Note Details
- Stage: seed 🌱
- Type: note
- Topics: novel digital-ethics
- A Novel by Joanna Kavenna
- https://fivebooks.com/best-books/digital-ethics-carissa-veliz/
Zed (2019) by Joanna Kavenna is a satirical novel set in a near-future society governed by a technology corporation called Beetle. Beetle’s flagship product is an AI system that claims to predict human behaviour with total accuracy — forecasting what people will buy, say, feel, and do before they themselves know it. The system’s legitimacy depends on the premise that human beings are fundamentally predictable, that free will is an illusion, and that all choices can be reduced to data patterns. The plot is set in motion when the AI produces an anomalous prediction it cannot explain, threatening the entire edifice of algorithmic certainty.
Kavenna uses dark comedy and absurdist prose to interrogate the assumptions embedded in surveillance capitalism, predictive analytics, and the tech industry’s aspiration to total knowledge. The novel asks what happens to meaning, agency, and selfhood when a society outsources its understanding of human nature to machines. It sits alongside works like Dave Eggers’ The Circle and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun in a growing body of literary fiction that takes the philosophical consequences of AI seriously rather than treating technology as mere backdrop.
The book appeared on Carissa Veliz’s recommended reading list for digital ethics, which speaks to its relevance not just as fiction but as a framework for thinking about the power dynamics between individuals and the systems that claim to understand them.