From a literary standpoint, there’s little to say about Ramez Naam’s Nexus; in terms of plot, pace and prose, it barely musters the lumpy momentum of the airport technothriller, and the only relation it bears to science fiction is as a reminder of how much weird cultural swarf got lodged in Silicon Valley during the smart-drinks and rave-trousers Mondo 2000 period, when “cyberpunk” stopped referring to an iconoclastic literary movement and started referring instead to a new iteration of the technoutopian cultural aesthetic based on symbols lifted—wholesale, unquestioned and stripped of their implicit irony—from the dystopian fictions of the aforementioned iconoclasts.
Or, more bluntly: there is no subtext to Nexus, no metaphor, no totality of theme. It’s a Hollywood story about what a technology does, not what it means—an admittedly subtle and fuzzy difference but one that I increasingly believe to demarcate the arid and cliché-strewn no-man’s-land which lies between sf and the technothriller. To find anything worth chewing on, we must consider Nexus as a transhumanist screed.
Movement transhumanism likes to make a big deal of its ethical dimension; there’s much chin-stroking over the morality of animal uplift, for instance, plus conversations about the existential risks of a superintelligent AI coming to exist in some parallel future time-line and then punishing you acausally for not aiding and abetting its apotheosis in your own thread of the multiverse. The transhumanist must justify the unpossible, in other words—which is hypothetical philosophy at its most enjoyable, as any lotus-eater will tell you, but possibly not the best basis for ethical enquiry.
Nexus plays the same game, using a blood-borne nanotech drug/computer/network as the vector by which the first big steps of the transhuman dream—namely supercharging the brain using microscopic cybernetic systems and optimisation software—has been achieved. Naam takes the opportunity to explore one of transhumanism’s favourite Big Questions, wherein we ask to what extent society will restrict individuals from augmenting themselves and whether society has the right to make those restrictions.
To be fair, Naam does entertain the very real possibility of augmentation technologies falling into the wrong hands and being used for unethical purposes, and there are plenty of scenes wherein the Gibsonian street is shown busily finding new uses for things. But his choice of China as top-tier bogey-man is as distasteful as it is lazy, its Yellow Peril-esque othering compounded by an egregiously unscientific portrayal of mass-produced clone soldiers as being not only physically identical (to the extent that face-recognition software can’t tell them apart) but also characteristically and behaviourally identical.
Naturally, there’s a sockpuppet stand-in for regulatory governance and scientific ethics in the form of the ERD. A USian three-letter agency set up to stomp all over new inventions that scare the Feds, the Emerging Risks Directorate has ignored Nietzsche’s warning and made hypocritical dragons of its dragon-hunters, augmenting its agents right up the wazoo so they can police the purported emergence of posthumanity. Their ace of spades is the female Dr Frankenstein whom the Chinese have (re)made to embody her own monster, and whose horrible apotheosis (yup, more damaged women; they sure do make for juicy plots!) has driven her to immanentise the posthuman eschaton By Any Means Necessary. The dilemma remains unresolved: caught between these two ludicrous extremes, our hero simply goes Galt and runs away from both, refusing the complex society that simultaneously enables and problematises his work.
My theory is that if you’re gonna set up two straw men for wrasslin’, you should at least knock one of them down at the end and give the reader some didactic closure. But to do so wouldn’t fit with the true project here, which is to tantalise with possibilities (though not necessarily plausibilities), to display the most polar dilemmas (ideally playing to the standard left-right partisan splits so that discourse might be steered with standard methods), then, finally, to use the resulting ethical edifice as evidence that you’re eating your own snake-oil and enjoying the taste, and that more money should be invested in snake-oil research because in twenty years or so we’ll finally have all the bugs and scaling issues ironed out, at which point [secular silicon heaven-on-earth with pseudo-Buddhist characteristics]!
In other words, Nexus—much like transhumanism itself—is fundamentally ideological in character, arguing implicitly that the individual’s right to augment themselves must supersede any collective right to control the development and use of technologies which threaten the always-already precarious balance of power between the haves and have-nots and, further, that all regulation of technology, however well-intended, is an act of political or economic hypocrisy. Technology is foregrounded, while the inconvenient global systems of resources and labour that produce said technology are backgrounded out of existence; we see the laboratory, as Bruno Latour would ask us to, but we do not see the actor-networks which make the laboratory possible. Technology is presented as morally neutral, shorn of association, devoid of embedded ethical issues; a gift from our own hubris. All that matters is the Supercool Thing and whether or not we’ll get to play with it.
The essence of USian Libertarianism lies in the assumption that the little things will work themselves out once a general framework for freedom has been established. The trouble with Libertarianism, transhumanism and Nexus is that they all use the Big Questions to elide the more pertinent personal questions of privilege and circumstance, to avoid the messiness of the real world and its niggling inequalities, its endless chains of unique and unrepeatable experimental conditions, its ossified hierarchies and old-boy networks. Freedom, for all three, is located in the Self and not in the Other, whose freedom is their own responsibility to negotiate, secure and protect—and devil take the hindmost.
Tellingly, this ethical narcissism is made manifest in the very first scene of Nexus, wherein the pick-up-artist mind-software which the hero is testing at a party goes awry, causing him to violently sexually assault the girl he’s been trying it out on. In the aftermath, his first priorities are to flee the party before being publicly shamed for his transgression, and to work out what went wrong with the software.
The girl is never mentioned again.