Our Dystopian Future: The World of 2034/2054

2034In our current American dystopia, all our problems are domestic. Unlike during the Cold War, we face no major power challenges.

A single encounter thousands of miles from our shores and that could all change. That is the message of 2034: A Novel of the Next World War.

Written by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis, it’s a brisk page-turner that depicts how China and United States stumble their way into a devastating war, following a clash between naval forces in the South China Sea.

While the book at times reads like an advertisement for “Fifth-Generation Fighters” (brought to you by Boeing), it’s ultimately about the decisions that government officials and military commanders make during times of extreme stress, when all the options are bad.

“America used to end wars. Now it starts them,” a character from a rising nation says late in the book, meaning that we joined World War I/II after the great powers of the day were exhausted, and accrued the benefit of global dominance. Now, we’re the great power, with military bases, commitments and troops in nearly every corner of the world.

2054

2054: A Novel picks up twenty years after the war. This time, there is a new threat: Artificial Intelligence.

Including many of the characters from 2034, and their children, it’s a techno-thriller in which a variety of countries in a multipolar world work toward the Singularity, a melding of computer and human minds that will fast-forward our technological evolution.

The country that reaches the Singularity first will be able to dictate humanity’s future.

While the stakes are much, much bigger than 2034, AI is more of a nebulous, hard to explain and hard to depict kind of a danger, not as dramatic as fleet actions in the Pacific.

2054 doesn’t grip you as much as 2034, though, for me, it did have its moments, like learning that the Metro is still running in 2054. Washington will always need a subway.

What I like about both books is that they get the DC geography right, a pet peeve of mine. The authors know that Columbia Heights is on the Green Line, where Lincoln Park is and that going across town during rush hour is impossible.

2034 will get you thinking about the benefits of being a superpower, and how quickly that can disappear while 2054 will make you realize that technology is something that we, as citizens, should control before it controls us.

Wide Awake

Wide Awake

America in 1860 was an oligarchy, controlled by a minority of a minority.

Slave Power was unassailable. You couldn’t even discuss it in Congress, which had a standing rule that resolutions dealing with slavery were automatically shelved. The Supreme Court reinforced the power of the peculiar institution by forcing Northerners to cooperate with slave catchers. Enslaved people, despite living in this country for centuries, were not people, according to the Court; they were property.

With the power of the federal government behind them, slave owners talked of expanding slavery across the country and beyond – even to Cuba and Mexico.

To be an abolitionist meant dodging mobs of Democrats who tarred and feathered anti-slavery speakers. Newspapers who criticized slavery, even in the most oblique terms, were destroyed, with their printing presses tossed into the river.

The Wide Awakes stood up to the mobocracy. Founded in March of 1860 by five law clerks, some of them too young to vote, this was a youth movement that confronted Slave Power and elected Abraham Lincoln.

Jon Grinspan tells their story in Wide Awake.

Dressed in black cloaks and carrying whale-oil torches, they marched under their “open eye” banner symbolizing their political awakening to the threat of slavery.

They were a popular sensation that spread across the North, a marching group, as they were called back then, that protected Republican speakers during a violent election year.

The elite class that ruled the country dismissed these Wide Awakes as so much theater; young people play-acting in the streets with their costumes, organized chants and military precision.

Theater matters. I’ve seen it in DC, with pro-Palestinian protesters staging mock scenes from Gaza; the pro-Putin right-left crazy town of Rage Against the War Machine; and even my experience as Red Bike Guy heckling the Patriot Front.

These moments, especially if they go viral, are both communication and inspiration, getting important messages out into the media and motivating others to take up the cause.

That is why the Wide Awakes grew from five to hundreds of thousands in just a few short months in 1860.

Theater matters. Or as, Grinspan puts it:

What the Wide Awakes wanted mattered less than how they tried to show it. Those skinny nineteen-year-olds drilling for war proved to be better forecasters of what was coming than all the august orators or party platforms.

We look back on all of this through a century and a half of mostly viewing political spectacle as hoopla, just a matter of elephants and donkeys and confetti and balloons. People often dismiss performative politics as empty, a collection of stock gestures going nowhere, the work of self-interested politicians or high-priced consultants. But our own era reminds us of the power of spectacle and bluff, costume and prop. They can be intellectually richer, and better indicators of what is to come, than forms of political expression we traditionally consider more substantive. Perhaps one of the central lessons of recent American politics is that, while the chattering classes parse phrases, and conspiracists hunt for hidden meanings, key plotlines take place out in the open. 

In this election year, Republicans are open about their plans to end democracy, take away our rights and make Trump a king. It’s all in Project 2025, their guide to the coming dystopia.

They promise it will be bloodless – as long as we don’t resist.

Failed coup
Democrats talk the issues as if we’re in the soft and gentle world of 1996, with moderates on both sides willing to play by the rules and graciously accept defeat.

But as the recent Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity told us, we’ve entered into a no-compromise era, much like 1860.

The protesters on the streets of DC, with their signs and bullhorns, all that easily-mocked theater, are more clear-eyed about the peril.

They are Wide Awake.

We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland

We Don't Know Ourselves

With a fine sense for the perfect, ironic anecdote, We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland by Fintan O’Toole describes how Ireland became modern. I read it as I rode trains around the country my grandparents left.

Early in the book, he describes the visit by President Kennedy to the country in 1963. The ultimate Irish emigrant who did well somewhere else, the Irish were bewitched by his glamor and sex appeal. Mad scenes were reported across the country as Irish nearly trampled the President. And the contrast between the youthful American leader and the elderly Irish leaders is striking.

During his visit, Kennedy says, “Most countries send out oil or iron, steel or gold or some other crop, but Ireland has had only one export and that is its people.”

But what if Ireland didn’t need to export its people? What if young Irish could find economic opportunity in Cork and Dublin rather than New York and London?

Deciding to Stay

O’Toole’s parents were part of the generation that decided to stay, rather than emigrate. This was despite the stultifying hold the Catholic Church had on the country, which ruled in matters large and small, from who could get divorced (no one) to what plays could be performed. Most Irish writers lived abroad, for they could find a freedom in England or Italy that they couldn’t find at home.

And underneath the traditional, thatched roof view of green Ireland hid an a archipelago of Catholic horror, from industrial schools for poor children to Magdalene Laundries for wayward women. This was institutionalized slavery and sexual exploitation. According to the Church, what went on in these prisons was not sinful; telling the truth about them was, for it undercut the faith among the believers. We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland uncover this habit of “compartmentalizing” these unspoken horrors in Irish society.

When I was in Ireland, I visited the Irish Workhouse Centre. Poor people turned themselves into the workhouse when they had no money. Families were separated. Men, women and children worked manual labor (like breaking rocks) for their daily gruel. And this wasn’t just some Dickensian-era cruelty; the workhouse was still operating in the 1920s.

This was around the time my Flood ancestors left the country. In America, we like to think that immigrants are in search of abstract causes like freedom. But, for my family, it was probably emigrate or starve.

What Would Ireland Be?

The Irish leaders of the 1960s – the “conservative revolutionaries” of the Easter Rising and the Catholic Church – realized that the country had to change before the population collapsed.

But if Ireland modernized, what kind of country would it be? West Britain? An American outpost? Part of Europe?

The answer: all of the above.

Ireland has inescapable trade links with the United Kingdom, a constant exchange of people and goods. In the 1980s, American investment arrived, with call centers and manufacturing plants blossoming around the country, during the short-lived Celtic Tiger days. (O’Toole has a very funny chapter on the excesses of the era, like the Riverdance phenomenon, when Irish-Americans shamelessly fused tradition with rock and roll into a global sensation.) And Ireland has worked hard to be accepted into the European Union, despite the skepticism of fiscally-prudent Germany.

We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland ends with a country that is very different from the one that my family fled. The power of the Catholic Church is no more. The veterans of 1916 are just memories. Brexit has flipped old animosities around, with the possibility that Northern Ireland opts out of the UK and returns to the EU through union with Ireland.

The Irish retain their traditional generosity. The country has welcomed more than 50,000 Ukrainian refugees, despite having a housing shortage.

And a power shortage, too. Power cuts are expected this winter, as Europe struggles with the economic turmoil created by Putin’s war.

But it’s a place where you can cross the country in a modern train in three hours. And sit in a Cork bar with the band so close that you can reach out and touch them while you drink a five euro Guinness surrounded by French teens practicing their English.

Ireland doesn’t need to export its people anymore. Instead, the world is coming to Ireland.

Exposed DC 2022 Brings Art to an Alley

16th Annual Exposed DC Show

I will go to any event in an alley.

The Exposed DC 2022 Photography Show features unique visions of Washington, DC. Not the postcard DC, but the real city beyond the monuments as captured by the people who live and work here.

I’ve had photos in the show in the past and love it. I’m fascinated at how different people can look at the same landmarks or events and come up with completely different visions.

This year’s show is in a Mount Pleasant alley. Steps from a taqueria and a laundromat, you’ll find 36 photos of the DC region reproduced as sturdy metal prints.

Seeing photos of Washington while you’re standing outside in Washington adds a gritty realism to the experience, making you realize that these aren’t just pretty pictures but depictions of very real people and places in the nation’s capital.

Go see Exposed DC 2022. Since it’s outside, you can visit any time of the day or night until the show closes on July 24.

Our Country Friends

Our Country Friends

Do you want to read a novel about the pandemic?

That’s a tough sell for a lot of people but Gary Shteyngart does his best to craft fiction from horror in Our Country Friends.

In this novel set in the early covid days of 2020, a Russian-born novelist (much like Shteyngart himself) invites friends to escape the disease-ravaged city to his bucolic country retreat.

At least it seems bucolic at first. But the novelist is under financial pressure and juggles contractors and payments to keep his estate going, too proud to ask his friends for financial help.

And his friends bring their own troubles, dragging behind them a swirling mix of fears, resentments and past slights. Cooped up together, in rural isolation, conflict is inevitable.

No one is better at mixing the wildly comic and heartrendingly tragic like Shteyngart. He’s my favorite contemporary author (Super Sad True Love Story is his best book), with a keen eye on the absurdities of American life, in all its waste and splendor.

A refugee from a dead empire, he sees parallels between the rot of the Soviet Union and our current state.

What he gets wrong about this country is our fundamental optimism: like the main character in a movie, we always think that things will work out for us. This may be a deluded belief but one that shapes our national character.

In Our Country Friends, covid is waiting for all of us. The bill must be paid for our follies. But before it arrives, Shteyngart tells a comic tale of misunderstanding and misadventure in the dark woods of the country.

Little Free Library Find: Beautiful Ruins

Beautiful Ruins

I had seen Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walters in my local bookstore in a stack of paperbacks where they kept the popular fiction.

Glancing at the cover, with its sunny shot of the Italian Riviera, and the blurbs from from famous people, I instantly put it in the category of “Live, Laugh, Love” books, dismissing the novel as a piece of feel-good, literary fluff.

I didn’t have to read the back cover. I was sure Beautiful Ruins was some silly nonsense about rich people going to Italy for some spurious reason (a marriage, perhaps) and then rediscovering the joy of life among the simple Italian peasantry.

But seeing it in the Little Free Library, and needing something to read, I took it.

How wrong I was!

Instead of light fare, I got a weighty and complex tale told from multiple viewpoints, spanning from World War II to today. A story that encompassed combat fatigue, post-war poverty in Italy, the making of Cleopatra and even the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Beautiful Ruins was a literary page-turner, full of surprises.

And full of profound questions on the life of an artist. If you write one perfect chapter, is that enough? Will becoming famous really change anything? Is it more important to make money from your art or pursue your own vision?

Jess Walter’s novel left with me a lot to ponder. And it came from a novel that I dismissed as fluff, based solely on the cover. There’s a lesson there somewhere….

We Need a Butlerian Jihad

Dune cover While the novel Dune by Frank Herbert has its science fiction elements, it’s really a book about politics and manipulation.

I’ve read it three times, having just finished it again in anticipation of the upcoming film by Denis Villeneuve. At first glance, the novel appears to be the classic Hero’s Journey in which a young man loses his father, gains new skills and allies, and then defeats his enemies to restore the world.

Herbert presents and subverts this familiar tale. As he says in the book, “No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero.”

The novel is a warning about charismatic leaders, though that’s easy to miss in this exotic story of Fremen, sandworms and spice. Herbert is telling readers to think for themselves, and to ponder the way that leaders manipulate their people.

Masses Manipulated by Rulers

The Dune universe is one in which the masses are manipulated by their rulers. Even the good Duke Leto brags that he has the best propaganda corps in the business.

We see this most notably in the way that Paul and Jessica Atreides adopt the myth of a redeemer to cement their hold on the Fremen people and restore the House Atreides to power. The Fremen were seeded with this myth by the Missionaria Protectiva, an arm of the Bene Gesserit that plants superstitions among primitive peoples for later exploitation. Jessica knows the myth and rituals and is able to use them to make Paul the divine leader of the Fremen.

Yet, chaos is the rule of the universe. The Kwisatz Haderach comes too soon for the Bene Gesserit and is beyond their control. And even this omniscient being cannot control the jihad that the Fremen will wreak upon the universe.

Stagnation is the greatest enemy, according to Herbert, and humankind must be periodically refreshed by the kind of wild mingling of genes that occurs only during wartime.

Butlerian Jihad

This jihad is an echo of an earlier one: The Butlerian Jihad. While this is often characterized as a revolt against machines, it was a rebellion against the rulers who controlled the machines. As Herbert states early in Dune:

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

The jihad began when the people discovered that their choices were being manipulated. Free will was an illusion. The course of their lives were being altered by men with computers.

Sound familiar?

Men with Machines

Frank Herbert had his own kind of prescience.

Writing in 1965, he could see our future, in which our decisions are manipulated by social media algorithms through the reinforcement and discouragement of certain behaviors.

What path are men like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos subtly sending us down? It’s not the golden path of the Bene Gesserit, seeking to better humanity. Instead, it’s all about the likes. Hate likes, love likes, fear likes – all that engagement adds up to greater wealth and power for the social media titans.

In the Dune universe, people rebelled against this kind of manipulation, though it plunged thousands of worlds into chaos. Shorn of their computing devices, humankind was forced to develop its innate potential, producing human computers like mentats, Guild navigators for safe space travel, and the Bene Gesserit with their exquisite mind-body control and limited prescience.

Butlerian Jihad 2.0

Back in the 1990s, I believed that the Internet was a democratizing force. Anyone could create their own web site – even me. This exciting new medium was a way to get around the traditional gatekeepers and let human creativity bloom.

Yet, the diverse and funky Internet that I was a part of is no more. Instead, the network has been taken over by global social media conglomerates with very different agendas from connecting the world’s people.

Why would you connect the world’s people unless you wanted to control them? Even the noblest soul would be tempted to manipulate users during a crisis (for example: now). You might think you’re doing something good, by raising some voices and silencing others, but it’s still manipulation.

A situation that Frank Herbert would instantly recognize. The machines themselves are not bad; it’s the men who control them that we should suspect. We’ve all been impacted by social media – consider your attention span – and we should ask how these men with machines are controlling our lives.

The Butlerian Jihad did away with thinking machines. There was a new commandment, with the penalty of death for anyone who violated it:

Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.

Frank Herbert had a healthy skepticism for leaders of all types. His view was that we are too ready to surrender our will to others, whether they be a charismatic hero or a powerful man with a machine.

Maybe it’s time for our own Butlerian Jihad.

The Three-Body Problem

Sunset for Humanity
A typically upbeat section of The Three-Body Problem

It’s hard to describe The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin without giving away the plot. And I don’t want to spoil the surprises in this sci-fi novel.

Instead, I’ll describe the three emotions I felt reading the book:

  1. HORROR

There’s the commonplace anxieties that make up much of life (and are mined endlessly for literary fiction) and then there’s the cosmic horror when you consider that your life is a mere speck in the universe.

The Three-Body Problem engenders that feeling, especially the more deeply you read into the book. If H.P. Lovecraft studied astrophysics and quantum theory, then you’d get a novel like this one, full of very real and plausible terrors existing in deep space. Things to worry about that you’ve never worried about before, I guarantee it.

It makes you feel unimportant. What is one life, even if it’s yours, compared to the broad sweep of galaxies and the mysteries of space and time?

Matt Haig in The Midnight Library believes that every life is precious. But in Liu’s cold and unfeeling universe, individual lives matter little, compared to the needs of collective humanity.

Which brings me to my next emotion:

2. GRATITUDE

After putting down the book, I had never been so happy to live on a stable planet orbiting a single, predictable sun.

With covid and coup attempts, I thought I was living in a dystopia now. Hah! The problems of 2021 are mere trifles compared to the world-ending dilemma of The Three-Body Problem.

3. IRRITATION

Is it the author or the translator? Did Liu Cixin write these clunky sentences (the dialogue in parts reads like a bad police procedural) or was it the translator, Ken Liu?

This isn’t a book with sweeping prose to thrill the heart. Instead, it plods along with long discursions on radio telescopes and nanoparticles. At times, I paged ahead to see if the plot got going again or if I should give up.

I kept going because it’s a really good mystery that Liu Cixin has set up. It’s a book about ideas – big ones – and not about characters, which are just clumsy pawns set against an unfeeling universe.

So, would I continue? Am I going to read the rest of the trilogy?

No!

While the ideas in the novel are fascinating (and troubling on a human level), I can’t read another huge book of clunky prose. Instead, I’ll wait for the Netflix series.








The Plot

the plot book cover

You can’t copyright a plot.

As a writer, people sometimes approach me with book ideas. They have the idea, they just need someone to “write it up.”

Sometimes, they even offer to split the profits with me. They’ve done the hard part, after all – thinking up the idea – and just need someone to put the words on the paper.

But an idea is nothing. It’s like saying that you have an idea for a bridge and just need someone to build it for you.

Which is why the central dilemma of The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz didn’t resonate with me. In the novel, Jacob Finch Bonner steals the plot for a novel from one of his students.

Bonner turns the idea into a best-seller. And then is blackmailed by an anonymous figure who accuses him of being a thief. Bonner then desperately tries to cover up his “crime” while trying to figure out the identity of his accuser.

But it’s not a crime. As Bonner himself says, plots are in the air. They’re narratives we’ve heard a million times before, from the Odyssey to Star Wars. They’re stories we hear from friends. Things we read about in the newspaper. Tales we overhear on the bus.

All these plots – they say there are only seven of them – slosh around in the culture and get recycled time and time again.

Where would we be if we couldn’t use the material around us? My short story collection, Likes, is based upon things I experienced, heard about or read about. I take the stories that are in the air and refashion them into tidy short fiction.

Which is why I didn’t understand Bonner’s guilt in The Plot. Or why he was trying to unmask his blackmailer.

It’s the expression of the idea – not the idea itself – that is the real thing. Jacob Finch Bonner took a plot and turned it into a novel. He did the hard work. He did nothing wrong.

So, if you’re around a writer, be careful. We may steal your stories. And not feel guilty about it.








36 Images of DC at Exposed DC 2021

me and my photo at Exposed DC
Me and my photo at Exposed DC

Go see 36 images of DC from local photographers (including me) at the Exposed DC 2021 Photography Show.

Now in its 15th year, this outdoor exhibit of photos can be found in the alley next to Ellē restaurant at 3221 Mt Pleasant St NW.

My photo is of Cupid’s Undie Run, in which people race around the streets in their skimpies to raise money for charity. I took the photo in February 2020, just weeks before the pandemic struck.

During the dark days of covid, I’d go days without talking to another human, my only interaction with others at a distance, our mouths covered. It was surreal to look at photographs like this, with people not wearing masks or much else. It gave me hope to see humans doing something great together. Very together!

Exposed DC is one of my favorite things about Washington. I’ve been in the show before but what I love about it is all the different photographic takes on the city. I always discover places to visit and new ways of seeing DC from the show.

Check out these unique visions of our nation’s capital at the Exposed DC 2021 show until July 11. Free and in an alley – how cool is that?