Do not use the words free speech! Free speech I practise with you directly to promote a meeting of the minds. This is not free. Every second an arm like a blade combs the surface of the earth for dopamine, yours and mine, our whims and arguments, our relationships with others, our attempts at love, our anger, our caring, to embezzle it as revenue for a dozen male college dropouts.
As a wickedly smart near-future speculative fiction, Meanwhile in Dopamine City feels like what The Circle wanted to be, and with a satirical snarky vibe (that works well to entertainingly expose the dangerous path we're all sleepwalking along), I was put in mind of David Foster Wallace and John Kennedy Toole. I have read D.B.C. Pierre before and I reckon this is his best work yet. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Good stuff in, bad shit out, don't let it mingle.The above is Lonnie Cush's motto: As a recently laid-off sewer worker, Lonnie understands the necessity of separating the pure from the polluting, and as a single father with a dead wife and a mother-in-law scheming for custody of his two kids, he works hard to protect his family from the societal forces (and particularly those online) that would seek to foul them. Soon after the book begins, Lonnie gives in to the pressure to buy his nine-year-old daughter her first smart phone, and as Shelby is nearly immediately put in the crosshairs of trolls, bodyshamers, and men with questionable intentions (she's nine), Lonnie finds himself ramping up his own online presence in order to understand this new world. In a format that sees the main narrative constantly interrupted by developing online stories – viral newsbites that demonstrate how petty groupthink becomes enforceable policy – D. B. C. Pierre doesn't make too big a leap from our present day to show how fast the world can change and how little control we as individuals might have over these changes.
Time and place remain unstated (I presume Lonnie's in the UK and generic names are given for other countries: the news reports on a war in “Al Qemen”, immigrants come from “San Uribe”) and this choice serves to remove specific political considerations and makes the story feel more universal. And so, while Lonnie's concerns focus us on the domestic, another storyline follows the hidden reality: the billionaire technocrats and their covert quest for the singularity – and world domination, delivered through cute memes and addictive apps – barreling along unchecked at the nearby Octagon facility. I do think that “Meanwhile in Dopamine City” is a lame title for this book, but much is made of our monkeyness and how easy it is to control humans through manipulating the chemicals in our brains. So states the chief wonk at the Octagon:
If the amount of memory a grand can buy is the only flying curve on a graph of the last seventy years – what government can now be surprised? Specovius lets his head roll: They thought it meant jetpacks and monorails. Now the old guard whimpers in bed at night, it can see the game's moved beyond tech, the brain's rewiring, the battle's gone to nature, to neurochemistry, influence. Name any human battleground, all are now battles for territories in the brain, and the armoury's the screen in your hand. Think of this: if you subtracted the empty space between atoms in all our brains, the mass of global intelligence would barely fill a shot glass. He serves his eyes like canapés – We hold that shot glass. That's what gives them the jitters. We own a shot glass containing the species, Baz.Serving as a voice of reason at the Octagon, Dr. Roos (hired merely to lend gravitas to their project but the good professor quaintly believes she can influence outcomes with her knowledge and wisdom):
By six o'clock my local time a hundred million people had focused their wills on a pair of runaway children in preference to matters in their own lives. As a proxy for those matters, breeding value in their brains without the risks of real life. And those children are unknown to them. They would stay unknown if they lived for a thousand years. The chemistry being deployed is there to encourage us to wave at the postman, meet a stranger's eyes – this is how it's relevant. Whereas their angst-by-proxy via advertising platforms designed to exploit vulnerabilities in the brain is making users happy to intrude until they crush to dust the status quo of anyone involved in the story.And through it all, good and sturdy Lonnie – forever more in tune with meatware than software – demonstrates that dopamine is best delivered through in-person contact, as when he gets a hug from his daughter after a fight:
She shuddered and sniffed at his sturdy neck, lips squashed aside, guyed by cords of spit. After a minute she burrowed a hand down his back and rubbed as if to comfort him. He closed his eyes as his brain sucked the drugs that resolve busted souls and forge wisdoms, that bring on a binge after bloodshed.The tone is certainly satirical – events ramp up from absurd to surreal – and Pierre constantly throws in colourful imagery:
• Lon's headlights swung over the flat like a puke of bleach.I liked this a lot – I would have found it funnier if it wasn't so scary, but I guess it's laugh or cry at this point – and while I'd rate this a 4.5, it's just barely missing the something that would make me round up. (Pierre might have been setting this up for a sequel or a series, and while that might explain some dangling bits, nonetheless, they dangle to my disappointment.)
• The girl crossed her arms and huffed like a freckled boy's stepmother.
• A rattle comes to the door and I pump Shel's hand to raise her head as a bare-chested man with a tan opens up, a forty-something man with a gym membership that he only uses for biceps.
