Infomocracy

I vote and keep up with politics, but my last active involvement with a campaign was my half-hearted run for student body president of my junior high school fifty years ago. I hated everything about it, didn't care that I lost, and no longer remember why I thought I wanted the job. I didn't know if I would make it through Infomocracy, but Older's vision of a near future in which Information, a search engine monopoly now indispensable to daily life, has moved the world from nation states to micro-democracies of 100,000 citizens each, is well-constructed and moves swiftly through the intricacies and intrigues of its plot. The campaign is all consuming for the true believers, spies, and insurrectionists that make up her young, super intelligent, globe-hopping cast of characters. There is a natural disaster and some old-fashioned violence to relieve the narrative's wonkiness, and both the food and the sex sound really good. What the story makes clear is that when systems become more sophisticated, bad actors will find more sophisticated means of manipulating it - or resort to blunt force if it will serve their purpose.

Most of the novel is in Asia and the Middle East, which seems right for a setting a century in the future. America, at least beyond what's left of the coastal cities, is considered a reactionary irrelevancy where millions continue to support entities holding onto the names of the Democratic and Republican parties. But this might make these voters susceptible to the enticements of the Liberty Party, the true villains of the piece who are possibly planning the anachronistic measure of aggression toward neighboring democracies. Mishima, the Information operative at the center of the novel, reflects on this situation, considers it an empty threat, but has to admit:

...they are targeting older voters for whom those old associations still ring true. But then those may be exactly the people who pose the greatest threat to the system: the people who can still remember, with rancor and longing and the inevitable distortions of time, what things were like before.