Infomocracy
motivation party rocked until well past dawn. Mishima knows these events are important, and
maybe once she would have enjoyed them, but now she finds they leave her feeling drained.
Not tired so much as empty, annoyed at all the hullabaloo for people who barely even think
about their votes. Officially, she was there to collect as much data as possible and send it up
for analysis, like any other Information employee, but her secret purview is far wider. Last
night, in addition to supervising the organization of the gig and coordinating with the local
security team, she was keeping an eye out for the kind of campaigning that governments do
at voter rallies, which are supposed to be apolitical. Usually it is much more subtle than
unsubstantiated allegations spelled out in giant burning letters.
She rolls over and checks the status of the libel case. Jorge and the local team are
focused on RosarioPrimero, the only government competing directly with Heritage in the
immediate surroundings, but Mishima is not so sure. Heritage may not be in many close races
in the Rio de la Plata area, but the big governments are thinking about the Supermajority, and
any loss for Heritage will increase their chances. Besides, those images were recorded and
shared so quickly, they could influence voters anywhere; it might well be a global play rather
than a local one. A team is working on cleaning it up, but the changing patterns of the flames
is making it hard to efficiently search for the shots. A bit sophisticated for RosarioPrimero,
Mishima thinks, checking their Information: only two centenals, one of which they're probably
about to lose to Heritage. She told Jorge to look bigger, Liberty or PhilipMorris or, possibly,
1China, have been making inroads in the southern cone lately. She doesn't think he's going
to, and toys with the idea of taking a quick scan herself, but she knows she can't solve every
campaign infraction she comes across. She's supposed to be looking at the bigger picture now.
The encounter with Domaine still bothers her. Was he involved in the libel plot? It didn't
look like it, but what else would he be doing there, in person and apparently alone and unarmed?
Disillusioning voters one at a time? She spent the rest of the party on edge, called in half a dozen
potential threats. None of them turned out to be armed, but she wants to review the vid footage
anyway.
First, though, she calls up her Information. Like most people, Mishima has a couple of
favorite feeds, sources that she's found to be fast and reliable, although she's probably pickier
and a better judge of "reliable" than most people. She has her screen set up to automatically
calculate and source the most popular feeds globally and locally, so that at any given moment,
she knows what most people are learning. She includes the major news compilers, regardless of
how many people are paying attention to them, broken down to the continent level and
sometimes further. Besides that, her algorithm adds in a couple of random streams that flick
between various compilers, opinionators, and virtual plazas without regard for size or relevance.
It's a tactic that reminds her, every time she uses it, of the panels from Watchmen where
Ozymandias watches multiple TVs tuned to different channels to reach a composite view of
society and make predictions, both financial and political. Not for the first time, Mishima wishes
that her world had as few channels as his.
As usual during the keyed-up election season, she is faintly disappointed by the lack
of anything earthshaking in the results. There is the standard slew of local news-minor floods
in Bangladesh, a daring jewel theft in Paris, an indiscretion by a music star-none of which raises
serious pings on her Radar. A significant smattering of stories about the mantle-tunnel approval
process, which doesn't look like it will make it through before the election. (Mishima wonders
briefly whether Heritage has delayed it on purpose, but decides the issue is too divisive for that.)
Everything—the floods, the music star, obviously the mantle tunnel—is tied to the elections by
this point in the cycle. All of the major feeds are dedicating resources to the campaigns, and
most of them strive to have at least some coverage every day, but Mishima finds nothing
surprising there, either. She skims a few of the longer features, hoping they will enhance her
worldview or lead to an epiphany: "Who are the least-campaigned voters?"; "Pivot centenals
across Southeast Asia"; "Most effective campaign vids." Mishima remembers similar titles from
a decade ago and learns little new.
Finally, she checks up on a few races and aggregates she is following closely. With
nearly a hundred thousand centenals, it can be hard to pick favorites, but part of Mishima's
job is looking for trendsetters and possible dominos, as well as places that might represent
interesting global dynamics. Some of this, of course, is subjective, like the centenal in Tokyo
where Mishima used to live. While it was solidly SonyMitsubishi back then, shifts in
employment and a couple of minor bureaucratic scandals have left it open to contestation,
And both Heritage and Liberty are advertising heavily there. The latest polls show
Liberty slightly ahead, but it looks like Sony-Mitsubishi has finally caught on to the gravity
of the threat and is trotting out some new job-training programs, so it may shift again.
This story-aggressive plays against weakened incumbents that are slow to respond but
often effective when they do-is a key pattern for this election cycle and seems to justify
Mishima's belief in subjectivity, even if not all of her supervisors agree. She also looks at
the distribution in the greater Mumbai area, a seething anthill of demographic diversity and
cutthroat competition, and notes Policy1st's continuing progress across Eastern Europe. Not
much change since the last time she checked, twenty-two hours ago, but the data is still
trending upward.
Still in bed, she checks her schedule-and, while she's at it, her location. Mishima's crow is not
large, and it's not fancy, but it's almost hers. Which is to say, it belongs to Information, but it's hers to
use. The fact that Mishima convinced Information that it made more sense to loan her a personal crow
than to continue paying for commercial travel and hotels makes her feel additionally proprietary toward
it, as a good which she has not paid for but won with her wits. (It has also given her a certain cachet
among the few other Information employees who have heard about this and made her a hero to the
even smaller number who were able to work out the same deal.) The best part is getting several hours
alone whenever she has to travel. The best part is being able to work in bed. The best part is being able
to move whenever and wherever she wants.
She's almost halfway across the Pacific, slightly delayed inclement weather that diverted her
from the optimal path. She has a few meetings to project into over the next couple of hours, and then a
brainstorming session on the name-recognition problem tomorrow. In the meantime, drafts of the weekly
comparison sheets, compiled by lower-level operatives, have come through for her review, so she decides
to go through them before the meetings. The comparison sheets are formatted as a grid, with important
topics across the top and governments down the side. There are pull-out sections for local issues at
various levels-centenal, municipality, microclimate, island, time zone, language group. Each square offers
the stated position of the government, an explanation of what that was calculated to mean in practice, and,
if applicable, the deviation from that stated position indicated either by previous performance or current
rhetoric. Citizens can even see a personalized grid with specific outcomes of each government for them:
how much they would pay in taxes, for example, or changes in the funding projected to go to their kids'
schools, or the probability that their local bar will be shut down.
It's a popular tool, and surveys last decade showed that a plurality of citizens used it to decide
their vote. Mishima is checking for anything that she can add based on her exposure in the field, as well
as scanning for questionable items, hints to campaign strategies, and possible trickery. Part of her brain
is looking at it in a more personal way too: she's also an undecided voter trying to get a full picture of
the options. Halfway down the grid, as she's running her finger along the row assigned to LIBERTY,
Mishima sits up in bed fast. She adjusts her vision settings, opens more feeds, tries to read five articles
and watch two vids at the same time, then stops herself. She only has a couple of hours. Where should
she look? She might as well start with where she's headed. Mishima begins pulling up Information from
Asia.
CHAPTER 3
Domaine sees himself as being like one of those campaign workers, or a high-level Information
agent like Mishima. (Mishima! He wonders if it's her first or last name). He's working himself to a thread,
traveling constantly, playing the geopolitical Great Game. He's just doing it for a different cause. “Yeah,
just like them. Except you hate everything they stand for," says Shamus.
Shamus is a second-generation Irishman whose maternal and paternal grandparents were, respectively,
from Zambia and Gambia. "Really," Shamus says. "Imagine the limericks.”
Domaine tries. "What was the fifth-line rhyme?"
“Usually Namibia. If you have enough of a brogue, you can make it work."
“You must have had fantastic geography courses," Domaine says. "Most kids where I grew up couldn't
have named one country in Africa, let alone three. Hell, most of them thought Africa was a country."
“And where did you grow up, then?" asks Shamus. "Not Africa, I take it."
Domaine ignores him, glances up at the massive three-dimensional football game projection above the
bar. They are sitting in a pub in Addis Ababa, Domaine's second port of call since the Buenos Aires party. Shamus
is a graphic designer and self-described "advid concept man extraordinaire." In point off fact, Domaine can't afford
the best. In the past, though, he's been happy with both Shamus's creative output and his prices, happy enough to
have a beer with the man.
Ideologically, they're on opposite poles, would probably be at each other's throats if Shamus
cared enough about it, which makes the beers more interesting.
Shamus moved to Addis after the first global election, during the now-traditional period of loosened
immigration controls. The whole point of micro-democracy was to allow people to choose their government
wherever they were, but plenty of people didn't agree with their 99,999 geographically closest friends. Some areas-
Ireland being one classic example, vast zones of what used to be the United States another-had been polarized so
deeply and so long that your choices if you stayed were pretty much A or B.
"Or maybe I was looking for a better climate, didja ever think of that?" Shamus points out.
Opening the borders (such borders as remained, anyway) allowed the new governments to pull in more
like-minded people, consolidating their holds on their centenals for the next election and stretching into
neighboring ones as populations surged. Some journalist two decades ago dubbed the process mandergerrying,
although it is also known as reverse osmosis, because it results in greater concentrations of like—minded-and, on
occasion, racially or ethnically alike—constituents.
"And that's exactly what's wrong with the system," Domaine says, thumping the bar.
©2016 Malka Older