They say that the family touches you, but Fanni has been able to choose hers among hundreds of thousands: the Naumanns. First thing in the morning, little Moira sets the table for breakfast while Fanni moves the computer around in the cubicle to make room for her food ration, all the while watching on the screen as the girl pulls out three bowls of cereal. . Then everyone starts eating, the family and Fanni. The Naumanns don’t know their observer, but Fanni knows everything about them thanks to the security cameras that have been installed even on their clothes to face who knows what threat, perhaps that of feeling alone.
On the other side of the shelves, another woman knows perfectly well the life of a stranger, a famous influencer who hangs everything, without thinking that one of her followers may want to become something more, go from fan to stalker and perhaps from back to something else. She updates, updates, updates the celebrity’s post over and over again, feeding on them, on that link that unites them without one of the parties knowing it.
Precisely Artificial Links is the title of the novel in which the French writer Nathan Devers discusses our life after the technological revolution and who joins Philipp Winkler’s Creep, with Fanni and her cameras, I’m a fan of Sheena Patel, with her scroll voyeurism, and a good number of volumes that explore through fiction what it is like to live in the era of unfolding thanks to social networks, when we relate not with others, “but with an image of others”, in the words of Devers. And this is the beginning. If literature is the mirror of its time, it was a matter of that, of time, that beyond essays and studies, digitization became omnipresent in fiction, because it is in our lives.
That is why the metaverse of Artificial Links has its own social networks, which will ultimately seal the fate of the protagonist, Julien, Julien Libérat for Facebook. A failure in every way, in his personal, professional and social life, but he will find in the Antiworld, a metaverse so successful that it has eliminated the others, his reason for existing.
There you can create your own personality and customize it, buy, sell, get rich, travel, interact with other Antihumans and even know the experience of killing someone, virtually, of course. But there is a price for the latter: whoever wants to kill can be a victim, and dying in the metaverse means that you can never enter the Antiworld again and the real one will prevail as the only possible existence. What to do when that virtual world is everything?
Metaverses already exist in video games and move millions, with investors buying land and real estate in the virtual world to make money in the real world. Last year Forbes magazine published a report on virtual real estate that is not science fiction, and one of the reasons it gave for buying was the possibility of establishing a home there and showing it to friends, “a bit like having a page personal web in the early days of the internet, before everyone turned to social media.” Yes, we don’t know if the metaverse will succeed or not, maybe we won’t need it anymore because we can already fantasize on Instagram.
The possibility of depositing our self in a container is disturbingly possible. In De nuevo centauro , by the Basque writer Katixa Agirre, the climatic cataclysm has eliminated tourism and travel, but the population can live the experiences they want through their vicissitudes; clad in neoprene suits, virtual sex becomes tactile in the red rooms of the Delphi metaverse, “the new factory of illusions that has replaced Hollywood”.
Paula works as a designer at Delphi and her mission is to create virtual worlds even for schools, now she is involved in a biography of Mary Wollstonecraft, pioneer of feminism in the eighteenth century and mother of Mary Shelley, but she knows that “every virtual reality application and increased causes misgivings and even a great rejection. Paradoxical in a society in which the avatar constitutes “a permit to leave the body behind”? Not so much when it is suspected that behind the avatars with which one socializes (and other things) there are not people, but software.
Artificial Intelligence as the great controller of the Internet and networks and, therefore, of people, without the need for killer robots and other nightmares of the 20th century. In the dystopian Discotheques outside of it, Víctor Balcells raises the existence of an anomaly called The Halo that affects the behavior of human beings and extends through screens and digital fields.
Who is behind this virus, and who has made the antidote? This is where the protagonist, inventor of Monsteropedia.com and web positioner, intervenes, a job that Balcells did in real life. “It is not that humans affected by The Halo lose abilities. Skills just change. Nobody notices anything but everything has changed”.
A disturbing premise that can be combated with the satire of QualityLand , of which its author, Marc-Uwe Kling, has just published the second part, QualityLand 2.0 and in which one of the characters blurts out “before the Internet you didn’t have to waste time with so many nonsense” which sounds like a boomer joke but it is not, because the author was born in 1982. The world is controlled by algorithms, which decide everything, but one day they make a mistake and send Peter Sinempleo a product that he has not ordered, and attempts to return it lead us to a Kafkaesque labyrinth populated with beings as (im)probable as the Thermomix-worshipping sect and the Followers of John of Us, an android elected president of QualityLand and based on a AI created for a toaster.
Chosen as one of the ten books of 2022 by The New York Times, arrives in September The Candy House, by Jennifer Egan, linked to her previous novel, Time is a scoundrel. In this dystopia, Bix, a character who is very reminiscent of Mark Zuckerberg, is the owner of Mandala, a company that has succeeded thanks to his ability to predict success in the networks using the algorithms that he stole from a researcher.
Now he has gone a step further and Appropriate the Unconscious is his new application, in which people can dump their memories to share them with anyone who wants to access, a way of trying to achieve something close to immortality. While the program proves useful for reexamining past situations, making it possible to stop pedophiles and abusers, users will soon discover that the price to pay is the loss of privacy. But isn’t that what we already do with networks.
Another critically acclaimed novel coming in September is I’m a fan, Sheena Patel’s literary debut. The protagonist is a 30-year-old woman who lives in south London and spends several hours every day scrutinizing the Instagram of a well-known influencer who has made her life a model to be copied at low cost (Gwyneth Paltrow, we salute you). . All very real. The novel delves into the fandom to make it clear that for each fan (attic) there is an object of their devotion and both need each other and feed off thanks to Instagram and others and “an algorithm not built by us, for a platform that is not designed for us”.
The most forceful critique of the digital revolution comes from Creep, in which the German writer Philipp Creek examines through two characters and a lot of English terminology the dualization effects that digitization has brought. On the one hand, the young Junya has become a hikikomori in Japan, a person who has isolated himself from the world; Junya spends hours in front of the computer locked in his room, from where he only leaves to commit atrocious acts by following tutorials on the Dark Web. Fanni, in Germany, completely lacks family or social life and works for a security company, which allows her through the cameras to have another life, just as lonely. She will also find the Dark Web. “I grew up with rotten.com, the place where splatter gore (extremely graphic and violent gore) websites come from,” the author explained. We are not talking about a virtual world only.
The counterpoint is put by Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin for an audience of young adults. A soap opera that revolves around friendship, love and video games. If it were so pretty.
