Naomi Alderman
Sun, 5 November 2023
Smile and smile and be a villain: Mark Rylance as reclusive billionaire Sir Peter Isherwell in Don’t Look Up
Lukas Matsson urinates on a mobile phone in Succession. Miles Bron takes charge of the Mona Lisa during the pandemic, with disastrous results, in Glass Onion. Robert Lemoine orchestrates the death of innocents in Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood. Sir Peter Isherwell plans for life on another planet in Don’t Look Up. There have never been so many technology billionaires doing so many stupid, unspeakable and downright evil things. In fiction, of course. One wouldn’t want to expose oneself to a libel action by the richest people on the planet by suggesting that they do stupid, unspeakable and downright evil things in reality.
My own new novel, The Future – fiction, let’s be clear – opens with three tech billionaires receiving a message from their predictive software that the apocalypse is on the way: they board a plane, certain that they will make it in time to their private survival bunkers. Things don’t go the way they expect, to put it mildly. Some of their underlings, we discover, have been horrified by their plans to escape impending disaster, to keep themselves safe while the world burns.
Why have I written about tech billionaires? Why are they so juicily tempting to so many writers and directors? Well. Why are there so many kings in the plays of Shakespeare?
Of the 10 wealthiest people in the world, eight are tech billionaires. They have amassed extraordinary fortunes by presiding over products that have become ubiquitous and essential; try accessing most public services these days without a means of getting online. These people have grown – with the invention and extraordinarily fast adoption of the internet and smartphones around the world – to be much more powerful than surely even they imagined 30 or 40 years ago. Certainly much more powerful than the rest of us ever imagined.
Their power isn’t purely wealth, although of course the scale of their wealth is mind-boggling – money enough to build space rockets and change the infrastructure of whole cities, the kind of thing that previously only governments could do. They have also built our channels of communication, though they often duck the responsibility of owning them. When misinformation about the unfolding horror in Israel and Palestine spreads across social media, millions of people see it and a lot of them believe it. Meanwhile, the question of who has been banned from which platform has become international news – as if they’d had their own passport confiscated.
Edward Norton as Miles Bron in The Glass Onion
These unelected rulers – not the users – control who stays and who goes, who gets to speak and who must remain silent. These aren’t democracies, they are kingdoms.
And whoever the king is, writers need to write about them.
So many of the themes of Shakespeare play out in how we see tech billionaires today. The country Shakespeare was born into had lived through the tumult of Henry VIII, the break with Catholicism and the Pope, struggles for succession, burnings and imprisonments. Then came a period of relative stability under Elizabeth I. A thread that runs through so many of Shakespeare’s plays is the terror of a bad ruler: Lear and his foolishness spark a destructive war; Claudius and corruption drag down the court of Denmark in Hamlet.
The character of the king determines the destiny of the kingdom. There is a powerlessness in an absolute monarchy which is hard to imagine if you don’t live in one: or at least it used to be hard to imagine. Everything depends so absolutely on someone who can’t be removed from office. You’re not trying to judge their character to decide whether to vote for them – you’re trying to understand their personality flaws in order to protect yourself. Elon Musk doesn’t have control of territorial borders or a private army. But in his own online kingdom he can do what he likes and the rest of us have to put up with it: even something as cringe-inducing and irritating as the time he replaced the Twitter bird logo with the face of a quizzical dog, a popular meme.
Billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk - Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
Running an online platform is not the same as running a country. But we’re at a place now where an individual’s obsessions and flaws play out on a huge stage in dramatic, extraordinary and frightening ways. For writers, that’s enticing.
In Shakespeare’s plays, the whims of the king can shape the wishes of ordinary people. Think of Oberon and Titania at war, which results in a state of confusion and, for poor Bottom, a donkey’s head. Now think of the struggle to retain our own focus and attention in the face of technologies that are designed to keep us clicking and scrolling. Think of the petty battles you can see every day online – sometimes it would make more sense to think that someone had put a potion in people’s eyes to make them swear and scream at each other.
Studying the technology industry, I’ve become much more aware that these behaviours are encouraged, that the platforms that we communicate through are trying in a hundred different ways to make us angrier and more afraid. Because those are the emotions that keep us glued to the screen. At a certain point – as one does when one reflects on A Midsummer Night’s Dream – one has to question whether the right people have taken charge of our destiny.
In the plays of Shakespeare, the legitimacy of the sovereign is never fully settled. Bad kings, weak kings, brutal kings who overplay their hand, self-centred kings who are unpopular with their people: their positions are always uncertain. When Cassius and Brutus plot to get rid of Caesar, the audience understands that while they might not be right in what they do, they certainly have a point. Richard II listens to the sycophantic courtiers who tell him only what he wants to hear rather than paying attention to the complex needs of his kingdom – and he ends up dethroned.
This costly blood: Paterson Joseph as Brutus in Julius Caesar in 2012
- Tristram Kenton/ Bridgeman Images
Some tech billionaires might welcome such historical and literary comparisons. After all, Mark Zuckerberg has a declared fascination with the Emperor Augustus, who “through a really harsh approach … established 200 years of world peace”. According to a recent biography, Musk likes to take leadership inspiration from Napoleon. “If they see their general on the battlefield, they will be more motivated,” he reportedly said of his employees.
As with the divine right of kings, we have to question the legitimacy of their power. Yes, they have invented interesting new technologies. But as one of the characters in my new novel observes: what they have done also has a lot in common with the enclosures of common land during the late 18th century, which helped make the rich even richer. Social media and various online services have invented a new kind of fenced land: a privatised space for “public” debate.
The rise of artificial intelligence has further increased the threat to data ownership. Vast quantities of data are routinely put to work training AI tools, which belong to a new generation of powerful companies – including, as I recently discovered, my own novels, even though I never gave permission for them to be used in that way.
Some tech billionaires might welcome such historical and literary comparisons. After all, Mark Zuckerberg has a declared fascination with the Emperor Augustus, who “through a really harsh approach … established 200 years of world peace”. According to a recent biography, Musk likes to take leadership inspiration from Napoleon. “If they see their general on the battlefield, they will be more motivated,” he reportedly said of his employees.
As with the divine right of kings, we have to question the legitimacy of their power. Yes, they have invented interesting new technologies. But as one of the characters in my new novel observes: what they have done also has a lot in common with the enclosures of common land during the late 18th century, which helped make the rich even richer. Social media and various online services have invented a new kind of fenced land: a privatised space for “public” debate.
The rise of artificial intelligence has further increased the threat to data ownership. Vast quantities of data are routinely put to work training AI tools, which belong to a new generation of powerful companies – including, as I recently discovered, my own novels, even though I never gave permission for them to be used in that way.
Alexander Skarsgård as Lukas Matsson in Succession
There is a thing about power. It tends to corrupt. Shakespeare wrote so much about monarchs, but we can also think of him, at least in part, as writing for them: his plays are a kind of warning. Everyone has flaws; the more powerful you are, the vaster the stage on which they can play out.
A few decades after Shakespeare’s death, England was engulfed by civil war, which proved a turning point in the balance of power between monarch and parliament. Perhaps we’re approaching that point again, where a small number of people have accumulated far too much power, and we have to wrest the sceptre and orb from their hands.
The proliferating fictional portrayals of tech billionaires – and their intoxicated relationship to power – are surely one (tiny) sign of this: a recognition of an anxiety among us that we (and our data) have been co-opted into just another billionaire’s bid to go to space. Maybe this time we can sort it out in less than several hundred years. Maybe we can do it without the wars and tragedy and bloody revolution of Shakespeare’s plays. Well, maybe.
‘The Future’ by Naomi Alderman (4th Estate) is out on Tuesday. Alderman discusses ‘The Future’ at the Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall on Nov 22.
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