Dusseldorf Tiff sits at the computer for hours, assigning names and captions to pictures, marking photos with crowds of people, clicking on correct names, entering names from badly scanned slips of paper into a database.
The young single mother Tiff is a so-called automaton – who does this monotonous work on the platform Automa. However, your employer pretends that this is not done by human hands, but by artificial intelligence.
Because of an anxiety disorder, Tiff can hardly leave her apartment, has hardly any social contacts – apart from her daycare-age son and two neighbors – and keeps her head above water with this online job, the half-silk concept of which means that she is bound to absolute confidentiality.
Tiff is the protagonist in “Automaton”, a novel in a whole series of publications that deal with the internet, social media and digitization – and raise essential questions of today: What is the internet doing to our society, to cohesion? Where does globalization, made possible by global networking, help and where does it harm? What is social, what is real – and what is staged? What and in what can we still believe?
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Berit Shine: Automaton.
Berlin publisher
Berlin 2022
288 pages
22 euros
“The role of the internet and social media in novels is becoming ever larger – and more and more normal,” says Magdalena Pflock, a philologist at the University of Greifswald. “It’s there as a matter of course, no longer needs to be introduced, but is a natural part of what is being told.”
Like in “Automaton” by Berit Glanz, in which Tiff not only does her job online, but also maintains many of her contacts via it. Or in “Tick Tack”, the new novel by Julia von Lucadou, in which 15-year-old Mette tries to gain recognition via Tiktok videos.
Or in “Fake Accounts” by Lauren Oyler, in which a young woman realizes that her boyfriend is leading a kind of double life and is spreading conspiracy theories on Instagram, and then dies in an accident before she can officially end the relationship.
Juliet by Lucadou: Tick Tock.
Hanser Berlin
Berlin 2022
256 pages
23.00 euros
“Literature has always been interested in picking up on the media that surrounds it,” says Björn Hayer, lecturer in German at the University of Koblenz-Landau. In the past it was the telephone or television, today mobile phones and the Internet – with the accompanying side effects. “Most of the time it was a rather critical consideration.”
Whether “Ruhm” by Daniel Kehlmann (2010), “Lookalikes” by Thomas Meinecke (2011), “Circle” by Dave Eggers (2014) or “Follower” by Eugen Ruge (2016) – no matter how much they differ in their stories and narrative styles differ, these novels are united by the desire to depict and classify the perception of the world that has changed as a result of the new media. It’s about monotony on the Internet, but also about fake news, fake videos, i.e. truths that have been filtered out in the truest sense of the word.
Lauren OylerFake Accounts
Berlin publisher
Berlin 2022
368 pages
24 euros
Translation: Bettina Abarbanell
One person who was able to convey this in a groundbreaking way is Thomas Hettche with “Animation”. In it he described the effects of digitization on human perception as early as 1999. Based on Goethe’s trip to Italy, Hettche draws images of Venice, from anatomical publications to computer-generated procedures, which in the end raise doubts as to whether they are real – or whether Venice is just a myth.
Above all, there is the question of what will become of language when the power of images gains the upper hand. A question that, in view of Russian propaganda photos, seems more topical than ever.
“The development that is often described in novels, namely that after a certain point in time characters no longer know whether something is real or not, we experience in a similar way in the Ukraine war,” says Germanist Hayer. “We see a lot of pictures that make us wonder if they’re real. Literature foresaw this development very early on.”
Hayer sees two directions: “The cultural pessimists, who strongly criticize the internet, who write dystopias. And the media optimists, who emphasize the advantages of a large communication company. They see the space of possibility.” The majority of those who clearly criticize the modern media in their works.
Be it Elfriede Jelinek in her “Winterreise” or Sibylle Berg in “GRM” – or the subsequent “RCE”, which will appear next week and whose choppy typeface alone can be understood as media criticism.
Sibylle Berg: RCE. #RemoteCodeExecution.
Kiepenheuer & Witsch
Cologne 2022
704 pages
26 euros
Also in “TickTack” by Julia von Lucadou you can see how the way of writing is changing due to today’s media. The focus is on a social media account of the protagonist, in each chapter the reader can track how many followers Mette has gained – and how much she keeps losing herself because she gets to the wrong people.
But, as philologist Pflock observes, there are more and more publications that “see the effect of the Internet a little more optimistically and deal with positive aspects, such as the possibilities for networking and solidarity.” As with Berit Glanz’ Automaton.
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One evening, when the protagonist Tiff is once again watching seemingly dull surveillance videos to capture any possible movement, she becomes an on-screen witness to a crime that the surveillance cameras have caught. But what to do when she is sworn to secrecy?
With the help of her Automaton network, Tiff not only manages to solve the crime, but also to help the victim. In the end, the work is a story of community and cohesion that would not have been possible without the internet.
The criticism that the employees are being exploited, that the clients are being fooled into believing that they are using an AI and that the company is thus on the verge of integrity, hovers over what is being told. But ultimately “Automaton” is a story about the opportunities of globalization.
About cohesion, solidarity, helpfulness. Values that are also desirable in the real world. And gives confidence that the opportunities offered by the new media outweigh the risks.
And, as Germanist Hayer sums it up: The media critics would like their stories to be understood “as an appeal to responsibility, so that the Internet is not seen as a legal vacuum”. A critique that looks to the future.
More: What the society of the future cannot leave to computers