Welcome to Qualityland

Welcome to Qualityland. Where there is quality and only the superlative is allowed. The residents are QualityPeople with the bestest technology to allow them to maximise their QualityTime and maintain their QualityLife. In fact, everything has been made so efficient and choke full of QUALITY, you don’t need to find what you need—what you need will find you. Algorithms are never wrong. When you hit subscribe, you are given the perfect partner, the perfect job and the perfect life. Feel sad? Wine is waiting for you at the doorstep. The baby is noisy? Activate the hormone-injecting chip inside its brain. Can’t be bothered to socialise and pretend that you care? Let the automated socialising service do it for you. Just remember though to rate everything from your dinner to your sex partner because how else will you know if you are getting quality result?

You ever come across books that are important, necessary and extremely timely but just...not very good? Take for example representations of minorities in YA fiction. Yes, they have been under-represented in the past. But it doesn’t mean we should praise any new novel featuring a coloured character to the skies, especially if it’s not very well-written. Conversely, calling out all the cliches and stereotypes is important but not very helpful. Mediocrity will always exist and standardising and quantifying degrees of ‘correct’ representations is ridiculous. What’s this got to do with Marc-Uwe Kling's Qualityland? Well. It’s an important, necessary and timely publication. But it’s not very good.

Let me be more precise: the satire is not very good. Qualityland is where we confront the Frankensteinian monster of late-stage capitalism merged with technological progress in a world that is hyper-connected and hyper-fast. Here we see distorted reflections of how tech companies profile us via our online actions and transactions, which then become the basis for introducing more similar content to us, limiting us to be predictable and stagnant persons. You’re mildly racist? Let me show you more racist posts and introduce you to other racists so that you can share racist remarks and be happily racist together. 

So if it shows us exactly what is happening right now...in a way that there is hardly any distinction...is it still satire? And when you insert didactic monologues about how the tech corporations are harvesting our personal data and that we are paying dearly for what is free, is it still satire? Maybe. But it’s certainly not very good. We are past the stage of satirising how algorithms define us because we know and we couldn’t care less. How about try satirising becoming so integrated with the system that we become a giant organic algorithmic function? Or that boredom as the latest fad in our tech- driven, attention-seeking era? Yes, similarities should always be present in a satirical piece. But they should make me cringe-laugh and not just cringe.

It could be to do with the fact that Qualityland was originally published in 2017, predating the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal that occurred in March 2018. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it felt like people cared about digital privacy before then, but no one understood the scope or the severity of political machinations via social media algorithms. Since then we’ve become more educated...but probably not more wise in our choices. Even so, I believe if I had read it in 2017, my response would’ve been vastly different. I would’ve been far more impressed by Qualityland. When you are living in the reality of Qualityland in 2020, the satire really doesn’t cut it.