Since Daemon was first published, Google Glass has come and gone, haptic shirt interfaces have been abandoned without ever being launched (it's all haptic gloves, now), and the idea of crowd-sourced problem solving has been confronted by the awful reality of Twitter. The looming disaster foreseen by the book's chief anti-hero has, so far, also failed to materialise. Perhaps it was just ahead of its time.
I reread both these books every now and then (Freedom is Daemon's sequel), and afterwards always find myself in front of a computer screen, pecking out an amateurish script (usually in Python) to automate some task or other. Maybe it could read my emails and compare the subject lines to a spreadsheet that gets automatically updated from a website scraped for keywords kept in a text file on a server; maybe everything could be broken down into actions and triggers for action. Maybe everything can be made to work.
It never works, or at least, never completely. Even the simplest automation fails the moment real human beings gets involved, phoning you instead of replying to an email, or making private arrangements with someone else and not CC’ing you in. It might just be me. Other people might be able to keep things organised and make allowances in advance for every possibility. Certainly, the premise of Daemon hangs on the idea of a genius software developer creating the Daemon, a program able to handle not just my emails, but also instigate a globe-spanning techno-conspiracy to overthrow the hidden rulers of the world.
This is hard Sci-Fi, so there is never any hint of the Daemon becoming self-aware. It never asks what someone means by 'love', and it never feels sad about not having emotions. The Daemon is a set of individually plausible programs reading newsfeeds, looking for keywords and triggering events when the proper conditions are met, leading to a wonderfully synchronised war, waged in the real world between corporate interests and various grievance-bearing geeks.
As an employer, or a dictator, the Daemon is near-perfect. It explains what it wants you to provide, rewards you for success and punishes you for failure. It is also refreshingly unconcerned with the damaging effects of labeling people. Like an MMORPG it assigns everyone a class and a level, and unlike life it gives everyone a clear path to self-betterment, along with a clear explanation of how the world works. Various tech-peons in dead-end jobs throw their lot in with it immediately, and even the author seems to hint that, while evil and despicable and not something he could ever approve of, it would be quite cool if somebody else did it.
"I'll tell you what the Daemon is: the Daemon is a remorseless system for building a distributed civilization. A civilization that perpetually regenerates. One with no central authority…
I suspect that democracy is not viable in a technologically advanced society. Free people wield too much ability to destroy."
Daemon is part thought experiment in the possibilities of automation, part guilty flirtation with Singapore style fascism, dressed up as a warning. There's lots of advanced technology, a palpable sense of efficiency and progress, married to the constant possibility of merciless violence if you cross the powers that be.
Freedom is a far more hippy-dippy affair. The Daemon has made real progress using superannuated teenage sociopaths and has now begun recruiting from the petite-bourgeoisie, who try to turn it into an NGO for sustainable economic development. There's a lot of talk of setting up new communities using alternative power sources. From being guiltily ambivalent about the Daemon, the story now flips into supporting it wholeheartedly.
The violence, when it comes, comes mostly from the old order the Daemon is sweeping away. Unexpectedly, the setting shifts to a farm in Iowa owned by the initially sceptical Hank Fossen, and the battleground becomes one of agriculture instead of high-tech.
"Fossen stopped for a moment then laughed. '[…] I started educating myself on why farming no longer made sense. We basically used oil and aquifer water to temporarily boost the carrying capacity of the land, all for economic growth demanded by Wall Street investors. It's a crazy system that only makes sense when you foist all the costs onto taxpayers in the form of crop subsidies that benefit agribusiness, and defense spending to secure fossil fuels. We're basically paying corporations to seize control of the food supply and dictate to us the terms under which we live.'"
You have to decide yourself if this is the sort of dialog you want to be reading. Freedom wears its heart on its sleeve, and it’s a heart that swells at the thought of regional economic independence and ecological farming techniques.
Since this is Sci-Fi, everything is moderated through the Heads-Up Display glasses worn by the Daemon operatives. These work like everyone assumed Google Glass would, and (apparently) how Microsoft Hololens actually does: overlaying reality with a digital skin, displaying data and offering interfaces that remain invisible to everyone outside the system. They link the operatives together and let the Daemon speak to them through pre-programmed avatars, giving real-life the air of being a videogame.
The technology is implausibly effective, especially in the precision and foresight of the Daemon itself, which has been criticised as a flaw in the story, but Jack Reacher is implausibly effective, and so is Sherlock Holmes. To call their abilities implausible is to miss the point. Paul Pennyfeather is implausibly innocent, and Count Dracula is, implausibly, undead. The Daemon is a plot device, and it serves to speed up society’s development in the face of new technology. It shows the noble and ignoble changes that technology wreaks and, through the unfolding plot, shows the values needed to build a better society in the information age, which turn out to be the same as in every age before it.
When the story ends, I always wish there was a third book, or more. I could imagine cheerfully reading Daemon sequels based on nothing more than descriptions of rural townsfolk wearing HUD's and building geothermal powered sewage works using distributed manufacturing plants.
Since only two were written, when I finish, I generally stare out of the window for a while, wishing I could get an allotment or start a business with a 3D printer. And then, since I can’t, I have another go at writing a Python script.
Addendum: I thought I should mention that Daemon contains a rape scene. It's nothing compared to Game of Thrones, I'm told, but if you prefer to avoid it (it adds nothing to the plot) skip forward a few pages after Gragg goes to a nightclub about a third of the way in. </Preachy Addendum>
