Tim Maughan

Infinite Detail tells the story of a revolt against big data that destroys the Internet and the global economy. Set mainly in a minority community on Stokes Croft Street in Bristol, England, it follows the fate of a group of friends as they search for their lost pasts and work to build new, healthier connections. There is a ray of hope at the end, but it leaves open the possibility that the destruction of our surveillance state will lead only to the old tyrannies. Our recent blip in the supply chain and Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter make the scenario more believable than it might have been three years ago.
Tim Maughan shares Cory Doctorow’s distaste for the surveillance inspired by the internet of things. Like Doctorow, Maughan does not want us to “let ourselves become nothing more than the content between adverts.” But Infinite Detail does not offer the utopian solace of Doctorow’s Walkway or Little Brother. As one character says toward the end, “[W]e just burned everything down and didn’t plan for afterwards.”
Stylistically, Infinite Detail is a patchwork of effective scenes embedded in a fragmented narrative that throws up roadblocks we don’t need. I especially like a conversation between a kid and his friends who can’t understand why he wants to find sounds to sample from old vinyl records and cassette tapes. 4 stars.… (mer)

It's interesting that, like Robert Harris's Second Sleep, Infinite Detail takes as its premise the collapse of the Internet (here, as a result of cyber terrorism), to explore what's left in the wreckage of global capitalism. Where Robert Harris took England back to a theocratic monarchy, Tim Maugham gets us to some form of communautarism. We follow several characters who, before the collapse, were all involved in some ways with the designing of a local, decentralized, network they crafted to escape the ubiquitous surveillance society that David Lyon has written about for decades now. However, none of them can escape the collapse, the subsequent rise of half-baked governance and militias. The characters all take different trajectories: one decides to run the community the old fashioned way, one becomes a sort of revolutionary against the militias, while the designer of the local network runs in search of his US boyfriend. The problem is that that's pretty much it. That's the book. This feels a bit light on content, which is a shame, with such a great premise.… (mer)