The Juggernaut Can Be Stopped

THE JUGGERNAUT CAN BE STOPPED: Ewan Morrison on ‘For Emma’ & Resisting The Rise of Techno-Capital

A conversation with Scottish literature’s enfant terrible about the themes of his new techno-thriller ‘For Emma‘, beamed to you from a dystopian near-future. By Bram E Gieben.

I enter the shabby hotel room a few minutes before the author Ewan Morrison arrives. He knocks and enters, and we exchange a wordless hello. Slowly, carefully, we each begin to feel around the room’s nooks and crannies, running fingers underneath the 3D-printed shelves and behind the smart wall’s glassy beveled edges.

Ewan disconnects all of the electrical devices from their sockets and takes a small screwdriver from the breast pocket of his blazer. With careful concentration, he unscrews each plug and checks the wiring, then replaces the outer shell, leaving the devices unplugged. I circle the light fittings, unscrew each bulb, and replace it with a fresh one from my pack.

It takes about ten minutes, then we each take a seat in two dilapidated armchairs, turning them towards each other. Ewan nods and I open my laptop, hit ‘RUN’ on a localised distortion field. Satisfied that we are hidden from the data-saturated environment, and free of listening devices, I hand Ewan a mylar bag. He takes the SIM from his phone and drops it in, I do the same. Finally we greet each other. We are here to talk about the singularity, and the eerily prophetic predictions of his 2025 novel, For Emma.

Just a few short years on from its publication, many of the novel’s technological tropes have become fact – from the implants that augment and monitor the brain functions of the majority of those now under 20 years old, to the exponential growth of surveillance technology and artificial intelligence in our digital devices, to the use of medical nanobots in our bloodstreams and neurons, to the implicit tightening and narrowing of free speech norms that attended the rise of digital states, and the emerging infrastructure of the UK’s social credit system.

What follows is a record of our conversation, and our hopes for the future beyond the horizon of the predicted singularity. We draw on banned works by Mark Fisher, Nick Land, John Gray, Nick Bostrom and others, burned in the great purge of 2028. If you’re reading these words, you are the resistance. Destroy this file after reading.

Bram E. Gieben (BG): The world For Emma depicts is one where corporate control and surveillance have penetrated every single facet of government, industry and culture. How far away did that moment feel when you wrote the novel?

Ewan Morrison (EM): People said, “Oh, you’ve written your first science fiction novel,” and I had to reply that I was still being a realist. The world has taken a turn into science and the fictions or ideologies around our big-tech future. The world has become sci-fi, and if you look into the big motivating idea behind AI, transhumanism and effective accelerationism (e/acc) in Silicon valley, it’s this belief in ‘Hyperstition’ – literally the belief that fictions can be made to manifest in reality if we believe in them enough and invest in them. Self-fulfilling prophecies.

These big tech gurus and their followers believe that they can force AI superintelligence and other imaginary science-fiction technologies to emerge via an act of collective faith, and by the whipping-up of hype to generate hundreds of billions in speculative capital to ‘make the fiction become real – to make the dream come true’.

It’s a Californian ideology that fuses the beliefs of ‘the law of attraction’ – as seen with people like Oprah Winfrey, and her belief in ‘manifesting’ wealth and health – and the old American Power of Positive Thinking, with the equally cult-like and euphoric tech utopianism that has grown out of Silicon Valley, and which is now articulated by tech gurus like Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk. Andreesen even wrote a techno-optimist manifesto. The result is that the fastest growing speculative economy in the world is now being led by science fiction, the acolytes who believe in it, and the investors who are duped by it.

As for the novel and the big tech within it, I didn’t invent anything new, I’ve only taken the tech that existed in 2025, and the euphoric future projections written by tech gurus like Ray Kurzweil, and the two co-founders of the World Transhumanist Association; Nick Bostrom and David Pearce. I subject them to hyperstition, so I allowed those technologies to emerge as realities in the novel.

We have a more advanced invasive brain chip technology, and the extensive human testing of nanobots as a health tool – that’s thousands of nanobots circulating within the human body with the goal of repairing tissue.

When I wrote For Emma, the widespread human testing of these technologies seemed maybe only five years away. Elon Musk said that he planned to have 20-30 human test subjects fitted with his Neuralink brain chips within 2025, let me just quote him: “There will be hundreds of people with Neuralink in a few years, maybe tens of thousands within five years, millions within ten years.” We shall see.

We should keep in mind (no pun intended) that this is a procedure that involves invasive ‘trodes penetrating the brain flesh itself, and that 4,500 lab animals died at the Neuralink Labs. Musk contests this and puts the number at 1,500. You could argue that the novel, since it deals with a young woman who dies from an invasive brain chip and nanobot experiment, is really about the consequences of what happens to us frail little humans, us nobodies, when the world starts to live by a vast fiction – a science fiction.

As for the other technologies in the book – by 2025, there are already hospital robots in China (China also has the world’s first AI run hospital), and pervasive surveillance technologies (London has the second biggest citizen surveillance system in the world). People consent to it, even enjoy self-monitoring.

People jogging happily wear devices that report their heartbeat, blood sugar, body temperature, geo-location and even their conversations back to central computer systems – whether or not they understood that they were feeding AI growth, and contributing to the building of the ‘internet of everything,’ the dataist worldview, and the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ – and of course helping to build the power base of the technocrats who want to reduce all human activity to measurable, monitorable and controllable data.

I have a question for you. Do you think that this big tech future in which we are all monitored and controlled by big tech algorithms is ‘fated’ or ‘inevitable’ as the tech gurus would like us to believe? Can the genie be put back in the bottle or do we just have to simply, passively accept this future, in which humans have less importance and less to do as the machines control more of our lives, and in fact enter our bodies?

BG: I like that formula you propose – that robber barons like Musk immanentized science fiction concepts that are neither good for the world, nor likely to be sustainable or viable in the long term. I’m not sure it’s inevitable in the sense that people fear – progress, like anything else humans create and drive, is very asymmetrical. As the global surveillance state emerges, run or powered by big tech, there are still many parts of the world it doesn’t reach.

A bigger risk, I think, is that the stratification of societies increased, along with inequality, as we have seen. Musk wanted a future where a select elite have access to the ‘benefits’ that technologies like Neuralink give them in a hyper-accelerated, technofeudal economy, while the rest of us remain unmodified “digital peasants”.

He got his wish, for the most part. But this attitude contains the seeds of its own destruction. I can still imagine a future where the techno-enhanced simply become irrelevant, because the rest of us are too busy running society and the economy. While the opposite may seem true now, that could change.

The more removed we become from our physical humanity, and the sense of ourselves as animals, the more abstract the problems we are likely to try and solve. So while Elon and the enhanciles are off attempting to control Artificial General Intelligence, we flatscans are starting to grow vegetables and live off-grid.

I see the latter as infinitely more appealing to most people, the more they are denied access to the so-called advantages of living in crumbling capitalist economies. If there’s a future that runs counter to the techno-utopian dream of progress, it lies in self-sufficiency. I often return to the fact that until the 1970s, Britain’s allotments provided nearly 20% of our food stocks. There’s potential to go back to that via projects like community gardens, or even vertical farms.

John Gray‘s view is that progress is an illusion of temporality. To any person standing in a certain era, looking back he will see progression from an antique past. Looking forward, he will see only the benefits of technological or social evolution. But over the timespan of just a handful of human lives, that unbroken line of progress proves to be much more faltering. There are reversals, regressions; leaps forward that seem judicious but prove disastrous. I wonder if our current drive towards the transhuman singularity is one of these regressions, if seen over a long enough timescale.

I wanted to ask you about theories of the ‘uncanny’ or unheimlich, as Freud proposed, and Mark Fisher later developed. At heart the unheimlich is about the familiar, made strange – perhaps the greatest source of fear. In what ways do the technologies proposed and developed by transhumanists leave us in an uncanny world? Will a more automated, simulated future free us from labour, or leave us in horror?

‘How can we just sit around waiting for society to crash in the hope that something better will come after it?’ – Ewan Morrison, Writer. (Photo credit: Angela Catlin)

EM:I’m glad you brought up Mark Fisher. He’s an important thinker who has been influential for both of us, and many in our generation, and the next. I latched onto him through his analysis of cultural stagnation and repetition in the 21st century. The sense of what the late great Lynda Obst, the movie producer called sequelitis – we’re trapped in sequels, remakes, reboots, and best-ofs, and this extends well beyond movies into books, music, even academia.

Everything repeats but there’s no real sense of forward momentum and eccentric, rapid invention and erupting crazy creativity as there was in the 20th century. All our present-day technologies are iterations of earlier innovations. As Fisher said (I paraphrase here), 21st century culture is 20th century culture ‘on higher-definition screens.’ There’s so much evidence of that, and this ties in with his Neo-Marxist analysis of what he would call late capitalism or Capitalist Realism, and “the slow cancellation of the future.” I think we’ve both been influenced by this insight.

And Fisher, to his great merit, found artists and musicians who reflected this sense of being trapped in a repeating time loop. He introduced me to the music of Burial and The Caretaker, for which I am eternally grateful. All good so far, and that’s because Fisher here is in diagnosis mode, but where I part company with Fisher is when he tries to move from diagnosis to strategy. From ‘these things are broken’ to ‘here’s how we can fix them.’

This is a common problem that plagues the entire history of left-wing thought, and that used to bother me when I was a card carrying communist and later a neo-Marxist and even Post-Marxist, like Fisher was. The big question after so much analysis and eventual analysis-paralysis is Lenin’s question: ‘What is to be done?’ This question plagues us as artists in the 21st century in this time of stagnation and repetition. Should art even be done?

I was here in Glasgow when the Berlin wall fell and the USSR collapsed, and I vividly recall being dragged into the farewell party of The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). It was a room in a dark, damp little place near the arches under the Glasgow Central station railway bridges. Free drinks were on offer, and ten old folks, true old school communists in their late 60s, were either sitting around drinking alone or were dancing to this squeeze box accordion.

It was like a scene from a Béla Tarr movie, and I was the young man getting burled around by the matronly old Stalinist who yelled out dancing instructions. It was surreal, and wild and drunken and sad. The thing they believed in all their lives had collapsed. Communism, as they saw it, had died. The idea of the planned economy which was the true foundation of Marxism had failed and to their merit, rather than shackling themselves to New Labour, or the Fabians or the postmodern / Maoist / deconstructionists, or what would in five years time emerge as identity politics, they decided to disband. True old school communists, faced with facts. They went down with the ship.

I mention this because I think that whether we like it or not, that great failure still haunts what became of the left to this day, and I think it contaminates and ruins Mark Fisher’s plans for ‘what is to be done.’ I also believe it explains his interest in ‘the uncanny.’

When Fisher is talking about the sensation of the uncanny and the weird (our sense of disgust and fright when we come across mannequins, dolls, and creatures that are augmented with machines), he’s using this to critique Freud for being a dusty old conservative. Fisher is trying to depict the uncanny as having the potential to ‘disrupt’ normalcy, to smash conventional society.

And so, I think Fisher is stuck in a very old pre-‘fall of the wall’ habit of trying to disrupt capitalism, trying to cause it to collapse, looking for cracks in the structure. He will unleash the freaks and weirdos of the uncanny, the cyborgs and the half-humans who make us shudder. But I’m afraid it’s all just a nostalgic replay of the early days of Marxism, a call to create a new revolutionary class, but this time not from the proletariat, but from the misfits, the dolls, the automata and the imaginary transhuman and posthuman beings of the future. When ultimately, the fact is there – the planned economy failed.

The only other option for communism is Maoist China. The hybrid control economy, the surveillance state. So much else that the left has done since the fall of the Berlin wall is just going through the motions of acting out old forms of subversion, habits that haven’t died, resentments that haven’t died out. But to what end? China is the only hope for communism. Face that fact, or go down with the ship.

I’m always conscious when talking about Fisher to pay him his dues – and to pay my respects, as he committed suicide in 2017, and we’re worse for the loss of his brilliant mind. But his idea of the uncanny is tied to this belief in tech accelerationism that he never shook off, and that is a problem.

Today, we associate accelerationism with big tech and mostly with the right-wing libertarians of America. You hear accelerationism coming out of the transhumanists, the tech utopians, the e/accs and the neoreactionary NRx trolls. You hear its sci-fi-fantasy ideology in the mouths of people like Musk, and even J.D. Vance.

The big idea is that you accelerate technology to ‘escape velocity’ where it escapes all regulation and control by the state and achieves a breakthrough (the singularity), after which an entirely new civilisation is created by superintelligent tech. It’s a liberation from which there is no possible return.

And, of course, Fisher was deeply involved with the leading accelerationist, Nick Land, at the experimental, radical Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) in the 1990s in Warwick and they then parted company, around 1998-2004 – they are the two sides of accelerationism, left and right.

Today, we see Land as one of the leading ‘Dark Enlightenment’ philosophers of neoreaction, and what he says is terrifying. He claims that capitalism and technology have fused, that acceleration can’t be stopped and that “nothing human makes it out of the near future” – meaning that we’re heading into the singularity and this will be a deregulated, chaotic, tech-led world in which none of the left wing goals survive, and even humans will become augmented by technology or bodily products on the cybernetic meat market.

So basically, Fisher went along with that dystopian vision half of the way, but then decided to break with Land and take the accelerationist idea and put a left-wing spin on it. If you like, he took the out-of-control juggernaut and planted a red flag on the roof. In Fisher’s version of the accelerationist apocalypse, some good can come of it because the techno-capitalist juggernaut will crash and then after that, from the ruins, something better might be built using technologies that free us from labour, that provide us with Universal Basic Income.

I think he’s wrong and he’s trying to, in story consultant terms, ‘nail an unearned happy ending onto a tragedy.’ Again, this takes us back to his suicide; hellish to speculate on it, but I’m haunted by the idea that Fisher might have realised that his belief in a left-accelerationist project was doomed to fail.

How can we just sit around waiting for the acceleration of tech society to crash in the hope that something better will come after it? That’s not doing or acting, it’s sitting on our hands and hoping. The desire for benign technologies emerging is not anything substantial to pin our hopes on. It’s like sitting around hoping that the coming future is more like automated UBI than Judgment Day in Terminator.

My only answer to Fisher and Land is that they’re both wrong. The accelerating juggernaut of techno-capital can actually be stopped, or has to be. That will take a lot of effort and resistance, but artists today are at the cutting edge of that – hacking through the fuel pipes and the radiator of the speeding juggernaut.

We have to get it to stop or at least to slow down, because we can’t place our trust on some fated apocalypse that will, as if by magic, create an opportunity to make things better. And we should definitely stop thinking that embracing the weird or the disruptive, subverting capitalism and so on is still an effective strategy for artists. The enemy is much bigger than that and it has only recently revealed its true scale. Accelerating techno-capital is the great disruptor and destroyer. The question then becomes what we can hold onto as we try to slow down the machine.

As my finger hovers over the ‘Send’ button, ready to disseminate this conversation across the interconnected webs of data and technology that make up the substance of our reality, Ewan and I hear the sound of heavy footsteps, jackboots in the hall. I execute the command, sending the conversation into the digital ether.

If you’re reading this now, the plan worked. I type in a string of old-fashioned green ASCII code into an open DOS window just as the door explodes inwards in a hail of splinters and steel. A gas canister spins and blooms, filling the room with acrid smoke. Green laser beams cut the choking air like knives. Voices shout and command. We scramble from our seats and retreat to the back wall, hands raised in surrender. I watch as the laptop bursts into flames, sizzling and bubbling, fusing the hard disk and plastic into a solid lump of slag.

We hope this conversation reaches you. We hope it changes you. Despite it all, we hope.

For Emma by Ewan Morrison is available now from Leamington Books.

The Darkest Timeline by Bram E. Gieben is out now from Revol Press.

This is part of a collaborative project between Glasgow Review of Books and Bella Caledonia. The Glasgow Review of Books is an online journal which publishes critical reviews, essays and interviews as well as writing on translation. They accept work in any of the languages of Scotland – English, Gàidhlig and Scots.