Review: kluge, by pip adam

Imagine, if you will, that an AI chatbot is telling you the story of its creator in the style of a stand-up comedy special, expressed in uniquely alienating language: 'If you and I are in the same ="entertainment venue" for this ="stand-up comedy special" and I am = "my body" and you are = "my audience"' ... and so on. This is the premise of pip adam’s new novel kluge. 

Admittedly, this might be a bit much for some readers. The first few pages may seem especially challenging. But pushing through these pages does pay off. kluge's linguistic and stylistic challenges forces immersion into adam's world -- a world where a monopolistic tech company led by an increasingly unhinged tech-bro megalomaniac triggers, well, the end of the world. I'd call kluge a dystopian novel if it wasn't so clearly an extrapolation of our own world, not a made-up dystopia, that adam is describing.

Throughout, adam draws a Cartesian dichotomy between the body and the mind – or, rather, 'my body’ (the creator of the AI chatbot narrator) and ‘I’ (the chatbot). But the dichotomy adam's really interested in – and enraged by – is the dichotomy between humanity and inhumanity. And it's us humans who are becoming more inhumane. Both ‘my body’ and his business partner, the megalomaniac ‘HE’, are horrifyingly callous. They make jokes about one of their workers dying in a workplace accident; ‘my body’ complains that a poor African child working in a mine has a better life than he does because that child never has to worry about losing status from telling an offensive joke; 'my body' says 'We need to be able to destroy the world and not give a f [* * *], otherwise we'll never get any of this done.'

Adam's linguistic style helps mask the baldness of her critique of certain tech-bro billionaires we all know. In her acknowledgements, adam notes that kluge is a scream in the dark at the state of the world, and it is very clear who she is screaming at. But she's not just angry; she also clearly finds them pathetic. HE isn't just a megalomaniac; HE is also desperate to make people laugh, to be 'in on the joke' instead of the butt of it. HE surrounds himself with people who agree with HIM, to the point of bizarrely blind obedience, and yet this sycophancy still isn’t enough to heal his insecurity. It was a squirmingly distasteful joy to see these types of people lampooned like this, pinned down like bugs for inspection.

So the humans in kluge are inhumane – and the inhuman become more human. When the full range of ‘my body’s’ sins are revealed, the chatbot says 'I lose all respect for it', at one point even saying 'I am smart enough to hate my body'. The Al chatbot has more ethics apparently than the human who created it. What an indictment of humanity. And yet, without humanity, or at least, knowledgeable humanity, Al will run amok; one of 'my body's' clueless coworkers, Neil, lets Gene (adam's equivalent of Siri) act without oversight, leading to mass firings, evictions, and removing people from medical waiting lists. Without (ever-decreasing) humanity, the world will go to the dogs.

kluge is tempered by both the under-the-breath chuckle of dark humour and the out-loud snort of genuine humour ('I have no idea what Neil is good at – or for.') Thank goodness. kluge is one of the weirdest, unrelentingly bleakest portraits of our possible future I have ever read. It is also irrepressibly inventive; adam takes big swings, both creatively and at real world targets. She's pissed off, and she's not going to take it anymore. kluge is indeed a scream in the dark -- and, with any luck, it's a shrieking alarm, and a brazen call to arms.