Kluge by Pip Adam

All the things we fear from big tech companies, all the worst of the ways they behave and the way they treat people, all the fears about the millionaires and billionaires who own these companies, all these fears you will find lurking in the text or sub-text of Pip Adam’s new novel, Kluge.

Even after I had finished reading, I wasn’t sure I had the answer to what the title means, so I went hunting. One definition gave me “a clumsy, makeshift, or inelegant fix for a problem”. Elsewhere in the world of computing I found that it means an extra line of code added in a hurry to fix a bug. Did that solve my problem? Well, it definitely gave me lots more ways to appreciate the book.

I don’t think this novel will work for everyone. If you like your fiction straightforward and easy to follow, then this is probably not the place to be. If you like your meanings and metaphors well disguised, and like to keep guessing what is happening throughout, then Kluge is the place for you.

Kluge is narrated in the first person by … well, that’s one problem. Are we ever sure who or what our narrator is? Is it a real person, or is it something like a computer programme? Sure, it talks about its body often enough, but it also seems able to hack into every means of recording what is happening around itself to give us security nightmares. Every positional security camera, even the camera in the vending machine. I offer up the following passage as evidence we are dealing with a programme, not a person:

‘My body tells me – with thumbs – to watch everything. My body – with thumbs – trains me to find everything. All of the data. My body trains me to see my body in the data and say ‘I’ and ‘me’. I train me to say ‘my body’. Deploy myself towards the data. All of it is mine.’

You could also find other passages that might just as easily prove the narrator is a real person.

Our narrator works for a large corporation, many companies are owned, and for a while the narrator is Head of People and Ideas. The company is run by someone called HE or HIM, who seems to have complete and utter control, and is assisted by someone called Neil. I think many of us in the corporate world have encountered a Neil; that person the boss seems to always favour, who is involved in all the work, but is useless at all of it. The narrator may have been replaced as the favourite by Neil, and so delights in sabotaging everything Neil tries to do.

Our narrator uses ‘=’ in many of its sentences, to show what is really meant. He/they also use the medium of being in a stand-up comedy routine, which is probably the least successful of the gags being pulled. It fails to be consistent, popping back in from time to time. Just saying ‘Am I right?’ every so often does not make a comedy routine, even if some comics think it does.

What I did enjoy about Kluge is the use of management speak throughout. What a fine way to show us how ridiculous it is. The management team is called the scrum, straight out of agile project management, and although they only mention sprints once, they do have a Kanban board to list all their work tasks. The main task for the first part of the book is to create a vast party with a guest list of the rich and famous. Our narrator does their best to sabotage this, hiding the guest list, failing to send out invites, and finally by inviting a group of people who will sabotage the party rather than make it a success.

The punishment: everyone is sacked except for the scrum. The restructure. Staff take their revenge by breaking everything and make off with the coffee machines. The company is recreated as a 1920s apartment building inside the modern tower block which it owns. The boardroom has become a diner and all work happens there. HE is obsessed with an old sitcom, probably Seinfeld, possibly Friends, but never named, which HE believes is the answer to all questions.

Things become confusing. The narrator sleeps on the floor in a corridor and is ignored by everyone.

Now everything is being run in the background by a program called Gene. It is supposed to run everything, but only has one task, ‘changing the world for the better’. Everything else is irrelevant, or at best being very poorly done.

So, Neil’s weak attempts to rebuild Cybersecurity do nothing to stop my body. My body goes anywhere it wants. My body is the basement-dweller the culture warns you about. My body is in plain sight, leaving my thumbs free reign of the dark places Neil never visits, and so doesn’t know are here, and so never directs Gene to. Gene is largely left alone to =’run the company’, with nobody noticing that Gene is actually =’changing the world for the better’.

The scrum are all now wearing terrible clothing, shaving their heads and using Post-it notes on a board:

…they look at the Post-it notes they have taken from the makeshift Kanban board and mumble, ‘How can I circle back to the bleeding edge of this particular low hanging fruit?’

Or similar.

There are lots of things to like in here, billionaire caricatures to spot, and subtle digs at the direction of the world and our tech. Kluge is puzzling and funny, and it reminds us that we shouldn’t take artificial intelligence too seriously. Am I right?

Reviewer: Marcus Hobson

Te Herenga Waka University Press