I recently finished an interesting dystopian novel called QualityLand, by Marc-Uwe Kling, a German author. I expect an English translation to appear soon. The book is something like a cross between Netflix’s “Black Mirror” and Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. By that, I mean that it’s a humorous, continuous story that follows, roughly, three separate story lines that become intertwined, it’s funny, and it has little bits of marketing thrown in, but ultimately, the implications of what it’s saying about technology are terrifying.

The premise is fairly simple: a certain country decided that it needed to re-brand itself because it had done some “bad” things in the past. The country is implied to be Germany, of course (though what has Germany ever done to anyone?). They rebranded themselves QualityLand and changed everything to completely destroy their history (including teaching it – history classes were replaced by “future studies” classes, because they were more popular when sampled and generally made people feel happier). Everyone’s last name is the name of the profession of their parent of the same sex, which can lead to interesting combinations like “Peter Unemployed” (the main character in one story line), “Melissa Sex Worker”, or “Sandra Admin”.

Everything has to use the superlative in QualityLand, so it is the best country in the world (all other countries are called QuantityLand and given a number to distinguish them). Smart cars take people where they want to go (and get offended if you’re not polite to them). Robot drones deliver everything from TheShop before you even know you want them. Everything is recorded for “Everybody”, the social network, so when the drones deliver you packages from TheShop they ask if you’d like them to record an unboxing video to post to your feed at Everybody.

As the story progresses, it highlights the problems that the Internet, AI and a technological marketplace are creating. It notes the tendency in high tech for a “winner takes all” quasi-monopolistic outcome; once a company reaches a critical mass, its competitors die and it assumes its place as the “only” company people use for, say, social media, or video content, or online shopping.

It also starts to ask uncomfortable questions about the algorithms that choose what we see in the first place, whether as the result of a search at Google or shopping at Amazon. Are we choosing, or are they shaping us based on what they are showing us? It briefly highlights the political aspect of the problem by noting that people are living in bubbles of thought conformity, but learning only takes place when we encounter ideas different from our own and debate them.

More disturbingly, it shows how everything is becoming commercialized and optimized based on user preferences. The idea that history is no longer taught because it doesn’t play well in tests leads to the perverse situation in which classic literature is rewritten to suit popular demand. This is highlighted well by an advertisement for The Diary of Anne Frank, which tells us that she and her family are hiding from Nazis (the same ones from Hitler! – The Musical, the tragic love story of Ado & Eva, two controversial figures from world history) for four years, after which they return to their lives and Anne gets a long-awaited pony. There’s also the Bible, which contains this excerpt (more or less - I'm not geographically near my copy right now to check for an exact citation):

Jehovah said, “Jesus, what did Mary tell you about your father?” Jesus replied, “She told me enough – she told me you killed him!” Jehovah thundered from the Heavens, “No, Jesus, I am your father.”

Going beyond these highly plausible near future abominations, the story begins to ask about what would ever stop a “Strong AI” from developing, an AI that would itself become like God because it would have access to every camera hooked up to the Internet, all information on the Internet and all the predictive algorithms. Would it try to create a paradise for humanity, or perhaps a Hell to punish people for perceived faults (machines don’t make mistakes, after all)? Or even if it tried to create a paradise, wouldn’t it just become a Hell for people? It’s a slightly different take on The Matrix, with the added question: given that every country wants to have a technological edge, how would humanity stop this from happening even if it wanted to?

The questions are mostly left unanswered, but there is an interesting and mostly humorous story to be told, and the book was released in two versions, a “dark” version and a “light” version. The main story is the same in both, but the news shorts that intersperse the main story are different (you can then go to the book’s website to read the “other” stories). It’s just a question of whether you’re optimistic or pessimistic about the future.

It was a very engaging book. I’ve been very, very busy recently but I still made time to read this book because I couldn’t put it down. I highly recommend it. I would give it ten stars out of ten using the QualityLand rating matrix.