The invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century led to an information overload that human society could not manage, leading to ‘things falling apart more quickly than they can be put back together’ and four hundred years of war, a disaffected ex-CEO declares in Naomi Alderman’s 2023 satire of the tech world, The Future. Given our current global situation, the observation is an apt starting point for thinking about the impact of twenty-first century technology—the fragmentation of traditional media, the rise of social networks and now AI—on our societies and our minds. The Future was published in 2023, before the most recent US election, the final disintegration of Twitter/X and the solidification of the Musk/Trump alliance, although the patterns in technology and politics that made it all possible were already evident. Alderman’s book is one of several recent novels that skilfully reflect on how technology is reshaping both our present and how we imagine what is to come.
Both The Future and Richard Powers’ Playground (2024) feature tech billionaires among the main characters. These billionaires pioneer AI technologies and then seek to escape from the world they have helped to create, either through ‘seasteading’—autonomous floating ocean communities—or by preparing their bunkers for the apocalypse they assume to be imminent. In Alderman’s novel, Lenk Sketlish—a thinly disguised caricature of Elon Musk—leads the group of shadowy tech elites, while Richard Power’s entrepreneur-protagonist Todd Keane is a more human character who reflects on lost friendship and failing memory, at the moment of his greatest success.
Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake (2024) takes a different angle, exploring the lives of those who have rejected technology and capitalism to lead a commune in rural France. Founded by two ageing left-wing activists who retreated to the countryside after the failed protests of 1968, the group’s response blends communal life and a return to nature with anti-capitalist protest. All three novels are compellingly written, seamlessly blending story and ideas and reminding us how vividly the human imagination can respond to the global challenges it has helped to create.
Maybe it has always seemed like the world is both ending and beginning at the same time. Certainly, the connection between authoritarian politics and a desire to use technology to engineer the future is not new. I teach and research the history of fascism and the alliance between Trump, Musk and their band of tech elites sounds all too familiar to me. In 1909, a group of Italian artists and writers who called themselves the ‘Futurists’ published their manifesto in a French newspaper. They were entranced by the speed and power of cars and aeroplanes, while their paintings featured robot-like mechanical figures. A Futurist restaurant, and accompanying cookbook, rejected the conventions of Italian cuisine in favour of dishes that would stimulate and reshape bodies and minds, a matter of perfumes, chemicals and theatre rather than pasta. When Mussolini came to power in 1922, an alliance emerged between Futurists and fascists. Both were concerned with remaking the Italian people. They were also mostly misogynists and for them, people meant men. Mussolini wanted to create the new Italian man—a model soldier—while keeping women in their traditional roles as wives and mothers.
The billionaires and tech CEOs who treat their bodies like machines, strictly regulating food intake, sleep and exercise, are the natural heirs to the Futurists. And women are still expected to stay home and have babies for the sake of the— white—human race. Just as Mussolini criticised the working women who were having fewer children in the 1920s, Elon Musk continually warns about dangers posed by the collapsing birth rate, while reportedly offering his sperm to women friends and acquaintances. A few years ago, I began reading Mark O’Connell’s To Be a Machine, a fascinating non-fiction exploration of the Silicon Valley ‘techno-utopians’ who treat their bodies like machines in the pursuit of eternal life, but had to put the book down when I was half-way through. I was a few weeks pregnant at the time, and I had never felt so rooted in my body, unable to escape the constant nausea and vomiting. The notion of leaving behind the body’s imperfections—even thinking that you could—was not something I could relate to. It brought home to me how for both the Italian Futurists and the techno-elites of Silicon Valley, the model human—the only kind worth perfecting—was a man.
In the opening pages of Creation Lake, the prophet-like Bruno Lacombe, muses, in mechanistic terms, about the superiority of Neanderthals—whose brains were as large as ‘motorcycle engines’—compared with modern homo sapiens. We are told that ‘he talked about sunk costs, as if the body were a capital investment, a fixed investment, the parts of the body like machines bolted to a factory floor, equipment that had been purchased and could not be resold’—an odd blend of industrial and financial imagery for a radical who proclaims their longing for the distant past. Perhaps it makes as much sense as tech CEO Lenk Sketlish’s obsession with wilderness survival. In their own way, each of these characters views the body as a sort of raw, muscular machine.
If Sketlish is forced to confront his physical limitations in the midst of nature, Todd Rawlings, the tech CEO in Powers’ Playground grapples with his brain ravaged by disease. When, at the cusp of a major AI breakthrough, he is diagnosed with early onset dementia, he puts his faith in computers as a way of continuing his mind. ‘[A]s the rogue proteins eat my brain and rob me of my ability to remember, I can hold a five-inch flat black slab up to my face and ask it questions about my childhood’, he reflects. ‘And the little black monolith, always ready, remembers everything for me’. If machines can extend the body and replace the mind, these novels ask, what does it mean to be human?
In The Future, any certainties about the relationship between technology, capitalism and the body are eroded, quite literally, by a ‘fucking biblical’ rain of blood, when feminist activists throw bloody tampons at a group of tech CEOs in protest at the practice of denying employees bathroom breaks. ‘This is what happens when you don’t give women time to change their tampons’, one sign reads. Alderman’s novel suggests that the unholy alliance of technology and capitalism might be, at least in part, a problem of gender, and starts to imagine how the alternative might look. The plot hinges around a group of rogue coders, led by women and non-binary people, who attempt to reset society by adjusting the algorithms used by social media towards happiness rather than anger and profit. Ultimately, though, like Powers and Kushner, Alderman offers no easy solutions. Perhaps it’s because AI wants to remake not only our relationship with the body but with time itself, as it seeks to push beyond human constraints with its promise of endless productivity.
The promise of generative AI to transform how we spend our time is seeping into my daily work life, too. There are mounting concerns about university students using Chat GPT and other AI tools in their written work. At the same time, universities, like most other big corporations, are often uncritically positive about AI, stressing how it will help staff and students to work efficiently and save time. AI-generated text is not exactly difficult to recognise: Chat GPT produces superficially polished text with little substance, repeating the same words about nuance and complexity while never quite getting to the point. In the words of one academic study, it generates ‘bullshit’. At the same time, it is becoming more difficult to trace, especially when used for planning or producing summaries of articles and book chapters to save you doing the reading.
But what is this time saved meant to be for, when reading, thinking and writing are how we learn in the humanities? Perhaps part of the issue is the assumption that there exists a static, solid body of knowledge that can be unlocked, now more easily and quickly through AI. But teaching the history of what happened is just one part of what I do: my classes emphasise how difficult it is to know anything about the past. Different sources tell us different versions, and writing good history is more about what questions you ask than what you know.
At a time when information is being pumped out faster than we can make sense of it, we need time and art to help us to reflect deeply on the implications. Alderman, Powers and Kushner all use fiction to think creatively about our contemporary moment, connecting ideas about past, present and future, as well as human and non-human intelligence, in thoughtful and surprising ways.
This takes place on the level of form as well as content. There is a playfulness running through all three novels—and while the fragmentation and irreverence of postmodernism is not new, such modes seem especially suited to the present and the rise of generative AI. The invention of photography prompted artists to rethink the meaning of art, some moving towards abstract work of pure colour and form and some towards the symbolic and the surreal. If AI tools such as Chat GPT can produce polished but flat prose, it seems appropriate to respond by fragmenting character and text, layering different stories onto each other and poking fun at the very idea of narrative.
Both Kushner and Alderman have written satires of the thriller and spy novel as if to remind us not to take them too seriously. In Alderman’s The Future, excerpts of text from an internet chat forum about survivalism are interspersed with the main narrative. One character’s earnest interventions about the Old Testament are annotated by direct messages from fellow chat forum users. Myth and story are tested and questioned even as they are presented. In Kushner’s Creation Lake, Sadie, an American undercover agent, covertly reads a series of long emails written by the elusive founder of the commune she has infiltrated. She becomes drawn into his thinking despite herself; the emails are an ironic call to turn away from technology delivered via an internet connection and a hacked email account.
Powers’ novel, while not satirical, has a similarly layered approach to narrative. Partly set on a remote Polynesian island, the myths told by the indigenous islanders are stories that reveal deeper truths about the characters and their world. The Playground of Powers’ title is not just a reference to the board games that Todd plays with his friend Rafi and that lead Todd to his breakthrough tech work. It is also a reference to the ocean. Interspersed with the narrative of Todd and Rafi’s friendship in Chicago is the story of Evie, a now elderly deep-sea diver. Decades of underwater exploration have left Evie with wonder and respect for the ocean. As she observes a manta blowing air bubbles, she reflects that ‘play was evolution’s way of building brains […]. If you wanted to make something smarter, teach it to play’. Anyone who has observed a young child absorbed by their toys will know that play is a deeply serious activity and woven into Todd’s story of board games and software development, there is a commentary about the creative process that drives new technology.
Similarly, in Alderman’s The Future, a professor explains to his students how machines learn: a computer plays endless games of tic-tac-toe to improve its technique. It has a far greater endurance for repetitive behaviour than a person, learning through recurrence and randomness and processing volumes of data at a level beyond human capacity. This means it can make predictions and discern patterns that the human mind might not detect. Experts refer to the ‘black box’ nature of AI: even those who have developed the software still don’t know exactly how it works. Rather like the secrets of the deep ocean.
For all that the three novels respond to the present moment, their protagonists can only make sense of the future by reaching back to the past. All three involve some form of retreat from modern civilization, whether imagined in the form of a bunker, an island, the ocean or underground. In Kushner’s Creation Lake, Bruno Lacombe has withdrawn more completely from the world than the commune he co-founded, residing nearby but unseen, in a network of underground caves. His emails (which are so beautifully constructed that I could quote from them endlessly) outline a new way of thinking about human history, rejecting the narrative of progress. ‘We can all agree that it was homo sapiens who drove humanity into agriculture, money and industry. But the mystery of what happened to the Neanderthal and his humbler life is unresolved’. The ice age represented ‘the fall’; the point when homo sapiens began to kill off Neanderthals (Thals for Bruno) beginning the ‘fundamental estrangement’, between people and the earth. Neanderthals were hunter gatherers and cave dwellers; they didn’t take ownership of the earth’s surface. They were also the real thinkers and artists: homo sapiens simply copied what they saw in cave painting, while Thals were ‘conjurers’, with the imagination to ‘render the unseen seen’.
Alderman also locates the ‘fall’ in the distant past. Her novel’s chat forum discussions are largely a device for one character’s retelling of the Book of Genesis, which becomes the story of a prolonged struggle between two groups of humans who survived the last ice age; those who wanted to remain hunter-gatherers and those who preferred to settle as farmers. These two groups represent conflicting impulses within humanity, described by survivalist cult leader Enoch as Fox and Rabbit. ‘When we were Fox’, Enoch tells his daughter, ‘when we walked from place to place, curiosity was needed and fed by our daily lives. What is curiosity but the desire to see what’s over the next ridge?’ The ‘Rabbit’ instead seeks comfort and certainty. Enclosures, considering land as property, the development of cities, and now the monetisation of personal data by large tech companies are all Rabbit’s inheritance.
Powers’ novel is more circumspect about the notion of progress as necessarily harmful. When Todd’s California tech company proposes its seasteading initiative, it is the newcomers who are doubtful while some indigenous islanders are more pragmatic. They are no strangers to the destructive powers of colonialism—a painful history of phosphate mining is in living memory—but neither do they romanticise the past or the present reality of remote island life where there are few opportunities for the young. If there are no easy answers for the Polynesian islanders, their dilemma echoes the broader questions that the novels address: can progress ever be a force for good, and does it make sense to remain in isolation?
If some characters in these novels seek to return to a simpler and semi-mythical past, their writers certainly do not, suggesting that technology alone is not the problem: it is the narrow understanding of progress as the maximisation of profit that needs to be unravelled. The flat certainties uttered by prophet figures like Bruno and Enoch only make sense when read against the reactions of other characters or in dialogue with other narrative strands. Indeed, Bruno’s own convictions crumble in the later sections and he begins to question his earlier ‘mystification of the past’.
If there is one consistent motif running through all three novels, it is the notion of the ‘deep’: the deep past, deep ocean and the deep, dark cave systems. Perhaps even the deep secrets of the ‘black box’ AI technology. It is not just the past, that Kushner, Powers and Alderman want us to think about, but the notion of times and spaces so alien to our twenty-first century world that they contain the spark of how things might be different. The ‘creation lake’ of Kushner’s title is the network of caves underneath the earth’s surface. Here on this earth is another earth’, Bruno tells us. If the darkness yields visions, you have to tune into ‘cave frequency’ to hear differently—to hear the voices of the deep earth.
The ‘deep’ is also a place of encounter with the non-human, and one where rational or ‘Rabbit’ thinking makes no sense. For deep-sea diver Evie, the ocean is a space that changes her perception, as it teems with life-forms almost wholly unknown to humans. It is a site of play: the manta’s bubbles and the curiosity-driven wandering of Fox. These uncontrollable forces of nature are very different from the non-human AI forces shaping our world.
The deep dark places of prehistory, the ocean and the underground are points of contingency, where you can forget human history as it has happened and imagine alternatives. The actual AI technologies that appear in The Future and Playground are either a sham or just not very exciting. This reflects my own experience, from the perspective of humanities teaching and publishing, where it seems to me that the primary function of AI is to churn out great slushes of content that no human would actually want to read. In November 2024 a start-up announced its plans to ‘disrupt’ the publishing industry by using AI bring out 8000 new books a year. Meanwhile I have piles of books written by humans on my desk that I never seem to get through.
If we only see AI as a means to drive efficiency, save time and maximise profit, then the results will mirror our dull, destructive preoccupations. Perhaps, these books suggest, there would be real creative potential if we freed ourselves from notions of productivity and profit and started to think like curious, wandering Fox rather than Rabbit. Maybe we could envision technology as something designed not to perfect or push us beyond the capacity of our minds and bodies but to allow us to explore our full humanity instead. These novels can’t tell us exactly what that might look like, but maybe that’s precisely the point: we have to close our eyes and find the deep places where we can tune into different frequencies and see with our symbolic eye.