Idoru

"There is an obvious link here with the next book on my list and is the reason I chose Idoru by William Gibson. His powers of prediction are astonishing and in Idoru he predicts ‘fake news’. It came out in 1997 and in it there are these huge sinister corporations, one of them is called Slitscan. They are actively producing something that is a blend of fake news and reality television—an utterly submersive form of culture that shapes the way everyone thinks and is all-powerful. These corporations are blended with a mafia type element and the nation-states are complicit. Media corporations hold the power in this world. Celebrity culture is a dubious gift, as the celebrities themselves become pawns and products—owned by their creators. At the centre of all this is a love story between a famous rock star and a synthetic, digital woman. This anticipates by many, many years the Spike Jonze movie Her . That’s a movie with Scarlett Johansson, in which a man falls in love with a computer operating system, and I mention Johansson in my book quite often, for a number of reasons. Idoru is a much more complex story—but this isn’t just a world of fake news and vast scale corruption, it is also one where society spends more time in the digital world than the real world. That wasn’t the case in 1997—but it is now. Gibson isn’t binary about whether technology is a strictly a good or a bad thing. Rather that technology is a transformative force, so you lose some things but gain others. “Technology is changing us. I fear that the main driver, in Silicon Valley, isn’t paying enough attention to the type of world it is creating” This is a good example of how writers of science fiction are not just storytellers but also visionaries. In Idoru there is the possibility for people, who in reality live in miserable circumstances, via the digital world to re-embody themselves in ways that they couldn’t in reality. One of the characters has a genetic disability but, though trapped in a painful existence in the ‘real’ world, is able to live an extraordinarily active life in the digital world. Technology is changing us. I fear that the main driver, in Silicon Valley , isn’t paying enough attention to the type of world it is creating. These technology creators are rather blinkered and have far too narrow a frame of reference to build technologies for everyone. One of the many problems is that they don’t employ enough women. Which is why I have a chapter on Silicon Valley in my book."