Adam Boulton Diary – Forget ghosts and demons this Halloween, fake news and big tech are the things to fear
We are now in the approach to Hallowe’en, or “the spooky season” as TV anchors in America like to call it when introducing reports about pumpkin spice latte, costume parties or alleged hauntings. We Britons more typically – and paradoxically – associate our ghost stories with Christmas. Dickens and Scrooge must be to blame.
Either way, as the clocks go back and the days shorten towards the Winter solstice, the darkness descends, stirring our fearful imaginings. To nurture them the English author John Lanchester has just published a new collection of disturbing tales for the digital age: Reality and Other Stories.
Lanchester’s books do not have a common theme. His first, The Debt to Pleasure, about a villainous epicure won a Whitbread Prize while falling into the poorly regarded category of belles-lettres. He has become more worldly since. After the 2007/2008 financial crisis he produced two volumes, one fiction and the other non-fiction. Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No-one Can Pay tried to explain what had happened in layman’s terms. The novel Capital, which dramatized the impact of a banker’s family, was turned into a peak time TV series starring Toby Jones. His dystopian fantasy The Wall was long listed for the booker prize in 2019. It seems to pre-figure some of the Home Secretary Priti Patel’s ideas for wave machines and floating barrages to keep out migrants.
So why turn to screens, the contemporary technology which gives us wi-fi, mobile phones, data sticks and constantly online Big Brother? And why mix it up all with the uncanny? Lanchester believes the gizmos we carry in our pockets and put on our laps are “magic” and because the sphere they create is “ubiquitous and instantaneous”, they are too powerful for us to control. “Our primitive brains are no match for the godlike technology that dominates and manipulates our lives.”
Every news cycle brings in stories which were not possible twenty years ago, starting with @realDonaldTrump’s Twitter stream. Just in the past week the government announced plans to toughen laws against using mobile phones while driving. The FBI claimed Iran and Russia abused the internet to plant fake stories to influence the US Election. Multiple US intelligence agencies have been ordered to comb through the contents of an old hard drive alleged to belong to Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son. The European Commission lots its case to claim back tax from the tech giants. And Joan Donovan at Harvard’s Kennedy School published The Media Manipulation Handbook detailing the failures of journalists, tech companies, politicians, police and watch dogs to counter online liars seeking to influence us.
What is death when we all leave a digital record of images and words behind us? Never mind what I am saying now, the life I am actually living, if you can divert attention to contrived arguments about what I have done in the past. We can now all listen routinely to voices from the grave – not just old performers, but more intimately in our voice mail.
Trump was one of the first to grasp the opportunities offered by this fragmentation of reality. He brands any facts he dislikes “fake news” and offers instead “alternative facts”, in the words of his long-time aide Kellyanne Conway. She spoke as the Trump administration used its very first day in office to dispute the observable reality of how many people turned out to witness his inauguration. It’s no longer a question of a lie getting half-way round the world before truth has got its boots on. Now a lie can get everywhere in real time.
When you can’t trust reality, or don’t want to believe it, there is an opening for fantasy, conspiracy theories, and even the supernatural to get in. Lanchester’s stories are a long way from the strongman deceptions promulgated by the likes of Trump, Putin, Kim Jong Un and President Xi. He prefers to haunt the traditional settings for British ghost stories first mapped out by M R James a hundred years ago and now faithfully reproduced on TV each Christmas: academia, country houses, condemned cells and, these days, recording studios. They are all good places to lose a grip on reality.
M R James’ stories were usually about unleashing, often digging up, something nasty from the past. In common with Charlie Brooker and Black Mirror, Lanchester is fearful of what the future is revealing. His title story Reality leaves the sexy but vapid young people in a Love Island-style villa waiting for something to happen and wondering if they are already “I-N-H-E-L-L”. Another of Lanchester’s ghosts died at the wheel while searching for a mobile phone connection.
The banal can be spooky and sometimes even uncomfortably funny because it connects to ordinary human experience. If you haven’t seen it yet I recommend the current run of Alex strips in the Daily Telegraph, featuring ghostly fatalities of Covid unable to give up the businessman’s commute into the City.
Lanchester says we all love our phones and love them the more now after the confinement caused by the Covid outbreak. When I interviewed him about his book on Sky News, he pointed out that our previous conversations had been in person, now we were meeting on screen, virtually. After the programme I realised that I had left my phone at home. Being out of contact without it all weekend was impossible. Instead of heading to the station, I trudged back home grumpily to fetch it, even more grumpy that my many extra “steps” that day would not be recorded in my health app.
The reality is that we are already ghosts held captive and abused by our machines all year round, not just in Spooky Season.
Reality and Other Stories by John Lanchester is published by Faber and Faber and is available now.