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EDITORIAL
by Peter Jukes and Hardeep Matharu
The Endless Insecurity of ‘Digital Nomads’
If the product is free, you’re the product. When it comes to so much of our lives lived on social media, this is one of the defining truths of our age, and it is brilliantly realised in Vincenzo Latronico’s novella Perfection, translated into English by Sophie Hughes, which was recently shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.
It tells the story of two southern European web designers, Anna and Tom, as they relocate to Berlin around 2010 and live out a perfectly curated Instagram life – working from home in a flat filled with pot plants and Nordic furniture, living off Google Translate, organic food, unsatisfactory sex toys, and microdoses of ketamine and MDMA.
They work in web design “tweaking colours for different interfaces, producing yet another variation on the current look in vogue in their neighbourhood, which could have just as well been New York – or anywhere in the world, for that matter”. They pass their leisure time on social media “utterly mesmerised by the apartment, kale salad, or the kitten of someone living two blocks or two continents away”.
Containing no dialogue – a homage to George Perec’s novella on the 1960s, Things – it’s a detached and quietly disturbing account of how a generation have had their “inner landscape reconfigured by 20 years of the internet”.
“If they spilled some coffee, their first reaction was to press Command-Z”. They live off the ‘likes’ on their Facebook posts. “It had to be a sign of something, to mean something.”
But, over time, “reality didn’t live up to the pictures” for Anna and Tom. They think they are special but are actually embarked on “an identical struggle for a different life” that “motivated an entire sector of their generation” through countless comparisons.
In the end, these “digital nomads” are not really in control of their lives. They are professionally precarious and economically uprooted from Berlin by gentrification and rising house prices.
Their fear of missing out means that meaning is always elsewhere. Alienation and a kind of nostalgia for a conviction they never had follow them faster and faster from Lisbon to Sicily and eventually back home.
Latronico has spoken of the estrangement that Anna and Tom experience as a corrosive insecurity that constantly drips into their lives: no beautiful apartment, no world-class city, no holiday, no creative design brief, no activism, no art exhibit, no sex act is ever ‘enough’.
It’s a relatively privileged type of insecurity, but it’s one that still mirrors many more extreme examples in our shifting world: rising economic inequality, public services offering little support, community fractured – and social media only increases the sense of being ‘left behind’.
In this edition of Byline Times, we explore both types of alienation, and why Keir Starmer was right when he warned of an “island of strangers” – but for the wrong reasons. ✺
In this excerpt from Peter Jukes’ work in progress The Trojan Horse – Democracy Under Siege, Vladimir Putin’s ‘internet guru’ Konstantin Rykov explains his plan to influence foreign elections while visiting Evgeny Prigozhin’s ‘troll farm’, the Internet Research Agency in St Petersburg, in 2012:
RYKOV: The industrial age turned us into workers.
We became just hands assembled on a line,
Machine-driven robots day in and day out,
And all that came with it – armies of Labour,
Socialism, the Soviets, revolution.
Then, with the crisis of overproduction,
Capitalism survived by turning workers
Into consumers. The post-industrial age was born,
TV sets, mass media, and advertising.
And resistance to it averted by turning
Us inside out, industrialising our inner lives.
Communism failed. The Soviet Union fell.
But Capitalism was still not satisfied.
It’s greed knows no bounds – accepts no limits,
So it came to its own final solution:
Turn the consumer into the product itself.
That’s what it’s done. Like Keanu Reeves’ pod
We are being milked and harvested online,
Because when the product is free, you are
The product. From mechanising our habits
To manufacturing our desires, now
Capital automates our reality.
It’s invisible. Like the water we swim in. Until
We see through the code. Then we can rewrite it.
Then we can become, as Stalin once foretold,
The true engineers of human souls
