Apart from baseball, another superior thing a couple of vacation weekend is studying. This weekend I’ve been obsessed with The Candy House, the most recent e-book by Jennifer Egan. Egan has a knack for peering into the not-too-distant future and displaying you a world that has been altered by technology. For example, The Candy Home begins in 2010 with Bix Bouton, a social media megamogul, worrying that he “can’t do it once more.” Later chapters, set in 2023 or later, encounter characters dwelling in the world that Bix has (again) modified: By means of a expertise known as “Own Your Unconscious,” Bouton’s company, Mandala, now permits any shopper to have their entire memory downloaded and made reviewable. Her riffs are plausible however not inevitable, which is what makes them so fascinating, compelling, and disturbing. While many can’t resist the urge to evaluate and relive their past, the technology also offers rise to the extra highly effective – and potentially sinister – Collective Consciousness, wherein the recollections of anyone within the system could be accessed and viewed.

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Want to know what your peers really considered you throughout your rebellious phase? Need to know what a well-known particular person was actually wish to those who knew them? The title is a reference to previous fairy tales like Hansel and Gretel in which the youngsters can’t help treating themselves to sweet from the witch’s home, even though they know it’ll probably lead them to ruin. Much of it’s there, accessible to anyone (anybody willing to pay a fee to Mandala, that is) within the Collective Consciousness. That could be too straightforward to write down off. Egan’s characters aren’t dwelling in a dystopia. As an alternative, like us, they’re abruptly shifting down a path of technological change that makes many fantastic things attainable but all the time seems to create simply as many complications because it resolves (or extra). In the end, Egan’s characters are usually not victims, but neither are they victors. They stay ineluctibly human regardless of all the “progress” humanity has achieved, suffering for and discovering comfort in the innermost sphere of human existence that expertise – even within the age of the Collective Consciousness – someway can’t attain.

But it is certainly a false choice to supply us either privacy or liberation. Zuboff understands that pitting privateness in opposition to know-how is a handy technique of eroding human beings’ free will and company. ” Her use of the word “dependency” right here doesn’t feel unintended; in securing a population of shoppers dependent on their merchandise, tech giants play god, utilizing their omniscience to maintain their own domination. However educating people concerning the dangers of something — a drug, say, or a cult — is one factor. Providing them with an antidote to the poison is one other. It’s a love letter to the artwork of fiction writing, the antidote she proposes for this homesickness. Egan’s novel, omniscient in its personal approach, is a unique sort of homage to free will. Fiction writers, too, know we lengthy to privately commune with the collective consciousness, one beyond our personal. They, too, make educated predictions about our behavior.

If the fairy tales don’t work to show us this lesson — that nothing is free — then what sorts of cautionary stories do assist us to see? Egan’s novel expansively explores these dilemmas of human consciousness: our longing for cautionary tales, and our refusal to listen to them. This ebook lets us peer in on many, many intricate (and recognizable) people’s lives, all of whom are battling their own demons. In her elliptically linked vignettes, which come to really feel like aloof (not fairly estranged) cousins of each other, Egan has created an assemblage of those many human candy houses: from literal Beverly Hills homes that seem paradisiacal and end up hellish, to imagined concepts of home that buckle under the burden of nostalgia or fade beyond recognition when held as much as the harsh light of others’ perceptions. There are scenes of confrontation over the place of a neighbor’s fence; there are drug-fueled orgies in a home in the midst of a redwood forest.

In Mandala, Bix’s company, Egan imagines a more literal model of Fb: externalize your memories! Keep a document! However I might name Bix a humane, anti-Mark Zuckerberg. The difference between technology invented in service of revenge and one invented in service of justice: Facebook steals our knowledge without our consent, whereas Personal Your Unconscious offers you default proprietary management over your recordings. That’s, except you wish to share your content with the Collective Consciousness, one other expertise of Mandala’s. Whereas (per The Social Network’s mythos) Zuckerberg thought up Facebook because a lady dumped him and he needed to stalk her and other girls (do we ever talk concerning the sexually violent roots of our main social institutions?), Egan’s Bix Bouton thinks up Own Your Unconscious because of a distinct sort of loss: the accidental dying of a friend, on a drunken night time that could’ve gone in any other case. The Collective Consciousness is a sort of public database of people’s nameless, “freely” given recollections, which may be searched by date, time, longitude, and latitude.

It’s a true smorgasbord of sweet houses, every as delectable as the previous. However probably the most double-edged of the sweet homes in this novel is our previous pal, the Web — and every of those other candy houses might in fact be allegories for this biggest one. For this story, Egan has invented a fictional type of social media, which includes having the ability to “externalize your consciousness” in the type of literal movies of your reminiscences, which you’ll be able to then watch and share. Going again through Zuboff’s ebook, I was struck to search out that she, too, talks of houses and homes, each literal and figurative. Although it is not the only driving pressure of conflict in the novel, it is the existential stage on which her gamers play out their non-public dramas. After an analysis of the technology within the very first “Smart Residence,” examined in 2000, Zuboff begins to consider the violation of the personal domain by tech corporations (suppose “Alexa” or “Siri”) as a metaphor for these companies’ other extra insidious invasions.

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