The Accidental Anarchist

“Darlingtonia,” by Alba Roja, 2017

This is political fiction about the uncovering of a massive surveillance plot by the tech industry, the CIA and the U.S. government up to the President.  The central character is a rich millennial art girl, Dylan, from Greenwich, CT working for a tech firm in San Francisco, OingoBoingo.  She helps blow the whistle on a civilian psychological manipulation program run through social media like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram called “Darlingtonia,” named after a carnivorous California plant.  Dylan (right…) and her work friend Ricky are sort of young Julian Assanges in this tense and breathless tale. Of course you don't have to be an anarchist to blow the whistle.

The book is a fast read, which leads to a somewhat predictable and happy ending.  You are never quite sure what the big secret is until the reveal about part-way through the book.  Unfortunately the central character is somewhat unreal, going from a Taylor Swift listening, high-end coffee swilling, Netflix watching, food-ordering, iPhone addict who might be boring and autistic - to somehow subversive, even cheering the burning of her own gentrifying upscale apartment building.  But then she has $300K in the bank.  She is truly the accidental anarchist.

The book, written by an anarchist collective, describes present San Francisco, Oakland and Watsonville in obsessive detail – freeways, BART stations, streets, coffee shops, tech headquarters, restaurants and bars.  The exact time is brought up consistently like some ticking clock.  Current themes of lesbianism, police violence, gentrification, weed, warm Latino families, homelessness, sex workers, dickhead frat boys in tech work, sexual violence at work, goth or hip clothing and food, food, food come up frequently.  Dylan herself is a somewhat irritating obsessive about food, her eyeliner and blue lipstick, her moto-jacket, her long showers  - all repetitive - the dumb shit upscale people love.  In the process bodies are dropping – at least 4 - in a somewhat movie-like unreality.  In the end, Dylan and her girlfriend Alexis happily run away to Washington State with her $300K, thinking the government will fall and the revolution is at hand – or some fantasy like that.  It didn’t after the Snowden revelations and it wouldn’t now.

The essence of the Darlingtonia GSX program is to use the random audio and video feeds from every ‘smart’ phone, every selfie, every purchase, every post on Facebook or Instagram, every Facetime, Messenger, Zoom or Skype call, even bio-metric data, to build psychological profiles of every U.S. citizen in order to manipulate their feelings about capitalism.  What this ignores is that the U.S. education system, legal structure, military and police forces, bourgeois political parties and corporate and semi-corporate media already attempt to control attitudes towards capitalism, and until recently, have done quite a good job.  Not to mention that this amount of data would probably overwhelm even the best algorithm or that the NSA mines much of this already.   The addition here is the psychological angle.

Dylan’s role at work is creating advertising for OingoBoingo’s ‘dream game’ that mines individual’s dreams and fears - and has 400M users! It is used by GSX to paint psychological portraits of the games’ users, allowing them to be manipulated in various ways – even in person. A key flash drive and murder become the focus of the book, but Dylan and her lover oddly ignore them for awhile.  OingoBoingo tries to get the program approved in China, but that deal is wisely rejected by the Chinese CP after the libertarian CEO melts down in front of them.  Russia and China are described by the media and government as the enemy throughout this surveillance scandal instead of the real perpetrators, even after Wikileaks publishes the whole packet of documents exposing the manipulative alliance between tech firms and the government.

A very culturally current and ‘hip’ novel a bit reminiscent of Tom Wolfe, hitting themes that young millennials might not be bored by, a semi-dystopian fantasy that relies on a few heroic individuals ‘changing the world.’  Of course individualism is a central component of anarchism, libertarianism and even capital, so this is no surprise.

Other prior reviews on this topic below, use blog search box, upper left: “The Unseen”(Bellestrini); “Anarchism and Its Aspirations,” “Good News” (Abbey); “The Bomb”(Harris); “Something in the Air”(Assayas); “The Dispossesed” (Le Guin); “Peace, Love & Petrol Bombs” (Johnson).

And I bought it at May Day Books!

The Cultural Marxist

June 11, 2020