Infinite Detail

Chronicles a near-future trainwreck where the internet (of things) is wiped out, triggering a collapse of global capitalism.

The story is geographically and dramatically centered around a community based at Stoke’s Croft in the heart of Bristol who gained fame and notoriety in the pre-crash world for engineering a ‘black spot’ where access to the internet is entirely blocked, augmenting their locality with their own custom operating system and mesh networking systems, a utopian artistic vision of what the internet could be.

The narrative is split around the collapse event, with each passage organised by the orientation of Before and After. The world before is told mostly through the eyes of Rush, information activist, anti-surveillance guru, founder of the Croft and lead programmer of their secure operating system, who now desparately wants to leave. After the crash, we thread through the stories of anarchistic artist Annika who once lived in the Croft, and locals Mary, Tyrone, College and Grids, all scrambling and hustling to survive as Bristol crumbles with the collapse of regional infrastructure and the flow of consumer goods and food being abruptly cut off as container ships and freight from the continent stop arriving.

Refreshingly, the lead characters are influential and extraordinary but they aren’t magical heroic figures who somehow pinball through the ruins of society and into the heart of the global economy and political system to figure out the mystery. There’s no tidy explanation. There’s no central agency or locus of control. The collapse is an inexorable consequence of the fragile complexity of global supply chains. Not so much that nobody can stop it, as nobody can even understand it.

Also refreshing: not only is London not centred, it barely features in the story, despite being at the confluence of so many of the novel’s themes. New York City takes its place instead, reinforcing the theme of global supply chains while also providing the frame for the long-distance relationship that drives Rush to abandon the community he founded.

The foundation of the New People’s Republic of Stokes Croft will be viewed by a lot of readers as a reimagining of the Occupy movement, but it seems to owe just as much if not more to the critical engineering, network mapping and stealth infrastructure work of artists like Julian Oliver and Ingrid Burrington. Not to say that shades of Occupy aren’t present. The novel seems to be strongly influenced by the questions and reactions that emerged post-Occupy around prefigurative politics, anarchism vs communism and how to intervene in surveillance capitalism without being absorbed and integrated into its seemingly unstoppable flow.

Maughan cleverly problematises the scenario of surveillance capitalism ending and the internet hellscape being destroyed in one fell swoop, taking the downfall that so many people desire and connecting it to unimaginable pain and destruction for ordinary people. After several days of exuberance and relief as consumers realise they’re freed from the shackles, UK cities begin to disintegrate into starvation and the military takes over the government and begins waging war on the people and hoarding resources. America is plunged into chaos as heavily-armed preppers and religious cults roam the landscape in search of food and shelter. This isn’t the future we want but it’s the future we continue to speculate and ruminate on as we equivocate and agitate for revolution on social media, while spending late nights wallowing in televised and simulated videogame projections of the revolution’s violent and grisly aftermath. The political question here is about strategy and the purpose of radicalism and revolution. Yes, we want to tear down these unjust systems, but what have we got to put in their place? What rushes in to fill the power vaccum?

One of the advantages Maughan has is that because we know this dystopian scenario so well by now, there’s no need to waste time on describing the bleak details of collapse in excruciating detail. He can strategically signpost and gesture in the right directions and the worldbuilding falls into place without too many tangents and digressions. This leaves the novel free to expand into its own unique thematic space where failing smart cities, decaying network tech and critical engineering collide with the foundational Bristol street culture of graffiti, dub sound systems and ancient drum and bass.

Where tangents and digressions do intercede is the stuff involving technology and hacking. Rather than leveraging existing hacking tropes and fixating on the surface noise of software and social platforms, Maughan shows great discipline and constraint to focus the technological aspects of the story almost entirely on the connected network infrastructure of the smart city and the internet of things. Reinforcing this and placing it in social context is the cameo appearance of a NYC Pfand collector as a viewpoint character—his livelihood is instantly wiped out when the city rolls out a ‘smart’ system that locks bottle and can refunds to give app credits rather than cash and only allows those who purchased the item to claim the deposit back. The character is irascible and selfish, hard to sympathise with, but we still feel for him when the abject scenario of his displacement by algorithms plays out, reflecting the hidden costs and social toll of detached decisions by market-oriented technocrats and techbros who see the city only as a problem to be solved.

Importantly, nearly all the technology presented here references or reflects stuff that’s already happening today. The effects might be dialled up and exaggerated—particularly the relationship between simulation granularity and the audio/video bandwidth of AR headsets—but there’s nothing qualitatively new or different.

The other side of the technology coin is Maughan’s deft act of worldbuilding that centers the Bristol sound. With the internet gone, all recent recorded music and pop culture has been completely obliterated, with the only surviving music being the physical artifacts of analog and early digital media. Thus, the crash has led to a musical event horizon, where the only music known to generations after is the stuff put on wax, CDs and casette tapes in the very last days of the traditional music industry before the internet platforms rolled in. Which means that the 90s and early 2000s drum and bass is forever frozen in that moment in time, the very last recordings that the people of Bristol will ever know. The cover of the novel even works as a subtle callout to the famous Roni Size album cover without being directly derivative or blatant about it.

Pure nostalgia for me, regardless of whether it was intended that way, but worth recognising that this all has its role to play in the story too. One of the key subplots involves the last song broadcast by a local musical icon whose spectacular end coincides with the beginning of the crash. There’s a pirate radio station broadcasting from a janky rooftop transmitter and giant street parties with dub-inspired soundsystems powered by the giant salvaged battery from a wrecked military tank. The musical broadcasts are beacons of solidarity and strength for the community, reinforcing themes of resilience, fragility and hope that challenge any attempt to pigeonhole this novel as a straight-up dystopia.

As the story concludes these same themes of resilience, fragility and hope are restated in another way that resonates with the underlying critique of activism without organising, revolution without strategy. The question emerges of whether the internet can be brought back and the networks reconnected without blindly repeating the mistakes of the past.

A few years ago, Infinite Detail would have been viewed as a groundbreaking scifi/post-cyberpunk or speculative fiction imagining—an extraordinary and prescient warning of the risks of shackling every single thing in our economy to the internet. In 2019 and beyond, stories like this are encroaching on the territory of straight-up realism.