BECCA ELLEN BOOKS

“the question today is how one can convince humanity to consent to their own survival”.

Very darkly funny. A lot of the content makes you laugh at first, then makes you despair because it’s all a little too real.

QualityLand is a world where everything is dictated by an algorithm: your career, social life, your parenting and even romantic relationships. Every decision is made for you, often before you even realise you need to make it. The algorithm books you a table at a restaurant within your price range, orders the dish it knows you will like most, and when you get home, there’s a drone waiting at your door with a package containing items TheShop has bought on your behalf.

The story centres on Peter Jobless, a machine scrapper who cannot bring himself to destroy perfectly good equipment for the sake of fueling capitalism. One day, he receives an order from TheShop that he categorically does not want and decides to return it. But TheShop can’t allow him to return it because that would mean admitting that the algorithm got it wrong, and if the algorithm can get things wrong, then the very fabric of society is at risk of unravelling.

The book openly criticises people’s ignorance, how easily we can be manipulated by technology, and the mindless consumerism that seems to be engulfing society. As we “advance”, corporations gain a tighter and tighter grip on us. We are given more choices, increased convenience and more technology, and yet we end up with less control over our own lives. We are slaves to tech.

It’s hard not to think about how quickly Qualityland is becoming reality. Even just within the past few years, AI has spread so far and wide that it’s inescapable. The carelessness with which people use technology, and how quickly we become reliant on new inventions, is genuinely terrifying. And I’m absolutely no exception to that. It’s very easy to sit back and laugh at the people in QualityLand for being so easily manipulated, before you realise that we really aren’t that different after all.

Despite being a slave to capitalism myself, I always enjoy an unapologetically anti-capitalist sentiment. The mocking of the general public is also excellent. There’s something particularly funny about watching a society of people blindly accepting increasingly ridiculous things because an algorithm, a corporation or some vaguely authoritative figure has told them that this is what’s best for them.

My main criticism is that I think the main storyline could have been padded out a little more. The ending, particularly the twist involving Martyn, needed more characterisation to have the impact I think Kling was going for. Martyn always felt a little too two-dimensional to me, which made it difficult to feel as strongly about the ending as perhaps I should have.

Overall, though, I really enjoyed it. It’s funny, cynical, ridiculous and increasingly uncomfortable the more you see the parallels with real life. The fact that so much of it feels like it could genuinely happen — or is already happening — is probably the funniest and most depressing part of the whole thing.

We really are all just a bunch of ignorant, mindless, greedy drones being encouraged to consume more and think less.