Everything is more than one thing: The surveillance state and the role of the reader in Nick Harkaway's novel "Gnomon"

This was never about what it seemed to be about, not high tales or state secrets or even love. It was always about you and me and the channel we have opened between us, from my self to yours...What is the difference between a person and a book? We can know the truth of neither. -Nick Harkaway, Gnonom

Nick Harkaway's dystopian novel Gnomon came to me much like the proverbial master who appears when the student is ready. I had just decided to make a clean break for a while from so-called "literary fiction." I hadn't read a lot of sci-fi in my life, but what I had read had left a strong impression on me, so I decided to try some more. When I heard about Gnomon from a Washington Post review that described it as being set in the near future in which the state (England, in this case) has achieved near total surveillance of its citizens, I was sold. I have more than a passing interest in the subject of surveillance.

The interesting but standard sci-fi frame story

For the first chapter, I got pretty much what I expected. There is the unveiling of England's surveillance system, dubbed "Witness," which is the main security protocol propping up what is simply called "The System." The Witness isn't just surveillance of communications. There are cameras and more sophisticated sensors everywhere. Unlike Orwell's society of cameras, though, the feed from those cameras isn't going to human monitors of the state. It's being fed to computer algorithms that are part of Witness. The algorithms are very accurate. They can read tiny human expressions. They can read our scents. They can spot trouble before it happens. Life is very, very safe. Moreover, it does not seem to have made life drab and bleak, as in 1984.

Except that The System was unexpectedly unsafe one day for a woman who died in Witness custody. The death shocks England, because Witness just does not make mistakes.

The dead woman, Diana Hunter--and if you think that name is heavily symbolic, you ain't seen nothing yet--was one of the few people Witness couldn't figure out. When the computer can't decide whether someone is a threat to society--because humans are so illogical sometimes, it still defies even the most advanced analysis--human inspectors of the Witness are called in. Mielikki Neith is that inspector.

Diana was subjected, against her strongly stated will, to direct brain readings from Witness. But she fought. She fought and fought until she died. Neith must find out why she died.

The freaky-deaky deeper story

Neith learns about the Hunter case by reading the file, which here means she watches what the computers saw when they looked inside Hunter's brain. Well, not just watches them. She thinks what Hunter was thinking, with Hunter's thoughts super-imposed inside Neith's own head. And therein lies the open door to the whole plot, and the great difficulty of being an inspector of the Witness. Because in thinking the thoughts of others, inspectors of the Witness are susceptible to having their own pattern of thinking change--their "connectome," to use the technical term for the pattern of wiring in the brain. In small ways, inspectors become the people they investigate. So Neith does all kinds of exercises to keep the real world and the dream world separate for her.

Hunter, in order to beat the system, had developed an elaborate string of fictions in her head. This is a common technique amateurs in this society try to employ in order to beat the Witness, but Witness is never fooled for long. Hunter was unusual in that she was able to defeat it for a very long time. Hunter employed four overlapping narratives in her head, narratives that wrapped back in on each other, reinforcing one another and frustrating the machine's attempts to co-opt her own thinking. Neith calls this the "Scheherazade Gambit." The four stories in Hunter's head are:

• A Greek sex fiend/math genius/investment portfolio manager, who has a close encounter with a shark on vacation and then after seems to have a shark god inside his own mind. 

• Berihun Bekele, An Ethiopian painter who was rescued from mediocrity when he suddenly had divine visions that he painted. He became famous, but was later imprisoned by the Derg, the brutal regime that ruled Ethiopia from the mid-70s to the early 90s. Berihun, quite apropos for the main plot, knew first-hand what it was like to live in an old-school surveillance state, one in which everyone had spies and also had spies for the spies. 

• The love interest of Augustine of Hippo, who was a real person but whose name is lost to history. Hunter gives her a name for her internal fiction. Athenais Karthogenensis is an alchemist. She is hauled off in the middle of the night to investigate the murder of Scipio, a close friend of the emperor. Scipio has been murdered inside the Chamber of Isis, the just-now discovered mystical temple that houses the alkahest, the mythical universal solvent that gives its holder the keys to the universe. 

• Gnomon, an all-consuming monstrostiy from the future. A jinn. A god. The shark god who vexes and blesses the other characters. Gnomon claims to have been created from a future in which humans share their thoughts throughout many biological hosts. This is seen as a smart way to preserve one's personhood nearly forever, but it comes with risks, such as wetjacking, when a criminal steals the original biological host of a mind, orphaning it. Society was concerned about minds that exhibited neuro-divergence or criminal behaviors, because of how they might pollute the group connectome, so everyone who was deemed a risk was segregated from the rest of society's connectome. Gradually, and quite spontaneously, everyone from this ostracized group joined minds together, becoming Gnomon, who now roams about, devouring souls. Gnomon is obsessed with avoiding his ultimate doom when the universe ends. His mortal enemy is Zagreus, a planet who is somewhat like Ego in the most recent Guardians of the Galaxy movie--everything on his planet is him, and he consumes all by shooting his tendrils into their connectome. 

These four stories have analogies in the real world Neith lives in, meaning they are coded signifiers of real people. (Harkaway was evidently influenced by the semiotics that ruled liberal arts programs for two decades.) But the characters in Hunter's head also have some autonomous life, some independent meaning. There are recurrent motifs appearing in all the stories, which give them their recursiveness that helps Hunter hold off the machine from reading her mind. Greek notions like catabasis, apocatastasis, and kairos. Five-sided figures, representing the completion of things. The shark god. Gnomon--in the many meanings of that word, including a sun dial and any thing that is perpendicular to other things. Encryption and steganography--hiding a message in plain sight. All of these things come in and out of stories, reminding me of nothing so much as Gabriel Garcia Marquez's A Hundred Years of Solitude.

I've given away a ton of the plot of this novel, but there is still so much there, you could read it and find a whole other book beneath the book I've just described. It's that rich.

The big point and the little point

Gnomon speaks directly to the reader at the end of the book in what I take to be a section we, the readers, can take in as straightforward a manner as we can take any passage in literature. I believe Gnomon is speaking the truth when he suggests this story, which started out looking like a science fiction story about surveillance, was never meant to be about "something so small and commonplace as politics." The entire book was to the reader like Hunter's thoughts were to Neith: a way of changing the connectome of the person who shares the experience. To read is to become what you read, just as to know someone is to become that person.

That's the big point of the novel, and the big point supports the little point, which has to do with surveillance. The novel is obviously skeptical of surveillance states. But it doesn't mount a direct attack on them. It wants the reader to see what a deep mystery the human mind is, what a sacred text, and what the state is murdering when it breaks into that sacred Chamber of Isis that is the mind. The obliquity of the stories is itself a kind of cryptography or steganography. We do not just find out who Hunter is and what her role was in fighting the Witness. We cannot find that out until we become her. This is, in a sense, respectful of Hunter's inner life, the way two of the sons of Noah approached him backwards and covered his nakedness.

The big point of the novel is a literary and a cognitive one. The little point has to do with the state and surveillance. But that's the point I'd like to focus on a little more.

Benign surveillance

Governments assure us that they strive to monitor their citizens enough to protect law-abiding folk without infringing on the right to privacy. Citizens are rightfully skeptical of these promises. One crucial competent to whether governments can keep their promises is the competence of their monitoring. The more the government can infer with less information, the less it will need to invade further.

Harkaway's world is interesting, because on one level, Witness is an incredible success. Society has achieved safety, and with it even a strange kind of privacy, through a system of near-total surveillance. There are some things we never learn about how it all works, but through a combination of information voluntarily given to the system--our social media feeds, all our connected Internet-of-things devices--and information involuntarily given--cameras and bio-sensors literally everywhere--the system is able to know so much about you, there is hardly any conflict it needs to get into. When the computer can realize you are becoming stressed and calm you down with soothing music, there is no need for aggressive police forces to enter your home and kick down doors.

There is a strange privacy in the totality of surveillance, too. The computers are generally so good at assessing the data, they do not need to give it to a human. A human never knows what kind of fetish porn you like. The computer knows, and the computer does not judge. The Witness only gives projects to humans that are borderline, where something is making it difficult for the algorithms to work. Neuro-divergence is one example. But sometimes, just regular, old human eccentricity will confuse the machine.

There is, of course, the danger that the system could become invasive. This is especially true with the mind-reading techniques--the enhanced interrogation of the future. These are only used in rare cases, and often they can be avoided by humans merely giving an honest interview--and the computer can almost always tell if you are lying.

But society seems to have controlled the excesses of the system. One reason it is able to do this is a concurrent development in England's democracy--the advent of direct democracy. Rather than electing representatives, citizens are able to directly vote on a number of issues every day. They are encouraged--but never forced--to do a certain amount of civic duty every day, be it voting on a certain number of proposals or participating in a virtual jury.

This is the real defense society has against the system being used in an manner that abuses civil rights. How could it defy the will of the people, when the people are able to express their will directly, without mediation?

It so happens that at the outset of the novel, England is debating a monitoring bill that would take the direct mind-reading of the operating room and into the real world. Real-time enhanced monitoring is on the table--only for those who present a risk, though. Former violent criminals, or those with a dangerous connectome, for example. They would have monitoring installed in their minds so the system never had to wonder about them. Some argue this is actually good for the former criminal--it enables their immediate re-integration into society by making society not have to worry about recidivism. More monitoring, ironically, means that people might be freer to be part of society.

Is benign surveillance really possible, though?

Diana Hunter did not think it was really possible to trust the state with this level of monitoring its own citizens. For one thing, the direct democracy was not really a hedge against abuse: "The devil in the detail is that Smart Crowds are fragile. With a very little adulteration, they cease to be smart at all, and become remarkably stupid, or indeed self-harming. They are susceptible to stampeding by demagogues, poisoning by bad information." We in America today know well how true this is.

In the chapter "Another Set of Colours," we get the full skepticism of the system. Although the intent was to develop a system based on "benign observation," and "for most people, for most of the time it would probably be great," it would also "have a capacity for monstrousness." It would be most monstrous, in fact, to the "gnomon" of society--those who stuck out perpendicular to it: "It's only the disempowered who need to be able to hide themselves."

Ultimately, once a technology becomes available, the monitors are unable to resist the temptation to use it. There is a fear that if governments are too scrupled to use the new technologies, then the bad guys will get an unacceptable advantage. Recalling early 21st-century developments of brain-imaging technology, which came along with assurances that no sane government would ever allow such a thing in court, one character concludes that "in the wake of New York's horror (9/11), it seemed to me, a person suspected of having advance knowledge of a similar outrage would be on the operating table before the judge had her wig on."

My personal experience 

I've been through a number of polygraphs in my life. It's the closest the world has right now to the brain-scanning of the novel. It's actually quite unscientific--it relies on factors like auto-sympathetic responses, which can give off all kinds of false readings, but also give data that kind of some value in a very brute force kind of way. I've actually had trouble passing these tests, even when I was utterly innocent of the things I was being asked about.

When I had trouble with those tests, I thought a lot about whether the problem wasn't too much or too little surveillance, it was surveillance that gave bum data. If governments are going to monitor people--and I assumed, given the public demand for security, that this would always be the case--then the prerogative was to get better data. I remember thinking that if they were going to give me a polygraph, I'd rather they just have my whole life: my bank account statements, my phone and email records. Give me a pap smear. You want to know about me? Here, take it all, and may you choke on it. This attitude recalls a line from Gnomon: "The watchers, watching one another, became increasingly desperate and paranoid lest they miss something, while we, constantly observed, became almost exhibitionistic of our sins."

What of this idea, that the only safety lies in competent surveillance? (I speak here of the state monitoring its own people. States monitoring those outside their own citizenry are, perhaps, an ethical question with a slightly different set of assumptions. One question, of course, would be how we determine who is inside and how is outside. But I leave that type of surveillance out of the question here.) 

Competent monitoring, even if it requires more monitoring than we now suffer, has a few advantages. I hate traffic cameras and speed cameras. I miss the old days when if a cop didn't see you and you didn't cause an accident, you drove on free of consequences. I think if I'm at a red light at three in the morning and nobody is there, I ought to drive through it, and no camera ought to give me sass and charge me $75 three weeks later. But what if total monitoring of the roads meant that you could easily prove that the guy who cut you off and caused an accident was lying when he said you cut him off? What if nobody was ever wrongly convicted of a crime? (Think of that! How many cases has DNA technology fixed? How many more could be fixed with better technology?)

If nobody was ever wrongly convicted, think what it might mean for something like the #metoo movement. There'd be no concern for whether some women were falsely accusing men. Think if you could simply replay the events and decide for yourself. There'd be no he said/she said.

We tend to be automatically suspicious and antagonistic to surveillance, and I understand. I mean I really, really understand. I don't even fly unless I have to, because I have never gotten used to the anal cavity search going through security has become. But we can't overlook the fact that those bastards keep planes from blowing up. At one point in Gnomon, Neith wonders "what might we have done differently, had we seen?" She is lamenting the growth of the total surveillance state, but in the same breath, she is wishing she'd had better intelligence about the universe. That desire for better intel is what causes the very growth of surveillance the character is wishing had never happened.

Can there ever be a balance?

One thing that's great about this novel is that it doesn't try to pretend that there is some easy formulation for the perfect balance. People want privacy. People want security. They demand both, and those two demands work against one another the way our desires for community and autonomy always work against one another. There may never be a perfect balance. It may always be a war between two opposing forces that occasionally comes to stasis as the forces become nearly equal now and then, but there will always remain tension.

Maybe one way we can try to answer hard questions is by creating some principles we all accept as hard "too far" lines going in. Diana Hunter offers one: "There's only one fundamental right, and that is the right to security of person, be it physical or mental." I can get behind this, having laid awake at nights fretting over the very minor invasion of my brain that came from a polygraph. The mind is the Chamber of Isis. It's the most complicated and sacred thing we know of in the universe. There is no security argument for violating that temple.

I wish we could all agree to the principle that the human body should be afforded that same protection. I'm disgusted that my government espoused torture, even the limited-by-historical-measure torture of waterboarding. Inspector Neith wonders at one point what her culpability is for having helped the system, even when she didn't know what it really was. I don't know if there's an answer to that. In a democracy, supposedly all decisions of government reflect the will of the people. So we all have some share of blame. 

I'd add another hard line. I never want to live in a world where it is impossible to break the law. 

There are a lot of reasons for this. Part of this is just the psychological need for some feeling of independence from the matrix of society. "God exists to be challenged," the novel puts it. I accept that I need to subsume my old needs in order for all of us to function together as a society, but it's not a natural thing for me to accept. In the Marine Corps, at one duty station, we used to always be reminded not to step on the image of the Marine Corps emblem--the eagle, globe, and anchor--that was on the door mat outside the admin headquarters. I hated treating that mat like it was sacred. So sometimes, I'd sneak over at night just to step on it. Once I did it with mud on my shoes. It helped me stay sane. Today, no doubt, there'd be a camera above the door that would find me out. Every encroachment into our autonomy carries with it cost to our psychological well-being.

There's more at stake, though, than just our mental health. It's the reason so many people are unwilling to give up guns to keep people safe (as much as I think it's naive to think owning an AR-15 helps you to fight a rebellion). There is the concern that if we make a society that nobody can overthrow, it will then become exactly the kind of society you'd need to overthrow. The system in Gnomon understood this need, and so allowed for "a reassuring fallibility."

The mirror and the eye

Everything is more than one thing. This is a great novel because it realized the question of how to do surveillance correctly is much bigger than the question of surveillance. It's a question that goes deep and wide. In one passage, Athenais describes God in this way: "I believe that God sees us all, from crown to toe, at all times and all places. I am forever observed. I am made of water, and any impurity is visible as it floats around me." The desire for the security that comes from someone always watching us is very ancient, and is the sense of discomfort that watching brings. And the system in Gnomon can offer benefits God never could: Augustine, Athenais records, "cannot trust in the mercy of the God whose mercy he expounds." But those who are subjected to the enhanced mind scanning of the Witness, we are told, often come out of it feeling "happier, more organized and more productive....These fortunate suspects are weighed in the balance and found worthy." Augustine should have been so lucky as to have the Witness.

In Tolkien's Middle Earth, there are two ways that great powers find out what is in the minds of others. Sauron, the dark lord presented as an all-seeing eye, penetrates the mind mercilessly. He shows his subjects themselves as they are at their worst, he seeks out the worst corners of their minds. Galadriel, however, has a mirror that is less exacting in its technique. It shows those who look into the mirror glimpses of things, but glimpses that are hard to read. It shows us something of the truth we already know, but are unable to understand until we read closely the book of our own mind. It shows us, in other words, only what is necessary. Wouldn't this be a great system of monitoring, if only the magic of Galadriel's mirror were possible? To show us only what we need to know?

And here is, I think, maybe the first hope we have of finding some way out of this mess. Populations will always complain about intrusions into privacy. But they will absolutely lose their minds over threats to security. Monitoring should be about threats to public security and end there. That's all we need to know. We might try to know more, not just "is this person going to commit some type of violence" but "might this person ever become antagonistic to the goals of our society?" This is a rabbit hole you will never get to the bottom of. Trying to answer more than immediate questions leads to a state thinking it needs ever more and more information to sift through, until it gets lost in its own noise and everyone is able to hide who they are in plain sight.

Of course, we can't neatly do this right now. We can't just ask people if they plan to commit wrong and wait for the answer. We'll get extraneous information we need to sift through. But we need to strive towards the type of competence that gets the least crap. We need to strive for minimally invasive surgery. We need to strive to be good at monitoring.

I know what I'm talking about here. In my role as a translator, I'm not unlike Inspector Neith as she relives the thoughts of subjects. I find the same thing as Neith did. Human minds are often full of crap. But everything is more than one thing. Human minds are also sacred spaces full of mysteries you can never unfold until you literally become those people, at which point you have forgotten what you were looking for, because the otherness you sought is inside of you. Unless the state is able to read the texts of others like this, the secrets they seek will remain mysteries locked inside a temple.