British author Joanna Kavenna.one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2013, won the the Orange Prize for New Writing with her second novel Inglorious.Her sixth novel, Zed, set in the near future, imaginatively extrapolates from contemporary AI trends to a world where algorithms rule and the line between the real and the virtual is blurred.Zed is a particularly relevant novel at a time when a global action plan has been launched by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and others to save the World Wide Web from political manipulation, fake news, privacy violations and other trends, which they believe will result in a digital dystopia.In Zed, multinational tech firm Beetle, think here a combination of Google, Facebook and national security agencies, dominates the world.People wear BeetleBands, which record all thoughts and acts, spend a crypto currency BeetleBits, consult Wiki-Beetle for information, are monitored by BeetleInsight and are encouraged to use a simplified language, Bespoke.
The United Kingdom is now “the most advanced benign regulatory environment in the world”, as viewed from the Beetle perspective.Given their systems run the infrastructure of Great Britain, they have immense power over the government, as well as the press.The London Times, staffed by “robohacks”, has been allowed to keep publishing as a Beetle-controlled “curiosity”.Human life is monitored by algorithms with anything unpredictable being deemed dangerous.People can be arrested by security forces and police for predicted future crimes and acts of terrorism,.Those who resist conformity are called “unverifieds”.
Echoes of Philip K Dick here.The novel begins when a man murders his family without any algorithmic prediction.Beetle panic ensues.It is deemed a “Zed” event, one thought impossible within the Beetle framework of prediction.Beetle, run by egotistical CEO Guy Matthias, assigns ‘lifechain’ predictive expert Douglas Varley to sort out the crisis.High level national security agent Eloise Jayne is also tasked to uncover the reason for the murder.
It is more pressing for them to find out what went wrong than finding the murderer.As it happens, anti-terror droid officers kill a man whom they wrongly identify as the murderer, another inexplicable Zed event, which foreshadows a plethora of unpredictable catastrophic events and a chain of events questioning Beetle’s global dominance.
Kavenna peppers her text with literary allusions, which include Kafka and Orwell, but the myriad characters and occasional info-dumps are drawbacks to a powerful cogent satire on the growing influence of multinational corporation technology on our life and thoughts.https://crypto247.news/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/trendomatic/r0_159_345_354_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg REVIEW May 2 2020 – 12:00AM In Joanna Kavenna’s Zed, algorithms rule, and the line between real and virtual is blurred Colin Steele Books Zed, by Joanna Kavenna.Faber.$32.99.
British author Joanna Kavenna.one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2013, won the the Orange Prize for New Writing with her second novel Inglorious .
Her sixth novel, Zed , set in the near future, imaginatively extrapolates from contemporary AI trends to a world where algorithms rule and the line between the real and the virtual is blurred.
Zed is a particularly relevant novel at a time when a global action plan has been launched by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and others to save the World Wide Web from political manipulation, fake news, privacy violations and other trends, which they believe will result in a digital dystopia.
In Zed , multinational tech firm Beetle, think here a combination of Google, Facebook and national security agencies, dominates the world.People wear BeetleBands, which record all thoughts and acts, spend a crypto currency BeetleBits, consult Wiki-Beetle for information, are monitored by BeetleInsight and are encouraged to use a simplified language, Bespoke.The United Kingdom is now “the most advanced benign regulatory environment in the world”, as viewed from the Beetle perspective.
Given their systems run the infrastructure of Great Britain, they have immense power over the government, as well as the press.The London Times, staffed by “robohacks”, has been allowed to keep publishing as a Beetle-controlled “curiosity”.Human life is monitored by algorithms with anything unpredictable being deemed dangerous.People can be arrested by security forces and police for predicted future crimes and acts of terrorism,.Those who resist conformity are called “unverifieds”.Echoes of Philip K Dick here.
The novel begins when a man murders his family without any algorithmic prediction.Beetle panic ensues.
It is deemed a “Zed” event, one thought impossible within the Beetle framework of prediction.Beetle, run by egotistical CEO Guy Matthias, assigns ‘lifechain’ predictive expert Douglas Varley to sort out the crisis.High level national security agent Eloise Jayne is also tasked to uncover the reason for the murder.It is more pressing for them to find out what went wrong than finding the murderer.As it happens, anti-terror droid officers kill a man whom they wrongly identify as the murderer, another inexplicable Zed event, which foreshadows a plethora of unpredictable catastrophic events and a chain of events questioning Beetle’s global dominance.
Kavenna peppers her text with literary allusions, which include Kafka and Orwell, but the myriad characters and occasional info-dumps are drawbacks to a powerful cogent satire on the growing influence of multinational corporation technology on our life and thoughts..