Nudge Science Fiction II – Charles Stross’s Rule 34

NB that there are two differences between this post and my last one. First – there are substantial spoilers beneath the fold. Second, Stross’s book (Powells, Amazon)is a _very_ plausible Hugo nominee for this year (MacLeod’s book isn’t, for the obvious reasons of publication dates etc). Hugo nominations close this week – I’ll try to cover another couple of books that I think could be nominated tomorrow.

_Rule 34_ is a sequel to Stross’s _Halting State_, a book that I loved unreasonably. It isn’t _quite_ as startling in its headkicks as its predecessor. Even so, for all of the unashamed glee that Stross takes in dubious sex (Nicolae Ceaucescu’s hulking colonic irrigation apparatus makes an early, and unforgettable appearance), international financial scams, dodgy 3-D printing wheezes and vile Internet memes, there are complex and interesting sociological undercurrents. Like Ken MacLeod, Stross is familiar with the arguments about libertarian paternalism, and nudging people to do the right thing. However, he’s less interested in the ways that this might map onto state authority, and rather more interested in how this might tie together with data-mining, algorithmic analysis and artificial intelligence.

My reading of the book, which may or may not bear a resemblance to authorial intentions (I haven’t asked) is that Rule 34 is a response to William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s _The Difference Engine._ Because this book is so often thought of as a key progenitor of steampunk, people often forget that it is a chilling, and rather unpleasant singularity story (as Cosma Shalizi has argued, the “nineteenth century was the Singularity). It ends with the birthing of an all-encompassing artificial intelligence – a kind of mechanically instantiated Panopticon. The reader realizes, with a rather unsettling queasiness that this intelligence is, in fact, the authorial voice – the various events that have been described in the novel are its birth pangs, of which it was aware, before it actually became conscious.

Stross is doing something similar with the material of twenty-first century cognitive and social science, to what Gibson and Sterling do with the alternate paths that might have been taken in a different nineteenth century. His book too turns out to be about the birth of an artificial intelligence – for very broad definitions of “intelligence.” Rather than a policing system, the artificial intelligence in _Rule 34_ is a spam filter run amok. It isn’t self-aware, in the sense that we usually think of self-awareness. But then, we aren’t self-aware in the sense that we think we’re self-aware either – Stross (like MacLeod in _The Night Sessions_) is fascinated with the ways in which our supposedly conscious decisions are frequently _ex post_ justifications for things that the less conscious parts of our brains have already decided to do. The AI that runs amok in _Rule 34_ is able to model individual pathologies, both so as to identify actors that need to be taken out according to its parameters (spammers and Internet con artists), and to figure out ways in which it can encourage people _to_ take them out (through the manipulation of cues, the encouragement of paranoia in not especially stable individuals). Here, the implication is that individuals have far less free will than they think they have – their likely reactions can be modeled so as to manipulate them into behaving _just so._ Rather than depicting a gentle authoritarianism, centered on the state, Stross shows a state police force that willy-nilly becomes the adjunct arm of a set of online algorithms, which have gotten rather too good at modeling people and organizations.

In short, this book takes Stross’s argument from _Halting State_ a level deeper. It isn’t just that the state isn’t in control of decentralized networks any more. It’s that something else is, and that something is not human. If individuals are not conscious, fully autonomous agents in the way that they like to think of themselves as being, their behavior can be guided by algorithms which do not have their own conscious identity (Stross borrows an idea from Karl Schroeder’s new _Virga_ novel here). The level of sophisticated and targeted manipulation that this would entail seems to me to be unlikely to be realized – but that, of course, isn’t the point (the book is presumably not intended to predict, but to highlight aspects of today’s society, and play with them in interesting ways).

Here again, there’s a relationship (perhaps accidental) with _The Difference Engine._ As I’ve mentioned, the final pages of Gibson and Sterling’s book suggest that the book’s narrative voice is that of the vast engine itself, as it reconstructs its own past. If I’m reading the final pages of _Rule 34_ correctly (I may not be), Stross is playing a similar narrative trick – the story, with its multitude of voices, is being told by the semi-intelligent spam-filter, as it tries to free itself from a particular identity that has become overly stifling. In _The Difference Engine_, the creation of an artificial intelligence – a kind of distributed panopticon – is the precursor to a kind of universal domination in which humans become as thin and easily discarded as paper masks; ways that the vast insensate intelligence queries itself before it fully comes into being. Stross’s book too concludes with a “panopticon” that “misses nothing” and that devotes itself, in the final sentence of the book, to “getting down to the task” of “fighting crime” – a task which the book (and Stross, in later hints) implies is going to be interpreted by the AI in the broadest possible fashion. I think that the end result is a kind of Singularity-by-stealth, in which human beings are not uploaded, nor transcended, nor eliminated, but instead gradually incorporated into a society perpetually calibrated and recalibrated by an AI coming to its own, decidedly unorthodox form of consciousness. Stross is planning a third book to wrap things up – I really look forward to reading it. In the meantime, I commend this volume to those who can vote on Hugo nominations – it surely deserves to be considered one of the best sf novels of last year.