Another Now Read online

  When I asked her reasons for the double exit, she answered by producing two pieces of paper. One was a circular from Sussex University in which the students were referred to as customers. ‘If that’s what they are, they are the sort who are always wrong,’ she commented. The second piece of paper was an internal Labour Party memo referring to the infamous Clause IV of its constitution, the party’s long-standing commitment to ‘secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry…upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service’. Ever since 1959, there had been those within the party who sought to have this commitment to nationalization removed, but the trade unions had resisted. Skilled at reading the writing on the wall, Iris knew what the memo foretold. In the wake of their recent defeats, the trade union bosses were preparing to drop, even as an idle vision, the dream of common ownership over the utilities, the factories, the railways and the various high streets and marketplaces where commerce unfolds. It was game over, she thought.

  ‘Nineteen eighty-seven is as good a year as any for these trade unions to die out and follow our universities into oblivion. And for me to return to my tapestries.’ Which is precisely what she did.

  Iris had picked up the art of knitting elaborate tapestries during her time in Cameroon. Her instructors had been the villagers with whom she lodged while documenting their languages. Here the norm was for the women to work all day in the fields, while the men stayed at home to cook, clean, look after the children and knit. She had been taught tapestry making by men whose social status hinged on the beauty of their handiwork and whose pattern-less knitting techniques liberated her imagination. What resulted were stunning depictions of intricate, and often lewd scenes, drawing on African, European, Indian and Japanese imagery.

  Iris took Thatcher’s triumph as her cue to withdraw to her upstairs sunroom and dedicate herself to an art form that defied polite society’s familiar categories. Of course, within a couple of years they had started selling at respectable prices in galleries in Geneva and London, even at auction. As I write these lines, one of the first tapestries she made that summer, featuring a sumo wrestler performing an erotic dance in Buckingham Palace, hangs above my desk, its woollen surface fraying and yellowing a little, but its irreverent power undiminished after forty-eight years.

  In the evenings, however, it was business as usual at Iris’s Brighton terrace. Her home remained the sanctuary it always had been for our circle of friends and hangers-on, who would gather at her house most evenings for drinks and debate and to be thrilled, reprimanded and cheered by Iris in equal measure. For years thereafter, she behaved like a constructed contradiction: the gregarious recluse of Brighton who passionately embraced anyone in need of her support while meticulously refraining from commitment either to person or to cause. Until, that is, Eva appeared on the scene twenty-five years later.

  Eva

  Eva moved in next door to Iris on a summer’s afternoon in 2012. The twenty-eight-year-old Californian arrived in a taxi, straight from Gatwick, with her five-year-old son Thomas and three large suitcases in tow. Minutes later Iris was knocking assertively on her front door to invite her over for a welcoming glass of wine and to meet whoever happened to be visiting later that evening.

  Having put Thomas to sleep and set up the remote child monitor on her phone, Eva popped round. Introducing herself to the gathered, she explained that she had come to Brighton from the United States to take up her first-ever lectureship – at Sussex University. A year or so previously she had earned an economics PhD from Princeton whose title, ‘Three Essays on Game Theoretical Models of Evolutionary Psychology’, would give Iris boundless opportunites to mock her viciously over the years. The mockery, however, hid a growing empathy due in part to the realization that Eva was on the run: that both her academic career as an economist and her passage to England were elements of a broader escape. What Iris could never have imagined back then was how far Eva’s escape would eventually take her thirteen years later, in the closing days of 2025.

  Chance and a talent for mathematics were central to Eva’s story. In 2006, as a twenty-two-year-old graduate in theoretical physics from Stanford, she had followed her privileged ilk to the riches of Wall Street, first as an intern at Goldman Sachs then as a ridiculously remunerated financial engineer at Lehman Brothers, the financial world’s Titanic. When Lehman hit its iceberg in the autumn of 2008, Eva abandoned not just the sinking ship but the whole racket. After a few months of clearing her head, she enrolled at Princeton’s graduate school of economics in early 2009, determined to lose herself in abstract, fully mathematized theory, seeking refuge in the economic sermons that once steadied her hand as a financier.

  Soon after arriving at Princeton, she discovered she was pregnant. Iris made a mental note of how meticulously Eva avoided any mention of the father, proceeding swiftly to recount the nine months she lived in a peculiar isolation, her mind and body in two vastly differing realms: while one surfed the most extreme abstractions, the other, with her baby growing inside it, provided the most powerful awareness of her own materiality she had ever known.

  For the first two years of Thomas’s life, Eva saw hardly anyone except for her baby and, occasionally, her academic supervisor. Iris imagined her as a cross between an East Coast pietà and a traumatized lieutenant who retreats from the butchery of the battlefield into the monastery that had blessed his generals’ holy massacres. ‘She ran away from Wall Street to hide in Princeton,’ I recall Iris whispering to me, ‘to hone the theories that underpinned her financial crimes at Lehman’s.’

  And in 2012, with her doctorate scarcely under her belt, Eva retreated again, this time leaving her country and its more lucrative university system for Britain and the University of Sussex. She was not yet thirty and already Eva’s life resembled a steady evacuation.

  Iris and Eva came from different intellectual and moral universes but, as they eventually came to recognize, it was their shared sense of paradox and trauma that provided the underpinnings of their most peculiar bond. Iris, the great practitioner and theorist of collective action, operated as a one-woman army. Eva, an unswerving individualist, felt keenly her abandonment and the absence of human bonds in her life. While neither cared to admit to it, their separate paradoxes mirrored one another. So too their traumas.

  Eva had been born in 1984, the year of the miners’ strike. The failure of that strike was Iris’s Waterloo, sealing her life as a permanent defeat. But what the miners’ strike had been to Iris, Lehman’s collapse had been to Eva. And just as in 1984 we realized painfully that we would live the rest of our days as history’s losers, so in 2008 Eva saw history erupt on her own doorstep with the same soul-destroying, optimism-sapping force. Each had experienced the shocking epiphany that their world was no more. It would prove the force that dragged them, despite strenuous resistance, down the path to an odd but solid friendship.

  That summer’s night in 2012, when Eva crossed Iris’s threshold for the first time, the mood turned from jolly to prickly rather abruptly. Iris had invited Eva out of a sense of neighbourliness, feminist solidarity with a single mother struggling alone in a new country and curiosity. But as soon as Eva mentioned her past as a banker, Iris was unable to help herself.

  ‘Bankers are only good at sucking the oxygen out of society,’ Iris declared. ‘They divert extraordinary resources to the spivs, while lending either far too much or far too little but never, ever to those who either need the money or who plan to do useful things with it. So,’ she told Eva condescendingly, ‘on balance it is a good thing that you switched from destroying people’s lives on a planetary scale to polluting the mind of England’s young with lectures on the efficiency of financial markets.’

  Eva lacked Iris’s enchanting insolence but was no pushover.

  ‘People t
rade through markets for the same reason they do business with the laws of gravity,’ she shot back. ‘Are you proposing to replace those too? Surely equipping the young with the skills they need to navigate the world they inhabit is preferable to polluting their minds with pointless utopias?’

  ‘My dear Eva,’ Iris replied, ‘universities are not about imparting skills. They are about producing flexible minions dying to do as they are told. You are there to manufacture young people willing – desperate – to be moulded to their future bosses’ priorities. And the first step is to get them to swallow without question your faith that markets are as natural as gravity and profit the only worthy aspiration.’

  Back and forth they went, with Eva matching every one of Iris’s insults with a passive-aggressive rejoinder.

  ‘I don’t deny the harm done by financial markets and profiteering,’ replied Eva at one point, ‘but grubby money-making is never capable of damaging humanity as much as your collectivist dreams have done. You mean well but you’re paving the way to the next gulag archipelago. You oppose commodification. It’s my job to persuade my students that it’s humanity’s greatest hope!’

  Uncharacteristically, Iris allowed Eva to get away with this lazy riposte. The young American had clearly hit a nerve, no doubt the same one that had prompted Iris’s withdrawal from academia and political activism all those years ago. Terminally frustrated with the Left’s authoritarianism, Iris now found herself – for the first time ever – yearning for a dose of Eva’s impoverished libertarianism. So instead of taking one of at least a dozen easy shots available to her, Iris simply smiled, raised her glass and, retreating into Shakespeare as she so often did when feeling mischievous, pompously welcomed Eva to England, to ‘this precious isle set in a silver sea’. It was the end of their first confrontation.

  A short while later, Eva excused herself, saying Thomas had been alone for too long, and said goodnight.

  ‘Poor girl, she stands no chance,’ Iris scribbled in her diary that night. ‘This England never did, nor never shall, lie at the proud foot of a conqueror.’

  Eva was already getting under her skin.

  Costa

  Costa parachuted into our circle long before Eva. I first came across him at King’s College London in 1989, at yet another tedious Thatcher-bashing meeting. An accomplished engineer, born in Greece, trained in Germany and then working in Amsterdam, Costa had been invited to give a left-wing perspective on what was soon to become the new economy. His prescient speech stood not a chance with that audience.

  In 1989 British leftists were up in arms against Thatcher’s notorious poll tax and its impending passage from Scotland to England and Wales. Even the most technically savvy in the audience still worked on clunky Amstrads with floppy disks and no Internet connection. What were they to make of Costa’s passionate appeal to combat the establishment with ‘digital messaging, financial engineering and artificial intelligence’?

  ‘Science-fiction fantasies are an indulgence when people are hurting, mate,’ shouted one member of the audience.

  ‘Capitalism and science fiction share one thing,’ he replied coolly. ‘They trade in future assets using fictitious currency. Even if these tools are still in the realm of science fiction, they are our best defence. Believe me, given half a chance the powerful will wage an all-out war against the rest of us using these high-tech weapons. We must deploy them first if we want to stand any chance of defending ourselves.’

  His nonchalance in the face of the crowd’s hostility brought back memories of my first encounter with Iris, seven years previously. A brief exchange afterwards was all it took to establish that we shared far too much. This we blamed on our common background in the island of Crete. We left the meeting together and ended up at a shabby Indian restaurant a few blocks south of the Thames where we continued talking until after midnight.

  A somewhat shy man of roughly my years, Costa had been both a tech evangelist and a tech heretic since his adolescence in Archanes, a small village south of Heraklion. After high school, like many Greeks of our generation, he fled to ‘Europe’. In 1979 he enrolled at Stuttgart University on an engineering degree. Immediately upon graduating, five long years later, he was recruited by Dornier to design missile guidance software. For three years his fascination with the engineering challenges clashed with his conscience. By 1988 his conscience had won and Costa resigned. Within a month he landed his dream job with Cornea PLC, a small company based in Amsterdam that employed him to design bionic implants to aid the blind.

  Costa had been working at Cornea for only a year when we met but, once again, disillusionment had already set in. The corporate profit drive was no less deadly in the health than in the arms industry, he had discovered. Only a few months ago he had designed an upgrade to a microchip that massively enhanced an implant’s capacity, which he proudly reported to the senior management. In response he had received a memo that congratulated him on the new device’s technical performance only to inform him that his upgraded chip would nonetheless be mothballed. Cornea intended to continue selling its grossly inferior chip indefinitely.

  When Costa protested, his line manager had explained the company’s rationale. Their main competitor was struggling to improve upon Cornea’s existing implant, which cost little and was selling well. They had no need for an expensive upgrade to stay ahead of the competition. But by simply leaking the information that Cornea had one waiting in the wings, their competitors would be dissuaded from investing any further, while avoiding the possibility that they might reverse-engineer the new chip if it were released.

  ‘My bosses understand,’ he explained, ‘that the best way to profit is first to establish a monopoly and then strategically to starve the market of the product they have monopolized.’

  The thought of blind people being denied the help his invention could provide made him furious. The company’s reasons for withholding it and its power to do so revolted him. These two emotions would eventually propel him to leave the company and embark on what would turn out to be a professional roller-coaster ride in the years that followed.

  Listening to him talk that night, I had a wild idea. Costa should be introduced to Iris. It was a risky move. Iris could be relied upon to treat him abysmally, if only to test his nerve. But I had a feeling it might lead somewhere interesting.

  ‘Come and meet the Miss Havisham of our failed revolution,’ I urged him. Eventually he was persuaded, and the following evening I drove him to Brighton.

  Had Costa been made of sterner stuff, I would have worried less. But he seemed fragile and unprepared for Iris’s eccentric ferocity. Thankfully, my concerns proved badly amiss. Iris took an instant liking to Costa. She recognized in him a rare quality: a willingness to absorb others’ suffering to halt its transmission and the nastiness it breeds. The technological universe he inhabited was wholly alien to her, and she eagerly listened to the insights he shared from it. When he left that night to catch the last train back to London, Iris’s natural cynicism remained at bay.

  ‘Despite his hilarious Graeco-German accent, your new friend is a living reminder of William Morris,’ she said excitedly. ‘Something deep inside him detests the dehumanizing ways in which new technologies are produced. If only the humans producing them were allowed to craft them like artisans – not like machines breeding machines. And yet this doesn’t stop him from appreciating the beauty and the virtues that they afford.’

  Costa provided Iris with a window on to a new world. It was clear from the start that she found the view both mesmerizing and disconcerting. And so began a friendship that would last the rest of their lives.

  With the arrival of Eva in our circle many years later, I realize now that three people had come together who had each in their different ways been lured in and then defeated by modernity: Iris by a long string of dispiriting leftist calamities, from the tragedy that befell her continental heroes Rosa Luxemburg
and Aleksandra Kollontai to the triumph of Thatcher’s Britain; Eva by the weapons of mass financial destruction and ‘riskless risk’ that she herself had once peddled; Costa by his badly misplaced faith in the digital revolution’s emancipatory powers.

  Each ended up in self-imposed isolation. Iris in her Brighton terrace. Eva in English academia. Costa, as we shall see, in his lab. But through their friendship and Costa’s reaction to his particular predicament, their isolation was transformed into something like its very opposite – at least for a few, devastatingly interesting months in the second half of 2025.

  2

  ANOTHER NOW

  Deliverance

  Costa’s reaction to his defeat began in the early 1990s. It was to prove consequential.

  Quietly, he started using Cornea’s facilities to carry out personal research projects, taking advantage of the company’s handsoff attitude, aimed at encouraging their engineers to explore their skills and creativity to the full. From the start, his main interest was brain implants. He would provide a new enhancement or design just often enough to keep his employer happy, but all of his major innovations – of which there were many – he kept entirely to himself.

  Towards the end of that decade, however, he could not help but have his attention diverted by something else: the skyrocketing value of high-tech stocks, including Cornea’s. Convinced that they would soon crash-land, he used up his savings to short every high-tech share he could. And when the dot-com bubble eventually burst in 2001, Costa made a very tidy sum, enough to earn him sufficient freedom to take a risk and leave the company. Immediately he resigned from Cornea and explained to Iris that he was moving to San Francisco. His visits would be less frequent. But this was the break he had been looking for: an opportunity to set himself up in Silicon Valley.