Discussing My Fan Fiction

For my transformative work, I chose to do a fan fiction. From the beginning, there was no question as to the angle I wanted to take for my story – apocalypse, the classic sci-fi standby. The Silent Age already has this plot built into the game, but I wanted to explain how the dystopian world of 2012 came to be. I did this by incorporating plot points from episodes of Black Mirror (“Fifteen Million Merits” and “The Entire History of You”) to show how excess of digital technology ruined society.

Unknowingly, I made the storyline to my fan fiction very similar to Forster’s “The Machine Stops.” (Remix or originality, anyone?) As I described in my fan fiction, society crumbled when the Archon headquarters imploded/exploded and people lost access to their archives and social networks. In “The Machine Stops,” the Machine that gives everyone below Earth’s surface life stops, causing an apocalypse. In that story, the Machine provided people with everything they could need in the literal sense, from communication via webcam to medical care. It was how their lives were sustained not living on the surface of the Earth — they didn’t need to travel outside of their world, because the Machine took care of them. Using the real world as a model for my own fan fiction, I wanted digital technology to be the downfall of civilization because in many ways, our society is dependent on it. I genuinely think society would lose itself if all of our technological devices were to disappear or become unusable. Kuno says to his mother at a few points during “The Machine Stops” that she and everyone else in the society hold too much importance to the Machine, and that they worship it like a deity. Although the world I describe in my fan fiction does not quite worship technology, it is surely the center of their universe, and without it people would have nothing to work/live for.

I made Archon a surveillance/information gathering agency because I wanted to mirror corporate digital juggernauts like Google and Apple. Yes, Archon is fictional, but is there really that much more of a difference between it and Google/Apple? It’s a headquarters that gathers people’s “personal” and “private” information, whether it’s things they’ve put on their various accounts (Facebook, Gmail, etc.) or the mundane details of their everyday lives (the grain). I made sure to include the detail that people are blissfully unaware of Archon’s data collecting, because that same ignorance exists for the average person in our society. I wanted to portray the public as having “only the vaguest idea of exactly how much information is being gathered about their […] habits and even less control over what [the company] does with the proprietary information about individual behavior it has collected in the ‘privacy’ of its digital enclosure” (Andrejevic 299). This is probably the most tragic part of my fan fiction – that people are suckered into the scheme of Archon and are unaware that they are being surveiled. They are too busy being enamored with the technology to ask critical questions about where their information is going and who’s seeing it, so much so that they revert to anarchy when they don’t have it. If the companies aren’t collecting our information, then they’re going crazy. If regular people don’t have the means to share their information with digital technology, we go crazy. It’s an endless cycle of need that gets at one of the core ideas we’ve studied all quarter. Digital technology is so ingrained in our culture now that it is almost necessary to use it. And if we don’t, the world goes into a panic.