Book Report: “Daemon” by Daniel Suarez
Apr. 11th, 2022 08:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pheloniusfriarThis was written for a 4th year interdisciplinary Technology and Society class called “Forecasting”. As in predicting the future... what's not to love? From the syllabus: “This course will examine how we engage the future against a background of technological, societal and environmental change. We will do this by looking at forecasting and foresight techniques, and especially by considering science fiction: how it anticipates the future and how it changes the present.” One of the things we spent a fair amount of time on was Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR), and when we were assigned to do a book report (on a book of fiction) that explored one or more of the subjects we covered, I went with AR since I had worked on AR-related stuff in the early 2000s as part of a tech startup (we didn't get the seed funding we were looking for because it was during the dot com bubble burst and nobody wanted to put any money into high tech, but that's another story). Anyway, if it wasn't clear, here there be spoilers yarrr, so proceed at your own peril if you ever intent to read this, or his related, books. As a further note, the structure was specified and is a little odd, but here we go.
Tombstone:
The books has 45 chapters (617 pages), each of which is named, and is divided into three parts: Part One, Part Two: Eight Months Later, and Part Three: Six Months later. Thus, the events of the book take place within the span of under two years. Some chapters begin with a “news report” to provide relevant information in a condensed form needed to understand the story, most do not. Note: IVR is Interactive Voice Response (a prompt is played and speaker-independent voice recognition is used to determine which of a very limited number of voice responses is spoken). Also note: since it is a 45 chapter book, it was not possible to fit even brief chapter summaries into two pages.
Part One:
Point Of The Book:
The book seemingly had four primary purposes: to be a mainstream action-filled thriller for the thinking man, to promote and further valourize dominant misogynous alpha-hacker discourses, to explore the possibilities of multi-tier augmented reality systems, and to expound a philosophy that humans are not capable of effectively managing human culture. The story happens in our “today world” and as presented, it could even have happened in the past and we haven’t noticed yet.
As a thriller with technological content, every time a necessary computer or networking term is introduced, some ill-informed cop (or equivalent) stops the conversation and demands that the term be explained in very simple ways. The dialogue in the book is generally terrible, but they are mostly contained and the reader is rewarded with more scenes of violence or people of action doing action things. Some of the action scenes were real page-turners, and the book did make the New York Times bestseller list, so it obviously succeeded at this aspect of its purpose.
Infantile men looking to have their terrible opinion of women and fantasies of masculinity validated through fictional representations that support this world view would love the book for this. As is likely evident from my tone, I think this aspect of the book is highly problematic. Again, this likely had something to do with its rise to the bestseller list, but from the perspective of helping to move us into the future, it fails. Particularly considering the philosophies presented, this book would be a case in point for how human society is failing itself.
In terms of exploring the power of augmented reality and human/machine interaction, this book succeeds in a dramatic and creative way. The problem is that this part of the book is very near the end, and really only occurs in two chapters (one where it is demonstrated, and another where it is explained). For all that the writing was overall terrible from both a technical and attitude perspective, the book was worth reading for the ideas this small section contained. The augmentation took many forms, from simple voice and smartphone instructions, “go here, do that, say this”, through to full augmented reality headsets that allowed the wearer to operate in a game layer overlaid 1:1 on reality. When participants completed tasks, they were rewarded with points that confer upon them rank and material gain in the real world. The Daemon implemented a fully distributed human-powered manufacturing industry, “give this part to this person, that person assembles two parts and passes it on, etc.”, and uses such operatives to extend its power and reach into the physical world using humans as its effectors. The idea of integrating system-purpose (machine goals), human flexibility, and loosely coupled (and possibly locally unreliable) distributed algorithms is a powerful paradigm.
Lastly, in terms of philosophy, it is spelled out in the book: “Mammals of every species indulge in play. Games are Nature’s way of preparing us to face difficult realities. [...] Civilization is about to fail. [...] The modern world is a highly efficient, precision machine. But that’s its flaw – one wrench in the works and it all grinds to a halt. So what does our generation get? A culture of lies to hide weakness. Decreasing freedom. All to conceal one simple fact: the assumptions upon which our civilization is based are no longer valid. If you doubt me, ask yourself: why was I able to accomplish this? [...] But what if we corrected civilization’s weakness – as painful as that correction might be?” Here, is another part of the mythos that is being supported: that society is in chaos and we need heroes with grand visions to save it (and a male techno genius is “just the person to do it”).
Pretty much everything in the book from an ideological point of view is a rehash of a well-worn hero myth amongst bit-heads and hackers, but the creative use of AR to redesign the way human systems could be made to function is still a very clever notion.
Connection to this Course:
The characters in this book are hegemonically masculine – even the one woman portrayed as having agency (the rest are there simply to prop up another character’s performance of “male”) – and thus operate with a nearly pure Dominant Western Worldview (DWW). It is notable that there are no non-Western/non-white individuals in the entire story (with the exception of a bartender that behaves Western in every way), and the few non-white characters display hegemonic whiteness in their actions. In fact, if they weren’t labelled by the author as being non-white, there would be no way to tell by their behaviour. Again, this supports the DWW of the characters and the author himself.
The main human characters of the story are the dead game developer and hacker Matthew Sobol, police detective Pete Sebeck, government agent and hacker Natalie Philips, foreign actor and hacker Jon Ross, TV reporter Anji Anderson, criminal and hacker Brian Gragg, former soldier and now FBI Hostage Rescue Team member Roy “Tripwire” Merritt, and mysterious man of power “The Major”. All of these characters act as though they truly are the masters of their own destiny, and everyone and everything around them is there to facilitate this self-actualization. Their goals are universally to assert their will upon their personal domains. Sebeck and Merritt are the only two characters that seem content to only control a small part of the world, while the rest know no boundaries in their goals of achieving power and recognition. At no point are any resource limitations discussed, and thus the only determinant of potential is ambition. Finally, all of the characters believe and act as though every problem they face has a solution, if only they can be clever and persistent enough to find out how to assert control. Sebeck, when he is framed by the Daemon, convicted, and sentenced to death, is put in a position where his problem does not have a solution that he can see, and thus it becomes an unfairness and a tragedy. Meanwhile Philips and Ross are doing everything they can to save him and continue the narrative that the program can be solved. They are ultimately frustrated in their efforts, but it is indicative of the Daemon’s power being greater than theirs, and thus it is able to achieve domination when they cannot. It’s one big pissing match and all of it told from a variety of privileged white male Western positionalities (again, even the “black woman” behaves like a white Western male of considerable power).
Much of the tension of the book is in the programmed behaviour of the Daemon as it seems to be operating in a Human Exceptionalism Paradigm (HEP). There is no indication that Sobol operated in in anything but a DWW manner, but he obviously had philosophical or ideological notions that were expressed through his creation of the Daemon. Like Dr. Frankenstein, Sobol seems to be a profoundly flawed individual, and the monstrosity of his creation is similarly an inevitable product of its origins and manner of construction. The Daemon was based on a series of MMORPGs written by Sobol. In a game environment, there is a lack of challenge if a DWW is assumed for player characters – there is nothing to strive for. It has been shown in the book’s world that cooperation and shared challenges (or at least challenges that are experienced by all in common) motivate people to keep playing. In the game environment, there is no physics being – it is all social and cultural factors that govern how it unfolds as a group activity. The final stated goal of Sobol’s Daemon to overthrow current human society and replace it with one built around the technology it brings, explicitly supports the notion that progress will happen through technology whether humans are in control of said technology or not – that it is an inevitable and never-ending situation.
At the end of the book, Sobol (as a semi-interactive recording), stated that as the Daemon took control of the economy, those who had vested interests in the old, DWW, society took steps to protect themselves, their wealth, and thus their position of power and dominance. However, since the Daemon had become able to monitor nearly all transactions everywhere, it knew who was doing this and claims that “now they are more vulnerable than ever”. The recording of Sobol, on behalf of the Daemon goes on to say “My enemies will show themselves soon, Sargeant. As much as you despise me, they are your true enemy. I am merely an inevitable consequence of human progress.” Thus, progress is inevitable, and progress through technology is the way it happens. This machine-driven revolution will provide the solution to all of humanity’s current and foreseeable future problems. Games have been evolving to be more and more integrated with the mechanisms we have for reward, motivation, and avoidance; thus it is entirely plausible that the social structures we have created to maintain society through those neural pathways can be extended from the game world to the physical world – especially when mixed reality technologies increasingly blur that line.
At no point in the book is any mention made of a perspective that could be interpreted as New Ecological Paradigm (NEP).
Given the particular content of the book, the manner the story was structured, and the behaviour of the characters in it, and what was missing from the book, it seems plausible that the author has a Dominant Western Worldview themselves. However, like Sobol, the author seems to feel that DWWs are doomed to collapse, and violently at that.
Bonus video content... want to know what a future where AR/MR is ubiquitous could look like?
Tombstone:
- The book chosen: “Daemon” by Daniel Suarez. Published by Signet 2010, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a Dutton edition, 2009. It was originally self-published by his own company, Verdugo Press, in 2006 under the author name Leinad Zeraus (his name spelled backward).
- I did a number of Google searches for lists of books that contained mixed reality or augmented reality. The search that worked for me was “science fiction novels augmented reality”. I found a number of lists or mentions of specific books this way. Two books I saw on several lists or posts were the book by Suarez I chose, and Vernor Vinge’s “Rainbow’s End” (e.g. “What are the best novels about augmented reality?”, “Books About Video Games and Virtual Reality”). I made a list with a few other book titles and headed off to the Chapter’s at South Keys. The only book they had on that list was “Daemon”, so that is how the book was chosen: a combination of research, capitalist market forces, and luck.
- Daniel Suarez received a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Delaware, but taught himself how to program and went on to become an information technology professional and systems consultant who worked for Fortune 1000 companies on “mission-critical software for the defense, finance, and entertainment industries”. He has been a speaker at TED Global, the MIT Media Lab, NASA Ames Center, the Long Now Foundation, and for various corporations. He is an avid PC and console gamer, and always loved creative writing and other creative endeavours such as running tabletop fantasy role-playing games. He has published four novels to date, all on ideas around technology-driven change, and his first, “Daemon” (originally self-published) became a New York Times bestseller. He lives in Los Angeles, California.
The books has 45 chapters (617 pages), each of which is named, and is divided into three parts: Part One, Part Two: Eight Months Later, and Part Three: Six Months later. Thus, the events of the book take place within the span of under two years. Some chapters begin with a “news report” to provide relevant information in a condensed form needed to understand the story, most do not. Note: IVR is Interactive Voice Response (a prompt is played and speaker-independent voice recognition is used to determine which of a very limited number of voice responses is spoken). Also note: since it is a 45 chapter book, it was not possible to fit even brief chapter summaries into two pages.
Part One:
- Execution. We learn game developer Matthew Sobol died from cancer. Colleague Joseph Pavlos suddenly finds himself dying alone in the middle of the desert with his throat slit.
- Rogue Process. Pete Sebeck is a hardboiled stereotype of a cop in an affluent suburb, who finds himself investigating the death of Pavlos by automated cable across a motorcyle path.
- Black Box. The murder cable was raised innocently by a maintenance contractor who received a computerized work order. A key employee at Sobol’s company is electrocuted.
- God of Mischief. Brian Gragg is a hacker who sells stolen identities. In his spare time, Gragg holds huge rave parties where he drugs and gang-rapes girls for live Internet shows. He sets up his hacking partner to be murdered in his place by the Filipino mafia Gragg stole from.
- Icarus-Seven. John Ross is an IT nomad. He helped a datacentre worker at Sobol’s company fight a virus or worm when the killings started. The FBI question his suspicious lifestyle.
- Exile. Anji Anderson is a self-entitled abusive lifestyle TV reporter fired in a media merger.
- Daemon. Sebeck gets a multimedia virus/email from Sobol directed at him personally.
- Escalation. FBI grills Ross, Sebeck befriends Ross as his techno-guide, Ross says thousands of computers were sent messages by the “infected” computer at Sobol’s game company.
- Herr Oberstleutnant. While laying low, Gragg plays Sobol’s video games, which he loves. He is contacted in-game by the game’s AI/ultra-boss, challenged, and given a riddle to solve.
- In the Air. Suarez pablum-feeds his readers about MMORPGs in Ross/Sebeck discussion.
- The Voice. Anji is called by a mysterious IVR system with a job for her. She doesn’t listen.
- Opening the Gate. The FBI go into Sobol’s mansion. Trap doors swallow robots, sonic weapons disable bomb squad, automated AI/Hummer kills bazillions of cops. Ross saves Sebeck and others by using game mechanics he has observed while playing Sobol’s games.
- Demo. Anji is contacted by IVR and is offered story exclusive if she does what she’s told.
- Meme Payload. Email to cops from “Sobol”: stay out of my house for 30 days. Cops take it as a challenge. Ross tries to warn them, nobody but Sebeck listens.
- Countermeasures. Secret meeting DARPA/NSA/CIA/DIA/FBI. Cops shoot Hummer dead, shoot generator dead through wall. Cheers. Just need to wait for batteries to run out.
- The Key. Gragg cracks riddle, gets GPS coordinates. Goes there. Sees special wi-fi link that allows him to enter special map in Sobol’s game. Given instructions by Herr Oberstleutnant and has to hack into protected wi-fi router to be able to go any futher (a test of his skill).
- Succubus. Sebeck gets a call from his secret mistress, they meet, beat each other up, she loses (deliberately), they have rough sex. Anji videos it all from adjacent building as instructed.
- Abyss. Forensic accountants going over Sobol’s transactions notice he bought large fuel cells. Cut to FBI going into now dark mansion. Power comes on, massive death. Agent Roy “Tripwire” Merritt survives and does macho one-man assault on AI mansion, which burns.
- Sarcophagus. Gragg hacks in, is guided through further hacks. He is questioned by IVR system on pain of death, survives. Kneels before video alter as Sobol’s image praises him, he weeps on his knees because he’s found the father figure he never had. Seriously. Uh, huh.
- Speaking with the Dead. Sobol’s funeral. We meet NSA crypto-goddess Agent Natalie Philips. Ross falls in love. Sebeck gets a call from Sobol apologizing for having to destroy him. Tells Sebeck that at his time of death to say that he “accepts the Daemon”.
- Hotel Menon. “Sobol” sends email to world telling them he has put a backdoor in the engines for his games. Anji living rich on Nauru investigating international finance. FBI. Deal struck.
- Honey Pot. Ross and Sebeck play Sobol’s game, Sebeck sucks. They go to an in-game location that appeared when Sobol died. Nasty demon kills Sebeck and confronts Ross, game starts hacking his laptop and the hotel. Ross hacks hotel system to hide his ID, gets arrested.
- Transformation. Sebeck is arrested by the feds for murder, money laundering, and for “inventing the Daemon hoax”. Anji is on the scene reporting, Sebeck is obviously framed. Ross casually escapes, it seems he’s some kind of super spy after all. The feds know Sebeck isn’t smart enough, so they peg him for the muscle and Ross as the brains. Ross turns out to be the only only person left who knows about the Daemon and the skills/freedom to fight it.
- Sit Rep. Secret DIA/FBI/NSA/DARPA/DIA meeting: Daemon is real, but keep hoax story.
- Lost in the System. Charles Mosley is a maximum security prisoner, he is forced to work in the private/corporate prison’s call centre pressure selling magazines to lonely housewives. He gets a call by an IVR system that promises to take care of him in return for his services. Within a day, he is transferred twice to successively lower security jails and then released. He receives a new identity, money, and transportation (which “the voice” proves it can control).
- Judgement. Gung ho Agent Merrit is excoriated by a congressional committee for his role in the destruction of Sobol’s mansion. Ross approaches him on the street afterward with the story of what really happened and how he’s fighting the Daemon. Ross also gives his backstory, that he was a Russian high tech worker brought in to work on the Y2K bug as part of a money laundering scheme by the Russian mafia. He stole identities after the high tech bubble collapse and blended into US society as a nomadic IT professional to survive.
- Mind Mapping. Charles Mosley goes where he is told and is involuntarily strapped down, drugged, and subjected to a personality-ripping psychological barrage while being interrogated under threat of instant death by an automated system and inside a functional MRI machine. Upon surviving the ordeal, he is deemed a valuable operative by the Daemon.
- Ripples on the Surface. Philips shows the Daemon is distributing itself so the loss of any node will not affect the whole. It attacked gambling and pornography domains: those that agreed to give it 10% survived, those that did not were DDOSed to ruin. Ross and Philips play Sobol’s online game. Ross points out the “backdoor” Sobol said was a literal door in game and was a tool used for recruiting people to work for the Daemon.
- Memory. Sebeck is on death row in despair that the public thinks the Daemon was a hoax.
- Offering. A bunch of guys release an automated car they built for the Daemon into the desert.
- Red Queen Hypothesis. A CTO tells the CEO of a massive multinational dirty-money investment firm that their network had been entirely taken over for months and “Sobol” has issued a list of demands: comply or say bye to the corporation. Sobol dumps philosophy on them (and us): parasites are more successful always than their hosts. He is the alpha parasite.
- Message. Anji interviews Sebeck. Sebeck says the words the Daemon told him to say.
- Response. A forgotten server in industrial China scans the news feeds, sees Sebeck’s phrase, triggers some sort of event for the Daemon before trashing itself.
- Sacculina. Back to CEO of multi-national at executive meeting. Departments are saying that their offline spreadsheets don’t align with the public ones: there is money missing. CEO goes to find CTO, finds seemingly endless corridor under building, Daemon uses sonic weapons to seriously injure him and says if he doesn’t cover for the missing money he will be killed.
- Cruel Calculus. Companies all over the world are going under due to network intrusions (i.e. they did not comply with the Daemon’s orders). Philips’ team has uncovered a block chain message that provides them with a partial API into the Daemon’s destroy() function that could be used against companies or foreign governments. It is interpreted as a gift to the governments that have the power to decipher it first. There’s also a video from Sobol telling them to befriend the Daemon and protect it, and in return it would protect their country. The US government forms a task force to covertly destroy the Daemon.
- The Powers That Be. CEO of multi-national receives list of Daemon-hacked companies from a mysterious government operative. CEO is killed by Bragg and an army of automated cars (Bragg takes the list and indicates he is hunting the covert task force for the Daemon).
- Cogs in the Machine. The guys making automated cars for the Daemon get a new task: a machine whose sole purpose is the efficient killing of humans. They comply.
- Assembly. Finally some AR/MR! We find out the sort of people the Daemon has been recruiting for low-level tasks, and how they are guided (by voice instruction over a GPS-enabled phone) and how it has implemented a distributed manufacturing capability where no person knows more than their single step, and then in purely real time (no way to decode). Back to Mosely who has full AR glasses that the Daemon uses to guide them (they are a high-level operative). They conduct the assassination of a group of people who send spam. We find out later that over 6000 prolific spammers in 83 countries have been killed.
- Closing a Thread. Sebeck is executed in prison by lethal injection.
- A New Dimension. Philip’s team intercepts and decrypts a terabyte of data from the Daemon’s command and control system, and manage to link one command with a real-world event. It took them a month to decrypt the messages with their best computers, but they realized it was the same protocol as used on Sobol’s games. Ross and Philips have a moment.
- The New Social Contract. Mosely kidnaps his son, whom he hasn’t seen since before he went to prison, from the drug dealers he is working for, brings him to a top boarding school.
- Building Twenty-Nine. Inside the government’s anti-Daemon task force, 24/7 team is playing Sobol’s games trying to infiltrate them. They have captured a high-level operative’s eyeball and use it to activate a set of the Daemon’s AR goggles. They see a game-type interface with tags over various Daemon-related artifacts. Reality is superimposed on the game grid, not the other way around... the world is a game to operatives. They turn the goggles and notice one of the players is tagged as a Daemon-object. They subcontracted all the security checks and perhaps that wasn’t a completely effective idea.
- Enemy Within. The traitor is, of course, Gragg. He proceeds to use techo-magic weapons to kill everyone who comes near and escapes, then automated cars and specialized death machines kill everyone else... military, police, and scientists alike. Ross and Philips are trapped, mysterious government guy (“The Major”) leaves by helicopter.
- Revelation. “Tripwire” Merritt vs. Gragg. Gragg is in an armoured BMW and has an army of VR-controlled death-cars, Merritt has a knife. It’s a mano a mano testosterone laden showdown as Merritt uses his bare hands to hold onto the BMW tearing down city streets and smashing into parked cars, while using a knife to disable the redundant transmitters on the BMW... his is winning, much to Gragg’s delight (he sees Merritt as a worthy opponent), but “The Major” puts a sniper bullet in Merritt’s head. Gragg is angry to lose his adversary. Ross and Philips escape, but realize that they never would have been permitted to succeed.
- Respawning. Sebeck is brought back from the dead as a reward for his service. He is told he has to continue to do what he is told and his family will be very well taken care of since his death. More philosophy of what the Daemon is and why by Sobol’s pre-recorded ghost.
Point Of The Book:
The book seemingly had four primary purposes: to be a mainstream action-filled thriller for the thinking man, to promote and further valourize dominant misogynous alpha-hacker discourses, to explore the possibilities of multi-tier augmented reality systems, and to expound a philosophy that humans are not capable of effectively managing human culture. The story happens in our “today world” and as presented, it could even have happened in the past and we haven’t noticed yet.
As a thriller with technological content, every time a necessary computer or networking term is introduced, some ill-informed cop (or equivalent) stops the conversation and demands that the term be explained in very simple ways. The dialogue in the book is generally terrible, but they are mostly contained and the reader is rewarded with more scenes of violence or people of action doing action things. Some of the action scenes were real page-turners, and the book did make the New York Times bestseller list, so it obviously succeeded at this aspect of its purpose.
Infantile men looking to have their terrible opinion of women and fantasies of masculinity validated through fictional representations that support this world view would love the book for this. As is likely evident from my tone, I think this aspect of the book is highly problematic. Again, this likely had something to do with its rise to the bestseller list, but from the perspective of helping to move us into the future, it fails. Particularly considering the philosophies presented, this book would be a case in point for how human society is failing itself.
In terms of exploring the power of augmented reality and human/machine interaction, this book succeeds in a dramatic and creative way. The problem is that this part of the book is very near the end, and really only occurs in two chapters (one where it is demonstrated, and another where it is explained). For all that the writing was overall terrible from both a technical and attitude perspective, the book was worth reading for the ideas this small section contained. The augmentation took many forms, from simple voice and smartphone instructions, “go here, do that, say this”, through to full augmented reality headsets that allowed the wearer to operate in a game layer overlaid 1:1 on reality. When participants completed tasks, they were rewarded with points that confer upon them rank and material gain in the real world. The Daemon implemented a fully distributed human-powered manufacturing industry, “give this part to this person, that person assembles two parts and passes it on, etc.”, and uses such operatives to extend its power and reach into the physical world using humans as its effectors. The idea of integrating system-purpose (machine goals), human flexibility, and loosely coupled (and possibly locally unreliable) distributed algorithms is a powerful paradigm.
Lastly, in terms of philosophy, it is spelled out in the book: “Mammals of every species indulge in play. Games are Nature’s way of preparing us to face difficult realities. [...] Civilization is about to fail. [...] The modern world is a highly efficient, precision machine. But that’s its flaw – one wrench in the works and it all grinds to a halt. So what does our generation get? A culture of lies to hide weakness. Decreasing freedom. All to conceal one simple fact: the assumptions upon which our civilization is based are no longer valid. If you doubt me, ask yourself: why was I able to accomplish this? [...] But what if we corrected civilization’s weakness – as painful as that correction might be?” Here, is another part of the mythos that is being supported: that society is in chaos and we need heroes with grand visions to save it (and a male techno genius is “just the person to do it”).
Pretty much everything in the book from an ideological point of view is a rehash of a well-worn hero myth amongst bit-heads and hackers, but the creative use of AR to redesign the way human systems could be made to function is still a very clever notion.
Connection to this Course:
The characters in this book are hegemonically masculine – even the one woman portrayed as having agency (the rest are there simply to prop up another character’s performance of “male”) – and thus operate with a nearly pure Dominant Western Worldview (DWW). It is notable that there are no non-Western/non-white individuals in the entire story (with the exception of a bartender that behaves Western in every way), and the few non-white characters display hegemonic whiteness in their actions. In fact, if they weren’t labelled by the author as being non-white, there would be no way to tell by their behaviour. Again, this supports the DWW of the characters and the author himself.
The main human characters of the story are the dead game developer and hacker Matthew Sobol, police detective Pete Sebeck, government agent and hacker Natalie Philips, foreign actor and hacker Jon Ross, TV reporter Anji Anderson, criminal and hacker Brian Gragg, former soldier and now FBI Hostage Rescue Team member Roy “Tripwire” Merritt, and mysterious man of power “The Major”. All of these characters act as though they truly are the masters of their own destiny, and everyone and everything around them is there to facilitate this self-actualization. Their goals are universally to assert their will upon their personal domains. Sebeck and Merritt are the only two characters that seem content to only control a small part of the world, while the rest know no boundaries in their goals of achieving power and recognition. At no point are any resource limitations discussed, and thus the only determinant of potential is ambition. Finally, all of the characters believe and act as though every problem they face has a solution, if only they can be clever and persistent enough to find out how to assert control. Sebeck, when he is framed by the Daemon, convicted, and sentenced to death, is put in a position where his problem does not have a solution that he can see, and thus it becomes an unfairness and a tragedy. Meanwhile Philips and Ross are doing everything they can to save him and continue the narrative that the program can be solved. They are ultimately frustrated in their efforts, but it is indicative of the Daemon’s power being greater than theirs, and thus it is able to achieve domination when they cannot. It’s one big pissing match and all of it told from a variety of privileged white male Western positionalities (again, even the “black woman” behaves like a white Western male of considerable power).
Much of the tension of the book is in the programmed behaviour of the Daemon as it seems to be operating in a Human Exceptionalism Paradigm (HEP). There is no indication that Sobol operated in in anything but a DWW manner, but he obviously had philosophical or ideological notions that were expressed through his creation of the Daemon. Like Dr. Frankenstein, Sobol seems to be a profoundly flawed individual, and the monstrosity of his creation is similarly an inevitable product of its origins and manner of construction. The Daemon was based on a series of MMORPGs written by Sobol. In a game environment, there is a lack of challenge if a DWW is assumed for player characters – there is nothing to strive for. It has been shown in the book’s world that cooperation and shared challenges (or at least challenges that are experienced by all in common) motivate people to keep playing. In the game environment, there is no physics being – it is all social and cultural factors that govern how it unfolds as a group activity. The final stated goal of Sobol’s Daemon to overthrow current human society and replace it with one built around the technology it brings, explicitly supports the notion that progress will happen through technology whether humans are in control of said technology or not – that it is an inevitable and never-ending situation.
At the end of the book, Sobol (as a semi-interactive recording), stated that as the Daemon took control of the economy, those who had vested interests in the old, DWW, society took steps to protect themselves, their wealth, and thus their position of power and dominance. However, since the Daemon had become able to monitor nearly all transactions everywhere, it knew who was doing this and claims that “now they are more vulnerable than ever”. The recording of Sobol, on behalf of the Daemon goes on to say “My enemies will show themselves soon, Sargeant. As much as you despise me, they are your true enemy. I am merely an inevitable consequence of human progress.” Thus, progress is inevitable, and progress through technology is the way it happens. This machine-driven revolution will provide the solution to all of humanity’s current and foreseeable future problems. Games have been evolving to be more and more integrated with the mechanisms we have for reward, motivation, and avoidance; thus it is entirely plausible that the social structures we have created to maintain society through those neural pathways can be extended from the game world to the physical world – especially when mixed reality technologies increasingly blur that line.
At no point in the book is any mention made of a perspective that could be interpreted as New Ecological Paradigm (NEP).
Given the particular content of the book, the manner the story was structured, and the behaviour of the characters in it, and what was missing from the book, it seems plausible that the author has a Dominant Western Worldview themselves. However, like Sobol, the author seems to feel that DWWs are doomed to collapse, and violently at that.
Bonus video content... want to know what a future where AR/MR is ubiquitous could look like?
