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The White Teeth author on the pleasures of foreign fiction, millennial tales and the influence of Roald Dahl
The book I am currently readingThe Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. It’s 700 pages long – I’ve been reading it for a while. If a book’s importance is gauged by how effectively it describes the world we’re in, and how much potential it has to change said world, then in my view it’s easily the most important book to be published this century. I find it hard to take any young activist seriously who hasn’t at least familarised themselves with Zuboff’s central ideas. How can we live in the digital age and yet still be so innocent as to what that really means? Zuboff is concerned with the largest act of capitalist colonisation ever attempted, but the colonisation is of our minds, our behaviour, our free will, our very selves. Yet it’s not an anti-tech book. It’s anti unregulated capitalism, red in tooth and claw. It’s really this generation’s Das Kapital. Or should be. The whole argument is that there’s nothing inevitable about the ways in which the technology has been exploited. There could have been another way. There still might be.
The book I wish I’d writtenJust a better version of any of my own. Continue reading...