Fiction in 2043: Looking back from the future

In the story of Rip Van Winkle, a British-American colonial villager living on the east coast of America in the 1760s falls asleep only to wake 20 years later, having slept through the American Revolution. Perplexed and disturbed by the new world he finds, he has nonetheless been spared the hardships and sufferings of war. I have often thought that the digital revolution has much in common with the American one, and that I would like to be spared the hardships of the messy years we are living through – the conflict between digital publishing and established publishers, the declines and booms, the false hopes and future projections, the compromises that in hindsight might have proven fatal – and to awaken when one side or the other is victorious and a workable peace has been established.

Imagine my surprise then when – after a flight to America, some appalling jet lag and some ill-advised sleeping pills – I woke to find myself in 2043. Although I was awake in that future world for only a short time, I used my time to chart that most important of issues: the future of fiction. I then fell asleep again and returned, alas, to our current interregnum in which, to quote Gramsci, "the old is dying and the new cannot be born" and culture is little more than "morbid symptoms" of unresolved conflict. The result is the first of two reports, from memory, of what I saw in 2043:

1. The popular multimedia retro-hybrid 'title'

First of all it's important to get terminology right: not books but "titles". While in our current time we still talk of "books", in 2043 this word fails to describe the plurality of "reading" material available – even the word reading is not entirely appropriate. While books in the sense of objects printed on paper still exist, the preferred name to designate the multiplicity of forms is titles (this sounding better than the popular digi-phrase "content"). In 2043, titles exist on many formats including ebooks, paperbooks, limited handmade "artisan" editions, enhanced ebooks, phone-texts, audiobooks, apps, film adaptations, TV series, computer games, merchandise, user-interactive franchises and fan-rewritten fan-fiction, while the most successful titles are "synergized" across all these platforms. The publishing houses of my day have merged with broadcasters, agents, casting agents, film studios and games designers into global consortia who now hold monopolies. The result is that there are only 10 or so globally successful titles each year and that the rest of the market is almost entirely demonetised. (See next week's feature on the end of the long tail, "Part Two – Peace".)

In 2043, the vast majority of all "published work" is self-published fan-fiction and with the cheapness of automatic printing machines and with free digital platforms these exist both as digital content and as paper versions. With 800m new titles every year, these works are derivative and based upon previously existing works of fiction. Popular titles mostly consist of alternative-universe depictions of franchises from our era and these include the title Ziggy Potter and the Spiders from Mars and Twilight – New Bloods, Series Five. These titles, however, have close to zero market value and are symptomatic of the widespread devaluation of cultural content that the slow process of the digital revolution unleashed in the west.

2. Franchises outlive their authors and inter-breed

To my surprise, waking in 2043, I felt I had slept only a day. This is because many of the titles which I had known in my time, not only still existed but seemed to be all that was visible in the cultural spectrum. Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code were still highly revered and new sequels, prequels and series based on these titles were being generated at an extra-ordinary rate. Twilight and Fifty Shades had come to exist in strangely mutated hybrid forms which included films, pop songs, cartoons, sex toys.

Furthermore, their original authors were no longer attached to these enterprises. It was explained to me that successful authors from my time had set up franchises and through various changes in copyright law had permitted fan-fiction (which in the case of JK Rowling, amounted to millions of pieces of writing across the net), on the condition that the originator retain a percentage of profits. This worked well for fans as they could then, if they were lucky (at odds of around 100,000 to one) be honoured by having their derivative writings turned into the "New Harry Potter" (or Twilight or Fifty Shades) - a privilege akin to winning the X-Factor by singing a cover version. Competition for such honours in turn legitimated and fuelled the life of the first versions. The "original" authors then, had left the fans to generate the content for the serial continuance of their successful brand names.

This system is further promoted by mainstream media who have created Reality TV series such as Write On – a cross between the Apprentice and Britain's Got Talent – around the thousands of competing wannabe writers who strive to be the lucky amateurs chosen to continue the existing franchises. Their products are, by necessity, unoriginal but sometimes lead to interesting cultural creations. One such phenomenon is the tendency to mashup different franchises - creating curious hybrids. The result is titles such as Shades of Hermione – a pornographic Potter serial, and The Twilight Code – in which vampires save the Catholic church. Such titles were extremely popular in the 2020s and 2030s and now exist as valueless artefacts of what in 2043 is seen as the era of decadence.

3. The Wiki Novel

Back in 2012, at the Edinburgh International book festival World Writers' Conference, and then subsequently on a BBC broadcast debate with myself, the novelist China Miéville announced that he welcomed the digital revolution with its concept of an "open text" which could be re-written by its readers, the plot changed, other characters introduced.

He promoted the idea that technological innovation might in this way empower readers to become writers and for them to take an author's work into new and exciting places. This, I understood, would mean that fans might generate "alternative universe" versions of a book through downloading copies of a book then adding to or deleting its text in the same way that Wikipedia is compiled. This, at the time, troubled me greatly. What about the autonomy and the art of the text, I protested? What if someone took the crime out of Crime and Punishment? Or if some authoritarian government rewrote 1984? What if someone added pornographic sections into the Diary of Anne Frank?

It transpires that both Miéville and I were right in part – he in his euphoria for the "inevitable" technological innovation and I in my fears. In 2043 there is indeed a pornographic version of Anne Frank, but there are also 45,000 alternative versions and one of them, The True Story of Anne Frank (a meta-fiction about the "secret" authors of the book), is a controversial best seller. It claims that the diary was itself a work of fiction (passed off as real) and used for propaganda purposes by Zionists. Is this true or itself a politically motivated fiction? Is it morally permissible to allow sacred texts to be rewritten?

As Miéville pointed out, the original text still exists and could be deferred to but I was concerned that within such a hall of mirrors truth was not so much hidden as obliterated in multiple reflections. I note also that in 2043 one of Miéville's books has been remashed. The City and the City has been rewritten over 40 times by fans and the most popular title, outselling the original in volume (and containing the entirety of the original within it while selling at a fraction of the price), is The City and the City and Zombies.

4. The Future is the Past – The Old is New (again and again)

As I looked around and saw remakes, prequels, sequels and the continuation of characters and franchises from my own era, retro-styled in perfect pastiche, it alarmed me to discover that no new culture had been created at all since around 2018. Time seemed to have stopped at that point. Had there been some kind of cataclysm that had turned all eyes back with nostalgia to safer times? Or some manufactured form of amnesia among the masses to make them consume exactly the same thing cyclically without realising it? Was this really the outcome of the digital revolution? The absolute lack of authors, musicians and filmmakers producing new content came as a shock as I was rather fond of the outdated ideas of "innovation" and "invention" and the idea that history was going somewhere rather than in circles.

It was explained to me that after several decades of getting "content" (see "culture") for free, the populace could not even imagine paying for new characters or new stories and that the media monopolies found it too financially risky to invest in the creation of fiction that had no track record. Throughout the 2020s and 30s (before the Great Betrayal, the Long Flatline and the New Era) only that which was done before had any value, and this terminal state of capitalism seemed unable to generate its own values. I recalled that between 2009 and 2013, cinema had gone through a similar pattern of entropy, the top 10 films from 2010-2013 being largely sequels, reboots, prequels and remakes. In 2013, 31 sequels and 17 reboots were released, and these included: the sixth X-men film, Fast and Furious 6, Die Hard 5, Scary Movie 5 and Paranormal Activity 5, Iron Man 3, The Hangover 3, and sequel/prequels for The Muppets, The Smurfs, GI Joe and Bad Santa.

I noted that popular music, too, had become dominated by retromania, repetition and a chronic lack of innovation – a ruse which, although it could attract temporary fame, did not create any new culture or pay much in the way of monies to the copy-artists. This was compounded by the fact that the former promise that recording artists losing money to internet piracy could earn a living wage through selling tour tickets, turned out to be a false prediction – the rot setting in around 2011. This led to bands having to seek corporate sponsorship, which resulted in even more cultural conservatism and a demand that content be little more than cover versions with the zero risk of the already known. If those of us involved in fiction had been more concerned and less elitist in 2013 we would have seen that the same crisis in creativity would come to the behind-the-times book industry when it finally caught up.

5. Algorithms become authors

The digital revolution had championed itself as removing the middleman, first doing away with the need for warehouses, then bookshops, then small publishers, then small agents, so around 2025, the final middleman was removed to ease the flow between reader and content – the author. The first novel written by computer was in fact released in 2008 – called True Love, it was a "variation on Leo Tolstoy's 1877 classic Anna Karenina but written in the style of Japanese author Haruki Murakami". The experiment – by a Russian-based digital operation – was later published and took only 20 minutes to generate the 320-page novel, which used plot and sentence structures taken from 17 other books within the romance genre. After the success of such early experiments (with readers being unable to spot the difference between computer and human-generated texts) titles started being written entirely by the algorithms, with text being generated from computer hybridisation of the Google archive of all known books All that a "writer/user" needed to do was to enter the name of a character, a location, the genre and a list of titles within the genre that he or she would ideally like the book to resemble (in much the same way that one would create an internet dating profile for oneself). The algorithms then generated the characters and narrative, according to the page-by-page systems used in the designing of film scripts in the era of the last days of Hollywood and popularised by many "how-to-write-scripts" online courses and apps. This took the idea of formulaic novels one step further by actually discovering formulas present within novels and reduplicating them. Algorithmic novels also performed better in the market as they were re-edited automatically to factor in audience appreciation levels according to previous successes.

Further plug-ins allowed the book to be written in the style of an existing author. One such title was Twilight and the Sea, which constructed a new vampire romance with the authorial voice of Ernest Hemingway. The populace in the 2030s greatly enjoyed algorithm-generated writing and believed that it took the backache and lonely slog out of the enterprise of both writing and reading (taking on average a mere 10 minutes to generate an 80,000-word title). Not only that but an "author" could, for a small additional payment, generate many variables of stories and authorial styles and test them all to see which one would be a hit, before chosing which title to take a gamble on and then of course mash them up: an example of this was the algorithm-generated series: 72,000 Shades of Sodom Success, which analysed and merged the authorial styles of De Sade, EL James and Brazil's most powerful businessman, to mashup the content of 120 Days of Sodom, Fifty Shades of Grey and 12 Steps to Financial Success, thus generating 72,000 new titles from all the variables (120 x 50 x 12). The result of all of this is that titles were written by computers and then barely read by their own audience, an audience who nonetheless wanted to have been seen to have read the title and who "shared" their "like" of that title – it was rumoured also that the majority of Likes and Shares that these received on social media were also fake, created by bots and persons paid to generate fake Likes and Shares

6. Twenty tears of Stagnation

Due to algorithms, demonetisation and piracy, by the 2030s, western culture had effectively ground to a halt. No new fiction was created at all. The bestseller lists (and the vast majority of the unsuccessfuls) consisted of second-generation work. In music and film it was the same.

So why was this death spiral of creativity so inevitable in all art forms? I recalled that Francis Fukuyama in his book, The End of History and the Last Man (1989), depicted late capitalism under western liberal democracy as the bittersweet but triumphant end point of History. He claimed "The end of history will be a very sad time" in which all of our conflicts had been resolved, not by revolution or courageous ideological battle, but by economic calculation and the satisfaction of consumer demand. A banal peace. A cyclic eternal present. One of the unexpected consequences of this would be that cultural production would grind to a halt. "In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history." To my alarm, Fukuyama was proved right and this explained why in 2043 Hermione Granger and Edward Cullen were revered as demi-gods. This perpetual caretaking of a stagnant archive however seemed to satisfy the older generation as it proved to them that they had lived through the greatest moment in human history; they were perfectly happy to see its highlights replayed over and over, no matter how much this strangled future cultural production.

Many even tried to justify it by using eco-cliches, talking about the "recycling" of culture in positive ways. I dug deeper into the history of the twenty-teens and discovered the economic root to the stagnation of culture. While the great era of cultural innovation (the 20th century) was superceded by the great era of tech innovation, what made the tech revolution so powerful was precisely its parasitic dependence on the cultural era before it (and the 100-year investment that had gone into it and which was called modernism). The mass of consumers after 2010 would only buy their expensive new smart-tech-pads and tablets on the condition that these systems provided free unlimited access to the entire archive of previous cultural commodities – all films, music, books etc. In our blindness in 2013, we took only tokenistic steps to prevent this cannibalisation of culture by tech companies. As Silicon Valley did not invest in the creation of any new culture and their businesses grew larger than those of the cultural content creators, forcing them into austerity and conservatism, the problem of who exactly would or could invest in new content arose. It was however masked by the euphoria of the binge years of free digital content, with consumers believing that the reserves of nearly a millennium of culture, could last indefinitely in rehashed forms. By 2043, in a pattern similar to that of the exhaustion of cheap oil reserves, the well of culture had been drained dry. All of this could have been avoided if we had paid attention to Jaron Lanier back in 2010. In You are Not a Gadget he (citing a Bear Stearns report) claimed that Silicon Valley believed that "content from identifiable humans would no longer matter and the chattering of the crowd with itself was a better business bet than paying people to make movies, books and music". By the time he published Who Owns the Future? the evidence was mounting that this analysis was correct and that action had to be taken to prevent impending disaster.

But the west failed to take heed and by 2032 it had forfeited its former role as the leader in cultural creation, and for that matter as evangelist and engine of cultural freedom. It would take another 11 years for the culture to recover from the aftermath of the digital revolution. And it did, or at least it began to. I shall explain how in the second part of this series.

Next week: Peace - cultural life returns after 2043