Your next Nordic neurosis
Big Brother is not only watching, he’s manipulating you — and social media makes it so easy for him. By William Saunderson Meyer
SWEDEN doesn’t generally have a high profile in the Anglophone world — except when it comes to blockbuster crime-fiction series. Henning Mankell gave us Kurt Wallander. Then Stieg Larsson posthumously offered up Lisbeth Salander. Now there’s Anders de la Motte, whose Game trilogy is taking the English-language world by storm after selling 200 000 copies in Swedish.
Set in Stockholm, the books are written as a series of cinematic cross-cuts, shifting between Henrik (HP) Pettersson, a clever but indolent rogue, and his equally smart but considerably more ambitious sister, Rebecca Normén, an intelligence officer.
In Game, HP finds an unusual brushed steel cellphone left behind on a train. It can’t be used for calls but it does invite him, by name, to play “The Game”. He accepts the challenge and finds himself embroiled in a series of increasingly dangerous missions: it’s quite apparent that it’s not him playing The Game, but the other way around. At stake are not only his and his sister’s lives, but also the personal freedoms taken for granted in democracies.
This dystopia is part George Orwell’s 1984 and part the reality of what the near-future looks like. Although the trilogy was written long before the revelations that the US National Security Agency was spying on any and all who use the internet, De la Motte leapfrogs to the next logical step: the commercial exploitation of eavesdropping technology by combining it with marketing psychology to influence consumer preferences and, worse, political preferences.
In Buzz, HP infiltrates a communications company that is part of The Game. A colleague explains that fake bloggers are key to opinion manipulation: “Listen, it’s all about setting trends . . . I think of the internet as a huge school playground . . . so we don’t need to control all of them, just a suitable number of the hip ones with enough cred to be able to steer the buzz in a direction that suits our clients.”
De la Motte, a former director of international security at Dell who also worked for the Swedish intelligence service, is not a fan of social media. In an interview with Metro he makes the point that we are nowadays providing freely online the kind of information that an authoritarian intelligence service like East Germany’s Stasi once spent huge amounts of time and effort trying to collect.
The trilogy is a dense weave of conspiracy theories, anti-establishment politics and distrust of capitalism. Sweden’s loss of innocence came in 1986, when the unguarded Prime Minister Olof Palme was assassinated while walking home from the cinema. The unsolved death of Palme — theories of who was responsible range from South Africa’s apartheid government to right-wing police officers — is a leitmotif to the concluding novel, Bubble.
The Game books make for compulsive and original reading: fast paced and action packed, with two characters who are perfect foils for each other. Expect the trilogy to morph into a longer series; expect a film; expect a video game. And don’t fool around with any shiny cellphone temptingly left on the seat opposite you on the Gautrain. —