Science Fiction and Smart Mobs

Continued from page 1

By Henry Jenkins

January 31, 2003

A compelling new theory of social organization is forcing Ellis to rethink science fiction's conventions. Ellis rejects the mighty demigods and elite groups of the superhero tradition and instead depicts the twenty-first century equivalent of a volunteer fire department. As Ellis explains, "Global Frequency is about us saving ourselves." Each issue focuses on a different set of characters in a different location, examining what it means for Global Frequency members personally and professionally to contribute their labor to a cause larger than themselves. Once they are called into action, most of the key decisions get made on site as the volunteers are allowed to act on their localized knowledge. Most of the challenges come, appropriately enough, from the debris left behind by the collapse of the military-industrial complex and the end of the cold war-"The bad mad things in the dark that the public never found out about." In other words, the citizen soldiers use distributed knowledge to overcome the dangers of government secrecy.

Transmetropolitan, Ellis's previous series, also incorporated debates about media power, tapping into genre conventions from the cyberpunk movement. At its center were two competing myths about media-the media "torrent" and the hacker who knows how to surf it. On the one hand, Ellis depicted a world where voters are benumbed by the challenges of navigating through 2000 cable channels, where our most sacred artifacts are sold as commodities ("Air Jesus" shoes allow you to walk on water), where politicians use nanotech to erase scandals from our brains, where individuals customize their identities through cosmetic surgery and body modification, and where advertisers set off "buy bombs" to implant their messages in our dreams. Here, elite groups use media to distract us from any real democratic participation.

On the other hand, there is a heroic story about the power of grassroots media to resist corporate control. The series' protagonist is a tattoo-covered gonzo journalist, Spider Jerusalem, whose often hallucinatory rants articulate the vague dissatisfactions of the underclass. Modeled after Hunter S. Thompson, Spider is alternatively bemused, outraged, addicted, and repelled by popular culture-but he plumbs its depth and emerges with the uncomfortable truth. Ellis may be cynical, but he maintains a core belief that an informed public can make a difference. Spider topples two political administrations ("The Beast" and "The Smiler") by following the traces, connecting the dots, and deciphering the clues, in a world where all information is out there if you can only find it. That the Spider action figure comes with its own laptop, suggests just how central this ideal of grassroots media is to the series.

Over the past decade or so, the original cyberpunk writers (such as Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, or Pat Cadigan) have moved away from their focus on hackers vs. corporations to deal more and more with themes of globalization and the collapse of the nation state. These stories have been increasingly pessimistic, offering no compelling vision of what a better society might look like or how it might come about. By tapping into current discourse about "smart mobs," Global Frequency gives us a glimpse into what kinds of social action might make sense in this rapidly changing political and technological landscape. Ellis does what science fiction does best-pushes contemporary theories to their limits and makes them accessible to the public; his new series incites us to speculate and debate the implications of technological change.

Hugo Gernsbeck would have been proud.