One thing Stephenson does super well is take subjects that are inherently very interesting and make them boring

Realmente me sorprendió muy gratamente. El autor ya veía venir hace 16 años lo que iba a pasar en la política mundial con las Fake News y la intromisión de la Big Data en las campañas electorales. Una excelente trama que te mantiene atrapado. Muy recomendable

tPublished in 1994, and probably written at least a few years before that, Neal Stephenson’s “Interface” shows some remarkable prescience with respect to our contemporary political era in presidential politics (circa end of 2020), which for me on that merit alone, adds an extra point in the ratings.

It’s a story that involves an unpopular incumbent president, and a presidential election, where the “come-from-behind” frontrunner is an elderly politician who just suffered from a stroke (kept secret to the public/media), but through some fantastical (and tangible) set of technologies, is able to speak well again (and more...), and who picks as running mate, an “straight-talk” African American woman, who herself rose from obscurity, after video clips of her speaking up to a racist politician “goes viral” in the public (this was before the notion of “going viral” was a thing, but it’s essentially what happens in the story).

One of Stephenson’s earlier books (it was originally not published under his real name from my understanding), “Interface” anticipates much of Stephenson’s future writings like Cryptonomicon, and the “Baroque Cycle” trilogy, especially in verbiage, style, and plot elements. Most pronounced here are two kinds of plot-elements: 1. The clever stringing of contemporary technologies to do something apparently fantastical 2. The existence of a “system” or collective/conspiracy of coordinated actors who are aiming to accomplish some goal. Also, perhaps more negatively, what is also present, like with almost all of Stephenson’s books (that I’ve read), is his inability to “write” in the perspective of different characters. So whatever the character may be, a rich industrialist, a politician, or an ordinary voter, they all “seem” like the same voice, this is especially noticeable during narrations if the character is getting “analytical” (almost all of Stephenson’s characters are analytical, even if you would not expect them to be…). So much so, that after reading any one of his novels, I get the feeling that I was sitting in a room of data scientist or strategy consultants talking over some random topic (it’s also why his books are especially popular for the tech-nerd crowd who likely don’t realize ordinary people don’t talk/think this way).

Given that I read this book in an election year (2020), it was especially timely for me as Stephenson hits hard upon the theme of data analytics to understand voter sentiment. After the 2016 election, most of the public is now familiar with now infamous names like “Cambridge Analytica” and the various “telemetry” shops that seek to combine disparate data points to better score individual people and score them on propensity to support this-or-that position (or vote for this or that party), but in the early 90s, I suspect this notion was much less well known. There were always political polling shops, but Stephenson takes that concept and augments it heavily with ‘over-the-horizon’ technology. Enter Cy Olge, the campaign manager for William Cozzonno (the come-from-behind politician who just got a stroke), and who’s polling shop is now leveraging two interesting pieces of technology 1. A massive data-mining operation that aims to cluster the electorate into one of over 100+ different ‘personas’ 2. To connect subsets of the population with an electronic watch, that will help siphon their preferences into a server so that they could analyze it and use it for … some purpose (can’t mention that since that’s a spoiler).

Again, Stephenson doesn’t use the term “clustering” or “personas”, concepts that are familiar now to the data scientist working in this field, but this is essentially what he’s writing about. Now the methodology by which he proposes this system operates is clearly wrong. Without going into details, Olge’s shop is housed right next to the Pentagon City Mall (though it’s referred to as “Pentagon Plaza” in the book, perhaps a previous name?) in “Pentagon Towers” (I’m 99% certain this is what is now known as “Metro Tower” today -which ironically now houses a branch office of the RAND corporation), and part of the way they obtain their ‘cluster’ is that they have staff go out to the mall and “pick out” people, and although the Pentagon City Mall is a tourist trap, and would definitely contain many different kinds of people, from different parts of the country, geographically sampling from that location alone would not be sufficient to build the proposed system.

Further, the way Stephenson proposes to extract the sentiment from his sample, is a combination of EEG and issue/opinion testing, and although I’m not a neuroscientist, I suspect his proposed system does not have the statistical power, in a formal sense, to discern much of anything when connecting the electrograph data to complex concept-level things like emotions/sentiment, but still fundamentally, what he’s proposing is akin to the kind of AB-testing that websites now do regularly as a matter of course in our contemporary era. In a certain light however, the timelessness (at the high-level) of this plot point is either impressive, or sad (because of how little the mode of humanity has changed in 30 years).

Similar to this point, there are certain character types that Stephenson has leveraged which is also timeless (unfortunately) is the use of the wily, rural, gun-loving, conspiracy-nut. Although this stereotype has existed for well over half a century now, Stephenson’s integration of this stereotype could have been taken right out of the today’s headlines (again sadly).

Overall, pretty satisfied with this book from Stephenson. For a book written when George H.W. Bush was president, he posited the eventually evolution of things like data-shops, machine learning in politics (though not put in those terms), the use of mobile devices to track people (he predicted the mobile computer would be a watch, and obviously the mobile computer took the morphology of the phone in reality), and other more fantastical things that have not come to pass (yet). Sure, most of these things were not that hard to anticipate as they are natural evolutions of previously existing methods/technologies, but Stephenson wrote them in such a way that reading this book 30 years hence, it does not feel very dated. Recommend.

Neal Stephenson & J. Frederick George teamed up to write Interface in 1994, and the result is unquestionably a product of that era of American politics. Seen from the modern perspective (as is often the case with "outdated" science fiction), Interface tells us a great deal more about the era in which it was written than it does about the future.

Very early in the book, during the rising action, campaign strategist Cy Ogle (a James Carville/Karl Rove/Fu Manchu hybrid) says the following, which captures the book's political world perfectly:

"We are in the Age of Scrutiny. A public figure must withstand the scrutiny of the media," Ogle said. "The President is the ultimate public figure and must stand up under ultimate scrutiny; he is like a man stretched out on a rack in the public square in some medieval @!$%#hole of a town, undergoing the rigors of the Inquisition. Like the medieval trial by ordeal, the Age of Scrutiny sneers at rational inquiry and debate, and presumes that mere oaths and protestations are deceptions and lies. The only way to discover the real truth is by the rite of the ordeal, which exposes the subject to such inhuman strain that any defect in his character wil cause him to crack wide open, like a flawed diamond. It is a mystical procedure that skirts rationality, which is seen as the work of the Devil, instead drawing down a higher, ineffable power. Like the Roman haruspex who foretold the outcome of a battle, not by analyzing the strengths of the opposing forces by groping through steaming guts of a slaughtered ram, we seek to establish a candidate's fitness for office by pinning him under the lights of a television studio and counting the number of times he blinks his eyes in a minute, deconstructing his use of eye contact, monitoring his gesticulations - whether his hands are held open or closed, toward or away from the camera, spread open forthcomingly or clenched like grasping claws."

This lengthy monologue is typical of the book, which was published before the Lewinsky scandal and before 9/11. The story is an artifact of an era where both parties were so close to center that there was no telling them apart, so the only thing that mattered was showmanship. In various tones and forms, the reader will be reminded of this political reality over and over again.

The story itself is, as mentioned above, a rehash of the Manchurian Candidate, with a twist. Independent presidential candidate William Cozzano has had a stroke, and his miraculous recovery is due to computer chips in his brain that are being tweaked by a nefarious transnational conspiracy. Effectively, Cozzano is under remote control, saying the best thing at any given moment. Meanwhile, a new "instant polling" technology reads the emotional reactions of a sample of voters in real time, so Cozzano literally respond to their concerns instantaneously. As the back of the book puts it: "Forget issues. Forget policy. Cozzano is more than the perfect candidate. He's a special effect."

This central storyline forms the spine of the book, but the narrative focus shifts constantly. At least ten characters wear the "protagonist" hat over the course of the book, which runs in many directions at once and takes a long time to get any momentum. Parts of the book resemble the very best passages of Cryptonomicon, racing at breakneck speed through really gripping subject matter. Others feel like the most amateurish moments in Stephenson's much rougher Zodiac. Whether this irregularity is due to Stephenson's relative inexperience at the time (he is clearly a much better writer now) or due to the collaboration with George is impossible to tell.

The story's narrative drive is equally irregular. Some characters (especially antagonists) are introduced but never elaborated upon, dropping like loose threads. The "main story" of the book doesn't even begin to take recognizable form until at least 1/3 of the way through the book, leaving the reader wondering in the early sections what the point of this or that tangent is. Usually, that point becomes clear over time, but not always.

Perhaps most annoying is the book's slightly self-righteous tone, especially when combined with how dated and naive its depiction of politics is. There is no question that money and media remain the deciding factors in a candidate's election, but the idea that there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans was a myth from the Culture Wars. As relevant as the monologue above remains to the electoral process, it can't be the whole story, as recent election suggest. Americans do care about issues and about policy.

Despite these problems, Interface is still an amusing political thriller. Its unevenness does make it hard to predict (which is something of a plus), and ever stodgy passage is matched by a gripping one. Parts of it are brilliant. Anyone who likes their political thrillers light on the politics or their science fiction light on the science will find this book entertaining. It's a good book. But it is far from great.

Back in 1994, Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George (writing jointly under the pseudonym Stephen Bury) wrote a political thriller based on a sci-fi "what if" scenario. What if there was a technology that let people know exactly what other people thought about things? What they were scared of. What they longed for. What they liked and disliked. What if a that technology were then placed in the hands of a political consultant who knew what to do with it and didn't mind getting his hands dirty, so to speak. What if he could then tailor his candidate's message on a microlevel to make it appeal to as many people as possible? The result would be a campaign that looks for all intents and purposes like it's totally unorthodox. It breaks the rules, but it somehow keeps winning against all odds.

Of course, in 1994 it was impossible to think that people would hand this power over to someone else without a cost. In the novel (Interface), the political hacks cull through a huge subsection of the country, breaking it down into 100 basic subtypes of citizens. They then find a "best representative" of each of those subtypes and pay them $10,000 to watch political programming with a sensor attached to their arm that will then tell the hacks what each person thinks of what they see.

Today, this is just called "social media," and people do all of it for free. They're just thrilled to see people care about what they think on a variety of topics. While the novel takes it perhaps a notch or two beyond what is completely plausible, the framework of the concept is strong and illustrative of just the sort of power these companies can wield now. Not just Facebook, either. Google can have a huge impact on what people think based on what they have show up in search results. Wikipedia can literally make millions of people believe something just by changing a few paragraphs on its site. Whether these companies are using these "powers" for good or evil is up for debate, but the fact that power exists shouldn't be.

I enjoyed the book a great deal. It had been recommended by Cory Doctorow at last year's Maine Library Association conference, so it took me a bit to get to, but I was glad to finally read it when I did. As I said, there are times when I felt like it went a bit too far, straining credulity in places beyond what my typical willing suspension of disbelief is up to, but the set up behind it all was still so compelling that I didn't mind that much.

Definitely worth a read if the topic interests you.

Interesting for the most part, but some things happen near the end that just seem kind of dumb. Seemed like so many better ways of handling the antagonist organization and the story around the political system then the path they chose to tell. That was a significant let down for me.

Prescient and gripping.

Приятно все же сознавать, насколько мы продвинулись за последние четверть века — вполне на собственной памяти, — читая такие книжки. В нем все «прото-» — прото-нёрды, прото-нанотехнологии, прото-политтехнологии. Читается прям как антропологический экскурс в прошлое. Но потом догоняет и накрывает Пинчон-паранойей, и на текст подсаживаешься, хотя (а может, и потому, что) роман скроен по лекалам и рецептам коммерческого чтива: главы умоподъемной длины, сцены чередуются в своем алгоритме, фигуры умолчания создают саспенс и подгоняют вперед, фонового знания дается в меру, экшн не раздражает.
Фантастики как таковой тут тоже не очень есть, вернее она — «ближнего действия по-американски», а не по-советски: т.е. все этот вполне вероятно и допустимо. Обложка да, не врет — это честный политический триллер с циничными персонажами, которые отлично знают, что делают, и умеют работать, а лучше таких персонажей я не знаю, что может быть. И еще «Интерфейс» — превосходный взгляд на то, из чего состоит «тело американской политики», о котором узнаешь больше, чем из газетных новостей (вот, я опять откатился к метафоре четвертьвековой давности — ну кто сейчас читает газеты? из фидов каких-нибудь, конечно).
Квасным патриотам читать его, конечно, совершенно бесполезно, они и слов таких не знают, как «выборы»: зазор между американским политическим сознанием и его русским отсутствием по-прежнему непреодолим. Хотя практически все фигуры на русских политических горизонтах — уже давно не люди, а спецэффекты, поэтому поди знай.

...оп-па. вот они его и не читают. на русском этого романа, оказывается, не существует.

Collaborative novels rarely in my experience enhance the gifts of a talented author. At the risk of being tedious, I refer to Sven Birkerts essay " 'The Fate of the Book' ", which ponders the future of discourse as we move from a literary culture to a mass-media culture. Mass-media (film, radio, etc) are never the products of a singular voice, but the products of collaboration, cooperation, and compromise. As we see more and more collaborative works of fiction, we can be sure that the act of reading them is not a communion with another singular soul, but the consumption of a product meant merely to entertain. Writers collaborating as equals form their own focus group; what is deep, complex and difficult to convey is neglected in favor of what can be expressed in simple, functional language. Style is on the chopping block here, and when it is gone so too will literature be gone.
So. This collaboration between Stephenson and (I believe) an uncle of his is mere entertainment, and though there are flashes of Stephenson's insight and comedic wit, they don't make the whole into something more.

Quite entertaining and full of grandeur but Trump's presidency undid the thrill. Why go to such great lengths when a lying orange blob of protoplasm full of stupidity could easily be a president? Why bother with all this tech?

This is an older book, 1994, by Stephenson and Frederick George. It deals with politics. It is in the best interest of certain multibillionaire international figures if the President of the US is not an idiot. The current president threatens to default on the national debt, which would not be good for those who hold the debt. Therefore, when he comes up for reelection, the hidden powers come up with a scheme which will guarantee the election of their chosen candidate. After the governor of Illinois has a stroke, they offer him a cure for the damage in the form of a chip which can be implanted in his brain to bypass and retrain the stroked out area. It works, but with an interesting side effect, they can have a measure of control over his brain.
This sounds hokey, but except for a little science fiction, it is extremely well thought out and researched. The medicine is actually very well done and the politics is amazingly applicable now. Gridlock in congress, no one willing to address the increasing debt, government by political poll.

Very good book.

Re-reading this one, inspired by the current state of US politics, I find it has uncanny echoes of the current situation. Believable and frightening. You've read the blurb so not point in repeating, the story is largely about mind control (direct or through the media) but what they don't tell you is the major subplot of Vishniak. An unashamed redneck representative of a voting class they term "economic roadkill", Vishniak is far brighter and more dedicated than the manipulators give him credit for. He becomes, ironically, a violent, sociopathic defender of the American political system. The book shifts between near-future SF, creepy prophesy and wry political satire. Highly recommended.