NEUROMINED

Citizens battle an oppressive technological state in Grant and Ashley’s alarming SF stories.

The authors (Grant is the founder of technology company Crown Sterling Limited; Ashley is a columnist for Forbes magazine) imagine a near-future America seamlessly woven from virtual reality, social media, online payments, self-driving cars, surveillance cameras, and social credit ratings, all merged into a convenient but suffocating corporate/governmental entity. Their uneasy protagonists include a woman whose digital accounts are hacked and obliterated by a spurned ex-boyfriend; an eighth grader who sees his town’s racist past expunged in his school’s VR history lessons; a private eye who gets targets canceled by obtaining video of them committing fat-phobic microaggressions and other thought crimes; and Civil Rights-era icon Rosa Parks, who sees her cash vanish into thin air during the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott (a fantastical metaphor for the de-banking of today’s social media dissidents). Other stories spotlight characters who fight back with their own digital technology, like a singer-songwriter who ditches her exploitative record label and goes indie using nonfungible tokens; a content creator who gets de-platformed for criticizing a creeping world government and its digital central-bank currency; and a man fed up with Friday lockdowns (imposed to reduce greenhouse emissions) who recites the Declaration of Independence to his TikTok followers and runs for city council. The authors append nonfiction commentaries to their stories, tracing their inspirations in sinister real-life developments, from the Department of Homeland Security’s proposal for a Disinformation Governance Board to World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab’s touting of brain implants. Grant and Ashley probe resonant, timely themes here, exploring both the seductions of immersive technology and its despotic potential. Their populist sentiments are blunt, but their techno-dystopian sketches are intriguing and scarily believable. The prose is vivid and punchy: “I peer out the window at the six lanes of traffic. Ninety percent of the vehicles don’t even have windshields. They’ve converted theirs to vidscreens so the occupants can watch Netflix while cruising. Although I suspect some are watching porn.” The result is an engrossing exploration of high-tech society and its discontents.

An entertaining, thought-provoking vision of the peril and promise of ubiquitous digital gadgetry.