The story “The entire immense superstructure: an installation” by Ken MacLeod was published for the first time in 2014.
When Verrall gets back from Antarctica after six months he attempts suicide and must be subjected to psychiatric treatment. The results of the therapy are ambiguous and after leaving the clinic Verrall starts focusing more and more on the Wikipedia of Things (WikiThing).
“The entire immense superstructure: an installation” is a short story in which Ken MacLeod describes some fragments of the journey of the protagonist in the Wikipedia of Things, or WikiThing. It’s an idea created by adapting to the concepts of the Internet of Things the idea of New Babylon by Constant Nieuwenhuys.
New Babylon is an anti-capitalist concept but the utopian idea of a city where what Nieuwenhuys called Homo Ludens is free from work, left to the machines, contains concepts that anyone interested in a post-scarcity society can agree with. However, if this kind of idea will be applied it will be using technologies developed by capitalists that want to earn from them.
In “The entire immense superstructure: an installation” the Wikipedia of Things quickly becomes central and for this reason there’s a long paragraph that describes it. The protagonist Verrall goes to the discovery of this utopia but putting together fragments of his reports it seems that he hasn’t found it entirely satisfactory.
The story is narrated in part in the first person through what Verrall writes and in part in the third person by other people. This choice, also because a part consists of single phrases taken from Verrall’s reports, makes it fragmented. In the end, the plot consists in the search for utopia by Verrall and his reactions to what he finds.
Ken MacLeod is really minimalist exploiting for “The entire immense superstructure: an installation” a thin plot to describe some concepts about a possible utopia with various possibilities and ambiguities. The author lets the readers draw their own reflections and conclusions on Verrall’s journey. It’s available within an ebook on Amazon USA
