Moxyland - Lauren Beukes [99]
It's been fascinating to see real-world correlations develop since the novel made its debut in South Africa in 2008. Some of them are strange and wonderful, others are deeply worrying to me. And the best of it is stuff I couldn't have invented.
In the last year, for example, Portugal has launched wave power generators, cell phone wallets have been rolled out and there's now proof, after all, that subliminal advertising can work, if paired with some kind of reinforcing reward – which might well include feel-good neural feedback in the future.
South Africa's national energy provider, Eskom, has announced its intentions to open up its own proprietary university (not, as yet linked to an AIDS orphanage); a Seoul National University team created the first transgenic dogs that glow in the dark thanks to the addition of an anemone gene; and the Pentagon put out a brief for military contractors to develop a 'multirobot pursuit system', ie, packs of robots that could 'search for and detect a non-cooperative human'.
There was a real bio-engineered artwork that caused a controversy in 2008 when it was exhibited and then 'killed' at MoMa in New York. 'Victimless Leather' was a small living jacket made up of embryonic mouse stem cells, but it grew out of control, clogged up its incubation system and had to be 'put down', to the apparent distress of the curator – all of which, purely coincidentally I'm sure, generated a whole lot of headlines.
But the scariest synchronicity with Moxyland was something an electrical engineer friend told me – that a cop buddy had idly asked him over a beer if there was any way to SMS an electric shock to a fleeing suspect's cell phone, you know, because it's a pain in the ass to chase them wearing a heavy bulletproof vest. Luckily, my friend says that even for the purposes of bar talk, it's an impractical idea, especially without buy-in from the cell phone companies and government. Impractical. But not impossible.
The thing is that it's all possible, especially if we're willing to trade away our rights for convenience, for the illusion of security. Our very own bright and shiny dystopia is only ever one totalitarian government away.
Further reading
Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Hearings that exposed some, but not all of the atrocities committed under apartheid.
Jonny Steinberg's Thin Blue and Andrew Brown's Street Blues about the harrowing challenges of police work in South Africa.
The Bang Bang Club by Greg Marinovich and Jaoa Silva – the true story of the four news photographers who risked their lives during apartheid. (Kendra would have loved these guys.)
Fiction
A Dry White Season by André Brink Black Petals by Bryan Rostron
LB, Cape Town
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