Hello, friends,
“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth,” the writer Albert Camus famously said.
As a journalist who specializes in facts, I am often jealous of the truths that fiction can hold. And maybe top of my jealousy list is a new book called “The Immortal King Rao,” by Vauhini Vara, who was a tech reporter colleague of mine at The Wall Street Journal before moving on to fiction.
In her novel, Vara paints a picture of a near-future Earth ruled by a corporate board that deploys an all-knowing algorithm that not only crushes dissent but also allocates resources and decides what clothes would look good on you. She describes how this world was developed by an Indian entrepreneur named King Rao, who starts as a tech pioneer and then extends his power to global governance.
Vara’s work provides a fascinating vision of what the world could look like if we let Big Tech’s boy genius founders have the final word on the speech we allow and the laws that govern us. It feels particularly prescient this week as we watch Elon Musk drop endless trial balloons about what he will and won’t allow on his newly acquired Twitter platform.
Her novel was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice and has been shortlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Vara is a Wired contributing writer, and her journalism has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. She is a mentor at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Book Project and the secretary for Periplus, a collective that mentors writers of color.
Our conversation, edited for brevity and clarity, is below.
Angwin: We were both tech reporters at The Wall Street Journal together. How did you get into fiction?
Vara: I was writing fiction even before I started working at the Journal. In college, I worked at my school’s newspaper, The Stanford Daily, but I also minored in creative writing. After graduating, I started right away as a reporter at the Journal, but I was always writing fiction on the side.
Facebook was part of a newer generation that seemed to be growing faster than anything we’d seen before, and that had a power we hadn’t seen before—a kind of stickiness to their use. We could speculate as to what they would look like in 10 or 20 years, but it wouldn’t have been responsible journalism to write an article saying, “If Facebook is allowed to continue to grow in this way, here’s what might happen.” We don’t do that in journalism.
I found myself frustrated by the limits of journalism in contending with these companies. The solution for myself, at 26 years old, was to step away and go to graduate school. In grad school, I was writing short stories that were not set in anything resembling Silicon Valley. But at some point I realized all those ideas that were swirling around in my mind when I was a tech reporter hadn’t left me. I was still thinking about them.
During school, I started working on a novel, and I knew that the novel would start with a kid born on a coconut grove in the south of India in the middle of the 20th century. Soon after conceiving of this character, it became clear to me that this kid was going to move to the U.S. in the 1970s and start a tech company. That was the first time my tech reporting world and my fiction writing world suddenly collided.
Angwin: Let’s talk about that kid, King Rao. He became a tech entrepreneur, and then he became a sort of god. It’s a pretty dystopian vision of the world, but it’s not the same dystopia that a lot of people talk about—with robots swarming the earth. Can you talk about the world you created?
Vara: In fiction, we can look at where we came from, and where we are at, and extrapolate using our imaginations. As a tech reporter, it was clear to me that there had been a compounding of wealth and power in the hands of fewer and fewer people and that technology and the tech industry had accelerated that change.
For example, we know that corporate power is very influential politically because companies hire lobbyists to write laws that favor them. In imagining what the world might look like, if this were to continue into the future, it didn’t feel like too much of a stretch to imagine that this power would stop being intermediated and companies would just start ruling the world.
Silicon Valley isn’t exactly a bunch of CEOs sitting together in a boardroom rubbing their hands together and saying, “We’re going to take over the world; we’re going to do evil.” It’s actually a bunch of individuals who, I think, truly believe they’re doing good in the world and often don’t understand why they face criticism. They feel like they’re just behaving the way their shareholders want them to. And shareholders, for the most part, don’t consider themselves morally responsible for the companies they invest in. I was interested in trying to write about this dilution of individual responsibilities such that it starts to feel like everybody is responsible and nobody is responsible at the same time.
Angwin: Was King Rao based on any real-life tech CEO?
Vara: I was trying to figure out how to write about King Rao in a way that felt like it kept with the actual world. In imagining his company, which came into existence in the 1970s, I wanted it to have some grounding in the actual Silicon Valley that was emerging in the ’70s. I did lean quite a bit on the actual history of that time because I wanted this company to feel recognizable to us. I was thinking of Bill Gates, I was thinking of Larry Ellison, I was thinking of Steve Jobs, certainly.
One thing that I think makes King Rao different from those three men, as well as different from the Indian American CEOs of tech companies now, is that he comes from a Dalit background. He comes from the most oppressed stratum of the Indian caste system, and I wanted to write a character whose decisions would be very much influenced by that background.
King Rao is a character who grows up aware of the oppression around him but instead of deciding to try to dismantle that system decides, consciously or not, that he’s going to build another system in which he can be on top.
Angwin: The way that Rao rules is through the “Algo”—an algorithm that reminds me of tech utopian dreams that involve making great algorithms to allocate resources appropriately and scientifically. Many people in the book seem to get along just fine under the Algo.
Vara: I think there’s a human tendency to want to align ourselves with power and wealth. I show a version of this happening in the 20th century, on this small coconut grove in India, and I also show a version of it happening in the near future. It is this thing where people are told by those in power, “Listen, as long as you’re smart, hardworking, and resourceful, you don’t have anything to worry about. It’s the people who aren’t very efficient and are lazy and can’t get things done who are the ones who have to worry.”
We all like to think that we’re the ones who are going to try hard enough and be fine. I think systems that are built in that way, whether it’s traditional capitalism or whether it’s an algorithm, are really successful.
Angwin: You also write about the people who refuse to join Rao’s system of government. I think it’s fair to say that their life is hard. They make drugs and they do sex work; they don’t seem to have great living standards. I’m wondering if this is a cautionary tale?
Vara: There’s a way in which I related to these radical separatists who are trying their best to push back against the status quo. Then there’s also a sense in which I find them naive and doomed from the start. I am conflicted about them as both a writer and as a reader of my own book.
Julia, I have to think you must feel this as a journalist. It can feel as if we’re doing all this work to make clear what the facts are and expose the truth, and it feels like it’s not clear who’s listening, or what the impact of this work might be.
We can especially feel it now in this age, where you go on Twitter, and Elon Musk with his 113 million followers, who’s now Twitter’s owner and CEO, is not retweeting the latest Markup investigation, for example, because it’s not in his best interest to share information that portrays his industry in a negative light. One can imagine a future in which that becomes increasingly the case. It’s a scary future, but I think—I hope—that there will always be people willing to resist a world that looks like that.
As always, thanks for reading.
Best,
Julia Angwin
The Markup
(Additional Hello World research by Eve Zelickson.)