Jpeg world with a lapsed techie in a quest for humanness
SCRIBE-for-hire Andrew Miller’s first stab at fiction, Dub Steps, is a real triumph, an award-winning yarn that pulls the plug on technology and cyber superficiality through an exploration of what’s really real.
Roy Fotheringham, his story’s stumbling star, is a reforming drunk and ad agency genius, a creative sparky who conjured up virtual reality (VR) concepts that lead people into the land of makebelieve-living where brand awareness has insidiously embedded itself in human consciousness. Hyperreality is presented as better than the real deal.
Those who can afford it get to have VR romps with the best parts of sex idols all jpeg-stitched together, those not satisfied with who they are — the suggestion here being: who really is? — are able to slip into another identity through an aggregate avatar.
Even rebellion comes courtesy of a bright, fanciful concept that randomly broadcasts imagery, beamed from cellphones, into the world.
Forget about subway graffiti. With transmission paint messages can be seen from afar on cooling tower walls, transforming the countryside of southern Mpumalanga, pockmarked by coal power stations, into something eminently funkier.
And yet, all the wonder of this bold and ambitious world suddenly slips through the ether like an old TV screen blipping off, as if someone flipped the mains switch. Not only does technology collapse for no reason at all, but people disappear as well.
This is the world in which Roy wakes up one morning. There is no one. There are no messages, and there is not even a signal so that he can post or tweet about
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Forget about our current postcolonial funk. Rather imagine a kind of collapsed connectivity bedlam, where a handful of survivors are forced to rely on their wits in order to survive.
More importantly, they have no other option but to connect with one another, really connect, without smart devices (perish the thought).
Amid all the newfound revelation of what it means to be human, obscured by the ascendance of artificial intelligence, it never really becomes quite clear what exactly happened.
Did Roy wake up in a world of mass alien abduction? Or was a porthole into an alternate universe accidentally opened, sucking in survivors?
A gripping point in Dub Steps comes when a mysterious book filled with mathematical schema seems to support the idea that it is all because of “parallel processing” going horribly wrong. (Parallel processing is the processing of programme instructions by dividing them among multiple computer processors with the objective of running a programme in less time.)
More or less at that stage some kind of blue-collar Godot appears on a park bench, offering sage-like, riddlesome insights on what it means to be human.
None of it, unfortunately, becomes clear. Consequently Dub Steps leaves one with the disquieting thought that, in spite of everything we have figured out, like searching for God particles through subatomic collision experiments; the nature and mystery of the human condition still eludes us.
That, by way of hazarded guess-work, is what Dub Steps seems to posit: that in an age of virtual reality we have lost sight of our vital reality and may very well have to rediscover it, albeit in a slow, shufflelike dance around a bright, rekindled fire.