Same Same by Peter Mendelsund
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Trap of Creative Ambition

The command to know oneself is one of those shibboleths of ancient philosophy that are taken as universally sound advice. But the obsessive drive to know oneself is a trap. Knowing oneself can become an ambition like any other: it absorbs the life that’s meant to be improved into itself and creates a prisoner who is at the mercy of the ambition. Even if the ambition in question is purely intellectual, the trap is set.

In fact all ambitions end up in the same sump of attempting to know oneself. The thematic core of the novel captures the common thread: “Become the best you.” This is the pervasive ethos of Freehold, the desert country and its Institute populated by creative geniuses in various fields from Brand Management and Financial Derivatives to Astrology and Architecture. Whatever their intellectual speciality, all end up pursuing some vision of themselves, that “ineffable, secret self.” The Institute is the ultimate self-help programme in an Apple-like campus.

The Institute runs on words, lots of words, and therefore lots of paper. It also provides “deliberation arenas, thought-huddles, and social pods” for the exchange of words among the residents. The Director of the Institute is very concerned to generate “ideas that are transmissible, scalable, and viable.” He wants “The PERFECT project and Discourse™. Relatable, marketable, profound, digestible, fun, fresh, smart…a masterful theorization of the Now.” This demands hard work from all the residents and “requires your complete buy-in. FULL bandwidth... End-to-end; ERROR-FREE channels. Proactivity. Actualization.” Words, of course, seem to have their own ideas and eventually gum up the works, literally and figuratively. Words can make you crazy; or mask the craziness already there. Wordspace is not meatspace, even if they do leak into one another.

The sci-fi (or fantasy, the genre is tough to pin down) gimmick Mendelsund employs to motivate the action is a Neal Stephenson-like reproductive facility, the Same Same Shop. The Same Same Shop can not only replicate anything from clothing to currency, it can repair and restore things as well. The technology of the Same Same Shop, whatever it is, seems to know the essence of the things brought to it for help. It, uncannily, understands their reality and is able to reconstruct this reality as needed. It even knows about the reality of words as unreal and self-referential. A sort of high-tech, post-modernist Kabbalah.

And if the Same Same Shop can fix things, why shouldn’t it fix people? Particularly people with burnt out minds who are bored with life, addicted to various substances, and unable to any longer function irl (‘in real life;’ it’s essential to understand Mendelsund’s blogspeak). Perhaps it might even fix the abuse of language that is rampant within the Institute, and that reflects the general banality of the culture which produced it. If only...

The real question is: Can the Same Same Shop do anything at all to help the creative luvvies at the BBC find themselves and come up with better programming on Saturday nights?

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