On a surface level, nothing! It was listening to Carole Cadwalladr’s superb yet disquieting new TED talk ‘This Is What a Digital Coup Looks Like’ when I sensed a connection to the three main themes in The Raw Shark Texts published eighteen years ago in 2007, nine years before the digital coup of Brexit and subsequent first term of Donald Trump. The reality of what happened to her afterwards has prompted Carole to speak out again and introduce a new umbrella word ‘broligarchy’ (tech Bros + oligarchy).
The Raw Shark Texts – a warning or simply hindsight?
In chapter three, author Steven Hall speaks on the reality of our past, and how it is left behind in space as we travel on our planet never to return to that exact point where our past selves existed.Think of a comet tail streaming out leaving behind fragments of that past carried in the language of our memories. The author L. P. Hartley memorably captures this in the opening line of his novel, ‘The Go Between’, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”.
Three interlocking themes
Like Hartley, Steven Hall must have also realised how fluid and conceptual our past, language, data and responses are in order to pull them together in the writing of Eric’s Sanderson’s labyrinthine journey. The first major theme is introduced from the moment Eric reawakens into this frightening amnesiac world as if someone or something has erased his past. In his case, it is almost irrecoverable.
Hold on to that thought as we encounter the second main theme in the form of the bizarre conceptual Ludovician shark whose calligraphic existence is predicated on breaking out from its salt water virtual reality into Eric’s real one. In doing this, the shark attempts to consume his ‘data store’, or memories. The attack leaves Eric a helpless amnesiac, a body divorced from his former self and his previous existence gone from his mind, except the shark is not finished with him yet.
The third major theme is personified in the enigmatic Scout, Eric’s guide in attempting to solve his existence. Scout carries an unasked-for app in her brain involving an interface to the unseen amorphous being of Mycroft Ward, a man long since dead, but who discovered a way to live on and fulfil his voracious appetite, a desire to garner all the world’s knowledge and experience. This virtual ‘existence’ requires field workers like Scout who have been coerced or charged with periodically downloading their knowledge and discoveries onto a dedicated hybrid server that collects and establishes Mycroft’s eternal legacy.
The unfolding of Eric’s second life quest parallels Scout’s desire to rid herself of Mycroft Ward and confronts us with puzzles through to the cryptic end. We know this is fantasy, but what aspects are real in the sense they relate to our modern reality?
The Ludovician Shark does not exist?
In her TED talk in 2019, Carole Cadwalladr spoke about how she went back to her roots in Ebbw Vale after the Brexit Referendum where she encountered a distinct dislocation between the EU’s positive impact locally and the high leave vote in the referendum. She found that there had been a huge online campaign of disinformation via advertising on Facebook that informed those who might have voted remain to vote leave, which it seems they did. Because of the way Facebook operates with information, unsurprisingly, they had been erased and the social media giant would not give any details about the background of the advertising. We now know that this campaign was targeted at Facebook users who had very likely been profiled as more susceptible to misinformation and Facebook was subsequently fined the maximum of £500,000 by the UK’s Information Commissioner.
Could the Ludvician’s appetite be paralleled with the covert consumption of data during the promotion of Brexit in the UK and forerunner to Trump’s campaigns? Perhaps couple this with the inherent online amnesia in many Social Media platforms? Ok, you can argue that you still have your memories, but, and here’s the crunch, you no longer have any control over anything you have put online and its potential ‘shark’ usage. You signed that away by agreeing to the terms of use once you engaged with the platform. Your data will not be lost as the proverbial shark continues to grow and we have no direct control to reign it in or stop it, unlike its demise in the novel.
What of Mycroft Ward, does he exist?
My answer is; he does in the form of a genderless ‘AI child’ parented by a myopic broligarchy and giving it rein to scrape data wherever its tentacles are directed. Given its current scope it will be increasingly instrumental in shaping our daily lives, how our countries are run, and power to those who ‘own’ and distribute it.. Unchecked and potentially gaining autonomy will undoubtedly challenge us in the future.
However, there is still hope. At the end of her 2025 TED talk, Carole conveys a solid message, not just a wish, but a genuine rally call: “I chose to come back to TED because I’m reclaiming my story, my words. We are not powerless. Because we know who we are and we know what we stand for.”
If I were asked by the child in the back seat “Are we there yet?” I feel my answer would be of the “Not long now!” variety.
