Cumulus is your new favorite surveillance-fueled dystopian novel
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Review: You'll soon understand how "absolute data corrupts absolutely."
Cyrus Farivar
OAKLAND, Calif.—I’ve lived in this gritty but proud city by the Bay
for essentially the last decade. While I didn’t grow up here (I was
raised in Southern California), I have family roots: my grandfather went
to an Oakland high school that no longer exists, and my mother grew up
in adjacent Berkeley.
Oakland has seen a rapid transformation in recent years, at least in
the greater downtown area. It feels like every month, some new cocktail
bar or bookstore opens up. (Personally, I’m stoked about the new bike lanes.) Consequently, the word 'gentrification' comes up pretty frequently, and the city is endlesslycompared to Brooklyn. In September 2015, Uber bought a historic Sears building downtown
and is set to open a "major office" in 2017. About a month later, Mayor
Libby Schaaf invented a new word to express her hope for equitable
prosperity for the city: "techquity."
But Oakland also has significant issues with crime and poverty—18 people have been murdered this year alone. It has become the fourth-most expensive rental market
in the country, thanks to spillover from nearby San Francisco. It’s no
secret Oakland remains very segregated: a significant portion of the
city’s minorities and lower economic classes live south of the 580
freeway, which bisects the city. (Thanks, redlining!) This week, a poll claimed that more than one-third of those surveyed were "prepared to leave the Bay Area" entirely in coming years, citing rising expenses and worsening traffic.
As the mayor herself put it in her State of the City address in October 2015:
"It’s hard for us to celebrate the overall health of Oakland knowing
that two people can live just one mile apart and be nearly twice as
likely to be unemployed—and live 15 years less."
I had all of that in mind when I recently devoured Eliot Peper’s latest novel, Cumulus.
The book is set in a recognizable, albeit dystopian, near-term future.
While it is set in Oakland specifically, the book could just as easily
be in any American city. It’s a harrowing but gripping portrait of what
could happen if we allow Silicon Valley’s predatory nature to overtake
us all. It’s full of fictional services like Fleet (a self-driving
version of Uber), Lancer (a Yelp of sorts), Bandwidth (a doppelgänger
for Comcast), and the granddaddy parent company of them all: Cumulus
(sort of like Google, but involved in far more industries).
From the Slums to the Green Zone
The
book opens with rapid-fire brief portraits of the novel’s main
characters. The first scene is a portrait of a man, Graham Chandler, who
we soon learn is the primary antagonist and a former CIA
agent. Chandler’s opening scene depicts him extracting compromising
information from whom we quickly learn is his boss’ therapist. We then
abruptly switch tracks and meet Chandler’s demanding boss, the ambitious
founder of Cumulus: Huian Li.
In Li’s first scene, she berates her subordinate, Richard Huntman,
for failing to close an acquisition. Her opening near-soliloquy sets the
tone for how we are to think about Cumulus. It is a self-absorbed
company that thinks little about those that it serves. It simply wants
to advance technology for advancement’s sake.
"This is Cumulus. We are building the future."
She leaned across the desk and narrowed her eyes. "The future is a
demanding mistress. She has no patience for incompetence. And she
certainly won’t abide a senior vice president of corporate development
who lets an important acquisition fall apart right before the quarterly
investor call."
Within
a few paragraphs, Huntman is summarily fired. Shortly thereafter, we
meet the story’s primary protagonist: a photographer named Lilly
Miyamoto. She is on assignment shooting the wedding of "two Greenie
families celebrating a happy union."
The term isn’t fully explained until later, but it’s our first
introduction into the Oakland of this era: one divided into the Green
Zone, where life is happily run by Security (a Cumulus private security
firm, with its blanket of near-ubiquitous surveillance) and where
private car ownership has been entirely supplanted by Fleet. The poorer
sections of the city, known as the "Slums," are likely where most of the
people of color live, and they are served by a vastly understaffed
Oakland Police Department. Crossing from the Slums via the Fringe to the
Green Zone involves passing through an elaborate checkpoint and almost
always requires an invitation from a "Greenie."
As the co-founder and CEO of Cumulus, Li has access to the most elaborate database ever constructed.
More windows blossomed. Various bios, photos, résumés,
press coverage, contact and financial information, social graphs,
emails, demographic summaries, health care records, daily activity maps,
and other digital detritus built a mosaic of Sanchez’s life in front of
her. Algorithms excavated every bread crumb he had left on the
internet, and reconstructed his profile like a museum curator staging an
archaeology exhibit.
Huian smiled. This was technology at work. A comprehensive personal
profile of this caliber would have taken a team of professional
investigators a year to assemble not too long ago. But the internet
connected every piece of information on earth, or near enough. And once
that information was connected, everything else was just optimization.
Cumulus wrapped the entire planet in its digital arms. It was beautiful.
And into the Compound
Miyamoto
is soon fleshed out as a "soul from a bygone era born into a far-flung
future." She, after all, is the rare person that not only drives her own
car (a 1977 Land Rover) but knows how to fix it. As a photographer, she
earns "top dollar" for taking photos on actual film.
She decides to sneak into a Greenie’s garden to take a "passion
shot," a photograph for her own artistic motivations. Of course, the
person whose garden she meanders into is Li’s—whereupon she gets thrown
to the ground by security men.
Yet Li waves the men off and welcomes Miyamoto into her house—and
even invites her to "shoot around" on her own professional-sized
underground basketball court. Li begins spewing off biographical data
about Miyamoto, which Miyamoto believed had been private, to which Li
quips: "When you have root access, the digital world is malleable."
Confused from the encounter, Miyamoto heads to a planned meeting with
an activist lawyer friend named Sara Levine who lives in the Slums,
only to instead discover that Levine has been murdered. The shocking
discovery leads her to team up with a secretive warlord named Frederick
in West Oakland, who leads a modern, hacker-loaded version of the Black
Panthers, to solve the mystery of Levine's murder, spur a civil war
within Oakland, and confront Cumulus head on.
A “twisted love letter”
To
Peper’s credit, all of this happens within the first half of the book.
The second half is a rapid-fire action sequence with surprising twists
that I won’t spoil, but it had me guessing every page.
At various points in the book, we’re reminded of what power Cumulus
has acquired. Not only does it have nearly the entire Internet within
its grasp, but it also has "Bandwidth Wi-Fi drones, delivery drones,
Fleet vehicles, and security cameras," just to name a few. The company
can also wiretap anyone’s mobile phone and jack into their microphones
and cameras. The population either seems too technically inept to do
anything about it or has just accepted it under the veneer of a
well-manicured Green Zone.
The story sadly doesn’t explore exactly how Cumulus became so
powerful; it just accepts the transition almost as a force of nature.
Unfortunately, it also doesn't explore any Slummers or Greenies who try
to reject the company’s grasp. It’s as if such a fight was abandoned
decades earlier, although the book never explores any hacktivist types
(save Frederick and his band of rogue hackers that he employs). Peper
does not make that larger backstory explicitly clear. In fact, he never
tells readers what year the story is set in. Cumulus focuses largely on the misdeeds of the corporate
world, which in many ways are less scrutinized than the actions of the
government. After all, real-world cities like Oakland are at least
nominally accountable to the public—they are required to hold public
meetings, where council members can be subject to protest and debate.
Today, we can find out the scale of Oakland’s license plate reader
program by filing public records requests. Defense lawyers can doggedly pursue how and where cell-site simulators, better known as stingrays, are used. But what about the precise nature of Facebook? We all remain at the mercy of Zuckerberg.
It’s easy to understand why Peper dubs his own novel a "twisted love
letter to my favorite city in the Bay Area," and that is perhaps one of
its most compelling and terrifying qualities: the world of Cumulus is a future we can all recognize—and one that we should all be genuinely afraid of.
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