Blog entry supplemental eighteen: The midway point
I’m now roughly halfway through writing The Great Flood, having completed eleven chapters and one hundred and fifty pages. Following the convention I’ve established, each of my novels has twenty two chapters, although the actual length of each book has varied! Twenty two is the typical number of episodes in a season of US television drama (science fiction or otherwise), which is the source of the convention. All of my books are written in a format that would facilitate adaptation for this medium.

My general conclusion having reached this point is that I haven’t paid sufficient attention in my fictional future society to the virtual world and the tendency of a growing number of people to want to take refuge within it, pace Ready Player One and similar works. This is something I will need to address in part two of the book.

I have already identified which of the characters will be missing their virtual existence the most. Through her story I’ll explore the phenomenon, its seductions and its limitations, which (not unnaturally) have been brought home to her by the disaster.  

At this point I would normally be banging on about the march of authoritarianism in modern politics, but I’ve decided to give it a rest for the moment. Of far more interest is the extremely partisan nature of modern identity politics, something which social media have exacerbated. This divides us as a species and is not good!

That social media is a two-edged sword is becoming more apparent by the day; as well dividing us into (mutually antagonistic!) tribes, it concedes far too much power and control over our lives to very rich men and they are usually men!) and unaccountable corporations! The Robber Barons of the late-nineteenth century would have envied the nabobs of Silicon Valley! Large tech corporations have gained (by a combination of stealth and flattery!) access to all of our lives and could use it against us, if they saw fit. They already exploit it for personal and corporate gain, something which has become apparent over the past few days!

Even more worrying is the extreme subjectivity inherent in social media’s hold over the dissemination of ‘news’ to huge numbers of people; this destabilises the very notion of objectivity, and thus of responsible independent journalism. That this is an existential threat to the notion of liberal democracy is also self-evident!

Rather naively, I had thought that future authoritarian regimes would make use of CGI (once it had become indistinguishable from real life!), and literally rewrite history!  But the actual use of modern technology by authoritarian groups has been far more subtle.

These developments would appear to pose almost as much of a threat to our way of life (and possibly our continued existence as a species) as climate change, environmental degradation, and resource depletion, the threats I have previously identified and highlighted in my fictional world. My current novel needs to address this, and will do so in part two.

But it’s not just social media; the pioneers of our online world were by and large idealists, Tim Berners-Lee literally gave his idea of a world-wide web to all of us, free of charge, and this idealism is also reflected in things like Wikipedia and Linux! But the downside of all this had been the ready availability of so much information and free content! This has had profound economic, political, social, and psychological results, the consequences of which are only just beginning to become apparent!

If I wanted to sum up all of the above in one pithy phrase I would say that irrationality has become a contagion and it spreads via the internet!

Stephen Clare  April 2018