THE GREAT FRENCH
thinker Michel Foucault argued that ultimate power is making people act as if they are being watched at all times.
He hadn’t banked on Youtube. Or Mindcast.
Broadcast is British author Liam Brown’s third novel, following Real Monsters (2015) and Wild Life (2016). The story follows David Callow, a seemingly shallow, narcissistic video logger, or vlogger, who posts his life to social media. His videos are peppered with product placements and orchestrated setpiece interactions with his vlogger mates; banal and revealing at once. With a million Youtube subscribers he’s a star, but is perhaps at his zenith, destined only to fall.
Enter genius Silicon Valley tech disruptor Xan Brinkley, offering to make David part of the greatest show on Earth: Mindcast, a brain-machine interface that streams the thoughts, feelings and dreams of the user to the web. Hungry for attention, David signs up.
The initial thrill of a grander stage gives way to misgivings as David encounters the day-to-day problems of Mindcast. Everyone knows everything about him, and soon his legion of fans, and the outside world, become things to fear. Even as every shred of privacy is torn from him, his viewers multiply: hundreds of millions, billions even, know his every action, desire and daydream as his viral superstardom spirals.
Increasingly alone, David begins to wonder if Mindcast is all it seems. Is it a media platform or the beta test of a technology with a terrifying potential for control that would have made even Foucault twitch in shock?
Broadcast is a tight dystopian work of science fiction that is consumed before you realise, dragging the reader willingly along David’s all too believable path from celebrity to calamitous climax. While not the most likeable character, David is familiar, fitting easily among the selfabsorbed content producers of real-world Youtube; and the story’s easy escalation, from one seemingly reasonable step to the next, is finely spun. While clearly echoing a trail of Orwellian sentiment in modern SF, Broadcast beds it down in the details of the contemporary world in a particularly compelling and unsettling way, an electric tale that is as thoughtful as it is entertaining.