve been working out – when you know the tech-tsunami is coming to destroy your way of life, you would be wise to use the time before it hits to create back-up plans, locating types of work that will not be impacted, you may have to start a second career, you may have to downsize, retrain, to find an area of work that will not be taken over by AI. Why not assume the worst and take Harari and Schwab’s warning at face value. Don’t just build a lifeboat or run, get together with other folk who are ‘in the same boat’ and build an arc.
Doing nothing and hoping for the best isn’t an option, there is only one other path I can see and that is that you join the ranks of those who are doing the opposite of the accelerationists, by trying to decelerate and reign in AI. Those calling for regulations and new laws or reinforcements of existing laws to protect copyright from theft by AI companies. Those calling for eco-regulations to stop the rapid growth of data centres with their colossal and wasteful use of power. As a decelerationist you can campaign for your governments and your unions to compensate people for the damaging effects of runaway AI venture capital growth. You can get together with other anti-AI activists and spread counter information about the promise of AI and try to discourage investment in it, you can try to burst the AI bubble and push for an AI economy crash – that might hold AI back for a few years.
But at the same you should know that you are just slowing down the tsunami, building small walls and dams and barricades together and it might not work, because AI has now entered an international economic race to the bottom, and when that happens every country is fearful of missing out and losing opportunity, so they deregulate faster than the others. It becomes an accelerating storm.
This is not an either-or, we can do both – prepare for surviving the tsunami by building up a secondary livelihood beyond the reach of AI, while at the same time working to try to hold the tsunami back.
This is my attempt at being optimistic and it’s maybe not a positive view for humanity as whole, because this is a bit more like a Noah’s arc situation, maybe it’s just a positive view for the survivors who plan ahead.
