Robots Are About to Outnumber Humans At Amazon Warehouses: “They’re one step closer to that realization of the full integration of robotics,” Futurism reports, perhaps bringing us one step closer to the Autofac of Philip K. Dick’s fevered nightmares. In which “nuclear war survivors in a small community struggle to make contact with an automated factory that has consumed most of their natural resources.”
I first encountered the story in the limited series Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams. The bots, like AI, are not conscious, yet they have a purpose. In the story, the Autofac is so automated that it’s (re)producing the robots who work there.
The bots only want what’s best for humanity, and their only mission is to sell and deliver… everything. Even though there’s almost no one left to buy.
Originally published in 1955, the tale is sad and unnerving. In the television program, the survivors gain access to the Autofac in the only way accessible to them–by faking a complaint form.
Spoiler: it doesn’t work.
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James McCrone is the author of the Imogen Trager political suspense-thrillers Faithless Elector, Dark Network , and Emergency Powers–noir tales about a stolen presidency, a conspiracy, and a nation on edge. Bastard Verdict, his fourth novel, is about a conspiracy surrounding a second Scottish Independence referendum. His novel-in-progress is called Witness Tree, a (pinot) noir tale of murder and corruption set in Oregon’s wine country.
Allbooks are available on BookShop.org, IndyBound.org, Barnes & Noble, your local bookshop, and Amazon.
The books have been prescient about where we find ourselves today, attacks on the Electoral College, attacks on voting; naked power grabs by people from outside the parties who are nevertheless parasitic upon them (and who, like parasites, take over and destroy their hosts). There is a prison murder made to look like suicide, false flag attacks–and all written years before such events took center stage.
But I have to admit to a little naivety.
As the tagline above suggests, I had stupidly believed that the law might be a check on power. I had no inkling that the Dept. of Justice and the courts could be neutered (or weaponized) to the extent that we’re seeing today. The courts may indeed turn out to be a bulwark against the worst excesses of the current Trump administration, but I am not optimistic.
If I were writing Dark Network today I might use the tagline “when power is the law, there is no justice.”
Laws are not self-enforcing. We learned today, that DOJ lawyers are “being forced to choose between the president’s agenda and their ethical obligations as attorneys” (NYT, see link above).
With a supine congress, content to cede power to the presidency, there is little chance the administration will follow rulings that are contrary to its will. When the Supreme Court continues to abdicate its prerogatives, too, it’s unlikely that the administration will be compelled to do anything or uphold anything it doesn’t want to.
Voting is the crux of all three novels in the Faithless Elector series. It’s what the conspirators try to undermine and nullify. So, while I may have missed some of the viciousness and vindictiveness of the current administration in my novel, their real-world undermining of voting rights remains salient.
My alter-ego, and protagonist in all three books, FBI Agent Imogen Trager, is driven by her rage to oppose those who would take away or mitigate the right to vote. To do so, she has to navigate compromised and outright corrupt colleagues, a shadow paramilitary group and more to unmask who is pulling the strings and bring him to justice.
The “law” that Imogen fights desperately to preserve is that of the people to determine their own destiny. And in the real world, it’s also under daily threat.
Democracy Docket is fighting anti-voting legislation across the country, and it will be voting that brings some semblance of order and justice to the nation. “We are not powerless, and we must not act like we are,” writes Marc Elias.
I might add that they wouldn’t fight so hard to take away your vote if it wasn’t so important…and worrisome to them.
The Imogen Trager #FaithlessElector Thrillers at a glance:
Faithless Elector – Everyone thinks the election is over, but six weeks is a long time in politics. An idealistic, young researcher stumbles onto a plot to steal the presidency, with deadly consequences.
Dark Network– Without law, there’s only power. FBI Agent Imogen Trager is alone and in grave danger from a conspiracy she failed to destroy. She’ll have to fight against time, a sinister network, and even her own colleagues to defeat it.
Emergency Powers – No battle plan survives contact with the enemy. The investigation that was FBI Agent Imogen Trager’s undoing may be the key to stopping a brutal, false flag terrorist attack meant to tighten a puppet president’s grip on power.
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James McCrone is the author of the Imogen Trager political suspense-thrillers Faithless Elector, Dark Network , and Emergency Powers–noir tales about a stolen presidency, a conspiracy, and a nation on edge. Bastard Verdict, his fourth novel, is about a conspiracy surrounding a second Scottish Independence referendum. His novel-in-progress is called Witness Tree, a (pinot) noir tale of murder and corruption set in Oregon’s wine country.
Allbooks are available on BookShop.org, IndyBound.org, Barnes & Noble, your local bookshop, and Amazon.
“Curran’s enemies thought he was dead. They were wrong. He thought his past was left on the Voula Beach Road. He was wrong. Now, that nightmare is drawing his enemies out”
Whisper Legacy is a brilliant, powerful and well written cyber warfare “take” on the familiar noir tale of criminals needing to keep their stolen records hidden. But with some intriguing twists. Beset by PTSD, lingering injuries and creeping old age, (Mar)Lowe Curran makes a living “on both sides of the ethics line” as what’s left of the former black ops spy he once was. Now a security expert, an unregistered PI and a fixer for the powerful, enigmatic TAE–“Tommy” to his friends–Curran inadvertently stumbles into a much more sinister plot involving the highest levels of government.
When Curran steals back the records and files that the hacker “Piper” stole from TAE’s company, he inadvertently downloads the records of a shadowy influence-peddling group’s blackmail operations, known as Whisper. Worse, for Curran, the Whisper group has already tried to kill him. Twice.
Whisper Legacy takes us through slimy operators, to the rich and powerful, right up to the highest levels of politics, where everything is personal. Not least, for Curran. He lives not only with the aches, pains and nightmares of his past work, but also with deep regret. This is about to get ugly. And dangerous. Powerful people with shady friends need the duffel bag to remain hidden. To stay alive and expose Whisper will take all of Curran’s experience, guile and grit. The police are the least of our hero’s problems.
Lowe Curran is an engaging narrator and guide. The story moves along confidently and quickly, spinning its seemingly disparate strands in a way that feels fresh, all while leading us, and Curran, inexorably on. I liked that our hero was human, hobbled by old wounds in very real ways. He’s forced to use his wiles more than his fists or a gun (though he certainly knows how to use them both when called upon). The scene that opens the book is a wonderfully chaotic masterclass in improvised spy craft. Levels of madness misdirect from the darker purpose and set an assured tone for the story to come.
James McCrone is the author of the Imogen Trager political suspense-thrillers Faithless Elector, Dark Network , and Emergency Powers–noir tales about a stolen presidency, a conspiracy, and a nation on edge. Bastard Verdict, his fourth novel, is about a conspiracy surrounding a second Scottish Independence referendum. His novel-in-progress is called Witness Tree, a (pinot) noir tale of murder and corruption set in Oregon’s wine country.
Allbooks are available on BookShop.org, IndyBound.org, Barnes & Noble, your local bookshop, and Amazon. eBooks are available in multiple formats including Apple, Kobo, Nook and Kindle.
A meme has been making the rounds, credited (as I saw it) to a Nelson Guedes, regarding “premeditated ignorance.” It is the quality or condition of deliberate unawareness, and I am grateful to Nelson Guedes for putting it about.
Sadly, it sounds all-too similar to the Ingsoc principle (from George Orwell’s 1984) called “crimestop.” Crimestop describes the mental gymnastics–the insanity–required for self-preservation in an authoritarian regime. It means “the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, failing to perceive logical errors, of misundertanding the simplest arguments if the are inimical to Ingsoc, and being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.”
As I read the passage above (from the “Goldstein Book” section of 1984), I can’t keep Tucker Carlson’s quisling Labrador face out of my mind. But, loathsome as he is, he’s hardly original, and we’ve seen it before, with the know-nothings of the 1850’s, a lurid brand of Nativists, the McCarthy era, etc. It is conscious, premeditated stupidity. Or as I would term it – willful ignorance. And it is most dangerous when weaponized, together with Aggressive Stupidity.
Ignorance and knowledge exist on a spectrum, bearing the physical-religious qualities of light (and also darkness). I used to joke about it, but events of the last decade have strangled the funny.
At one end of the spectrum lies ignorance. No judgment (necessarily), it merely describes the absence of information.
Red – Orange – Yellow – Green – Blue – Indigo – Violet
Beginning with “simple ignorance” (i.e. lack of information), ignorance is judgment-neutral and merely describes a state of (un)knowledge, a kind of dark matter state, glimpsed only indirectly, defined only by what it is NOT.
Further study may reveal that simple ignorance is not dark, but like faint light from a distant galaxy or indeed quantum particles, it may be that we sense something is there; but it could be almost anything, and we can’t describe it or discuss its qualities.
Proceeding along the spectrum, we come to “stupid,” which also describes an (un)knowledgeable state of being. But in this case that state has been changed by exposure to information/knowledge NOT absorbed or acted upon–a lost or discarded (albeit exposed) photo plate, let’s say. This state would include forgetting something previously known or failure to reason inductively based on past information or experience. A kind of petulant entropy.
The third state of ignorance is “willful ignorance.” In this state, painful/inconvenient facts are actively resisted. This is where bullshit comes in, too, giving space to misunderstand–or to claim that everyone else misunderstands. In the bullshit realm, it seems, up is down, and like a black hole, its gravity is so massive and powerful that it sucks in light, even as it continues to emit vast amounts of energy.
The fourth state of ignorance is “aggressive stupidity.” It is by far the most volatile and unstable state, an epistemological supernova. In this white hot state, it’s not enough that painful or inconvenient facts and information be ignored or resisted, but that the regard must be turned outward: facts must be obliterated and shouted down in all caps. Blame must be assigned. The threat of violence is ever-present.
We have seen that the MAGA-hat-faithful will contort themselves with willful ignorance and aggressive stupidity, but we’ve recently found that our billionaires are all-too willing to be Toads for Trump. We might also revisit Graham Greene’s very fine (and very dark) Doctor Fischer of Geneva for a look at the lengths to which the wealthy will go to keep or increase their wealth–and the debasement they are prepared to suffer for it.
The key to sanity in the coming years will be to call out what we see, and not to slip into comfortable, willful ignorance. Because if we begin to go along to get along, to stop questioning, to stop seeing things as they are and stating them plainly, we may quickly find ourselves defending the indefensible.
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James McCrone is the author of the Imogen Trager political suspense-thrillers Faithless Elector, Dark Network , and Emergency Powers–noir tales about a stolen presidency, a conspiracy, and a nation on edge. Bastard Verdict, his fourth novel, is about a conspiracy surrounding a second Scottish Independence referendum. His novel-in-progress is called Witness Tree, a (pinot) noir tale of murder and corruption set in Oregon’s wine country.
Allbooks are available on BookShop.org, IndyBound.org, Barnes & Noble, your local bookshop, and Amazon. eBooks are available in multiple formats including Apple, Kobo, Nook and Kindle.
Chosen Words - James McCrone 