IMPACT COMMUNICATION
AND INNOVATION
AND INNOVATION
We are increasingly aware of the problem of data leaks and the responsibility of those who receive and hold our information. Just this week, we have already been confronted by three emblematic news stories on this issue: the Neymar case and the public exposure of intimate photos, the news that different religious and anti-abortion groups funded a fertility tracking app and, finally, the breach of iPhone privacy caused by apps.
If the dystopian novel 1984 already spoke about how terrifying it is to have an entity, like a totalitarian government, having access to all of people's information as a way to control them, today we see the example of China and the proposition that perhaps we no longer need a democracy at a time when we will be able to guide ourselves primarily based on data. Amidst the provocations about freedom and security, privacy and convenience, two new science fiction novels emerge that bring the theme of surveillance with a fresh perspective, as highlighted by a report from The Atlantic.
Written by Lily Meyer, the article opens with a quote from an important essay written by Ursula K. Le Guin in 1975, where the author comments that the great focus of science fiction is “the question of the Other—the being who is different from yourself. That being may be different from you in sex or in annual income, or in the way you speak and dress and do things, or in the color of your skin, or in the number of legs and heads.” Continuing her reasoning, Le Guin also commented on how in American science fiction, human aliens—that is, women, Black people, and the poor—are often subjugated or neglected by aliens who came from space, who, in turn, are often murdered or have their planets colonized.
“Enough,” wrote Le Guin. “Time to make the genre the true face of the future. To do this, writers must take an anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-colonialist stance in their work. They have to consider ‘concepts as deep and radical to the future as Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.’”
In this sense, two new releases, Dark Constellations by Pola Oloixarac and The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell, strictly follow the concept of privacy according to Le Guin’s premises. The Argentine and Zambian writers, respectively, wrote stories set in their own countries, thus creating “post-colonial futures in which surveillance presents new, disturbing dangers,” describes Meyer. While Dark Constellations has a more relaxed writing style, The Old Drift is an epic with details worthy of a Hieronymus Bosch painting, according to the journalist. In both cases, however, we are presented with provocative narratives with a central idea: “colonialism was an immense invasion of privacy, and technology is on its way to rivaling that.”
While Oloixarac’s novel deals with the story of a hacker named Cassio who begins working for Stromatoliton, a DNA-based surveillance company that has partnered with the fictional Latin American Genetic Data Unification Project in order to keep its eyes and attention on everything citizens do. According to Meyer, although the company’s agenda is clear, Oloixarac does not point to a specific villain or a dichotomy between good and evil, not least because the protagonist also begins to make certain controversial and destructive decisions as his thirst for power grows throughout the story.
But, unlike the pessimistic outlook of the Latin American author, Serpell describes a complex universe that has at its core a classic Hegelian opposition: when colonialism and anti-colonialism collide, the result is Serpell’s fictional Zambia. Opening the story at the turn of the 20th century, Serpell describes the observations of a British colonizer named Percy Clark while a bridge was being built in the vicinity of Victoria Falls in what was then called Southern Rhodesia. “In the end, a multiracial trio of Zambian revolutionaries destroys the Kariba Dam. The function of colonialism, as the novel suggests, is to contain power; the function of anti-colonialism is to liberate it,” writes Meyer.
From the turn of the 20th century to Zambia’s independence and the hopeful 1970s marked by socialism, the novel The Old Drift deals with a near future in which an authoritarian government has allowed a Sino-American consortium to have almost unlimited access to the country. This consortium ends up buying Zambia’s energy sources, as well as the Kariba Dam itself, and then begins to conduct medical experiments on the locals.
“The three protagonists in the final part of The Old Drift are all complicit, on some level. Naila works for a government office that installs free, mandatory Wi-Fi stones into the hands of Zambians. The government uses these stones to monitor citizens and, at one point, to test an experimental HIV vaccine without their consent—a vaccine that Naila’s boyfriend, Joseph, helped develop and that was delivered with the help of drones invented by their friend Jacob.”
Upon realizing the dangers of the projects they were supporting, the three characters eventually join forces to rebel against a system that, much like in Dark Constellations, calls into question the issues of state power and personal autonomy. It is in this sense that Meyer brings back another quote from Le Guin, in which the author suggests we stop “daydreaming about a return to the Victorian Era and [start] thinking about the future. I would like to see … a little human idealism.” As if following this recommendation directly, Serpell opens her novel with a story set at the end of Victoria’s reign and with an explosion of idealism. “Naila is the heroine Le Guin would likely love to see: she is young, female, a Zambian of Indian descent, and a militant against global oppression. Jacob and Joseph may be inventors, but Naila is the one with a vision for the future of previously colonized nations,” Meyer describes.
In this sense, unlike Dark Constellations, the Zambian novel brings a revolutionary courage that is absent in the characters of the Argentine book. Regardless, as the journalist points out, both works reinforce how easily surveillance disguises itself as progress, and this is exposed in subtle ways as colonialism persists in contemporary political life.
“To this end, Serpell emphasizes global financial disparities, while Oloixarac focuses on the intellectuality of colonization leading to technological dominance. In Dark Constellations, however, this domination is impossible to resist. In The Old Drift, not only is it possible, but it is also a necessary moral choice,” writes Meyer, concluding that perhaps this is precisely what makes “Oloixarac, with her precise description of the tech industry’s misogyny, a more realistic writer, but there is much more of Le Guin’s idealism in Serpell’s future, which, by the end of the book, proves to be unprecedentedly and radically free.”
