Finding Freedom
| Danny Suarez’s second novel is a blood and guts laced techno-thriller that will probably not make much sense without knowledge of his earlier book, Daemon, in which he outlines his vision of a “botnet” powered by a potentially benevolent AI. If this doesn’t already make sense to you, you might want to stop here.
In Freedom, this AI has designed an online game in which accrued in-game status points somehow allow real word powers; this game is extended towards creating real world self-sufficient sustainable communities, which thus end up in a defensive war against the evil overlords of capital. |
As with many of the described possibilities in the book, though many are permutations of existing or soon to exist technologies, Suarez’s descriptions range from fanciful and interesting to completely ludicrous — largely because of his purposeful blending of virtual and real worlds.
This blending, however, and his description of the world as blending has merit. “The core of our civilization” is capital, commerce, states one of the antagonists, “That no longer means gold bars in a vault; it means ones and zeros in a database.”
As real and virtual have mixed, so have spirit and real worlds. What is the the solution? Not a transcendent God, rather a new god created “out of the popular will of millions of people” — itself a machine. We need to be ruled, the author indicates, but we can create our own god, or will it into existence, thus mobilizing the masses and putting an end to the “corporate domination of culture and media.”
Thus, we are saved from potential dystopia by embracing tech-laden fantasy, one which goes far beyond the possibility of the real in search of a god that can save us from the disaster which, as the traditional accounts would have it, we have wrought with our own hands. Freedom is a very valuable thing, but it has not been stolen and trademarked without our consent — we have sold it for a few baubles and no new tech trinkets will bring it back.
Moreover, the baubles exchanged for are much what the author offers us, more or less constant titillation in the form of graphic descriptions of what happens when the various spinning blades attached to various combat robots meet human flesh, an event which happens quite frequently, or technological wet dreams, including, at its root, the fantasy that a new “spiritual” machine can somehow liberate us from the corporate one.
Technology, in the end, is nothing but levers and cranks, hanging chads, ones and zeros — nothing to build a society off of. The more we use it to also fulfill spiritual needs, the more likely we will be bound by fantasy.
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