Infomocracy

"Infomocracy is a 2016 book, and it’s the first in Older’s trilogy, The Centenal Cycle. It’s set in a near-future real world, where nationalism and nation states have been primarily replaced by a new form of micro-democracy: a system where every 100,000 people elect a government. They’re very small and local, so you get a strange micro-democratic patchwork world. Of course, there are also nation states that have not agreed to adopt this new system. And there are people who aren’t beholden to any one bit of it, and move between them. In Infomocracy, Malka explores what this kind of political system might be like to live in, and to run an election in. The first book is an election thriller, almost in the vein of a Michael Crichton or a Tom Clancy novel, which I love; it also owes a lot, I think, to William Gibson. Essentially, the micro-democracies are made possible by a new technology – or I guess, now not so new – which is a giant search engine that’s incredibly accurate, incredibly effective, and has an international team of people working to keep it that way. The omnipresence of this information network, which is called Information with a capital ‘I’, has spurred the creation of the micro-democracy system in some way which is undefined. I think what Malka is really interested in is the question: in politics, who gets to decide what is real? The micro-democracy is an incredibly cool science fictional idea, but it’s less important than the considerations of narrative and truth-telling and persuasion that are woven all the way through the book, which are all older political techniques than democracy – either in the form we know it or in the form that Older imagines. The plot revolves around who’s telling the truth, why, and who believes them. Yes. It’s not a ‘here’s where we’re headed book’, nor is it quite a ‘here’s where we could go if we weren’t careful’ book. It’s more a ‘here is a thought experiment about a possible way the world could be different; you can see how we might approach it from here’. And that is, I think, the oldest science fiction trick in the book. Have you ever lived in a small town? It’s never utopian!"