INVENT-10n
You
know they’re watching, don’t you?
Invent-10n is my
latest book (I call it a semi-graphic novella, that’s a novel of 60,000 words
augmented with illustrations) which is to be published by Alchemy Press in December.
It’s a dystopian story, following the travails of my heroine – twenty-year old jive-talking,
nuBop singer and angry young lady, Jenni-Fur – as she struggles against the
suffocating strictures of the surveillance society that is Britain 2030.
Invent-10n began
life a long time ago – in 2009 to be exact – when I was playing around with the
idea of writing a story about a world where the full implications of living in
a pan-surveillance society were being played out.
My research told me that, by some margin, the British are
the most watched people on the planet with one CCTV camera for every fourteen
of us (a conservative estimate by the way). The reality is that no matter where
we are, we’re being watched. What this also signals is how obsessed the British
authorities (be they the police, security services or local councils) are with
CCTV surveillance: they have become the most avaricious voyeurs in history.
Worse, the brouhaha following Edward Snowden’s disclosures regarding GCHQ’s
Tempora system – the hacking into the transatlantic fibre-optic cables by the
British security services – indicates that the British authorities don’t just
like to watch, they like to listen too!
The chilling thing is that Tempora is one and only one of
the programs our spooks are developing to better access, store and analyse our
e-communications: they can tap into the calls you make on your cell-phone, read
what you say in the e-mails you send and monitor the opinions you post on
social media sites.
The Britain of 2030 described in Invent-10n is one where this information-gathering addiction has
reached its zenith (or its nadir, depending on your point-of-view) and my
fictional National Protection Agency – the MI5 of 2030 Britain – is using its
PanOptika surveillance system to hoover up all
personal data relating to everybody
in Britain.
Fiction did I say?
Infinitely large data storage capabilities coupled with the
use of unfeasibly powerful algorithms means that soon (as in now!) our security
services will have a real time 360⁰ portrait of each and every one of us. They
will know what you did, when you did it, who you did it with and what you said
while you were doing it … everything … 24/7. All of these data will be poured
over looking for patterns that might suggest you’re thinking of doing something
of which the government doesn’t approve.
Which brings me back to the heroine of Invent-10n, Jenni-Fur. She is a girl mindful of Scott McNealy’s
famous maxim, ‘Privacy is dead, get over it’. Jenni-Fur comes to understand
that curbing the inclination of the National Protection Agency to dig and delve
into her life is futile: knowledge is power and politicians (the putative
masters of the security services) are in the business of acquiring and wielding
power. As Jenni-Fur sees it the surveillance genie will NEVER be put back in
its lamp.
What Jenni-Fur also realises is that the availability of so
much surveillance-gathered information puts democracy at risk. This is what she
calls the ‘J. Edgar Hoover Syndrome’, where the power derived from having
access to so much (often very sensitive) information has a corrupting effect on
those controlling it. In a world supervised by PanOptika it is oh-so-easy to
follow the declension:
Yesterday the Government was
serving you …
Today the Government is surveilling you …
Tomorrow the Government will be controlling
you.
Jenni-Fur’s insight – her Ker-Ching Moment – comes when she
understands that it isn’t the computers and cameras that threaten our freedoms
but the use made of this surveillance-harvested information by the Government.
Therefore she must scheme to take the human element out of the surveillance
matrix, to use the computer to protect us from ourselves. To do this she teams
up with mysterious übergeek, Ivan Nitko, inventor of the eponymous Invent-10n.
Jenni-Fur’s world is one where paranoia is an everyday state
of mind and to communicate this I wanted to create a feeling in the mind of the
reader that they were actually in
that world so I came up with the idea of combining faux-factual material
supposedly published in the e-media of 2030 and interlacing this with extracts
from the diaries of the two chief protagonists, Jenni-Fur and National
Protection Agency apparatchik, Sebastian Davenport.
Given that there would be significant design element in the
book I collaborated with a friend of mine, Nigel Robinson, who did the artwork
for my Demi-Monde series.
That was when I got distracted writing the four Demi-Monde books and Invent-10n lay on a dongle gathering
dust. Then in March this year a friend of mine – Peter Coleborn – who I knew
from the Renegade Writers’ group in Stoke sent me an e-mail asking if I had
anything, novella-sized, I might consider publishing through his imprint,
Alchemy Press. I remembered Invent-10n
and sent a mock-up to Peter. Peter liked it (what a sensible lad!).
Now I was
faced with finishing the bloody thing … and up-dating it. In this day and age four
years is a technological eternity and reality had already caught up with some
of the ideas I’d dreamed up back in 2009. The most alarming was that in the
original Invent-10n my characters
used a thing called a Polly (a Poly-Functional Digital Device) to e-interact
with each other and Nigel had designed a Polly (in 2009) to look like this:
Seem familiar? One year later Apple came up with their iPad!
Bollocks!
For this and other reasons I had to rework/remodel Invent-10n which took longer than I
supposed – two months in fact – and then I had to hand it over to Nigel to work
his design magic. The interesting thing was while Nigel beavered away the world
became increasingly aware/interested in surveillance and its implications for
society. The Edward Snowden revelations and the realisation (pause for gasps of
surprise) the GCHQ was actually e-monitoring everybody and his brother via its Tempora
system made me more determined to finish Invent-10n
while the subject was hot. When I had written it in 2009 I had been writing a
fantasy, now it was more a piece of social commentary.
So, what with the design requirements of the book and
Peter’s various editing suggestions Invent-10n
wasn’t finally finished until early September. Then I had to write the blurb
which would go on the back of the book and wanting something suitably Jenni-Fur-esque
I came up with this (presented à la Jenni-fur on a typewriter, which she uses to
avoid the e-wigging of the National Protection Agency):
Greetings Gate, let’s Agitate.
Look over your shoulder. Do you see the camera? Then dig
that even as you read these words of sedition and denial you are being watched
by the ever e-quisitive National Protection Agency. The National Protection
Agency –
omnipresent, omniscient and most ominous –
which runs PanOptika, the spider at the centre of the Web.
PanOptika.
What’s the slogan: watching out for the
good guys
by watching out for the bad guys.
But what did that Roman word-slinger, Juvenal say? Quis
custodiet ipsos custodes: who watches
the
watchers?
So dig this to the extremity, cats and kittens: if we do
nothing soon we must kneel, digitally-dutiful, before National Protection, and
then there will be no chance to zig when the ChumBots say zag, or to beep when
they say bop. Realise thou that PanOptika triumphant means we will not be able
to think, to act, to speak or to move without the spirit-sapping realisation
that the badniks know everything …
everything.
We are circling the drain.
This
is my warning.
I hope you enjoy the book!
Rod Rees
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