Words

The Word Exchange (Alena Graedon, 2014) is a book that relishes its very frequent displays of self-indulgence, like describing its main character for three pages, being filled to the brim with SAT words, including “in-universe” impossibly long and opinionated articles in a flagrant showing of tell-don’t-show-worldbuilding, etc. But it is (much more importantly) self-indulgent by premise. Because it is a book (an ink on paper, long string of characters, meant to be read book) about words, the loss of words, the search for words, the meaning of words, the culture in words. It’s a book for English majors, which you’ll grant, is very self-indulgent even by book standards.

And some of this self-indulgence works, works very well for it. For example, the intersection of culture and technology (or the war of them?) is a worthwhile theme, and the liberal use of sesquipedalian vocabulary is a good reminder to the reader (this reader, the reader who is a human, reading a book written by a human, in a world not eaten away by software yet) of what they stand to lose; when the book talks of words being replaced we can see them, right then, right there on the page, do we know them all ourselves? Could we read this book without looking up words on the Internet?[1]

It is very clear, of course, that the story of the erased words is less about losing language than culture. Because the words are the representation of their history and context, and the context we learned them, saw them, remembered them in, and the feelings they called back, then a mythical technology that would obviate the need for words would cut away the user from the culture the words made up and were made up by. A mythical technology that would constantly rotate new words would have an ephemeral, everchanging, patchwork culture where no word lives long enough to accrue true meaning, new meaning, extra meaning; and the world would run the same except no one would need writers anymore. (Since the writer is, ipso facto, a writer, the dystopia is probably stronger in her mind than on the page.)

An interesting parallel here is to software. Now, as a computer programmer, a non-false way to describe my most important job skill is the making up of names. Technically there are two skills: the finding of names and the making of meanings, and both are much, much more involved than writing a pithy dictionary description. Code is the name of operations; coding is the naming and use of names for operations. Programmer remember names; they create names; they share names. A typical program has thousands or millions of names, all of complicated meanings, understood and shared by 1-n people (and at least one computer). They gather in communities of people who know and use the same names, and define themselves by the number or versatility of names they know, and of names they make up. But software is inherently different from words. Where the words are a shadow of the culture that preceded them, an abstracted representation torn away from its concrete definition as was made, and that characteristic allows words to evolve and be used (claimed?) by different communities, and to gain new meanings, and allows writers to use words as they please, to inform and to tell and to hint and to sound, code exists because of and for the series of operations it “means”. Code that has multiple meanings is bad (thank you, Single Responsibility Principle); code that has many names is worse. The ideal of the programmer would be, upon reading a name, to immediately understand the code it represents, its meaning, its one meaning, separate from culture and made entirely function (and programmers lament every day that it hasn’t happened yet). The Word Exchange (the system) is a writer’s nightmare and a programmer’s dream.

Technology

The Word Exchange is a part of an ever-growing tradition of works primarily interested in deconstructing the relationship of culture and technology; specifically, the reliance of culture on technology. Ever since “new media” became a headline in the old media, its representation has included some degree of hand-wringing over what this change (like any social and economic change) meant for the fabric of society in the future.

When an American startup (of course) takes over the English language by means of providing future society with actually functional PDAs and cute networked games with a low barrier to entry, an inexplicable epidemic spreads around the world, taking the meaning out of people’s communications, the will out of their words, until they fall silent and die alone. This is the general setup (and it’s a pretty slow-going setup – by the time all of the aforementioned happens a couple hundred pages have gone by) of the Word Exchange, and it is the role technology plays in it, roughly the same role it does in Wall-E (or Fahrenheit 451 to go with the more obvious reference), where the use of technology renders humans so helpless that they willingly give away control of their environment (their thoughts, their relationships, their culture) to it, until they themselves are mindless automatons in a society with no heart. In all three examples, interestingly, even the humans who originally created the technology are not immune, they, as the rest of society, eventually fall prey to its side-effects (in The Word Exchange, tragically so). Not only is technology corrupting, it is ultimately uncontrollable, and in this sort of story is treated more as a representation of temptation than as an economic activity or a particular kind of knowledge work.

This is why in these stories we don’t see technologists – or if we do it’s not as technologists. (The Matrix is a world in which this particular breakdown of society has already happened, and whatever Neo may have learned about technology as a software developer is useless to him when it comes to saving the world from it.) The existence of humans – not robots, not companies, free-willed flesh-and-blood crying thinking beings – making technology is antithetical to the conception of technology as a superhuman force in direct opposition to the human will. The fact that in the real world technology is a direct extension of (some) humans’ wills that more often than not also serves the direct interest of a subset of society, is where the applicability of the fictional stories starts to show flaws. [Interestingly, The Word Exchange looks like it is going to go for a more mystery-like conspiracy plot for a good half of its run, but then takes a sharp turn and winds up being clearly sci-fi after all, down to technology being used as a force of nature in a morality tale about the excesses of society that, by the end, no human can control.]

Industry

One of the last things I want to touch on about The Word Exchange is how it treats business. This aspect is perhaps the one in which it is the most representative of the time of its writing, and since all science-fiction books are written in some way as a commentary on their present (their writer’s present – not the fictionalized future that is “present” of the narrative), it makes it worthy of some interest.

The 2010s are marked by an economic recovery primarily impacting technology fields. We [it is my present too – perhaps I will correct this entire comment with the benefit of hindsight] live in a world where technology companies make tens of billions of dollars of profit in a given year, where Facebook could conceivably buy up several small countries, where cities are rushing to implement large-scale real-time automated monitoring of all their hustle, where bootcamps spring up all over the place with the promise of turning ordinary people into programmers. (I guess if this is the new Industrial Revolution, we’re the new factory workers.)

With that considered, it makes sense that the antagonist of the story is a technology company. It makes sense because they are the 2010s heroes; the darlings of the modern media, the models of the world. If there is anything stories love it is to show the dark side of whatever idolatry the current zeitgeist has adopted. The company experiences a meteoric rise – from “garage startup” to mega-multinational giant that’s a household name in the whole world in eight years – based on a concept that most of us would find hard to believe, that people would want to buy individual words instead of having to remember them. (Also fantasy iPads.)

They make their money from using offshore labor in China and Russia (the Russian connection is bizarre, I can only assume it to be an appeal to American Cold War sensibilities – Russia doesn’t have a particular significance in the tech world, though it does produce a lot of hackers – just like the US). They sell the creative production of their users, rewarding the users only with momentary (and, therefore, meaningless, devoid of cultural significance, see words) fame, keeping for themselves any profit. They drive their workers to illness through the combined effects of their always-on culture, their demanding workload, and the heightened exposure of the workers to the corrupting influence the product has on the world at large. They topple their older, more traditional competitors who see themselves as servants to society rather than leaders. And worst of all “they” are heartless – they have founders, they have products, they have cool stories and neat designs, they have fancy shows, but they don’t stand for anything but, perhaps, money and the future. In the end, when facing destruction, disease and death they are powerless, they posture and lament and try but their entire agency is based on co-opting that of their users (usees?). And so they can do nothing.

Perhaps the primary criticism of modern business that is levied by the book at Synchronic (yes! it is called that!) is its relationship to time. In the haste to bring about a “future” made of and serving their own designs, they devalue the history of their society and the people that make it up, steal meaning from the present the people are living without quite having the time to process it, and jeopardize the longer-term evolution that would have occurred through natural cultural exchange. This is more widely applicable to a lot of business practices today – there is one time, and that is whatever is right for the business. People are hired based on “skills” with less and less reliance on history, and they are slotted in ever-more commoditized structures where any talk of “future” is more-or-less white lies unless it is the business’s future (ie, growth, ie, profit). Products are tested and abandoned as the whims of “the market” (people’s consumption habits, and much faster, and more present, algorithms’ betting patterns) decide. Even homepages can be different from a visit to the next.

And ultimately this is what differentiates “good” from “bad” work in The Word Exchange’s world. “Good” knowledge work is respectful of people’s time, it is produced by the deliberate act of their thoughts, it is helped by their experience and made better by their age (the heroine’s dictionary editor father and Phineas Thwaite both being older gentlemen whose career achievements are a direct product of the time they have spent building expertise). “Bad” knowledge work is intentionally ahead of its time, it exploits the almost-unwilling patterns of people’s habits, it is the province of young people. It changes “on” its users and producers – neither really wants the change to happen, but growth is change, and growth is money, and therefore change must occur.

[1] The answer is yes. I’ve seen my first “new” word (lambent) on page 102, and I’m a non-native English speaker who majored in science. You’ll be fine.