ThrillersReview‘The so-called “right-to-privacy” means less every day … ’ This whip-smart novel is a polemical addition to the debate on Big Data
Commenting in these pages on recent developments in the Snowden whistleblowing saga, Shami Chakrabarti, director of the campaign group Liberty, was moved to suggest: “Who needs the movies?”
You could equally ask whether there is anything within David Shafer’s debut novel – about a sinister cabal of Big Data magnates scheming to seize the world’s information and sell it back to us via its own proprietary platform – that could possibly outpace actual events. But, at the very least, Shafer’s polemic about the apocalypse implicit within all end-user licence agreements is significantly funnier and more entertaining.
Shafer channels a sprawling narrative through the experience of three characters in their mid-30s. First there is Leila, employed by an American NGO in a remote Burmese province, and a keen jogger who literally runs into trouble: “The map showed there was no road in a place where she could pretty much swear there had been a road. And yet she’d marked the GPS point on her running watch. What do you do when the internet calls you a liar?”
Then there is Leo, a self-obsessed Portland slacker so mired by the conviction that “the shadow government” has been reading his blog that even his dealer has become worried: “His pot dealer cut him off. Out of concern! Like pot dealers are bound by the Hippocratic oath.”
The third in the trio is Mark, an old college friend of Leo’s and the stupendously wealthy author of a fatuous business manual that has propelled him into the world’s elite boardrooms and television chatshows, even though he isn’t entirely sure what his own concepts of “conscious-clusion” and “flowtachment” are actually supposed to mean. His destiny entwines with Leo and Leila through fealty to an underground counterconspiracy whose agents are domiciled in the show apartments of Ikea stores, and the three receive the code names Whiskey, Tango and Foxtrot for no more discernible reason than it provides the novel with the splendid hashtag @ WTF.
Yet among the hair-raising flights of fancy and irresistibly urgent plotting, Shafer alights on most of the key issues of the privacy debate. As one of the technocrats points out, someone has to control the flow of information, suggesting that the “so-called ‘right-to‑privacy’ hasn’t really meant much in 30 years and means less every day. You may as well defend people’s right to own steamboats”. One can only hope that it is possible to doubt the existence of an ultra-vindictive sector of intelligence saboteurs known as the Ruiners: “A cadre sitting on the 13th floor of a 12-storey building in northern Virginia. It was said they had full access, through every lens, tap, screen or pipe … they could reach into your life as a child reaches into the world of her toys.”
Of course, there is no entirely new conspiracy theory under the sun: Shafer’s supposition of vast, undetectable, off-shore servers may be reminiscent of the “data havens” dreamed up in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon; while the mysterious initiation procedure that members of the resistance undertake – “not unlike a good bong hit, or a gust of wind off a river, or going steeply downhill on a bike” – has a sensory effect similar to Philip K Dick’s Substance D.
Shafer’s prose is whip-smart, funny and informal, though occasionally prone to made-up adjectives – “He was appraising her: had she looked listen-y?”; “It left him feeling articulate and rapid fire-y” – which can feel a bit lax and slapdash-y. But the narrative maintains an edge, which suggests it might have been constructed in a haze of inspiration similar to that which Mark experiences when first formulating the ideas behind his self-help volume: “The trick was to stay hammered enough to write courageously but sober enough to see the screen and avoid porn.”
Perhaps the most ironic testament to Shafer’s powers of prophecy was that, on publication in the US last year, the book became a casualty of Amazon’s obstructive tactics towards the publishing group Hachette. The standoff prompted the author to question whether a massively powerful media conglomerate was attempting to silence him in retribution for writing a novel about the motives of massively powerful media conglomerates. In an impassioned post to the Daily Beast Shafer admitted: “I know I’m being paranoid and melodramatic and self-aggrandising. But even paranoid, melodramatic self-aggrandisers sniff out nefarious, tentacular plots from time to time.” Well, he should know.
To order Whiskey Tango Foxtrot for £6.99 (RRP £8.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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