Lauren Steates

Review #3

Distraction: The future?  How will humans deal with technology?

“Nothing is ever simple anymore”

Technological advancements have been a fundamental part of human development throughout history.  Recently, these advances have become intertwined with the everyday lives of ordinary people.  Such technologies start to become part of our cognitive processes, as they affect the way we think.  Through his novel Distraction, Bruce Sterling explores how technology effects humans, both individually and societally, at first exploring how an increasingly complex world affects the human mind and spirit, then offering us a frightening scenario where technology directly changes the way humans process information. 

Distraction takes place in 2044, a time where America is in great distress.  Both environmental and economic failure has left a society with little trust.  Imagine an America that is spiraling out of control: the United States government and armed forces are just about bankrupt, there over a dozen different political parties, states are practically autonomous, and nomads wander around everywhere with no chance of ever finding a job.  In those states that are not burned to the ground, a majority of the populations are “proles,” people that do not have a job or a chance of ever finding one, that are living in the streets “off the grid.”  Because of all of the chaos, Congress has been replaced by an Emergency Committee.  The United States Armed Forces have resorted to blocking roads in order to collect “voluntary donations” from the public.  A new cold war exists, this time with the Netherlands.  The global economy is largely a thing of the past; China has ruined the American economy by decimating its software industry, and the United States to struggles to maintain its own existence. 

            Oscar, a campaign manager for a newly elected member of the Senate, is caught in the middle of the chaos.  Oscar has an “embarrassing personal background issue”: he is a human clone “created” as a result of the Columbian black-market.  Because of his “condition”, he has abnormal problems, such as a constant high fever, insomnia, and a hyper-focus on politics.

            After the campaign, Oscar is looking for another job to keep him busy.  He hears about a Collaboratory, a corrupt state-funded biology lab in Texas.  Here the novel spins off to Oscar’s dealings at the lab, and his developing relationship with Greta, a top neurologist/cognition scientist.   Together they clash with Green Hughy, the tyrannical Governor of Louisiana, who is possessed with new sinister technology.

            In Sterling’s world, technology has led the world into a diffusion of fractured interests and shattered societies.  The book takes us through a scattershot of various plot twists and turns.  Oscar flits from subplot to subplot.  Sterling offers us dramatic advances in technology (although most of them are at least somewhat plausible), but then offers us little hope that humans are capable of grasping the technology and using it in a way that improves the Earth’s quality of life.  Instead of drawing a picture of Utopia, he offers us a mild version of hell.  Humans seem to take the new technology, and twist it until it becomes a perversion.   Oscar is himself such a perversion: not quite human, genetically engineered (far from perfectly so), seemingly incapable of consistent ethical behavior.

On one level, Sterling seems to be telling us that advances in technology may well lead our world into a chaotic, fractionalized state.  Early in the book, after observing an intricately coordinated attack on a Worchester, Massachusetts bank, Oscar ponders the role of politics in America:  “Oscar Valparaiso had once imagined politics as a chess game. His kind of chess game. Pawns, knights, and queens, powers and strategies, ranks and files, black squares and white squares. Studying this tape had cured him of that metaphor. Because this phenomenon on the tape was not a chess piece. It was there on the public chessboard all right, but it wasn't a rook or a bishop. It was a wet squid, a swarm of bees. It was a new entity that pursued its own orthogonal agenda, and vanished into the silent interstices of a deeply networked and increasingly nonlinear society.”

Further into the novel, Sterling introduces us to a more frightening use of technology, an agent that when introduced into humans directly affects the brain’s cognitive process, presumably to improve its functioning, but ultimately to be used  to further the interests of  unscrupulous politicians. 

We may not yet have many of the technologies of Sterling’s novel, but our world and society is already shaped by the technology around us.  Technology is showing an increasing role in our lives.  Cell phones, Blackberrys, ipods, video games, and immersion in the Internet are increasingly taking up more and more of our daily routine.  Technologies start to become part of our cognitive processes, as they affect the way we think and obtain information.   Genetic engineering and drugs that alter the body’s physical and mental processes are already here.  Perhaps Sterling’s cynical view of a possible future technological disaster is meant to offer us a warning. We should try carefully to not allow technology to pervert us as individuals, and to not allow technology to make our world so complex that it leads to a perversion of our societal ethics and responsibilities.