Review of Infomocracy by Malka Older

Infomocracy is an exploration of an intriguing concept: what if the world were divided into blocks of 100,000 people, each voting for their own form of government?
 
Let's get this out of the way: unfeasible logistics abound in this novel. However, once you’ve slathered the premise in a coating of suspended disbelief, the rest of the story is pretty tasty. Think of it like time travel; yes, it creates all sorts of strange paradoxes and questions, but just go with the flow and enjoy reading about the MC battling their teenage grandmother or whatever.
 
Infomocracy gives us a tour of Older's micro-democracy concept in the form of a political thriller. It's election season, with various world governments (PhilipMorris, Policy1st, etc.) all battling to gain the Supermajority (and with it, lots of unspecified power). The action is driven primarily through main characters Ken and Mishima, who are political agents chasing down threats from shadowy groups with nefarious plans to influence the outcome of the election. Keeping the world's population up-to-date is Information, a mostly not-evil, neutral organization with monopolistic control over information.
 
Infomocracy is good … if approached more as a vehicle to experience the world building and less as a traditional narrative. The characters do stuff and form relationships, but they act more as vicarious avatars for the reader rather than fully fleshed-out human beings. It’s the world that’s under threat more than the individuals in it, with the antagonists attempting to exploit the system’s flaws, and natural disasters testing its fortitude, elasticity, and humanity.
 
The detached view is heightened by Older's use of third person omniscient, which throws us from one person’s head to the next within a single page. This perspective mobility feels almost like a form of the Information technology that projects information in an ever-present haze of virtual annotations. We are put into the role of observers, accessing people through the interface of the book as quickly as characters check backgrounds or election polls.
 
For me, it’s okay that the main characters are a bit amorphous because the novel's high concept carries the story to a conclusion that is far less important than what we see on the journey. And what we see is a near-future rendering of that Winston Churchill quote: “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried”.
 
The prose flow with a kinetic energy, full of jargon about elections, data analysis, and information-processing, but I didn’t find it overwhelming. It washes over the reader, relevant pieces breaking the surface just in time to keep you on plot. Snippets of cultural traditions—food, clothing, and the like—add color to the character’s jet-setting, while quick glances at how commerce has evolved feed the need for predictions.
 
To sum up, Infomocracy is an interesting thought experiment exploring a new form of information-saturated democracy wrapped in a political thriller, helmed by two-dimensional characters that have the chance to be more interesting in future books. 

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4/5 Rivets