BackWTF, the thriller of the year
Funny, scary, gripping, erudite, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot taps into our techno-paranoia like no other book in recent times
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Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is the title of the new techno-thriller by first-time American novelist David Shafer. The words refer to the international aviation (and radiotelephony) codes for the letters W,T and F. If you don’t get what this combination of these three letters cheekily refer to, maybe you should stop reading now.
Because, if you read one thriller this year, read this one. Gripping, scary, erudite, funny, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot taps into our techno-paranoia like no book I’ve read—of giant corporations and government intelligence agencies collecting and analysing all data and information we are producing in the electronic world, and planning to use them to control our lives, minds, attitudes, opinions, habits and future. Privacy? Strike that word out from your vocabulary. The bad guys in WTF make George Orwell’s Big Brother seem like Winnie the Pooh. And it’s not set in the future. It’s set in the here and now.
Something that happened to us last week: My wife has been setting up a website for herself, where she had mentioned that among other things, she had translated some Bengali children’s stories, which were published as an anthology called Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne: The Magical World of Upendrakishore Ray Chaudhuri. Like everyone does, she had then given the link for the book at amazon.in, where it is available for sale. Within a couple of days, she got a mail from the e-retailer (and she has never bought anything from Amazon), asking her whether she would like to buy a DVD of Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, the film Satyajit Ray had made from the story, or DVDs of any other Ray films, with the necessary links. Some would find this an example of tremendously intelligent design of data analysis software; others would find it plain unnerving.
WTF is not for those who find this unnerving. It would give them sleepless nights.
As one admiring reviewer quoted on the back cover puts it: “I devoured (the book) imagining this is what a brainstorming event between Thomas Pynchon and (National Security Agency whistleblower) Edward Snowden would deliver."
The Committee, an international cabal of industrialists and media barons, led by gigantic business conglomerate SineCo and global private security firm Bluebird, has a dream—to record and control all—yes, all—information in the world and twist the future of mankind, according to its blueprint. Between them, they have managed to corrupt the entire American intelligence establishment, including those that are not even supposed to exist. They control the satellites, the networks, the phones, in effect almost everything.
Only a small bunch of people stands between the Committee and utter loss of human freedom—an idealistic online underground organisation called Dear Diary, as techno-savvy as the Committee, armed with a new generation of “organic computers" that can defy the rules of the Internet and read your personality. Three young people are drawn inadvertently into this secret war—an NGO officer, a somewhat unhinged out-of-work blogger and a phony self-betterment guru with a bad drugs-and-booze problem.
If all this sounds terribly weird, it’s not really so. Large evil corporations—or other powerful entities (human, supernatural, extraterrestrial)—trying to control the world is an old theme, and so is that of a small group of people being the last hope for mankind. From The Lord of the Rings to the Matrix movies, we’ve been well-fed on this plotline. Writers like Robert Ludlum built their entire careers and made millions of dollars milking this one premise. But what separates WTF from the run-of-the-mill world-domination airport thriller is the author’s imagination, his sense of humour (WTF has a charming not-taking- itself-too-seriously quality) and an uncanny ability to tap into current global techno-paranoia.
Shafer picks up all our fears—the National Security Agency recording every phone call and email in the world, Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. collecting and scrutinising every piece of data on us that they can lay their hands—or rather algorithms—on, Apple Inc. gorging on information from its devices as we use them, the spectre of Big Data that churns everything that we do—from what we buy and where we go to our tastes in music and every stupid home video we have posted on Youtube. And then he takes these fears a few steps forward, to the edge of the cliff.
Suppose everything that you see when you use those new net-linked glasses is going straight into a company’s servers and getting tagged? Suppose the webcam on your computer is constantly videotaping you? Suppose your cellphone is taking your biometric readings all the time? And suppose there is a ship somewhere out on the ocean, in international waters, double the size of the Titanic, with data storage and mining facilities that make cloud computing sound like pocket calculators, collecting all that information—plus all the stuff that we already know is being collected on us—and figuring out how to manipulate our destinies, at both micro and macro levels?
So this is the overarching question that Shafer delights in scaring us with: WTF do you know about who’s watching you and what’s really going on?
I highly recommend this book, because I found it tremendous fun, a bravura display of intelligence and imagination. It’s also tremendously gripping—almost addictive; I finished the 422-page tome in two-and-a-half days, missing a couple of livemint.com deadlines in the process.
Of course, as I said, WTF is not for the paranoid. It would only worsen their condition.
But then, just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean no one’s following you.
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