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Review: You'll soon understand how "absolute data corrupts absolutely."
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 endlessly compared 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."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."
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."
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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