RCE – RemoteCodeExecution
Western Europe, today: The rich have won. Populism holds sway everywhere. The surveillance state is perfect. Opposition has been abolished, people are petrified in consumerist silence. But not all of them. A few nerds are still awake. And they have a plan.
Sibylle Berg’s new novel takes us deep into a world that is disturbingly similar to our own. The climate has tipped, AI is making more and more people superfluous, refugees are being locked up, homeless people are disappearing without a trace. Markets don’t like democracy, which is why it is being increasingly dismantled – by autocrats, new anti-terrorism laws, and bans on demonstrations. Which we could just as well do without anyway – because what should we protest against? Against everything? Night has fallen on the world; only in one tamper-proof container does light still burn. Here, hackers sit in front of their computers, coding away. And what they unleash step by step is nothing less than a world revolution.
RCE is an incisive analysis of a world devastated by neoliberalism, in which all resistance seems futile. Above all, however, it is a rousing literary blueprint for how it might still be possible to restart Europe. One thing is clear: Only those who are capable of rewriting the system can overthrow it. For now.