Big Tech Empire Goes From Dystopia to Ridiculous as Hot Literature Subject

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“An entire culture had been seduced. I saw my blind faith in the ambitious, aggressive, arrogant young men of America’s benevolent suburbs as a personal pathology, but it was far from personal. It had become global anguish.”

As with all cultural cataclysms, literature turned its eyes to the technological world that opened up from Silicon Valley. The lenses are varied, ranging from dystopian to satirical, and balance the analysis of how we arrived at this concentration of power in such new and so little understood megacorporations with reflections on where the hell it is taking us.

The account that opens this report comes from the autobiographical “Vale da Estranheza”, by 34-year-old American Anna Wiener. On the book’s cover, writer Rebecca Solnit classifies the author as “Joan Didion in a start-up”, and you can understand what she means.

By narrating how he exchanged, from 2013 to 2018, an analog job in the publishing market for jobs that broke the barriers of innovation in California, Wiener shows how the economic, political and, yes, cultural domination of big techs was sedimented and who men are responsible for making decisions that guide our lives ever since.

“Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors are great storytellers,” says the writer, in a telephone interview. “From this start-up scene, a very good type of marketing emerged. A lot of companies were selling ideas and worldviews, and that was it.”

To combat these heroic narratives, Wiener’s account decided to omit almost all people’s names — and absolutely all brand names. In this way, the characters of “Vale da Estranheza” work on the “search engine giant”, rent rooms on the “home-sharing platform” and have profiles on the “social network that everyone hated”.

“I wanted to emphasize what is generic in these companies”, she points out. “And focus on the environment and structures that allowed them to pile on so much money and political influence. If Mark Zuckerberg hadn’t existed, for example, someone else would have founded Facebook.”

This depersonalization is true for herself, who claims that her life is the least interesting aspect of the book. The decision to tell the story in the first person, rather than as a detached story, was pragmatic. “Everything in that culture seems a little ridiculous. If I didn’t tell it that way, no one would believe it. They’d think it was satire.”

It’s understandable. “Strange Valley” introduces readers to ebook start-up owners who misspell “Hemingway”; a millionaires’ hippie retreat that looks like a simulacrum of freedom straight out of a 1960s movie; and people who want to know from each other, seriously, “which books make up the core of your operating system.”

But not all of the literature surrounding big tech is so witty. “Ecologia”, a novel by Portuguese writer Joana Bértholo, takes on dystopian ink as it infiltrates a world where technology companies start to control human language. And to charge for the use of words.

The writer strove, as she tells this reporter, to make this fanciful idea sound as believable as possible, so she combined a solid theoretical basis with a practical implementation that was slow and gradual.

“People don’t wake up one day and language becomes paid,” she points out. “The possibility enters everyday life. First, it’s just a few words. Then you start to see advantages in this type of consumption. Dead languages ​​are recovered, human communication is studied like never before. And, when you see it, everyone is paying for it. something they always got for free.”

The novel itself explains this in a good synthesis. “When the technology is ready for the desired transition, paying for talking will already be an ingrained habit, a natural and question-free thing. So, the most inexplicable thing will be that language has been free for so long.”

There is almost no force in “Ecology” that is not economic, says Bértholo. “In other words, it’s basically a portrait of the way we end up giving in to the markets. And it’s a contradiction – how do we have a moral discussion about a structure that presents itself as amoral?”

In this, the writer differs from other famous dystopias, such as “1984”, in which the oppressive force comes from the State. Here, totalitarianism belongs to large corporations.

The idea is echoed in other recent productions. For example, Eleanor Davis’ award-winning comic “Hard Tomorrow” looks to the not-too-distant future when Zuckerberg is president of the United States — and, spoiler, it doesn’t look very promising for political activism.

All of this is reminiscent of an inspired passage from Anna Wiener’s narrative—a nonfiction account, it’s worth remembering. “Reference newspapers had reporters covering the search engine giant as if it were an area of ​​expertise, like a foreign government, a new kind of nation.”

“Strange Valley” doesn’t get its title just from a pun on Silicon Valley. It is a consolidated expression in the field of aesthetics to name a very particular effect.

“It describes how people feel about something that looks realistic but isn’t quite real, like a humanoid robot,” describes Wiener, a woman who spent years among the pioneers of the tech mecca. “The more realistic, the more unsettling it becomes. It’s an unease that stems from the feeling that things aren’t quite what they seem.”

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