Infomocracy Read online

  Mishima eats the sandwich slowly in front of her feeds. Nothing surprising, although she notes a slight increase in what is usually labeled “unrest” in a number of closely fought centenals; that has been consistent in the run-up to every election so far, but it still puts her on edge. She finishes eating and takes a long bath. The tub is wrapped in mirrors (whose idea was that?) and she ends up looking at her own face as she lolls. Even in the dim light (romantic?), she can see the hints of softening, the beginning of furrows. Before crawling into bed, she applies antiwrinkle electrodes to her forehead, coaxing the skin into folding at a different place the next time she frowns in concentration. Mishima is not vain, but she remembers how smooth her mother’s skin was. Her own flaws seem to represent everything that is wrong with her life: too much work, not enough sleep, too much stress, no love interest, no home. Of course after thinking all that she can’t sleep anyway, so she grabs her handheld from the nightstand and gets back to work.

  She checks the most recent data correlating voter interests and Information usage, basically whether people are looking up what they should. It isn’t promising. In the first election, Information leadership was naïve and idealistic (Mishima’s read not only of the broadcast speeches but the internal memos). They thought that providing data about each candidate government would be enough for people to make informed, more-or-less-sensible choices.

  That did not work out so well. The new Heritage coalition of wealthy, experienced global corporates ignored the accessibility of Information, produced their standard glossy misinformation, and not only took the Supermajority but won centenals where, analysts agreed, it was demonstrably not in the interests of the people living there to vote for them.

  The lesson was learned too well. In the second elections, Information spent billions of bits on slick presentation of their data. This failed as well; people continued to vote in ways that were highly irrational from any standpoint. Some blamed the incumbency problem, claiming that Heritage had accrued certain advantages, including of course name recognition. There was also significant evidence of a backlash, voters sneering at Information’s wealth and power. The corporates—many additional conglomerate governments had sprung into being after Heritage’s success—played their hand well, Mishima thinks, flipping back through the vids from the time; they insinuated that these expensive productions showed an unlimited, unmonitored budget and made Information the enemy.

  Mishima shakes her head. She has her own theory: Information workers, with their ingrained culture prioritizing rigorous truth, struggled to slap motivational music or abstract video of stunning views and happy faces onto their datasets, and it showed.

  This cycle, there are strict budget equivalency rules: no Information campaign can be more expensive than the campaign of the governments it is evaluating. Mishima suspects that when the dust settles, they’ll find a lot of government vid budgets were larger than reported, but beyond that technical problem is a larger one. Information is still reacting, and the corporates—and the other major governments, by this point—are far too smart to play that way. She has been pushing a viral strategy combined with increased efforts at communicating transparency, but it’s hard to get the point across. Two decades into its existence, Information is now full of decision-makers who always seem to want something flashy and expensive.

  Moving on, Mishima rereads the notes from the session on the name-recognition problem. There was a study done with minimally educated voters who, given a hypothetical ballot, picked the names of famous serial killers over randomly generated names as well as over those of actual, less well-known politicians. Most of the discussion among the Information workers was about how to increase the name recognition of the politicians and governments in this election, or whether there’s any way to evaluate the exact degrees of name recognition different actors have or even—and here the conversation gets very tentative and hypothetical—weight the voting accordingly. In the resulting unease, someone extended the conversation to face recognition, a consistent problem for governments like Policy1st or Economix that either don’t have official spokespeople or select boring and/or unattractive ones. At that point, Mishima started to tune out. What worries her, and what nobody at Information seems to want to talk about, is how the name recognition problem could be used as an argument against the whole system.

  That reminds her of that encounter with Domaine in—what city was that?—and she checks up on him.

  Saudi? What’s he doing there? Since the country is closed to Information, there’s not much she can find out. But there’s no one to convince not to vote. Is he looking for funding? She checks in with some of her informants, but they can’t give her anything beyond his itinerary, which she already knows.

  Her intuition is tingling, although Mishima tries to talk herself out of it. Because she’s been painstakingly looking for evidence of war plans and clandestine coalitions all day, her mind jumps there as soon as she sees an unexplained fact, knitting together an unsubstantiated narrative with its usual skill. When she reviews the dossier, there’s no sign that Domaine has ever worked for a corporate; he’s more the underdog type. But then, what is he doing in Saudi? Maybe he would align himself with anyone to overthrow the election system. Very, very carefully, she begins to search Information for intersections between Domaine and Liberty.

  * * *

  Ken climbs into the climate-controlled bed in his narrow hotel room. He’s going to have a lot of follow-up to do tomorrow while keeping his antennae flexed in case those goons find him again, and he wants to be fully alert for the debate in the afternoon. Of course he can’t sleep; it was a ridiculous idea to try. This is not the first time he’s been of use to the campaign—there was last month’s scoop about the wavering governor of a SecureNation centenal in Austin, and of course the intel from Amuru—but it is certainly the most dramatic. He relives briefly the moment crouched behind the three-wheeler, the glare from the headlights splashing over him. So worth documenting.

  He sits up in bed, pulls over his handheld, and starts looking for vidfeeds that might show him in that moment. Removed from all context, it could be a cool avatar. By the time he’s gone through the two feeds near that kiosk, he’s realized, belatedly, that they (PhilipMorris heavies? Local rent-a-goons? Centenal-level security?) might be trying to identify him this way, and then he has to check through the feeds along his entire route that night. It’s humbling to look at it on a map: the drama felt like it took hours and involved a mile or two of road, but the stretch he sees traced on his locator is tiny.

  As he’s doing this, he has his other feeds on, as usual. Ken doesn’t go on Information these days without opening a minimum of two real-time poll sites (one is generally considered to be slightly Heritage-biased; the other is an indie site with less carefully validated data and is a little more daring in its conclusions), at least one news compiler for each continent, and Policy1st’s campaign stream. His Information automatically prioritizes the feeds in order of most recent update, so as he’s watching the vids from along his route, they are interrupted every few seconds by one of the other feeds jumping into the foreground with a new headline or a minuscule poll shift. He falls asleep without dimming them, and the feeds keep leaping into place to compete for his attention until his handheld realizes nobody is watching and autoextinguishes.

  CHAPTER 7

  ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the first debate for the third global election! We welcome representatives of the thirty-three governments that meet the official cutoff to be candidates for the Supermajority position, according to the latest round of official Information polling. Each of the candidates will now present a brief opening statement, followed by questions from the moderators.

  HERITAGE: Thank you, and we are very pleased to participate for a third time in this inspiring and historic process of global democracy! We are also thrilled to celebrate with you, with our constituents all over the world, and with everyone who is participating in this wonderful exerc
ise of citizenship and empowerment! You are the ones who make micro-democracy great—we couldn’t do it without you! And so, before we even begin, I want to thank you for giving us the opportunity not only to govern our centenals but also to guide this amazing effort toward peace and prosperity as the Supermajority for the past twenty years!

  Ken shakes his head and takes another swig of his beer. William Pressman is so smug and obnoxious. If he were on the Heritage team—not that he ever would be!—he’d advise them to cool it with that. He doesn’t think their attitude helps them with undecideds. Although considering their record, he could be wrong about that.

  Despite the unpleasant ambiance at the Policy1st office, he stayed in Jakarta to watch the debate. He’s managed to find a centenal where alcohol and marijuana are legal but tobacco and pop-out advertisements are not. As Ken waited for the debate to start, he checked out this government’s broader policies. They’re called Free2B, which sounds like they might promulgate that kind of individualism that gets annoying quickly once your neighbor starts playing gronkytonk at top volume at five a.m. or refuses to donate to the volunteer fire department until their house is burning down, but when he scans their policies, he sees they’re reasonably socially conscious. If they’ve got anything in a more temperate climate, he’s seriously considering moving there once the election is over.

  The bar is unfinished blond wood with light fixtures made of old-fashioned glass beer bottles and lots of ceiling fans powered, according to a sign in the bathroom, by an anaerobic reactor. They have a wide range of drink and drug offerings and some good early ’20s music playing through the ambience. It’s too bad he has to get on a plane tomorrow; there’s a World Cup elimination match he wants to see, Hokkaido versus Greater Bolivia, and this would be a great place to watch it.

  The Heritage spokesperson is complaining about why there are thirty-three governments included in the debate. Since Policy1st is currently thirteenth in Information’s ranking of Supermajority candidates, Ken would very much like for there to be exactly thirteen parties up there. Or maybe fourteen or fifteen, so his isn’t dead last. Thirty-three does seem like a lot—even with simulquestions, this is going to take forever. But Heritage wants to cut it down to five. Naturally, the fewer governments people take seriously, the better chance Heritage has to hold on to what they’ve got. Having looked at the numbers recently, Ken knows that the text and animations that the moderator is superimposing over Heritage’s long-winded statement are accurate: there’s a huge gulf between number thirty-three and number thirty-four on the list, so it’s the most sensible place to make the cut.

  Whether the ranking criteria are valid is a whole separate set of questions, though, and one that no one but the big muckamucks at Information is likely to get a chance to ask.

  HERITAGE: You will see many advids from our opponents, and particularly from Information, claiming that we have not kept every single one of our campaign promises. But we would like to remind you that, as the only Supermajority holder in history, we are the only ones who have been tested in this way. It is easy for the others to claim they will keep all their promises if elected.

  This argument makes Ken grind his teeth. Dodgy as it is for Heritage to admit they haven’t kept all their campaign promises—in fact, he thinks, they’ve barely kept any—this is a very clever way for them to do it. All of the governments on that platform have several thousand centenals and therefore plenty of data about how well they’ve held to campaign promises, even if not as the Supermajority. By accusing the reliable scapegoat Information of bias, Heritage can defend itself and point out the failings of its competitors at the same time. Indeed, as Ken watches, some jerk at Information takes the bait and starts scrolling down the screen a table with all the data they’ve accumulated on broken promises by other governments. Ken waits, trying not to cringe, until Policy1st’s turn and internally refutes every accusation:

  Campaign Promise

  Result

  Ken’s response

  Greater transparency in decision-making and administration

  Legislative processes made public and external agencies contracted to provide technical explanations; executive and bureaucratic branches still excessively protected

  We tried, but some things take longer to explain and clarify. Data management isn’t easy, especially in places with low education. And we were blocked in some centenals by agreements to respect previous policies to protect existing bureaucrats. We’re just starting to work our way out of some of those traps now.

  Data-based policies

  Greater explanation of data basis, but still notable politicization in the way data is selected

  It’s impossible to be completely neutral, but we have commissioned external experts in almost every case and tried to open up broad fields of questioning. See above about low levels of education.

  Removal of unsupported tariffs

  47% of pre-existing tariffs still in place

  Our trade partners wouldn’t cooperate! Unilateral removal of tariffs would have been economic suicide. But still, we got most of them.

  Focus on long-term over short-term policies

  Unclear

  On this … there have been some trade-offs.

  Noticing that absinthe is also legal here, Ken decides to move on from beer.

  LIBERTY:… and we welcome the chance to set forth our ideas for world government as we celebrate another decade of freedom and economic growth in our centenals!

  Yoriko finds herself nodding along with the people around her. She is watching the debate at a Liberty campaign event: a huge projection set up on the beach, with cows turning on spits and, of course, lots of free Coke and Dasani, Gauloises cigarettes, Degree antiperspirant and Unilever soap, and Nestlé breast-milk substitute. There’s a play area set up for small children, which Yoriko appreciates (she couldn’t get a sitter) almost as much as she is surprised by it. She thinks of Liberty as being uncaring and not exactly family oriented.

  STARLIGHT: We’d also like to protest the refusal of Information to broadcast vid as well as sound. We feel that the public has the right to see as well as hear their candidates. Studies have shown that nonverbal language is a key element of trust and decision-making.

  Mishima doesn’t move, but inside she’s somewhere between rolling her eyes and cursing. She can’t believe StarLight is among the contenders, if toward the bottom of the pack, and she really can’t believe they’re dragging this argument out again. They better be out by the next debate. As she watches, whoever’s working the debate starts scrolling text down the screen about why debates are sound only. It’s a stupid, process-oriented point to even be having a discussion about, but Mishima knows that all over the nonelection world—in Saudi Arabia, in Switzerland, in holdouts of the former USA and PRC and USSR, people are watching the debate for its entertainment value and loving every dig at Information.

  She can’t show her indignation, because having stayed an additional night at the Merita hotel, she’s watching the debate in the bar. She would prefer to be alone or with like-minded colleagues, but she considers it a professional responsibility to check reactions. The Merita has thrown an actual party for the debate, with reduced-price drinks and free snacks, and a lot of people have shown up. Unfortunately for Mishima’s purposes, more of them seem more interested in the drinks and snacks (and each other) than in the massive and multilinked projection of the debate. Mishima can barely hear through all the meaningless chatter, and she has unobtrusively turned on her earpiece and linked it in to her own feed.

  POLICY1ST:… we welcome the audio-only format of the debates, as well as the simulquestions and the comparison sheets. These elections should be about policy, not presentation, and not even people. Our government officials are all chosen for their qualifications and capacity, not for their looks.

  Ken catches himself wincing, or maybe it’s the alcohol. Not that he disagrees; of course not. He just wishes Vera Kubugli hadn’t let herself get pulle
d into such a silly issue, and without excuse of a direct question. Something about it sounds smug and self-righteous, which is a bigger risk for Policy1st than for Heritage.

  Still, he is guiltily glad that it’s Vera representing them in this debate, rather than Suzuki, who has an even greater tendency to let his tones get sententious. Vera is warmer, or at least comes across that way—Ken’s only met her briefly. Also, she’s female and not remotely white. Ken has gotten the sense that she’s one part of the government that Suzuki can’t micromanage.

  Wow, absinthe really works fast. And well. Ken admires the empty cup, then punches in the order for another.

  MODERATOR: Thank you all for your opening statements. We will now move on to the questions. As you all know, due to the high number of participants, we will be taking answers in groups simultaneously. The audience can select which voice to hear while the other answers are transcribed on the screen; we do encourage you, however, to listen to the recorded answers of all the respondents later, to get the full effect of all of their statements.

  Mishima orders a bourbon, pleased that she is no longer in the Information trenches. When her drink comes, she raises a silent toast to all the grunts who are poised at their interfaces right now, fingertips and neurons twitching. There are two groups of Information workers on a debate: the A team, which does the simultaneous fact-checking and context-setting that viewers see on their screens, and a second set of less-senior but also well-regarded staffers who collect data from the listeners and integrate it into analysis and projections. One of the first Information datasets to come out of a debate is which government got the most listeners. Some argue that it’s not a great determinant of the way the polls will move next, on the theory that people listen for entertainment value and vote out of self-interest, but Mishima has been with Information long enough to be cynical: most people’s interest is entertainment. From the icon in the corner of the big projection, she can see that this Merita hotel is tuning into Heritage, which now that she thinks about it, is not particularly surprising even if they are sitting in an 888 centenal. She brushes her hair back, casually adjusting the feed in her earpiece to listen to Liberty.