Interviews
Barnes & Noble Q&A from David Shafer
David Shafer is the author of WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT, which the NY Times said “may be the novel of the summer,” and which Lev Grossman called “astoundingly good.” David is a graduate of Harvard and the Columbia Journalism School. He has lived in Argentina and Dublin, and has been a journalist, a carpenter, a taxi driver, and briefly a flack for an NGO. He now lives in Portland with his wife, daughter, and son.
1. WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT is about the danger of data—when it's in the hands of an omnipotent online oligarchy. Is Big Data really the new evil empire?
No. There are wondrous and progressive uses for thevast swathes information that can now be collected: data to do good epidemiology, data to figure out what we're going to do for our ruined planet.There's some information I don't mind giving up to the collective; there's a large portion of my life that I don't consider private. Data vacuuming — please forgive the tired metaphor — is only a tool,with no morality intrinsic to it. So if an evil cabal were doing it for nefarious pecuniarypurposes, we'd definitely be screwed. In the twentieth century we had all those madmen, the monstrous dictators. That's the threat we know, and I hope we're be less likely to fall for it again. But now the thing we need to watch out for is some sort of “technoligarchy,” a headless kind of beast that's watching us now, and learning about us. It's mainlyvast buildings full of servers, all being directed by algorithms. (Full disclosure: I know exactly zero about computer science. But it's lots of decisions being made mathematically, right?) There are probably still humans somewhere in the equation, though soon those might only be guys dusting the servers. I'm not that worried about the Singularity —the web coming alive somehow to rule over us — I'm worried about unconscious autonomous machines. Like the NSA's cyber warfare bot called MonsterMind(!). That was the recent dispatch from Snowden's purloined hard drives.
(I shouldn't have said “ruined planet.” I am more hopeful than that. Maybe “injured planet.”)
2. Considering the undeniable power of technology and today's large corporations, how close do you think we are to “an international cabal privatizing all information”?
With The Committee, I was stretching things for comic and dramatic effect. Sucha cabal would require that the techno-barons cooperate with each other; I don't think that's happening. And I don't think we're in imminent danger. It seems that all they want for now is data about our consumer habits so they can target their advertising more efficiently. If they start to want much morethan that, we should push back. Again, this of course all depends on the “They.” When I keep saying “they” I know I sound paranoid, but in factI believe that I live in a functioning democracy. We can decide to protect ourselves from the sort of evil oligarchy I made up for the book. We just need good journalists, an uncowed citizenry and good-hearted leaders. In WTF, The Committee is mainly banking on our laziness, our tendency to ignore creeping control if we are kept distracted by shiny things - moving sidewalks in airports, box sets of TV shows, organic kale in a sparkling produce section.
But there is this worrying trend, which is accelerating: we're pouringso much of our lives into our devices. The devices then send all that back to HQ. The device is called a “platform.” Your phone is a platform. Once we had desks, as there was paper on them.Then we haddesktops, and the paper became little pictures of paper, and now I don't think they're really bothering with the little pictures anymore. They want us to keep all our information with them, in a place they have asked us to call “the cloud.” The deal with cloud storage is essentially: Let us keep all your stuff. We'll do it for free and we'll make it searchable. But we'll give it back to you really fast when you ask for it. That seems like a raw deal.
3. So you do suffer from Internet paranoia?
No. Or if I do I am taking very few precautions. I have crummy passwords. I never back up. I leave my phone beside my bed at night. I do not read the EULAs that I agree to by clicking a box. I told my bank the name of my first pet. I use a debit card to buy a $2 coffee. Twenty times a day I type into a little box words that tell the story of what I'm thinking about. I grew up as this locomotive went from chugging to barreling, and I've never even taken the time to really understand how it works. Like Leila, I've never looked behind the icons. But I do the easy things. I tape over my web cam (If that's really where the lens is—don't you think there's something fishy about the little green light on the CAPS LOCK key?). I don't "tag" pictures of people on social networks, or "allow location services" on my Words With Friends. I think we should leave some work for the actual spies at Fort Meade. I also write letters — with a pen and an envelope and a stamp. I bet the NSA finds that tedious.
4. One of your protagonists, Leila, works for an NGO, which you yourself have done. Was Leila's experienced based on yours?
My NGO work experience was brief. After Hurricane Katrina savaged the Gulf Coast in 2005, I worked as a press officer for an NGO that was trying to help people who had been flooded out of their homes and communities. We did help. But I saw then what a difficult proposition it is — helping people — especially when an organization is trying to do it. I'd thought Aid and Relief work would consist of delivering vital goods and services to needy, grateful people. It turns out to be more complicated than that.
I wrote Leila to be a logistician because the people I met who had that job description seemed to get things done. They have a point A — point B job, and they are very no-nonsense. Leila is a hero not because she is going to be the savior of women's health in Myanmar, but because she works hard at her job, because she tries to roll the boulder forward. I think that the people who work in Aid and Development are helping a great deal. (They are also usually agreeing to give up the idea of being rich, which is saying something in this world.) Plus, I imagine they probably do run up against spies, which makes them excellent for my purposes.
5.The novel jumps around between a number of different international locations—Myanmar, London, Dublin, New York, California, and, of course, Portland, your current hometown. Why those cities? Are the locations and the geography in the book real?
Yes, I walked the streets of those places. The Portland and Dublin locations are especially reality-based; Portland has been home for half my life. Dublin and I had a thing. London and I had a fling. Myanmar I only traveled through. Tarzana, and LA in general, not so much. I made up a fair bit in those passages. But isn't that why they made Google Street View? If the LA scenes seem kind of pixelated or perspectivally-oblongated, that's the fault of the Google camera.
6. How much research went into the book?
To write Leila I had do a fair bit of looking stuff up. I didn't know anything about Iran, or Persian culture, I didn't know much about Myanmar. In terms of trying to sound convincing about grand scale data collection and how that might happen I leaned pretty hard on the work of two journalists named Dana Priest and William Arkin. They wrote a series for The Washington Post, and then a book called Top Secret America. As I mentioned above, I tried to make all the locations ring true, so there was a lot of walking around, driving around, looking at maps. But I'd say two-thirds of the book required no research. It required honest recall and imagination.
7. What inspired the title?
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is radio code for WTF, which in turn is code for a three-word phrase that is most often considered an obscenity. But I meant this WTF to take in all the ways in which the phrase might be uttered, from its angry form to its merely frustrated form, to a form in which it is a nearly religiousexpression of wonder and bafflement about the world.
8. What are your own favorite books about nefarious oligarchies?
Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. (I'm one of those people.)Maybe I could say the Robert Graves novels,I, Claudius and Claudius The King. They definitely treat an oligarchy. I don't know thatthe Romans in questionwere nefarious, but certainly they were bonkers. I would also say Bob Shacochis's grand novel, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, though I fear that to do so might actually undersell the thing. Nefarious is too silly a word to describe the people who pull the strings in the world of Shacochis's book. I guess they're not even oligarchs. But they are wicked, powerful and hidden.
9. In the book, almost everyone in Dear Diary has a codename. Have you given thought to what yours would be?
Colonel Truth. But now that one's blown, so I'll need to choose another one.
