BOOK REVIEW || The Agents Offers a Glimpse into a Probable Dystopian Future

The Agents by Grégoire Courtois offers much much food for thought.

The book is set in an environment where humans live in buildings, inside their cubicles, where their sole purpose is to wake up to work (or pretend to work), eat, and sleep. Those who reside outside of the buildings that rise hundreds of storeys into the sky and have to roam the street are deemed lowly ‘cats’. The employees, in the book referred to as Agents, are made to believe that living inside these cookie-cutter buildings, doing the same thing every day, is what they live for. You work until you die. Those who could no longer live like that would throw themselves from the windows to plummet down to the street below. Gory, yes, but that’s not why I have been ruminating on the book weeks after I finished reading it.

The premise of the book made me think of how we are conditioned to be productive since when we were children. Children would go to school during the day for a set number of hours. When we graduate from our educational career, we are taught that we should get a stable, 9 to 5 office job. The book takes this to the extreme; the story depicts a future where we don’t ever leave the workplace because it has become is our home. There is no need to do anything other than work. The day is scheduled with three breaks, where you enjoy the same breakfast prepared on a hot plate every morning, the cafeteria provides lunch, and you sleep for some five-odd hours before waking up to work again. Agents don’t even need to procreate. If an Agent is fired from their job or unfortunately meets their demise face down on the street, a replacement Agent is sent through a nondescript 8 Char door to replace them and take over their cubicle.

The book takes the theory of productivity to the extreme with this setup. If I had read the book before the pandemic, this world the author meticulously outlines would have been more likely to materialize. After the pandemic, many are leaving their routine 9 to 5 jobs to become content creators, and digital nomads or starting their businesses to break the cycle. Still, I’ve not tried my hand at becoming a content creator, and I know from experience that owning your own business doesn’t necessarily mean you enjoy unparalleled freedom (in fact, it usually means the opposite). This may be why it made me consider why I have thus far followed the invisible rule to maintain a 9-to-5 schedule. Who said we have to do it this way? I’m still thinking of this question right now and will continue to do so until I can break from my cycle.

Another main idea in the book that I feel is relatable to how humans operate nowadays is waking up to a curated feed for our minds to ingest and take as fact. Our curated social feeds based on our browsing, listening, shopping, and even physical behaviour (for example, where we check in and what our GPS reveals about our preferences), are tailored to fuel what we already believe. This reinforces our unwavering belief in the news we are served and keeps us coming back for more to affirm our views.

“It’s becoming harder for us to decipher between real and fake news, and curated feeds reinforce and widen the worldwide divide between opinions, values, and beliefs. ”

While we read these curated feeds on social media and through mobile apps, podcasts, tv shows and more, the Agents in the book are shown a daily feed when they wake up, containing the latest news and gossip on celebrities, companies, and even stock exchanges whose existence is highly questionable. It reminds me how we rely on these curated feeds to shape our world. It’s becoming harder for us to decipher between real and fake news, and curated feeds reinforce and widen the worldwide divide between opinions, values, and beliefs.

For example, if you are leftist, then the news you read would likely be articles that support this view, which continues to reinforce and affirm your beliefs. This means you never even get to read articles that share other worldviews. If the system sees that you are always reading about the looming recession, it will continue to serve you these articles because you spend more time on this type of news. This equals more time spent on the app, more clicks on ads, and thus more potential and realized revenue for the platform.

If we are to fix the widening gap between groups with different opinions on all matters, maybe re-introducing a non-curated, chronological, unbiased feed would be the first step.

The Agents showed me what the future could be if we continue to travel down the current path. We would live in a world where we accept things based on the media we are fed and imprison ourselves in our jobs.

I would recommend the book to those who feel stuck in their lives, and who need a wake-up call about what the future could hold if we continue to allow the media to shape our views and create an even more divided world.