CHAPTER 8 . . . SHERRYL VINT

TOO BIG TO FAIL

THE BLUE ANT TRILOGY AND OUR PRODUCTIZED FUTURE

William Gibson’s Blue Ant trilogy is often considered the author’s turn away from science fiction, written in a near future that rapidly recedes into the past even as the novels appear. ¹ Jaak Tomberg argues that the trilogy is characterized by a “double vision”: that it must be “read as simultaneously realist and science-fictional.” Tomberg also contends that this genre convergence, through which Gibson’s style creates an estranged version of living in the present, is indicative of the hegemony of neoliberal logics that posit there is no outside to capitalism. ² A variety of conditions erase distinctions between inside and outside (the world market and the world; technologically mediated reality and materiality; the world of art and the world of the commodity) and have created a crisis in our capacity to effectively mount critique. Tomberg reads this as the collapse of science fiction’s capacity to offer visions of a world different from the quotidian one, because “in a culture that behaves as if it had no outside, there is also no plausible outside space-time where science fiction can position the figure of its estranging Other.” ³

I agree with Tomberg’s diagnosis that the trilogy depicts the impersonal forces of contemporary surveillance technologies, marketing soft ware, and social media immersion as an estranged kind of present, an updated cyberpunk in which we have not left the material world to immerse ourselves into cyberspace, but cyberspace has extended outward: reality fused with advertising spin that maps over and displaces our perception of materiality. At the same time, Tomberg’s focus on how Gibson’s mode of representing technology drives this shift minimizes the importance of the neoliberalist context that gives us this language of the “absence” of an outside, or, in Margaret Thatcher’s phrase, the sense that “there is no alternative” to the market economy and a future dominated by its values and metrics. This essay explores the opposition in the trilogy between advertising and art to argue that Gibson is nostalgic for the power of art to resist capitalism’s infiltration of social and political life, now at such a point of saturation that commodity relations have replaced all social ties. Blue Ant represents the nadir of a culture so thoroughly subsumed by capital that not only have relations of production become abstracted into the commodity, but people can no longer discern a line between authentic experience and the manipulations of advertising.

My point of departure is a passage in Spook Country given as the in-world Wikipedia entry for Hubertus Bigend. This citation notes that Bigend’s mother had links with “the Situationist International,” although Bigend denies their relevance to the success of Blue Ant. ⁴ Guy Debord’s analysis in Society of the Spectacle is perhaps the best-known theorization of changes to social life concomitant with the rise of consumerist and information-age capital. One way to understand the world as shaped by Bigend and Blue Ant is as the epitome of everything that Debord and other situationists anticipated and critiqued. Debord’s first dictum—that society has become “an immense accumulation of spectacles” in which “everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation”—aptly captures the future we see in this trilogy. ⁵ Crucial to this theorization of the spectacle is that we must understand it not as “a collection of images” but as “a social relation between people that is mediated by images”; ⁶ throughout the trilogy we see Bigend work actively to co-opt any social or creative activity that is not oriented toward market profitability and redirect it to that end. Debord also argues that “the fetishism of the commodity” has its end point in the society of the spectacle, “where the real world is replaced by a selection of images which are projected above it, yet which at the same time succeed in making themselves regarded as the epitome of reality.” ⁷ Thus, Gibson hints that we need to understand the Blue Ant trilogy not in terms of technological change and a Baudrillardian blurring of the distinction between reality and its representations, but through Debord’s observations regarding how capitalist alienation has so completely colonized social experience that we can no longer remember there is an alternative—that is, we take its spectacles as the world.

Perhaps the most potent way Gibson depicts a commodity ethos that supplants other social relations is through the various ways the fashion industry is taken up across the novels. Cayce’s work as a coolhunter in Pattern Recognition , and her value to the advertising industry given her allergy to brands, capture the complexities and ironies of the new kind of secret advertising that Blue Ant spawns. Her talent lies in finding things that still have some connection to what Debord would describe as the “directly lived,” what Cayce calls “at the level of consumer repurposing.” ⁸ She finds these styles in people’s innovative use, before they become “productized” by someone such as Bigend and thus sought by consumers based on how the industry directs their desire. ⁹ The more something becomes associated with fashion and branding, the less connection it seems to have with material existence, such as the beautiful kitchen in Damien’s London apartment, “as devoid of edible content as its designers’ display windows in Camden High Street.” ¹⁰ Later novels explore this interplay between use and exchange or advertising value, such as Bigend’s interest in “recession-proof” military contracts, which prompts Milgrim’s analysis of the borrowings between military style and street clothing, ¹¹ or Meredith’s experiences with making and designing shoes. In these examples, branding is a force that pulls the clothing out of something like a realm of lived experience and into that of the spectacle, images that come to be taken for the real.

Bigend explains to Hollis that the appeal of military-styled clothing has almost nothing to do with wanting to be a soldier but expresses a desire to “self-identify as. However secretly. To imagine they may be mistaken for, or at least associated with.” ¹² This is the apotheosis of Blue Ant’s insight that “consumers don’t buy products, so much as narratives,” here perfected in the longing that the “costume and semiotics of achingly elite police and military units” cultivates in buyers, who will never use these products “for anything remotely like what they were designed for.” ¹³ Meredith notes the degree to which the fashion industry embodies a logic of capitalism such that meeting human need is secondary, while the endless circulation of capital to generate profit is paramount. The emphasis on seasons and ever-changing “looks” symbolizes this broken economic base, an industry that “wobbles along, really, like a shopping cart with a missing wheel. You can only keep it moving if you lean on it a certain way and keep pushing, but if you stop, it tips over.” ¹⁴ Marketing, particularly marketing in which promoting an item takes precedence over its qualities, is the most afflicted aspect of this diseased structure. Meredith tried to make shoes that would defy this market logic of shabby commodities built for planned obsolescence, and there is a utopian promise in her description of handmade shoes that are lovingly crafted, with beauty and longevity in mind. Thinking of shoes made and distributed in this way requires that “you imagine a world. You imagine the world those shoes come from, and you wonder if they could happen here, in this world, the one with all the bullshit.” ¹⁵

The footage in Pattern Recognition is the primary symbol of a different economy of making. It appears online segment by segment, inspiring fierce fan loyalty and obsessive analysis of the possible meanings of each frame. The desire inspired by the footage is partly a desire to detach from history, here understood, it seems, as inevitably tied to capitalism, evoked by ever-changing fashion. The footage’s style does not allow viewers to date its period, and Cayce explains that part of her pleasure in the footage is that it emerges to them as an art object unconnected with the quotidian world, what Cayce calls the gift of “‘OT,’ Off Topic,” the studied avoidance of topics such as “the world . . . News.” ¹⁶ Cayce sees an artistic project and a way to escape a twenty-first century she finds increasingly distressing, whereas Bigend sees the footage as “the single most effective piece of guerrilla marketing ever,” ¹⁷ a set of images that captures attention and prompts widespread distribution, even in the absence of a product or narrative. At one point, writing to the maker of the footage, Cayce imagines it almost as a pathway to unalienated sociality, suggesting that viewers “allow ourselves so far into the investigation of whatever this is, whatever you’re doing, that we become part of it.” ¹⁸ Her desire for some kind of unalienated connection, which she can imagine only through a social relation to a product, is symptomatic of the society of the spectacle, in which “the commodity has succeeded in totally colonizing social life. Commodification is not only visible, we no longer see anything else; the world we see is the world of the commodity.” ¹⁹ The trilogy’s grasp of what troubles the twenty-first century emerges from this tension between Bigend’s plans to productize the footage and Cayce’s longing for the different world it seems to anticipate.

The real source of the footage proves macabre. Its images originate from surveillance cameras, whose ubiquity speaks to one of the alienations of contemporary society the trilogy explores (the interest in military uses of GPS tracking in Spook Country ; wearable technology, the “ugly t-shirt” that allows subjects to be deleted from recordings in Zero History ). ²⁰ To produce the footage, these images are manipulated by Nora, whose brain has been damaged by a grenade, and her resulting work is then rendered, pixel by pixel, to beautiful resolution by a captive prison labor force, controlled by her Mafia uncle, Volkov. As the novel points out, the rendering is extremely time intensive, and the only way the project could have been kept secret is if the labor force was subjected to “unusual constraints.” ²¹ The footage is the most prevalent of a several icons in the trilogy that point to the exploitative conditions of labor that underlie the production of commodities. Another striking example is the Curta calculator, another marvel of hand-crafted genius, that can calculate without electricity or electronic components, invented by Curt Herzstark during his imprisonment in the Buchenwald concentration camp.

What is crucial about Gibson’s version of these relations of production is that it is not merely the mass-produced items of the globalized economy that are tainted. Even something as seemingly disconnected from these industrial forces as the footage bears their trace. Indeed, when all is finally revealed, Bigend’s assessment of the footage is closer to the mark than Cayce’s, since the use of prison labor to indulge his injured niece was not simply a familial gesture on Volkov’s part but “a test operation, where healthy, motivated prisoners can lead healthy, motivated lives, plus receive training and career direction”; the experiment’s aim is to transform prisons into “entrepreneurial,” profitable spaces. ²² It is thus not all that surprising that in Zero History , we learn that Bigend successfully productized the footage into Trope Sloop, a “viral pitchman platform” for developing more advertising. ²³

Just as Cayce is deployed by Bigend to find the maker of the footage in Pattern Recognition , in Zero History Hollis is sent to find the maker of Gabriel Hounds, the elite denim maker whose refusal to participate in the excesses of branding render it all the more valuable. Indeed, perhaps the central irony that Gibson explores across this trilogy is how attempts to escape the commoditized society of the spectacle are inexorably transformed into its next advertising strategy. We eventually learn that Cayce makes Gabriel Hounds clothing, an updated version of her style as described in Pattern Recognition : items of clothing with no visible designer labels, whose cut is simple enough that they cannot be accurately dated to any particular decade or fashion movement. Cayce values her work for its attention to craft, the quality of the items produced by methods other than mass production—the indigo smell of the dye persists, the metal buttons are “nonreflective” rather than insignia of a company, and the cotton seems to have been hand loomed. ²⁴ Yet as Hollis searches for the designer, the scarcity of the item, the lack of any regular distribution outlet, seems to drive others to value Cayce’s work. When she and Hollis finally meet, Cayce regrets that people have forgotten how to make things with care, observing that a quality cotton shirt made in America in 1935 would be both inexpensive and better-made than more recent versions, and yet “if you re-create that shirt, and you might have to go to Japan to do that, you wind up with something that needs to retail for around three hundred dollars.” ²⁵ As a commodity, quality items seem impossible, but as elite objects, almost attaining the level of art, they might persist.

Gabriel Hounds’s designs and the footage are “things that weren’t tied to the present moment,” ²⁶ and in this discussion of craft in production we get hints that a significant element of what is to be eschewed in the present is its globalized economy. Simple cotton shirts or durable denim must become bespoke, luxury items, costing far beyond the reach of the working people whose attire they mimic, another strange kind of cosplay like the military clothing Bigend pursues. Describing her preferred style in Pattern Recognition , Cayce characterizes her avoidance of brand markers as a desire for clothing that “ideally seem[ed] to have come into this world without human intervention.” ²⁷ By Zero History , this erasure of labor has been corrected. An older Cayce explains that she lived in Chicago for a while after her marriage and “discovered the ruins of American manufacturing. I’d been dressing in its products for years, rooting them out of warehouses, thrift shops, but I’d never thought of where they’d come from.” ²⁸ Like Meredith’s shoes, Gabriel Hounds points to another world, a world where articles are manufactured to meet humans needs rather than to continue the circulation of capital, where items are desired for their functionality and craftsmanship, not for the spectacle of their branding—a world where humans make things, rather than represent them.

The resistance to globalization is most apparent in the trilogy’s reflections on commodity production and what Cayce calls “the mirror world,” which is how she describes the United Kingdom as it is embodied by commodity products that are almost like the familiar ones of the United States, yet subtly changed. When Boone tells her that the two Anglo countries are too similar, that UK products are “just more of our stuff,” ²⁹ Cayce corrects him by pointing to the traces of distinct and local economies of manufacture that remain embedded in the infrastructure. The differences may be subtle, but there are differences: “They invented that here, probably, and made it here. This was an industrial nation. Buy a pair of scissors, you got British scissors. They made all their own stuff. Kept imports expensive. Same thing in Japan. All their bits and pieces were different, from the ground up.” ³⁰ Yet the mirror world is disappearing, Boone points out, and Blue Ant’s philosophy, and advertising more generally, drive this erasure: “no borders, pretty soon there’s no mirror to be on the other side of. Not in terms of the bits and pieces, anyway.” ³¹ Later Cayce observes this conflation and feels “complicit in whatever it is that gradually makes London and New York feel more like each other. . . . She knows too much about the processes responsible for the way product is positioned, in the world.” ³² Thus, it is Bigend and those like him, their search for ever-larger global markets, that replace products attached to a lived reality, local from the ground up, with homogenized products positioned to serve consumers everywhere.

These reflections on commodities may remind us of another of Debord’s contentions, that the spectacle is the inverse of a true society, an alienated social relation that hinders critical thought. He observes that “spectacle is a concrete inversion of life,” ³³ and later suggests that “the economy’s domination of social life brought about an evident degradation of being into having—human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed.” ³⁴ This decline from being into having, he continues, has reached a second stage in which “all ‘having’ must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances.” ³⁵ Gibson’s critique of advertising and its social effects clearly echo Debord’s critique, including Cayce’s worry at the end of Pattern Recognition that the world has moved closer to “that country without borders that Bigend strives to hail from, . . . where there are no mirrors to find yourself on the other side of, all experience having been reduced, by the spectral hand of marketing, to price-point variations on the same thing.” ³⁶ Advertising is the basis for all social relations in the Blue Ant trilogy, a change far more sinister, in the final analysis, than the Sprawl trilogy’s intuition that the emergence of artificial intelligence would presage a fundamental social change. The market understood as an entity with agency and needs somehow independent from—and taking precedence over—human ones is the nonhuman force of alienation in the Blue Ant books.

The collapse of all social relations into market ones is the real subsumption of life under capital, exemplified by Magda’s work for Trans, a Blue Ant subsidiary. Magda promotes products not through visible advertising but through staged social encounters. She is paid to “go to clubs and wine bars and chat people up,” mentioning a client’s product in a favorable way as part of this exchange. “Nothing like a pitch, you understand, just a brief favorable mention.” ³⁷ This work is solely to attract attention, an early iteration of what Bigend hopes to capture and perfect with the footage, a marketing tool that colonizes people’s imagination and encourages them to promote the product themselves. The circulation of the narrative and its spectacle is enough, it seems.

As Magda notes, one of the most distressing things she learns through this fake socializing is that her interlocutors also lie: their desire to be part of the in-crowd with exclusive knowledge means that they tell her they like the product, too, even when Magda knows they could not yet have encountered it. She finds the work distressing and believes “I’m devaluing something. In others. In myself. And I’m starting to distrust the most casual exchange.” ³⁸ Her alienation epitomizes Debord’s observation—when the economic dominates social life, being becomes having, and having begins to “derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances.” ³⁹ The abstraction from lived experience is complete: while Cayce finds patterns of real use and enables them to be productized, Magda works to generate the pattern in the first place, such that human agency, preference, and ingenuity are entirely abstracted from the circulation of commodities.

The society of the spectacle is the world of Blue Ant, as Gibson’s sly reference to Bigend’s mother’s relationship with situationism suggests, but the question remains: does the trilogy champion an artistic strategy along the lines of détournement , to reawaken a sense of lived reality? Détournement , recall, is a strategy for turning received critical ideas, media texts, and received truths back against themselves, transforming them so that they are not faithful quotations of the original but are simultaneously critiques and transformations of what is cited. ⁴⁰ Rather, is Blue Ant something that might best be described as situationism everted? The motif of locative art, traced mainly in Spook Country , introduces this language of everting. Locative art uses GPS positioning and locally embedded technologies to create virtual images that can be viewed only with the appropriate equipment at that physical place. Locative art thus resists the detachment of time and space often associated with the internet and elements of online culture, creating artwork that is virtual and digital but insisting that it remain attached to a particular location, often especially to a history of events that have taken place there. One such work shows River Phoenix’s death on the Sunset Strip, for example, and Hollis is instructed that the artist’s work has to do with “history as internalized space,” a sensibility that emerges from trauma. ⁴¹ Locative art is also later described as the way cyberspace everts, “turns itself inside out.” ⁴² Hollis writes a book on the topic, Presences , which began as a magazine article for Node , another Blue Ant subsidiary. Node is another image of artistic interventions and provocations continually at risk of becoming appropriated by advertising and turned into their opposite. ⁴³

One way of understanding the Blue Ant trilogy, then, is that it is concerned with how artistic practice everts into advertising. Détournement is a situationist tactic by which the expressions of capitalist mass media are turned against themselves, revealing the empty promises of commodity culture. Debord observes, “détournement reradicalizes previous critical conclusions that have been petrified into respectable truths and thus transformed into lies.” ⁴⁴ The culture-jamming activism of Adbusters exemplifies this strategy of critique, which Debord describes as a practice that “deletes a false idea, replaces it with the right one.” ⁴⁵ The core practice of détournement is the use of reversal to create a meaning in the artwork that is antithetical to the meaning conveyed by the original commodity or media product.

With Blue Ant, we see the possibility that capitalism’s resilience has turned things once again, that advertising has now become a strategy of détournement that channels the energy of artistic critique away from social relations that emerge within lived experience and directs it toward affective relationships with the products and images that replace our social relations. All art, it seems, eventually becomes advertising. For example, Hollis and her former punk band mates decide to sell their hit single for use in an advertisement for Chinese cars: despite this selling out, the advertisement never airs (a better car, it seems, was needed to launch China’s bid to be a global automaker), and Hollis loses her share of the money in the stock market crash of 2008—events that suggest the trilogy wants us to see this choice as a mistake, not an acceptance of one’s realistic prospects.

Of more concern, however, is the fact that even people seeking to escape commodification, to make art or protect its creators from Bigend, ultimately have more intense social relations with products than they do with people. Cayce is obsessed by the footage, Hollis with Gabriel Hounds: the products, not the artists, are what entice them. The trilogy seems to observe (more than endorse) this preference for the object, part of a motif that explores how the art world has everted into the society of the spectacle. Cayce can find the footage because of Stella, Nora’s sister, who describes her role as being the distributor rather than the artist: “the one who finds an audience.” ⁴⁶ This phrase contrasts with Cayce’s use of the word “producer” to describe what she anticipates Bigend wants to be in relation to the footage, a term Bigend corrects: “I don’t think there’s a title, yet, for doing whatever it is that would be required. Advocate, perhaps? Facilitator?” ⁴⁷ By the later novels the word “producer” is used to describe roles similar to Stella’s in distributing the footage. Bobby’s technological work makes the locative art possible, a role the artist insists is more than mere dissemination: “If someone else were doing what Bobby’s doing for me, my work would be different. Would reach the audience differently.” ⁴⁸ The analogy here is less with film producers, often understood as those who find the funding for a project and perhaps supervise its marketing, than with music producers, those who find and cultivate a talent, often shaping an artist’s image or brand.

The term is stretched even further to apply to the old man, “who had supposedly once been something, never specified, in the American intelligence community,” who is “Garreth’s producer-director, in an ongoing sequence of covert performance-art pieces.” ⁴⁹ The old man and his cronies enact these stunts based on “a shared distaste for certain policies and proclivities of the government,” ⁵⁰ such as the complicated caper to irradiate money embezzled from Iraq rebuilding projects that Garreth pursues in Spook Country . We might understand Garreth’s stunts as a kind of military-culture situationism, turning his elite skills and training toward a critique of the “false idea” (to use Debord’s term) of military profiteering and replacing it with the “right one,” which in this context seems to be some sense of noblesse oblige regarding America’s role as a global power. Just as the military is no longer interested in securing any specific kind of global order, only in profiting as much as they can from economic manipulation, Bigend and Blue Ant are not interested in promoting any specific product but only in the trajectory of productization, in creating the society of the spectacle, which has the political benefit of stunting our capacity for critique.

The drift in the meaning of the word “producer” here points to some of the nostalgia that suffuses this trilogy. The world and values these novels long for are deeply in the past, almost certainly not in any real past but merely in an idea we have about the past as a simpler and better time—noblesse oblige, well-made cotton shirts, art for art’s sake, and unalienated social relations. ⁵¹ “Producer” once meant the one who makes something, but in the trilogy this activity is almost always discussed using the terms “maker” or “artist.” The Oxford English Dictionary lists another, more specific usage of “producer” in political economy: one who supplies commodities for sale, that is, as the opposite of consumer (John Locke’s discussion of interest rates in 1692 is the first recorded such usage); and later, first dating to 1891, as one who is responsible for the financial and managerial aspects of a cultural product (play, film, broadcast, etc.). This alternation of the meaning of “producer” charts a path that is similar to the displacement of the material world by the society of the spectacle that emerges with late-stage, information age capitalism. Bigend sees this as a natural evolution, the organic perfection of the market as a living being, and suggests that advertising works on the limbic brain: what makes us buy addresses “that older, deeper mind, beyond language and logic.” ⁵² Thus, for Bigend, it is a positive sign that “far more creativity, today, goes into the marketing of products than into the products themselves.” ⁵³ Yet for the Blue Ant trilogy, this precedence of producer over product, spectacle over material, is precisely the problem.

In my reading, then, the trilogy diagnoses and critiques how advertising everts situationism, taking cultural images that in their original context suggest alternatives to commodity relations and turning them into engines of commodity circulation. Art that has become branding, creativity applied to keeping the wheels of commerce turning, is splashy but hollow, like the fake books Milgrim finds in the library of the house where Brown confines him for a period. What from a distance appear to be the leather spines of antique books is only “a single piece of leather, molded over a wooden form,” with traces of gold lettering suggesting the presence of titles and authors, without forming any actual words: “It was a very elaborate artifact, mass-produced by artisans of one culture in vague imitation of what had once been the culture of another.” ⁵⁴ This encounter with an ersatz version of the traces of a real historical culture is evocative of Bigend’s description of the end of the idea of the future in Pattern Recognition , a concept that becomes inaccessible when the present is so much in flux, when “all that is solid melts into air,” as Marx and Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto . For Marx and Engels, things melted away because capitalist production always seeks to change the social relations and thus speed of production. ⁵⁵ Bigend contends,

we have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which “now” was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient “now” to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. . . . We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition. ⁵⁶

This ability to divine the patterns of the market is linked to advertising via Cayce’s sensitivity and allergy. In Pattern Recognition she tells us she has “a morbid and sometimes violent reactivity to the semiotics of the marketplace,” ⁵⁷ and in Zero History she describes her allergy as simply to “advertising . . . [a]ny concentrated graphic representation of corporate identity.” ⁵⁸ She can discern which patterns will be successful and which will not, yet she continually reminds herself to avoid the trap of apophenia, “the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things.” ⁵⁹ Her father warns her that such conspiracy theory thinking, in which all the pieces fit together, distracts one from seeing “the genuine threat, which was invariably less symmetrical, less perfect.” ⁶⁰ The specter of 9/11 haunts this first novel, but the rest of the trilogy is more concerned with globalized commodity culture than with militarization, although they are entwined. Perhaps the genuine threat has less to do with visible enemies, and more to do with how our own desires now seem also to be the engines of our ongoing alienation within commodity culture.

At the risk of falling into my own delusion of apophenia in trying to make all the pieces of the trilogy fit into a theory of advertising as the co-optation of détournement , I want to conclude by suggesting that the problem Gibson illustrates in this trilogy—namely, how economic logics of commodification subsume all social life—symbolizes a problem for science fiction in the twenty-first century. As is well established in the critical tradition, science fiction is often understood as a literature of utopian possibility, emerging from the genre’s affinity with historicized thinking. Science fiction shows us that the world might be otherwise and often encourages us to see the present moment as the past of an anticipated future. ⁶¹ More recently, however, in a move of détournement eerily like the strategies of Blue Ant, icons and images drawn from science fiction are increasingly used to advertise the products of a technologized future that proceeds as if there is no outside of or alternative to capitalism. ⁶²

One of the places where this conflation of speculative imaginary with corporate projections is most evident is in the future projections of speculative finance, the risk management commodified by the derivatives industry and gestured to by Bigend in his speech about the absence of a future. As I argued in more detail elsewhere, speculative fiction and speculative finance both seek to build material worlds from discursive ones, albeit aimed at radically divergent notions of what constitutes the best of all possible worlds. ⁶³ Bigend argues that the twenty-first century no longer has the luxury of “fully imaged cultural futures,” a verdict that in this context begins to sound as if we are no longer capable of believing in alternatives to capitalism, no longer able to cultivate a utopian imagination. As the present seems to collapse into science fiction, the future itself becomes colonized by market values.

The trilogy concludes with Bigend able to aggregate market data such that he can see the future, or at least “seventeen” minutes into the future, although he notes “seven seconds ” would have been sufficient. ⁶⁴ The importance of speed and anticipating future movements in the market is key to profitability in speculative finance, via arbitrage, that is, minute differences of prices for the same asset, usually at different locations. Yet it is important to recall that in these novels, people do their utmost to get away from Bigend. They fear his influence on their lives and the world and see him as the dangerous embodiment of a world fully subsumed by capital. Bigend may believe the world has become one with the market, that there is no past or future, only flows of capital and spectacle, but it would be an error to conflate his vision with the theme of the trilogy. In an interview with Larry McCaffery, Gibson lamented long ago that people understood his cyberpunk fiction to be a celebration of a “hard and glossy” future, failing to recognize that “what [he was] talking about is what being hard and glossy does to you.” ⁶⁵ Similarly, in the Blue Ant trilogy, Gibson shows us what being productized does to us.

The title “zero history” refers to erasing one’s traces in the systems of surveillance and data mining, systems that increasingly turn even our consumerism into a commodity and source of value for someone else. It also refers to Milgrim’s zero credit history, the absence of his participation in an economy increasingly grounded by relations of debt and ever-widening economic disparity. ⁶⁶ Citing Faulkner, Milgrim reminds us that “the past isn’t dead. It’s not even past.” ⁶⁷ The trilogy asks us to recognize that the future is not dead either, although it is at risk. Still, as Inchmale contends, “some futures needed throwing away, badly,” ⁶⁸ and the world of Blue Ant as détournement of artistic critique is one of these. The trilogy urges us not to capitulate to the logic that Blue Ant is too big to fail, yet its characters find spaces only of individual retreat and escape, not collective social transformation. If we want to throw this Blue Ant future away, we need to move beyond the novel’s critique of artistic provocation turned into advertisement, to turn things one more time—away from the individual and back into collectivity, thus making a society of being over having, lived reality over spectacle.