No Signal
Jem Tugwell
Serpentine Books
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A BUREAUCRAT navigating the pandemic would chew their right arm off for an iMe. No one leaves home without one in the world Jem Tugwell has built in No Signal, because each citizen has the device implanted in their brain.
Think of it like a smartwatch, tracking your location, exercise and calorie count while keeping you connected to social media. But thanks to a mix of nagging and coercion, this souped-up version actually stops you eating more than your recommended allowance or falling behind on your step count. Oh, and anything you do consume is filed automatically with the tax office.
No Signal is the second in a series, but works as a stand-alone tale. It is set in a post-Brexit Britain in which a high-profile event has driven the public into the arms of technological surveillance. Pretty soon, the implant is integrated into every fibre of governance and commerce, and having an iMe becomes the law.
It has its upsides: no one can get lost, gain too much weight or develop an addiction. Yet breaking the rules gets you sent to a re-education camp. You emerge as a creature of moderation.
The book is set just as the first generation of iMe implantees have come of age: lithe, unburdened by bad choices, the picture of health. Not our protagonist, though – Clive Lussac is older and still remembers life before bad habits were cancelled. He is a detective, but what is left to detect? If, say, a woman is abused by her husband, their iMes’ tracking information paints the only picture the police need. No one eats an extra bar of chocolate and no one gets away with murder.
It is a perfect Eden – except that the new generation’s ability to evaluate risk has been blunted to nothing by a world without it.
If this sounds a bit like a social media rant by someone who is angry that society’s needs are infringing on their individual freedoms, that is because the book is fairly explicit about hammering home these themes. Though the message rings true at first – yes, of course we shouldn’t outsource our decisions to machines, even if that makes our lives more convenient – as the book grinds on, you find yourself with questions.
Lussac’s suspicion of those without cravings for excess is as sculpted by culture as the iMe generation he holds in such contempt, shaped by a machismo that crams steak and beer down its throat to prove its commitment to individual liberty. Is that a choice? Or were those ideas formed by a system just as overbearing as the iMe nanny state he rebels against?
The book may not go down well with those who don’t share Lussac’s (and, one suspects, Tugwell’s) sympathies. Yet the questions are worth examining from all sides as we decide how to respond to the coronavirus. How do you live inside a system’s rules and still be happy?
Even now, tech is being made that seems like a precursor to the iMe: track-and-trace apps collecting data that may linger on government servers, for instance, and an experimental sensor that flashes when you get closer than 2 metres to another person.
Yet for all the concern about overreach – the sensor is being developed by a company perhaps appropriately called StrongArm – few agree with the protesters who insist that getting or passing on the virus is a matter of individual choice. When it comes to evaluating risk, the more people invited to weigh in, the better. Otherwise we might be sleepwalking towards an iMe.
