This 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 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.
Outline: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.
( The chapter-by-chapter spoilers are here... )
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?
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