Sibylle Berg’s novel “RCE”: hyper nervous, brutal, silly – culture

Sometimes a revolution fails because people don’t want to be saved. That’s how it was in “GRM Brainfuck”, Sibylle Berg’s last dystopia, published in 2019, in which a group of urban, impoverished digital nerds in London pulled the plug on the end devices and mobilized against the complete surveillance of post-Brexit society. But their fellow citizens were already used to having their lives recorded live by the government and the mega-corporations and were even a little happy that someone was watching at all. But if nobody joins in, it’s not a revolution.

In one of the interviews that Sibylle Berg gave about “RCE,” the sequel to dystopia, she said recently that she couldn’t just let the uprising fail so quietly. So now “RCE”, “#RemoteCodeExecution”, and that means: The young hackers launch a second attack on capitalism with the plan to throw everything into chaos one after the other with a super hack from banking platforms to mom blogs.

“People had lost track of their dead”

A revolution comes in threes: analysis, propaganda, mass unrest. In terms of content, this would roughly describe the novel. The subtitle of the last book, i.e. “GRM”, also fits the linguistic recipe of “RCE”. Again you get the story of the revolutionizing friends delivered as a “brainfuck”: shrill, pointed sentences, hasty elipses, punch lines without ceasing, images of disgust and horror. Eagerly lined up highlights of a turbo-capitalism in which even the last bit of the welfare state has been privatized and even the terminally ill only communicate with bots in their distress, while they put their hands on themselves during the live explanatory video.

Which brings you to the first part of the three steps, the analysis. The novel takes place in a European post-bank crash present, the main actors are well known from reality. Peter Thiel is also doing venture capital here, Elon Musk hasn’t bought Twitter but has bought a whole host of other things, and Bill Gates’ investment strategy has made him America’s largest landowner. In general, most of the investors mentioned by their first names can be researched on the Forbes list, and if you want to know exactly, you can also use the attached glossary from “Aladdin”, the BlackRock company’s data analysis system, to “Wirecard”, the alphabet of the tech – and look up finance capitalism.

In Berg’s apocalyptic financial feudalism, only some have legal personality, the others vegetate in shackles on the outskirts of the city, “masses who still spat: competition, competition murmured when they were arguing about the best cardboard sheets for their night’s sleep”. A few rounds of tax increases for the poor and tax exemptions for the rich, the pulverization of the social budget and all social security systems have potentiated the society of day laborers. Five million of the deprived have already died from undersupply. “People had lost track of their dead. The corpses that arose from escapes, landslides, hurricanes, civil wars, from cold winters and hot summers, from hospital germs.” In between these catastrophes, investors, CEOs, and corporate owners jet around the world when they’re not exercising their sinewy bodies or watching animal porn.

In the midst of the scenes from the broken-capitalized society, there is also a kind of plot – keyword propaganda and mass mobilization: a large-scale hacking strategy is planned and implemented, a defense of the even younger, digitally even smarter cracks against the capital cracks. Whether the “friends” are successful in doing so will have to be seen in the next book in the series, which is designed as a trilogy, because this breaks off shortly after the “event”. Instead of a new world order, “RCE” describes plans for upheaval, “peer-to-peer mixnet” strategies, platform analyses, encoded interception procedures and in general a lot that can only be understood with a lot of self-study.

But if you try to put things in order by retelling, you miss the core and thus the reason why “RCE” is not an ordinary revolution novel tuned with nerd vocabulary. For how else should literature relate to an unmanageable financial-political situation, to crashes that nobody seemed to have foreseen and to an undisputed economic dogma that growth always leads to good, while crises are flying around your face, but in this clanking aesthetic of overpowering?

Not even the revolutionaries manage to have a friendship

Financial economics itself has a fictional, speculative character. For example, stock prices respond to expectations, and expectations are predictions based on a narrative, on fiction. In the financial world, non-real quantities are traded, such as licenses that stand for goods, but not the goods themselves. Art, literature, responds in return with a fictionalization of the financial world, with an aestheticization of numerical concretism. Elfriede Jelinek did it this way when she associated endless monologues about financial flows in “Die Kontrakte des Kaufmanns”, or the performance collective “Rimini Protokoll”, which invited to the annual general meeting of Daimler AG.

Sibylle Berg’s literature also has a strong theatrical bias. She has written 27 plays to date, but many of her novels read as if they were meant for the stage from the start. In “RCE” the punch line, the blatant exaggeration, the felt 500 scene changes occasionally seem silly or megalomaniac. But that doesn’t change the fact that being overwhelmed doesn’t hurt the hyper-nervous sense of the present.

But what do you do with the knowledge from the novel? There is no light in the dark, only death, annihilation, not even the revolutionaries can manage to be friends. It’s probably the same as with all functioning tech and financial dystopias: you get a little scared, maybe delete one or the other app, but soon install it again. In other words: In the best case, yes, that would be something, a very important university would award the author an honorary doctorate for her services to crisis economics and applied disaster psychology. Which in turn would be a drastic increase in Sibylle Berg’s cultural capital. Who then immediately continues to write and, in the best of moods, could also tell this episode just as madly as so-called reality is.