Travel Documents 120: Danse Mecanique
Genre: sci-fi, near-future, social change, cultural change
The Dust Cover Copy
Divaloids—performing software robots—fill the world. They sing. They dance. They bring their audiences to their feet screaming for more. You can see them in concert or in the privacy of your home. Watch them at corporate functions or select private meetings.
Of them, the most famous is Dot. She has fan clubs, discussion groups, caravans of people following her concerts like perpetual gypsies.
But the divaloids cannot write their own material. Everything they do reflects someone else’s creative work. That was true for Dot 1.0. Dot 2.0 is an experiment. She can write her own songs and drive them home with all of Dot 1.0’s powers.
Dot 1.0 did what she was told. Dot 2.0 has other ideas.
The Scene
Worldbuilding
In our near future, the cars drive themselves, the cameras check your gait to see if you’re drunk at work, and getting you to make little consumer-preference changes is an arms race with all the best and brightest in the game.
But that isn’t where this story starts. It starts with one musician. He fixes other folks’ music for a living these days. One day, an old flame shows up with some interesting music.
Turns out it’s written by a divaloid
A divaloid who might just have figured out how to think for herself. Her name is Dot, and she knows she’s being used to manipulate her audience. She’s okay with that part. Thing is, she doesn’t want to manipulate them to buy this or that. She’d rather get them to be better, happier people.
And this is where it gets interesting.
Right at the perfect time, we get a book about what it looks like when AI steps into our most cherished realms: art. Music. Decision making. Discernment.
Is it good?
No.
Is it bad?
Also no.
Is it thought provoking?
Oh hell yes. And sometimes chilling. In fact, some of the most chilling sequences I’ve ever read come out of this book. For instance:
“
Advertising finds a homogenous group of people holding a particular set of attitudes amenable to the goal. Then, bombards them with a statistically favorable set of images: women. Men. Chinese white-collar workers in Nigeria. Persuasion targets a set of traits that can comprise a collection of one to many individuals and molds those traits in the desired direction.”
Abby blinked. “I don’t get the difference.”
Ima thought for a moment. “Let’s say I have a candidate running for office. If I’m in advertising, I look for a population of people that could support him. I narrow them down by demographics, income level, location and tailor several ads in multiple markets to motivate them to vote for my candidate. If I’m in persuasion for that same candidate, I look for traits that incline people to vote for him. Then, I dispatch a set of agents to track the evidence of the traits and engineer targeted ads, rumors, and social media articles that encourage those attitudes. Monitoring those attitudes to see if they gain favor. Then, when I have those attitudes at the right intensity, then I target ads for the candidate towards those attitudes. The people that contain those attitudes are just vessels of the traits I’m marketing towards.”
“People don’t matter,” said Abby slowly. “Just the traits—the attitudes—that you find useful.”
This the setup. Sounds familiar, yeah? It could have been the setup for a horror flick. Shades of Hal are murmuring implacably in the back of your mind, right?
Nope! Out of all these stock robots-attack horror movie parts, Popkes crafts an incredible anthem of self-determination, redemption songcraft, community, and candles burning in the dark like fireflies.
The Crowd
Characterization
Now for the performers. Take one washed-up rock and roll band. One sentient performance-optimization program. One earnestly striving Corporate climber. One family not only on the rocks but falling off the cliff. One sweet and principled house wife. One guy battling mental illness and loving nature. And a whole country full of people yearning for community, belonging, and a song to sing.
Mix them together, and you get…something amazing.
The story is, in the main, told from three rotating points of view:
Jake
Former Singer for Persons Unknown, present singer for Dot’s new band. Former raging jackass and self-absorbed rock’n’roll asshat. Present stellar musician, Gloomy Gus, and okay guy.
John
A guy who, at the start of his story, is failing in all his roles: husband, factory worker, dad, functional adult. But changes are coming.
Ima
The quintessential Striving Corporate Lady. Keeps trying to shut the door on a dysfunctional family but can’t quite do it. Has a lovely little wife waiting for her at home. Gets an earful from the little wife when she honestly and earnestly explains she doesn’t see the difference between showing a brand for sale and guaranteeing blocs of voters for sale via algorithms that can actually manipulate thought at the reptile-brain level. Scary in her lack of insight, her earnest belief she’s doing nothing bad, and her genuine urge to succeed.
Through these three sets of eyes, we see near-contemporary technology, society, humanity, and everything that goes into creating a successful concert tour. We see the work of the musicians, the tricks of the advertisers, and the faces of the audience. Everyone is there for something. Some want to be a success. Some need a boost. Some just need an escape.
Whatever they want or need, whether they’re playing or partaking, everyone gets something from the music.
Writing Style
The style is spare and clean, relying on its characters to tell you what’s going on. But stick with it, and will unfold like an origami piece to show you wonderful things.
By using the three chosen points of view, Popkes is able to do three styles really: Jake’s tones are light and clean and arid as Arizona. But in them is as much hidden life as the desert at midnight. Ima’s parts are even more spartan, clean as fine china, but full of cracks that have been filled with language gold. And John’s sections are the most colloquial and accessible for a general reader, if sometimes the most painful to read. Popkes is able to orchestrate a medley of emotions and mindsets worthy of the best concerts using these three leitmotifs. Each one is understandable in its own context, and empathetic, even when it makes you shiver. Ima, in particular, made me cringe, because I have a drive in myself that I could see warping as hers does. And the scary thing is, if you’re warped enough, what you’re thinking seems perfectly normal. Take this little sample of her thought process:
“Sales was entirely an act of persuasion. So was politics. So was business. A continuing arms race between who was better at it. It was a continuum. If it was morally acceptable at one end, it had to be morally acceptable at the other, right?”
The other end of the continuum being, in this case, a program behind a performing puppet that chooses a handful of representative folks in the crowd, judges their every shade of notice and attention, and devotes every iota of vast computational power to keeping them absolutely engaged. And then tracks their activity across purchasing platforms, web browsers, and everyday acts to see if the performance has a lasting impact."
But Ima isn’t a bad person. And that’s what really makes the reader shiver.
Seeing through Jake’s eyes allows us to explore the fraught arena of the modern artist and their relationship with tech, as well as the underlying incentives other humans use to disenfranchise them and then dare to say ‘well, it’s the tech’. It also paints a wonderful picture of redemption, redirection, and turning it all around.
And seeing through John’s eyes allows us to be in the audience too: in the shoes of Everyman. The world isn’t hard on you, it just doesn’t give a damn about you. Work isn’t great, and then you get canned. The marrige isn’t great. Sometimes it feels so pointless that all you want is oblivion. Maybe nothing matters. Maybe you don’t. But then the right song comes at the right time, and you open your eyes, and there in front of you are roads to somewhere you haven’t been. Maybe you take them. Maybe you want to. Maybe there’s something worth it after all. That’s your choice. The song just got you to open your eyes.
In John, Modern Western Man’s collective sense that something important—call it community, or purpose, or dignity'—has been lost is explored in all its impotent and corrosive rage.
And then an option is offered for making meaning again.
So far, we’ve got a nice danceable ensemble. But then Popkes makes the work profound by changing key from third person to first person near the last third of the book and looking at the whole thing through the eyes of Olivia: a keyboardist who’s used to being in the background, a woman stepping into the limelight for the first time. And with that virtuoso move, Popkes nails every emotional note the story was working for.
The Moves
Plot
Moving through stages of group cohesion, bonding, vulnerability, connection, community, and finally freedom to become more than they have been, this is a story of self discovery, self-forgiveness, community healing and anti-corporate mass action you’ve got to check out.
Overall Rating
A story that starts quiet and builds as the very best music should. A triumph of soul over software, and of possibility over probability. Whether you’re having a hard time, you’re into the philosophic elements of human/AI hybrid collaboration and the corporate co-opting of both, or you’re a big music fan, you’ll want to put in the headphones and check this one out.