Day 3: “The Candy House”
In addition to baseball, one other awesome thing a few holiday weekend is reading. This weekend I’ve been obsessed with The Candy House, the most recent ebook by Jennifer Egan. Egan has a knack for peering into the not-too-distant future and showing you a world that has been altered by technology. For instance, The Sweet Home begins in 2010 with Bix Bouton, a social media megamogul, worrying that he “can’t do it again.” Later chapters, set in 2023 or later, encounter characters residing on this planet that Bix has (again) changed: Through a know-how known as “Own Your Unconscious,” Bouton’s firm, Mandala, now permits any shopper to have their whole 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 review and relive their previous, the technology additionally offers rise to the extra powerful – and doubtlessly sinister – Collective Consciousness, by which the memories of anybody within the system could be accessed and viewed.
Want to know what your peers actually considered you throughout your rebellious phase? Need to know what a well-known particular person was really like to those who knew them? The title is a reference to old fairy tales like Hansel and Gretel through which the kids can’t help treating themselves to candy from the witch’s home, despite the fact that they know it will probably make them spoil. A lot of it’s there, accessible to anyone (anybody prepared to pay a price to Mandala, that is) in the Collective Consciousness. That can be too simple to write down off. Egan’s characters aren’t dwelling in a dystopia. As a substitute, like us, they’re abruptly shifting down a path of technological change that makes many great issues doable however at all times appears to create just as many complications because it resolves (or more). In the end, Egan’s characters should not victims, however neither are they victors. They stay ineluctibly human regardless of all of the “progress” humanity has achieved, suffering for and discovering consolation within the innermost sphere of human existence that technology – even within the age of the Collective Consciousness – somehow can’t reach.
Providing them with an antidote to the poison is another.
But it’s certainly a false selection to offer us either privacy or liberation. Zuboff understands that pitting privacy against technology is a handy means of eroding human beings’ free will and company. ” Her use of the word “dependency” right here does not feel unintended; in securing a inhabitants of shoppers dependent on their merchandise, tech giants play god, utilizing their omniscience to keep up their own domination. But educating individuals about the dangers of one thing — a drug, say, or a cult — is one thing. Providing them with an antidote to the poison is another. It is a love letter to the artwork of fiction writing, the antidote she proposes for this homesickness. Egan’s novel, omniscient in its personal means, is a special kind of homage to free will. Fiction writers, too, know we lengthy to privately commune with the collective consciousness, one past our personal. They, too, make educated predictions about our behavior.
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If the fairy tales don’t work to teach us this lesson — that nothing is free — then what kinds of cautionary stories do help us to see? Egan’s novel expansively explores these dilemmas of human consciousness: our longing for cautionary tales, and our refusal to hearken to them. This book lets us peer in on many, many intricate (and recognizable) people’s lives, all of whom are battling their own demons. In her elliptically related 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 houses that appear paradisiacal and turn out hellish, to imagined ideas of home that buckle beneath the load of nostalgia or fade past recognition when held as much as the tough light of others’ perceptions. There are scenes of confrontation over the place of a neighbor’s fence; there are drug-fueled orgies in a house in the midst of a redwood forest.
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It’s a real smorgasbord of candy houses, each as delectable because the previous. But the most double-edged of the candy homes on this novel is our old pal, the Internet — and each of those other sweet homes might in reality be allegories for this largest one. For this story, Egan has invented a fictional type of social media, which entails being able to “externalize your consciousness” in the form of literal movies of your recollections, which you’ll be able to then watch and share. Going back by way of Zuboff’s guide, I was struck to find that she, too, talks of homes and properties, each literal and figurative. Though it isn’t the one driving power of battle within the novel, it’s the existential stage on which her players play out their personal dramas. After an analysis of the know-how in the very first “Smart Residence,” examined in 2000, Zuboff begins to think about the violation of the private area by tech companies (think “Alexa” or “Siri”) as a metaphor for these companies’ other extra insidious invasions.
