Qualityland by Marc-Uwe Kling is set in a near-future Western European country that, according to the book's intro, was recently renamed after "an economic crisis of such severity that it became known as the crisis of the century." The intro goes on to say that this was "the third crisis of the century within just a decade." We shortly discover that residents of QualityLand have surnames that reflect their occupations (e.g., Tatjana History-Teacher, Sandra Admin) and are given ratings points which impact every aspect of their lives, based entirely on their online profiles. The hero of the tale, Peter Jobless, finds that his rating has slipped to single digits because of inaccuracies in his profile, thus classifying him as a "Useless." Much of the book's plot revolves around Peter trying to figure out how such a thing could have happened and, in trying to get the errors corrected, encountering a technocracy controlled by unfathomable algorithms and run by TheShop (an online retailer eerily similar to Amazon).

Eventually meeting up with Peter's narrative is a parallel storyline that explores QualityLand's political system. Its president-for-life is on her deathbed and so elections are to be held. For the first time, though, one of the candidates, John of Us, is an android (who just happens to look like Bill Pullman, the actor who played the president in the 1996 film Independence Day). John determines he'll win the election because he can calculate "which policies will be of most use to society as a whole," and naïvely plans to rely on "the unforced force of the better argument." As it becomes apparent his proposals favor a redistribution of wealth, his affluent backers begin to question their choice, and those who would benefit from his policies ignore politics entirely, asking their digital assistant who they should vote for rather than researching issues. John is incapable of lying, but he is able to manipulate the enigmatic algorithms to his advantage.

First and foremost, I have to say the book is very funny; I was chuckling from literally the first page, and found it immensely entertaining from start to finish. Although Kling is German, his style of humor as it appears in Jamie Searle Romanelli's excellent English translation is right in line with British comedy sensibilities exhibited in the novels of Doug Adams, Terry Pratchett and Jasper Fforde (and a bit of Monty Python to boot). Humor is subjective, true, but I can almost guarantee that if you've enjoyed any of these works, you'll like Qualityland.

Perhaps more to the point, Kling has the uncanny ability to analyze Western society's current political and technological trends and predict where their trajectories will lead. Many science fiction authors have taken a similar tack, but what I found interesting (and more than a little scary) is that his projections aren't for a society centuries down the road, but for one that's just around the corner. In an early chapter, for example, a politician is asked why he thinks voter turnout is getting lower and lower. He responds, "[T]he current government successfully addressed this problem when we decided to stop publishing voter turnout numbers." Another case in point: Sandra Admin becomes the team leader in the Department for Alternative Facts. Later, someone remarks that John needs the Useless vote to get elected, but that he won't win the masses over with reason; they can only be swayed by their emotions. These and many other passages gave me pause as I realized how close we are to the dystopian world Kling imagines; in the United States, for example, voting rights are already restricted, and espousing "alternative facts" and winning the electorate over through emotion rather than policy are common practices.

In short, I absolutely loved Qualityland and highly recommend it to those who enjoy well-written, relevant satire. Although billed as a comedy, the book isn't light fare; the author sneaks in quite a number of truly interesting concepts that will cause most readers to ponder the fate of our society. Book groups in particular will likely find more than enough topics here for an entertaining discussion.

In the past few years, much discussion has focused on the question of personal data; what we give away in exchange for a supposedly free service, how a digital identity of who we are is constructed, and how the algorithms which possess this information creates a world almost wholly bespoke to us.

I first heard about the notion of an internet ‘bubble’ at my first year of university many years ago. At the time, the prospect that purely off the basis of previous search histories and selections, I could type the exact same thing into a search engine (okay, Google) as someone else, and the results which come up could be completely different. For example, ‘Hong Kong’, could yield top results which discuss the current delicate political situation there, or recommendations for tourist spots. What’s worrying about this is that it means people are increasingly not exposed to anything that challenges their viewpoint. To flip that, it means that people are only ever shown things which tell them that their beliefs and views are correct. The arguable consequence of this can be seen in the increasing partisanship across society – the refusal to even try to see where someone with divergent political beliefs may be coming from.

But it’s difficult to explain this to many people. These are complicated concepts that are difficult to explain to people. Enter Qualityland. A novel that sits somewhere between speculative and science fiction (to better understand the difference between the two, see here), it was initially published in German in 2017. The book’s setting is a futuristic unspecified country where algorithms and major companies have free reign in determining the lives of people – who they date, what they buy (products are literally delivered to people on the basis of a predictive algorithm determining when somebody will want something, and what it will be), how they live – even how they will vote. As the reader becomes immersed in the story of Peter Jobless and the world of Qualityland, very contemporary concerns about insufficient regulation on data privacy and corporate reach become accessible.

Don’t worry – the book is very readable, and there is quite a bit of acerbic wit to keep the subject matter from becoming too heavy; one of the book’s pivotal items is a pink dolphin vibrator. This contrives to mean that the plot unfolds in a way that surprises, which is quite refreshing when dealing with storylines which create a cautionary tale about corporate overreach.

One of the other dominant themes within the text is about the creation of artificial intelligence that is so sophisticated as to be a individual rather than a very clever machine. This is less relevant to the concerns of 2019, but as technology becomes ever more complex (remember, there is an AI which has passed the Turing test), and AIs become ever-more present in everyday life, this is a question that we as a society will have to face at some point.

I’ll confess that I dragged my feet in reading the first few chapters, not certain where exactly they were heading, and equally uncertain that I was fully engaged. Peter Jobless initially seems a rather dull character who is wholly content to allow himself to be pushed around by algorithms that do him no favours, but as the story develops, it swiftly becomes apparent that there is more to Peter than a first glance would suggest. I guess that’s the point of the book; individuals are more complex than the sum total of their browsing history. As we move toward an increasingly digitised world, it’s important for us to remember this and to delineate clearly where the analogue world and its myriad complexities begins and ends, and to understand the limitations of simply trusting in google to always give us the ‘right’ answer. It’s one of the reasons I think this book is well worth the read, and likely why it’s currently being made into a series by HBO. It’s also why it’s probably going to pop up as a recommendation for me to watch at some point.