Meme War: The visionary cyberpunk of John Barnes
1995's 'Kaleidoscope Century' offers a prescient glimpse of our possible technological, cultural and military futures, writes Bram E. Gieben
This essay is a prelude to Episode 15 of Strange Exiles. It contains plot details and spoilers for the novel ‘Kaleidoscope Century’ by John Barnes, who will join us in conversation on 23 November.
CONTENT WARNING! This post contains discussions of extreme violence, including the use of sexual assault in warfare. Please avoid reading if these subjects could cause you distress.
“Human spirit is a kind of virus that parasitizes on the human animal, exploits it for its own self-reproduction, and sometimes threatens to destroy it.” - Slavoj Žižek
In John Barnes’ violent, uncompromising and prescient 1995 novel Kaleidoscope Century a young man is recruited as a sleeper agent by a crumbling Soviet network of spies and saboteurs known as ‘the Organisation’. The novel follows what appears to be a parallel timeline. Instead of the fall of the USSR, a new and more militaristic form of state Communism topples the slowly Western-capitulating Yeltsin administration, after Yeltsin is executed live on television. As a new post-Soviet power emerges, it is clear that any ties to ideological or state Communism are gone. The American protagonist begins to work for the Organisation as a destabilising ‘black ops’ agent, undermining, sabotaging, and strategically murdering political, military and civilian targets in America and beyond.
In what feels like a callback to the dummy President of Philip K. Dick’s Valis, it is heavily implied that this new, anti-democratic Russian power is behind the election of a puppet-leader in the US, whose extended and undemocratic term, ably assisted by the covert action of sleeper agents like our hero, signals the end of the US as a democracy. The parallels to the ascendancy and chaotic reign of Trump, and his shadow ties to the post-Soviet, gangster-state proto-fascism of Putin’s Russia are self-evidently prescient. But what is fascinating about the novel is not how uncannily it mirrors our own age of emergent political and social collapse, but where Barnes predicts the intersection of warfare, espionage, artificial intelligence and ecological devastation might lead. No other science fiction writer has captured this confluence of threats as vividly.
The unnamed (or rather, multiply-named) protagonist of Kaleidoscope Century is a sleeper agent in Barnes’ alt-history present day, but we learn of this in atemporal, nonlinear scenes. The novel opens in a ‘Marshack’ on the red planet 100 years in the future, as the protagonist tries to piece together memories from the digital fragments on his ‘werp’ (a device that is half-way between a laptop and a mobile phone). The amnesiac narrator is a useful device - Barnes slowly unfolds the timeline from this future-present, jumping in and out of different identities, eras and phases of human history and society, at which the narrator can be present thanks to life-extending drugs provided by the Organisation.
There are moments of utter brutality in the book - Barnes’ characters are morally ambiguous to the point of barbarity, and beyond. In one section, the narrator and his sometime friend, sometime enemy Sadi are employed to entrap US politicians by throwing a drug-fuelled orgy in a diplomatic residence in Prague. As rumours of an attack on the city spread, the pair further destabilise the situation by goading the orgy into a frenzy of violence, rape and murder.
The scene is chilling, but feels utterly real - a snapshot of how violence, especially sexual violence, is used in real-world conflict and espionage. It’s not the only beat like this in the novel. Barnes has a shorthand for the military use of sexual violence - in the conflict that will become known as the ‘War of the Memes’ the practice is known as ‘serbing’, a pitch-dark reference to the Balkan conflict of the 1990s. The way the narrator relates incidents of horror such as this is detached, indifferent:
“Sadi and I… spent three days serbing the pretty ones before Murphy called the unit back in and we had to hang them all… there was something about doing them all in one hour, chick after chick hoisted kicking into the air, all of them naked, the ones yet to be done cowering in the corner, bruised, bloody, crying for their mothers - I still got stiff thinking about it. I fall back out of the memory, sick to my stomach, thinking at first it was just some kind of hideous nightmare, but no, I’m quite sure we did that.”
The brutality is the point - in a collapsing world, the narrator is not just an amoral double agent, he is also perfectly prepared to come to terms with the worst imaginable depths of human depravity, in order to get paid and survive. Yet as the narrator switches back into the present, he feels appalled. Piecing together his memories from the ‘werp’, he doubts his account of events. They horrify him; he weeps, he regrets. But he can no more deny that he perpetrated these atrocities than he can be absolutely sure they took place. His memories are a kaleidoscope.
While the narrator begins as a kind of secret agent, the life extension drugs he is treated with enable him to take up a new identity every few decades. At each point of re-emergence, he experiences amnesia, and must piece together both the fragments of his past lives, and the new social and cultural (or often, military) situation in which he has re-awoken. This journey will take him from service as a covert operative, through private military contractor, to construction worker, Mars prospector, and finally, fugitive. The nature, allegiance and ideology of the Organisation changes; sometimes it disappears. Eventually though, the Organisation always finds him, and he is recruited again. The journey begins in the world of shadowy, outsourced counterintelligence work, and Barnes’ unfolds a narrative that speaks to what Richard Hosfstadter, in 1964, identified as the ‘paranoid style’ in American politics:
“The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse.”
Barnes, like all great American science fiction authors of the Cold War era, is a paranoid spokesman for the counterculture. He portrays a world in which the two great ‘paranoid’ powers - the USA and the former USSR - are slowly and covertly merged, behind the scenes, into a single corporate, globe-spanning entity. This takes place via espionage, and a mixture of outright and clandestine conflict. His narrator is an amoral agent in the middle of this war between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and comes to realise that neither side is in it for anything except power. The ‘paranoid style’ is at once the source of Barnes’ anxieties, expressed in the plot, and the backdrop to his vision of apocalypse.
From here, the planet descends into ‘Meme War.’ The barricades of civilisation are not manned in the name of humanity, but in the game of domination. The paranoid style - the engine of conflict that drove the Cold War - becomes merely a competition between powerful and identically authoritarian blocs, which eventually become even larger, merged monopolies. Authoritarianism becomes the dominant form, not through the ballot box, but through the secret machinations of an unaccountable elite.
There are echoes here of the capture of the Republican Party by the shadow-narrative of QAnon, and on a lesser scale, the shady backroom dealings with Russian oligarchs undertaken by the Tory Party. While ostensibly we still vote and participate in a democracy, in practice, corporate and elite (and increasingly, criminal) interests take precedence. This truth is expressed in the real world via the phantasy of conspiracy theories. The truth is that a network of shadow-power is protected at the highest levels. This is unfortunate, because it maps conveniently onto events like the suicide of Jeffrey Epstein - even if his death was an accident, it fits the pattern identified by paranoid narratives like QAnon, and as such, is taken as evidence. As Sarah Churchwell writes in The Guardian:
"Paranoid narratives are inherently narcissistic as well as authoritarian. Paranoia rejects the proportionality of pluralism, in which the world’s indifference to you is a sign of its multiplicity, and interprets that indifference as malice. The world is not unmoved by your existence, but upholds your central importance: even your refrigerator is spying on you. A paranoid system confirms that your powerlessness is only because the game is rigged against you– and that the world cares enough to bother disempowering you."
All paranoid narratives contain a grain of truth. While the heroes of the ultimate ‘paranoid’ SF writer, Philip K. Dick, are often powerless as they discover the horrific reality, or the ‘secret chiefs’ of his fictional worlds, the hero of ‘Kaleidoscope Century’ is an agent of that power; he is the perpetrator of those horrors. He is the character who would have slipped a makeshift noose around Epstein’s neck to protect the secrets of his paymasters. Barnes portrays him as completely amoral, opportunistic, and utterly prepared to use terror and brutality to achieve the mission objective, so he can get paid.
As Barnes unfolds a future that proceeds from such a paranoid world, the Organisation begins to recede. Climate collapse leads to global conflict, but as regional and national borders become more irrelevant, the warring ideological divisions split along cultural lines. There are the Ecucatholics, the Cybertao, the libertarian, anti-meme Freecybers, and the increasingly dominant One True, a nascent version of Resuna, which will come to dominate and absorb all other memes. These ‘movements’ mutate into communal consciousnesses, a mass of programmed humanity in thrall to larger cultural ‘entities’. For these ‘mass contagions’ of conformity, Barnes uses the term coined by Richard Dawkins - memes. As ideologies and nations disappear, religions rise again, but in a toxic, techno-augmented form; these ‘memes’ behave like nothing less than monopolistic corporate entities. The price of ‘joining’ one is your individuality.
The War of the Memes is therefore at once a physical conflict between small, technologically advanced paramilitary units, conducted in and amongst civilian populations, and a conflict of ‘ideas’ waged by large corporate military 'brands'. These ideas, however, are not ideologies (or at least, not any more). The warring memes have no goal beyond their own reproduction - human beings are merely a vector for their evolution and continuing existence. Artificial intelligence and the ‘memes’ that drive the conflict become one and the same thing:
“The war had been raging ever since some bright guy had figured out how to write a program that could analyze any operating system it talked to, figure out how to penetrate it, and get in and take over AIs. Whoever it was, he’d probably never realized that to a program like that, a mind’s just one more operating system running on a slow-running massively parallel processor.”
Even the Freecybers, the ‘anti-meme’ memes designed to keep individuals free, become instruments of conformity and control, as Sadi explains after he and the narrator kill two renegade Freecyber agents:
“Everything out there in the noosphere mutates pretty fast. Whatever they started out to do, I think the Freecybers are probably just like any other memes now, replicating because they can, spreading out any old way, taking over and running things, no doubt believing themselves to have the best of intentions… That’s the reason we had to kill them. Not just that One True would have taken them over, but that they’d have found out they were wrong, and I wanted them to believe right to the end.”
Sadi and the narrator, who kill on behalf of the memes, are also afraid of them. Broadcasts of memetic information that scramble human personalities and enforce the individual's sublimation into the memetic ‘whole’ are depicted by Barnes as violent psychic attacks; a psychotic break delivered through broadcast devices (early ‘werps’). While the novel predates the rise of social media, smartphones and ‘viral’ content by almost a decade, the scene where Sadi and the narrator are infected by a OneTrue meme, and immediately attempt to murder each other, is strangely reminiscent of friends watching a TikTok video. What else is a dance challenge, but an idea in search of a host? Barnes’ vision of memes as weaponised cultural units that evolve into cold, ruthless super-intelligences is the dark side of Susan Blackmore’s chilly, mechanistic vision of human culture and behaviour, outlined in ‘The Meme Machine’ in 1999, shortly after the publication of Barnes’ novel.
In Barnes’ stark conclusion, Resuna eventually absorbs all the competing memes, and the people in their thrall. The narrator is one of a small handful of un-memed humans who leave Earth in order to remain individuals, and not part of Resuna. It’s a devastating metaphor for religion and ideological control, but perhaps also an echo of the ‘red scare’ propaganda Barnes would have grown up with. In his vision of the future, communal humanity is the face of totalitarian horror. Ideas and ideology become meaningless in the furnace of forced conformity, and the extermination of individuality and free will.
During the War of the Memes, Barnes also draws on several ‘black swan’ scenarios, perhaps inspired by the work of K. Eric Drexler, the author of the 1986 book Engines of Creation, which lays out both the transformative potential of nanotechnology, and the very real dangers it poses. Various world powers employ bioweapons and nanotechnological warfare in the lead up to the War of the Memes, delivering crop blights like ‘Tailored Rice Blast’. Barnes’ master-stroke, in terms of the novel’s world-building, is that the emergent memes spring from the same technological font as the devastating ecological consequences of biowar. Both are derived from the semi-autonomous weapons he calls SMOTs (Simulation Modelling Optimising Targeters), which begin as smart weapon targeting systems, then become bioweapons:
“The SMOTs running on thousands of microsupers in tiny little labs, a few freshly-trained microbiologists in each one, wrote script after script for ecological disaster. Here a new fungus to attack a particular set of roots; there a bacteria that locked up soil phosphorus in an unusable form for a few weeks out of each growing season. Here the super-grasshopper, toxic to birds and especially attractive to them; there beetles that fed only on the leaf buds of trees in the spring. Everywhere, as vegetation lost its grip, mud and slime replaced soil, and the living parts of the continents bled down into the ocean.”
Ultimately, the bioweapons hack human nervous systems, and memes merge with artificial intelligence. The idea that a confluence of AI, biotechnology and smart weapons could bring about the end of humanity feels terrifyingly plausible. The bioweapons devastate the ecosystem and reproduce just like the memes, turning cornfields into tundra and killing billions, in a perverse echo of the Stalinist ‘five year plans’ and Mao’s ‘great leap forward’. In the 1990s, when Barnes was writing, this scenario was straight out of speculative science - now, the prospect of mass crop failures caused or exacerbated by human intervention in the food cycle with pesticides, genetically modified material and other technological ‘solutions’ (not to mention the effects of runaway climate change) are very real considerations. The response of the governments in the novel includes solutions we would now recognise as the ‘climate hacking’ approaches being considered in light of climate collapse - and as Barnes quite rightly predicts, these may also have unintended and devastating consequences, just like the plans of Mao and Stalin.
The replacement of humanity’s individuality with the total mind-control and unity of Resuna has echoes in Joe Haldeman’s Forever War cycle, begun in 1974. In Haldeman’s novels too, the protagonist returns to Earth to find it ruled by a collective consciousness. Like Haldeman’s hero, Barnes’ protagonist is a man out of time. In both works, the terror expressed at this form of human unity is to do with the loss of the self, of individuality. Haldeman’s fears betray an existential dread about common humanity without agency through the eyes of a rugged and individualistic American hero. Barnes’ concerns are expressed through a much more conflicted narrator - a covert agent of a foreign power; a man who has committed atrocities, but can only remember fragments of them.
The loss of our ‘self’ to some sort of ‘replacement’ species has long been a theme of science fiction, and there are countless robot or artificial intelligence versions of the racist ‘Great Replacement’ theory to draw upon if we want to catastrophise about the rise of the machines. What Barnes makes clear is that the evolution of artificial intelligence will happen in concert with social changes in human culture, in perhaps unpredictable ways, just as John Gray argues in Straw Dogs - progress will proceed “haphazardly, as an upshot of struggles in the murky realm where organised crime, and the hidden parts of government vie for control.”
Some hybridity, some cyborg merger of human and artificial intelligence may be inevitable - Barnes makes the argument that this will be more likely to take the form of co-evolution through subjugation, rather than the transhumanist ideal of ‘uploading the self’ into some great digital hereafter.
The tech in Barnes’ novel is appealingly battered and dysfunctional. The contents of the ‘werp’ are like a description of the ‘selves’ we archive now on social media, in the cloud, on our phones. Barnes plays with the idea that these images, videos and fragments have meaning, but that time obscures it, leaving nothing but the image. The motif of a fractured, broken man sifting through digital echoes he half remembers, while exiled from the world, is a perfect evocation of the way we interact with social media. Even our most animated moments - the adrenaline rush of an argument, the laugh out loud at clever memes - are experienced passively, and are quickly gone. Faced with an old image, an old video, we might scratch our heads and wonder, obscurely, if we have seen it before - if the self it portrays is truly ‘us’.
The novel’s conclusion strays into even more experimental science fiction territory, as the protagonist reunites with his long-time best friend and occasional enemy, Sadi. Now in a woman’s body, Sadi explains that at around the time the narrator’s story began, the Organisation created a ‘closed timelike curve’ by detonating a large nuclear explosion on the dark side of the moon. A hole in spacetime was opened, connecting the future of 2109 with the past of 1991. Sadi has travelled through the time-looped pocket universe many, many times, and in that process, has gained complete control of the Organisation, up to and including the protagonist’s recruitment. History has become their playground - they can live infinite lives or versions of lives, be any gender or identity they choose, kill with impunity, experience fabulous wealth or the deepest depravity they can imagine.
The twenty-first century has become Sadi’s ‘kaleidoscope’ - a smorgasbord of turbulent history, a banquet of experience set against the decline and collapse of the human race. The narrator and Sadi fuck, and Sadi offers him a ship to travel back through the entrance to the closed timelike curve. Like Sadi, he can experience the kaleidoscope century as many times as he wants, in as many configurations as he can imagine, before he returns to Sadi’s arms. Like the protagonist of ‘Groundhog Day’ he can repeat history until he gets it ‘right’ - but may first indulge his instincts for gluttony, hedonism and cruelty, or charity and kindness:
“I can do good things for Momma, Gwenny and Alice, everyone, if I want. I can party for a hundred years. I can kill someone every month just for fun. And if it ever starts to look too hot for me, I can always get on this ship again.”
The conclusion struck me as powerfully strange upon my first reading of the book. With time, the meaning has come into focus. Endless variations of gender, race, age, class, experience, suffering, delight - these are the promises of late capitalism; that we can choose our own adventure, be whatever we want to be. In practice, the consequences of this freedom liberate us from considering the individual worth of other beings with less control, other unchosen lives - including the global organism of our planet. They make us, like Sadi, into tyrants. Barnes asks if we, too, could live through collapse in a selfish and narcissistic trance, blind to our own cruelty; or at least indifferent to the suffering we cause, and unable to face or imagine a future that is not a vision of totalitarian horror.
Like the rich, endlessly re-born oligarchs of Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon, eventually, Barnes' protagonist and his lover will face the ‘Methuselah problem’. Such disregard for consequences, for human life, makes one inhuman in a different way. Rather than abrogating control to a larger entity, subsuming themselves in the whole, they consider the world their playground, and people their playthings. Lost in sensation, they will not realise that eventually, the sensations will dull. They will become so powerful, and so removed from human experience, that they will not feel a thing.
The freedom to create oneself, to choose one’s destiny, is also the freedom to consider the dreams, hopes and welfare of others as unimportant, beneath consideration. We choose individualism, but are we driven towards meme war? Neither outcome seems destined to make us happy, or to guarantee our survival.
John Barnes joins Bram in conversation for Episode 15 of Strange Exiles on 23 November.
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