And so, I felt like writing a short story.....
I had been in Milan for only a few hours, having arrived from Germany with that slightly unreal feeling you get when you step off a train or a plane and the world around you is speaking your language again, but not exactly as you remembered it. Milan was doing Milan: traffic, nervous air, people walking as if they were on their way to fire someone, scooters launched like morally superior projectiles, and that Lombard grey which is not a colour, but a diagnosis.
One of the most irritating things — as well as one of the weak points of politics in the sovereign age — is this habit of talking about one’s ideas without actually doing politics. That is, without ever getting to the essential point: saying, or at least suggesting, what policy should follow from those ideas. What the concrete actions of the national government should be, in other words, once those ideas become a policy, a majority, executive power, a signature on a decree, an order given to an official, an instruction sent to a police headquarters, a rule written into the Official Gazette.
The emergency caused by the new Hantavirus outbreak aboard a cruise ship and the energy crisis triggered by Trump’s war with Iran have something profoundly similar about them. And I am not simply referring to the fact that both are frightening, or that they dominate newspaper headlines for a few weeks. I am referring to the very psychological and political structure of the emergency itself: two crises arriving only a handful of years after other almost identical crises, and therefore striking societies that are already stressed, already traumatised, already conditioned by recent experiences.
There has been a great deal of talk about Palantir Technologies, which leads me to suspect that a crusade is either being prepared or is perhaps already underway. And crusades against multinational corporations are always easy: they are large, visible, impersonal targets, and therefore perfect for projecting onto them every kind of moral anxiety or political paranoia.
Writing science fiction often means confronting questions that, when pursued far enough, end up looking remarkably like problems in theoretical physics. And sometimes it even forces one to search for solutions credible enough not to make the entire narrative edifice collapse the moment it meets a reader with a passing familiarity with relativity.
One of the things I have been noticing with increasing clarity over the past few years, every time “digital security” comes up, is that a growing part of the problem is not actually being solved by companies at all: it is simply being redistributed onto end users.