The free world, to use an old-fashioned term, is being subsumed by a convergence of ubiquitous digital technology and permanent political crisis.
I AM NO ONE
Patrick Flanery
Atlantic/Allen & Unwin
Democracy is subverted by global capital, and technocratic elites combine neoliberal economics with state power.
Violent and disaffected groups extend their attacks into the heart of the Western world, from within and without, their outrages staged more for amplification by mass media than the actual destruction of life or property.
Citizens themselves are observed and judged, as the "security'' of the global order now depends on automated algorithms.
I Am No One is an extended riff on the meaning of privacy and personal life in the era of Wikileaks, of Edward Snowden, of the Panama Papers, considering the implications of a scalable surveillance apparatus whose purpose becomes ever more opaque as its methods become more intrusive.
As a kind of cloud-based echo of The Trial, by Kafka, Patrick Flanery's uneasy novel is an account of an impersonal process disconnected from cause but not effect, in this case situated in the virtual panopticon of the networked society, where only the interior thoughts of the individual escape inspection.
Everything else is monitored. Every trace of communication is potentially recoverable, hackable, or interceptable.
As existence becomes mediated through an electronic ocean of social media and dematerialised information, so does the potential for control, coercion and manipulation.
The tone of the novel is formal and dry, the narrative voice that of a middle-aged American male, a professor of history, Jeremy O'Keefe (who, incidentally, we discover is a specialist in the history of the East German secret service, the Stasi.)
O'Keefe is almost stereotypically ordinary, apart from his privileged position as a middle-class academic.
He suffers all the trials of his age: divorced, unmoored, trying to reconnect to his American life in New York City after a tenure at Oxford University.
He is apparently self-contained, self-interested in an inoffensive way, liberally minded but non-engaged, neither particularly likeable nor particularly repulsive.
A series of disturbing events occur in his life. His computer is hacked. He is trailed by a sinister figure who starts to force interactions on him. A series of packages are delivered to his apartment building containing dossiers of his email, internet browsing and mobile phone records.
As the events become more threatening and surreal, his unreliable, partial account progressively reveals aspects of his personal life that he has hidden.
Previous relationships from Oxford have marked him out as a potential security threat.
Despite his intellectual achievements, he fails to connect his abstract knowledge with the dangerous situation that is enveloping him.
While his intentions are innocent of political extremism, instead the product of boringly conventional impulses, his actions are both exposed and misconstrued, with dire consequences.
This novel functions successfully as both a claustrophobic high-end thriller and a political investigation of radical transparency in a globalised age.
- Victor Billot is editor of The Maritimes, the magazine of the Maritime Union.
