Malka Older: Infomocracy

For a political junkie like me, there’s nothing quite as exciting as an election, particularly if you are in some way or other on the inside, with access to real information about some aspect of the process. That’s part of what made Malka Older’s Infomocracy so interesting to me, because it’s all about politics and elections.

Infomocracy takes place in a world of global governments, divided into thousands of centenals - constituencies of 100,000 people - each one literally governed by the political party - though in this future, what we call parties are referred to as governments - that holds the majority. There’s a world council, with representation from each centenal, and the political prize is the supermajority, becoming the government that holds majority status in the largest proportion of the world’s centenals. These governments are a mad mix, some run by global business conglomerates, some by countries, some by the descendants of NGOs, some by affinity and interest groups, all with their own policies, which they enforce in the centenals they hold. This passage, from the viewpoint of one of the main characters, gives a sense of the political system Older has imagined:

“JaBoDeTaBekBan, the urban conglomeration with Jakarta at its heart, has more than four hundred centenals within the administrative limits, and perhaps another three hundred in its sprawl. Ken is now in one of the densest, most diverse places on the planet. In half an hour, he can walk through upscale enclaves where the intellectual rich have voted for tranquility and gardens, keeping out anyone who doesn’t belong with guard-enforced no-trespassing laws; squalid centenals where the whole hundred thousand seem to be packed on top of each other, sustained by subsidized drugs and cigarettes and probably subsidizing some far away coconstituents through cheap labor; neocommunist areas with massive canteens and service economies; governments where pork is illegal; where beef is illegal; where any meat at all is illegal, along with advertisements, soda, and material possessions. Of the two thousand, two hundred and seven registered governments, nearly one hundred and fifty hold at least one centenal in the northwest tip of Java.”

Another aspect of this future world is Information - a global body that everyone has access to, that provides massive streams of information, customised in whatever way the user determines. Personal information, news, political data, online shopping catalogues, it’s all there in Information. As one of the characters thinks on entering an Information “hub” or central facility:

“The glass-fronted elevator gives her a view of floor after floor of endless cubicles as it rises, like cross-sections of a hive: the mindful drones of Information collecting, processing, and compiling records of every bit of human action or interpretation they can get their feeds on. She has sometimes wondered if this is why people hate Information; whether the idea of all those people working for an enormous bureaucracy, supposedly sapped of their individual identities, spurs some primal fear in people. Or guilt that unimaginable masses of workers have to sort through vids and grind out commentary nonstop to provide the extraordinarily individualized Information that almost everyone on Earth now feels entitled to. She usually concludes that it has nothing to do with the structure of the organization. The power it wields is enough to make people hate it.

Why the corporates hate Information is clearer and just as evident in the structure of this building. Like much of the other hardware involved in the effort to keep people well-informed, the Singapore hub was funded by the massive settlement accorded after People vs. Coca-Cola et al., the civil action when Americans realized that diet soda was depriving them of their right to be thin. Further support was provided by the subsequent lawsuit, building on that precedent, which led directly to the cable news collapse.”

The novel follows the activities of three insiders - Ken, a worker for one of the governments, Mishima, an agent of Information, and Domaine, an ambiguous player whose affiliation is unclear, but whose stated purpose is to reform, or perhaps bring down, the current system - as an election draws closer. But this is about more than just politics and policies and party work. The global system is supposed to be key to global peace, but there are subtle indications that one of the main governments is gearing up for war. There’s a plot to steal the election. And someone is waging a campaign against Information.

The details of the political structure of this future, which Older has her characters call “micro-democracy” (and which to my mind have some broad similarities with a syndicalist model, although without the socialist policies) are fascinating, as an attempt to imagine a functional world government. I loved the detail and the discussion between characters about politics and governance, though it is possible that someone less of a political junkie might find these a bit dry. Still, there is a sense of on-rushing urgency, a feel of the techno-thriller, to the narrative which will, I suspect, pull all but the most politics-averse readers along with the movements and actions of these characters. Very much looking forward to the next book in the series.