“Welcome to the Useless Class”: Ewan Morrison in conversation with Irvine Welsh

Ewan Mor­ri­son is one of my favourite writ­ers from these islands. Since his debut nov­el Swung, he’s always chart­ed his own course and remained relent­less­ly ahead of the curve.

His new nov­el For Emma, is a per­fect illus­tra­tion of this. It’s a trou­bling but utter­ly human dive head­first into the big issues of our age; the cor­po­rate tech­no state ruled by oli­garchs and fuelled by big cap­i­tal, the pow­er of algo­rith­mic sug­ges­tion, the advance of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, the com­pro­mis­ing of the human spir­it and the decline of free­dom and equal­i­ty, the impo­tence of oppo­si­tion, the end of the state as a redis­trib­u­tive force and enhance­ment of it as a puni­tive one with its increas­ing­ly bru­tal war on its cit­i­zen­ry, cul­mi­nat­ing in the inevitabil­i­ty and futil­i­ty of terrorism.

So yes, a ton of dystopia to consider.

Most writ­ers shy away from all or at least most of this stuff. He takes them all on head-first, AND in the form of a page turn­ing thriller.

I sup­pose it was time to fight through my writer­ly jeal­ousy and ask him how he did this…

IW: Can you iden­ti­fy the gen­e­sis of the novel?

EM: There’s this genre that I love, you could call it, ​“the under­dog revenge” genre. Or maybe ​“the lit­tle nobody tak­ing revenge against the sys­tem that crushed them.” It’s maybe some­thing we love in Scot­land as we tend to see our­selves as under­dogs. So, with­in this there’s all these clas­sics like Dog Day After­noon, Fight Club, Taxi Dri­ver, Jok­er as well, and this cross­es-over into clas­sic out­sider/an­ti-hero sto­ries like Catch­er in the Rye, Crime and Pun­ish­ment, Trainspot­ting and Amer­i­can Psy­cho. So, I’ve been read­ing these for years, it’s pret­ty much the only genre I can relate to, being a bit of an out­sider myself, and for a long time I want­ed to write about a char­ac­ter who los­es every­thing and decides: ​“Screw it all, I’m going to die for a cause because I’ve got noth­ing left to live for”. So, this is Josh, in the nov­el, father of a girl who dies in a Sil­i­con Val­ley AI brain chip exper­i­ment and his act of revenge is homicide/​suicide against the CEO of the Biotech com­pa­ny who was respon­si­ble and who cov­ered it up with the help from gov­ern­ment agen­cies. ​“I’ll take the bas­tard with me when I go,” Josh says. It’s his final act of love for Emma.

The gen­e­sis – there was def­i­nite­ly a much more per­son­al ele­ment to this too and it came from the Covid pan­dem­ic. My wife has a seri­ous heart con­di­tion, so we went pret­ty hard on the lock­down pro­to­cols and lived with a lot of fear and med­ical pre­cau­tions dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, basi­cal­ly secret­ing our­selves away to a lit­tle cot­tage in the Scot­tish wilder­ness. From pret­ty ear­ly on, I worked out that we were not being told the truth about the ori­gins and nature of the virus, and that it was being hid­den for polit­i­cal rea­sons by our gov­ern­ments, and I got think­ing, what would I do if this virus were to kill my wife?

How would I deal with the fact that gov­ern­ments and bio tech indus­tries were work­ing hand in hand to sup­press the truth and to cov­er their ass­es? I worked out that I would prob­a­bly exhaust myself on appeals to gov­ern­ment agen­cies and law courts to get jus­tice, but that ulti­mate­ly, I would have to accept defeat, silenc­ing, as a nobody whose lit­tle life is just part of the cov­er-up. I would most like­ly go insane. From obsess­ing about that, as I watched my wife walk­ing round with a mask on all the time, I thought, I would do some­thing, I would have to, I would have to strike back against the pow­ers that be. Even if it would kill me. How would I do that, who would I attack, a bio tech com­pa­ny? The gov­ern­ment? It’s like a flea attack­ing a mam­moth. Pathet­ic, but a mind could get stuck in obsess­ing about that, just like Raskol­nikov obsess­es about the mur­der he feels he must com­mit in Crime and Pun­ish­ment.

So, I thought the best (and safest) way to work this out was to make this char­ac­ter who has noth­ing left to lose and to see how far he can go and how he copes. And what loss would hurt me the most – my daugh­ter, so I wrote about a lit­tle nobody of a man who los­es his daugh­ter to a secret exper­i­ment that is cov­ered up by forces so much more vast than he can even grasp. And I start­ed to care for him.

The book is also, I think, me final­ly com­ing to terms with the bi-annu­al depres­sions that I’ve been suf­fer­ing from since the age of 17, and a deep dive into what depres­sion, addic­tion and help­less­ness feel like and how they can moti­vate us to des­per­ate acts, espe­cial­ly when we feel that our love and our lives have been stolen from us. The depres­sions, as you know, have seen me on the point of giv­ing up writ­ing more than once over the last decade, and if it hadn’t been for the sup­port of your good self and few oth­ers, this book and the two before would nev­er have come into existence.

So, the gen­e­sis was real­ly the com­ing togeth­er of those per­son­al things with the polit­i­cal. Yes, it’s all about the lit­tle nobody tak­ing revenge against the sys­tem that’s crushed them and maybe that’s the sto­ry I’ve been try­ing to tell for a hell of a long time, and one that we maybe share in common.

IW: The themes are the rapa­cious, accel­er­a­tionist nature of tech­nol­o­gy and our lack of con­trol and agency in this process against the pow­er of the cor­po­rate state, what peo­ple will do for love and revenge when utter­ly des­per­ate. Is human progress inher­ent­ly dystopi­an now?

EM: We do feel an increas­ing lack of con­trol and agency, for sure, against the tech­no-state and its growth. It seems to want to con­trol all our behav­iours and reduce us to data that can be mon­i­tored and man­aged. This has been both­er­ing me for a while and it came to a head when the Nos­tradamus-styled futur­ist, Yuval Noah Harari declared that a great mass of humans will lose their jobs as they’re replaced by AI and automa­tion and they will become a ​“use­less class” who will have to be kept ​“paci­fied” with dis­trac­tions like vir­tu­al real­i­ty games, enter­tain­ment, and drugs.

Gov­ern­ment admin­is­tered hero­in, or mol­ly, or SOMA as Hux­ley said in Brave New World. The pre­dic­tion seemed pret­ty far-fetched only a year ago, but now feels more like a descrip­tion of our unfold­ing real­i­ty as AI has begun relent­less­ly culling jobs. Many of us have friends or folks we know who have suf­fered job loss or dras­tic loss of income due to AI. In the arts, I hear all these reports from folk who work in con­cept design, graph­ic arts and jour­nal­ism, as employ­ers have replaced them with cheap AI. Wel­come to the Use­less Class. 

Some are throw­ing in the tow­el, like one graph­ic artist friend said, ​“I just can’t com­pete with these AIs that were built on scrap­ing our art. I’m done. I’m out.” I know a jour­nal­ist who is look­ing for a new career after hav­ing seen how well the new DeepSeek AI pro­gramme can write copy. A friend on X con­tacts me every week to ask if ​“it is over”- by this he means the hope of ever hav­ing a career as a scriptwriter. He’s twen­ty-three and feels lost and sui­ci­dal on-and-off with every news sto­ry that comes in about AIs devel­op­ing the abil­i­ty to write fic­tion. How can he get start­ed if AI demon­e­tis­es the entire sec­tor and steals all the content?

It’s real­ly fuck­ing offen­sive to be told by peo­ple like Harari who get nice­ly paid to lec­ture at the World Eco­nom­ic Forum that you now belong to the ​‘Use­less Class.’ I think I’ve been in and out of the use­less class most of my life, but for folks to realise they are no longer valu­able or need­ed for the first time, replaced by machines — that’s going to hit very hard.

So, I think for many of us the future does seem dystopi­an, and it seems this is all being done just so the bil­lion­aire tech over­lords can have even more con­trol and pow­er, and worse than that it does feel like tech­nol­o­gy is a run­away force, that ulti­mate­ly this feed­back loop of tech­no­log­i­cal advance and state pow­er is beyond the con­trol of any one per­son or group. As the tech­nol­o­gists love to say, progress can’t be stopped. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.

The prob­lem I should say, is not even that I believe in the com­ing of this vast AGI super­in­tel­li­gence that will have expo­nen­tial­ly more intel­li­gence and pow­er than humans, like the tran­shu­man­ists dream of. No, that’s just snake-oil hype talk and a tech­no investors wet dream. What wor­ries me is that even with the lim­it­ed nar­row AI that we have today, this dumb AI that talks to you like a cus­tomer ser­vices bot, the tech­nol­o­gists already have all the tools required to cre­ate very oppres­sive sur­veil­lance soci­eties, with our health, mon­ey, mobil­i­ty, rela­tion­ships and lan­guage turned into data that is processed by sur­veil­lance algo­rithms that dish out micro-pun­ish­ments and rewards. You see this already in the exper­i­men­tal Social Cred­it Sys­tem in Chi­na and their sys­tem of 700 mil­lion sur­veil­lance cam­eras which they (it’s no joke) have named SKYNET. We’re not far from this ​“total care soci­ety” that reduces us all to spread­sheet data and there’s the pow­er­less­ness and lack of agency that comes from that. Your life micro­man­aged by nar­row AI sys­tems that don’t under­stand your need for ques­tions and human con­tact and the unknown. Your lan­guage planned, your sex­u­al part­ner pre-assessed, your food and trav­el lim­it­ed. And on top of that you have the forced unem­ploy­ment caused by AI.

That sense of being use­less leads to learned help­less­ness and depres­sion. I’ve been in that hole more times than I like to think about and what Harari warns about seems accu­rate to me – what will they do with a pop­u­lace who no longer have mean­ing­ful work to do, when mil­lions of jobs are replaced by advanced non-con­scious algo­rithms that can per­form faster and cheap­er than humans. What will they do to stop the ​“use­less class” burst­ing out into revolt, or acts or ran­dom vio­lence. Yes, we will be kept paci­fied with games and drugs. Ter­ri­fy­ing to think that gov­ern­ments might actu­al­ly be con­sid­er­ing uni­ver­sal drug paci­fi­ca­tion pro­grammes. Ren­ton in Trainspot­ting walks away from drugs for a rea­son, actu­al­ly Ren­ton walks away from the whole soci­ety. This is def­i­nite­ly an impulse that I and many oth­ers feel. We don’t want to be the paci­fied use­less class. How can such a future not make us furious?

IW: How do we build a pos­i­tive future for human­i­ty when the main dri­ving forces of change; cap­i­tal, tech­nol­o­gy and the nation state are now all co-opt­ed (and are assim­i­lat­ing) few­er peo­ple and simul­ta­ne­ous­ly nar­row­ing the emo­tion­al band­width of those peo­ple? Are we des­tined to become tech­noserfs in those great fiefdoms?

EM: I’ve been think­ing a lot about what we can do in the face of this tech­no-dystopia just because the dan­gers of admit­ting defeat are huge, they take a toll on us, rob us of all ener­gy. I spent a few years in bed with Chron­ic Fatigue Syn­drome and I don’t have any time left for sur­ren­der. I sup­pose, part of the impe­tus behind writ­ing the book was to see what lit­tle free­doms our anti-tech rebel, Josh, could dis­cov­er along the way, even though he is des­tined to blow him­self and maybe his ene­my to pieces. What free­doms emerge unex­pect­ed­ly when we accept the worst? It’s a pret­ty dras­tic but maybe lib­er­at­ing way to look at things, more empow­er­ing, if fatal­ly, than accept­ing that we are fat­ed to become tech­noserfs. And in his case, being forced to accept that his daughter’s death was just col­lat­er­al dam­age to be swept under the car­pet, in the ongo­ing unstop­pable march of technology.

And why should we let the tech­nol­o­gist be the only ones who get to talk opti­misti­cal­ly about their pos­i­tive future for human­i­ty. Won’t it be amaz­ing they say, when we are all implant­ed with brain chips and can con­tact each oth­er tele­path­i­cal­ly. A kind of hap­py ver­sion of the Borg in Star Trek.

This hap­py utopi­an vision of the tech­nol­o­gists and tech­nocrats is quite ter­ri­fy­ing and tone deaf. Even ​‘thought lead­ers’ like Klaus Schwab of the WEF, in his talk of the amaz­ing eman­ci­pa­tion promised by full automa­tion in the Fourth Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion can’t help but use the metaphor of the tsuna­mi to describe the com­ing flood of tech­nol­o­gy and our impend­ing inun­da­tion. Don’t peo­ple drown in tsunamis? Crushed to death? Don’t they lose their homes and fam­i­lies and sav­ings and liveli­hoods? The tech­nocrats keep using these mass-death metaphors, with a smile. These are the same tech­no-thought-lead­ers of the WEF, who pre­dict, in their Future of Jobs report that 85 mil­lion jobs may be dis­placed by AI and automa­tion by the end of 2025.

So why not take them at their word — a tech­no­log­i­cal tsuna­mi is com­ing to destroy the use­less class, so what do we do, those of us who know it’s com­ing? If you pos­sess a tsunami/​mass destruc­tion ear­ly detec­tion warn­ing sys­tem, then, unlike every­one else, you’d be wise to get pre­pared, you will have ​‘grab bags’ ready for the emer­gency, you will know where the high ground is and what the fastest pos­si­ble evac­u­a­tion route is to your sec­ond sur­vival loca­tion, you will have stash­es of med­ical and food sup­plies, alter­na­tive ways to con­tact peo­ple beyond the zone of dam­age, you will, yes, most of all be pre­pared. You will not go pad­dling or swim­ming or sail­ing in the waters of the new tech­nol­o­gy while hop­ing for the best.

This is what I’ve been work­ing out – when you know the tech-tsuna­mi is com­ing to destroy your way of life, you would be wise to use the time before it hits to cre­ate back-up plans, locat­ing types of work that will not be impact­ed, you may have to start a sec­ond career, you may have to down­size, retrain, to find an area of work that will not be tak­en over by AI. Why not assume the worst and take Harari and Schwab’s warn­ing at face val­ue. Don’t just build a lifeboat or run, get togeth­er with oth­er folk who are ​‘in the same boat’ and build an arc.

Doing noth­ing and hop­ing for the best isn’t an option, there is only one oth­er path I can see and that is that you join the ranks of those who are doing the oppo­site of the accel­er­a­tionists, by try­ing to decel­er­ate and reign in AI. Those call­ing for reg­u­la­tions and new laws or rein­force­ments of exist­ing laws to pro­tect copy­right from theft by AI com­pa­nies. Those call­ing for eco-reg­u­la­tions to stop the rapid growth of data cen­tres with their colos­sal and waste­ful use of pow­er. As a decel­er­a­tionist you can cam­paign for your gov­ern­ments and your unions to com­pen­sate peo­ple for the dam­ag­ing effects of run­away AI ven­ture cap­i­tal growth. You can get togeth­er with oth­er anti-AI activists and spread counter infor­ma­tion about the promise of AI and try to dis­cour­age invest­ment in it, you can try to burst the AI bub­ble and push for an AI econ­o­my crash — that might hold AI back for a few years.

But at the same you should know that you are just slow­ing down the tsuna­mi, build­ing small walls and dams and bar­ri­cades togeth­er and it might not work, because AI has now entered an inter­na­tion­al eco­nom­ic race to the bot­tom, and when that hap­pens every coun­try is fear­ful of miss­ing out and los­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty, so they dereg­u­late faster than the oth­ers. It becomes an accel­er­at­ing storm.

This is not an either-or, we can do both – pre­pare for sur­viv­ing the tsuna­mi by build­ing up a sec­ondary liveli­hood beyond the reach of AI, while at the same time work­ing to try to hold the tsuna­mi back.

This is my attempt at being opti­mistic and it’s maybe not a pos­i­tive view for human­i­ty as whole, because this is a bit more like a Noah’s arc sit­u­a­tion, maybe it’s just a pos­i­tive view for the sur­vivors who plan ahead.

IW: Are we replac­ing our­selves with AI because on a cos­mic, sub­con­scious lev­el we inher­ent­ly know that we’ve reached our lim­i­ta­tions as human beings?

EM: Have we reached our lim­i­ta­tions as human beings? Jesus. Cut to the heart of it, man! OK, I think this is all to do with a huge frus­tra­tion that West­ern soci­eties have been hav­ing with human beings and human nature since the French and Amer­i­can rev­o­lu­tions and the ​‘death of God’.

So, the idea with these his­toric lib­er­a­tions was we have to shake off the ancient belief that human beings are bro­ken, flawed things, ​‘fall­en’ accord­ing to the Chris­t­ian world­view. And instead, we have to replace this old belief in our flawed and lim­it­ed human nature, cow­er­ing in all our fail­ures beneath the all-pow­er­ful God, with the rad­i­cal new idea that there is no God and no human nature. The result being that we are then free to build any soci­ety that we can imag­ine, and since the human being real­ly has no fixed human nature, we can make it a blank slate and cre­ate new per­fectible human beings.

This was the big inspi­ra­tional utopi­an project that explod­ed out of the French and Amer­i­can rev­o­lu­tions – man is born free but is every­where in chains, and so humans must shake off all their shack­les. And this ran on a hatred of human lim­i­ta­tions, a refusal of any kind of time­less flaw in humans, because if there is such a thing as an unfix­able flaw then it’s going to drag us back down into all the vices that kept us at each other’s throats for mil­len­nia and that spoiled all our plans for a per­fect soci­ety – all the lust, glut­tony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. So, we were sick of human nature way back with the enlight­en­ment and the 20^th cen­tu­ry was real­ly a huge attempt to shake off all that came before and cre­ate Utopias on earth.

Of course, you and I lived through the tail end of those great projects of eman­ci­pa­tion, we saw the dream of com­mu­nism col­lapse with the USSR in the ​’90s and also we maybe try to make our­selves for­get that fas­cism had been a utopi­an attempt to cre­ate a new mankind and a new soci­ety too. So, yes, by about the ​’90s, when you were unleash­ing Trainspot­ting and many oth­er artists were show­ing the dark, and some­times hilar­i­ous­ly flawed side of human nature, there was a big sense that utopia was done. A stu­pid plan that end­ed up killing a hun­dred mil­lion. It’s fin­ished, and so we just had to accept our lim­i­ta­tions as human beings, maybe even laugh at our­selves. A lot of our cul­ture at that time was about accept­ing that humans just can’t be fixed. We’re a bro­ken, lust­ful, addict­ed, venge­ful species. Deal with it. A lot of great books and movies came out of that peri­od of human scep­ti­cism in the ​’90s.

Well, that didn’t wash with Sil­i­con Val­ley, and it was found­ed in the ​’70s and ​’80s with the help of many refugees from the failed ​’60s Cal­i­forn­ian Utopia. You even see peo­ple like John Per­ry Bar­low of the Grate­ful Dead announce that the inter­net will be the new Utopia, with his Dec­la­ra­tion of the Inde­pen­dence of Cyber­space in 1996. And he pro­claims: ​“Gov­ern­ments of the Indus­tri­al World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyber­space, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not wel­come among us. You have no sov­er­eign­ty where we gather.”

So, cyber­space and AI were devel­oped as a way to, as you say, shake off all human lim­i­ta­tions once again, due to a kind of dis­gust with human nature and this long chain of fail­ure in human his­to­ry. A renewed Utopi­anism, which now, with peo­ple like Musk and Bezos, aims to fuse humans with machines through inva­sive brain chip tech­nol­o­gy so we can become part of a vast super­in­tel­li­gence, and to take humans to the stars, or with peo­ple like Kurzweil, the mes­sian­ic tran­shu­man­ist guru, to make humans immor­tal and to achieve a dig­i­tal deity through AI – a SuperGod.

You’re right, there is this fear and almost loathing of human lim­i­ta­tions behind all of this, and the prob­lem with the tran­shu­man­ists and their desire to fuse us with machines, is that there is a dis­gust with exist­ing humans that comes with it.

There is a tran­shu­man­ist philoso­pher, David Pearce (I’ve argued with him on X), who has pub­lished papers on his plans to re-engi­neer human beings and all oth­er ani­mals through bio-tech, so that they will no longer be able to suf­fer or to inflict suf­fer­ing on oth­ers. It’s an insane plan, utter­ly Utopi­an, which would result in 8.7 mil­lion species on earth becom­ing bio-engi­neered to be über-veg­an; all those ani­mals lined up every day for their cru­el­ty-free food pills. But it would also result in so much DNA alter­ation that all the orig­i­nal species would come to an end.

In the name of replac­ing humans with a Post-Human 2.0 upgrad­ed mod­el that can’t feel pain or cause harm, Pearce’s plan, like that of Kurzweil would result in the mass geno­cide of Humans 1.0. So yes, the tran­shu­man­ists are dis­gust­ed by human frailty, human immoral­i­ty, human cru­el­ty and lust and suf­fer­ing and prob­a­bly even human humour too, because humour is all about accept­ing our pathet­ic lim­i­ta­tions – and so the tran­shu­man­ists are essen­tial­ly just against humans.

It is alarm­ing just how many peo­ple in Sil­i­con Val­ley hold these qua­si-reli­gious belief in a com­ing tech utopia in which tran­shu­mans and then posthu­mans pop­u­late the uni­verse. Even more alarm­ing to see how much the tran­shu­man­ists are fus­ing with the Amer­i­can government.

Maybe like your­self, I came of age wit­ness­ing the fail­ures of 20^th cen­tu­ry utopi­anism and took that as a warn­ing, so I don’t get a sense that 21^st cen­tu­ry tech utopi­anism will do any­thing but lead to a new big­ger, faster, more intru­sive, all inclu­sive and more con­trol­ling totalitarianism.

IW: Humans do beau­ti­ful, soul-nour­ish­ing things like love, art, sport… but our tech­nol­o­gy seems to focus on turn­ing those activ­i­ties into per­for­mance out­comes. Are we cre­at­ing a post cul­ture soci­ety, mak­ing peo­ple into robots so our con­ver­gence with tech­nol­o­gy will be easier?

EM: I think that’s spot on. As far back as I can recall we’ve heard the sci­en­tists announc­ing that ​“humans are bio­log­i­cal machines”, ​“con­scious­ness is com­pu­ta­tion”, recent­ly we had Harari claim­ing that ​“humans are algo­rithms”, then you’ve got Kurzweil, say­ing the qui­et part out loud and pre­dict­ing that humans will merge with machines and become super­hu­man by 2045, in what he calls ​‘the sin­gu­lar­i­ty”. And you’re right, what they’re doing is low­er­ing the bar of what it means to be human, so they can claim that this project they’ve invest­ed in – to cre­ate human lev­el arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence or AGI – can be more eas­i­ly reached. Part of this is just hype they gen­er­ate to secure bil­lions in ven­ture cap­i­tal finance – look they say, com­put­ers are becom­ing super smart and lo and behold humans are just bio-com­put­ers so the gap to achiev­ing syn­the­sis is tiny, so invest bil­lions in our project and you can share in the prof­its of mak­ing the evo­lu­tion­ary step that fus­es humans and machines.

One day, the tech push­ers and tran­shu­man­ists, say we will map the entire human brain, and prove there is no sub­con­scious, no soul, noth­ing but algo­rithms, and then ​‘vision­ar­ies’ like Kurzweil add, once we can map and store entire human brains with­in our com­put­er sys­tems, and per­son­al­i­ties are saved with­in cir­cuits, humankind will achieve immor­tal­i­ty. On the one hand this is just snake oil sales-pitch, it’s like street sell­ers sell­ing you elixirs for longevi­ty or bak­ers sell­ing you bread that they claim will bring you viril­i­ty, but on the oth­er hand this reduc­tion of all that is human to cal­cu­la­ble sys­tems, opens the door­way wide to the return of this hor­rif­ic idea of 100% mapped and planned human behav­iour, cre­at­ed by a fusion of big tech with the big state.

We saw this before in the 20^th cen­tu­ry. This reduc­tion of humans to data on spread­sheets was the bedrock of total­i­tar­i­an­ism. There’s this image that’s hard to get out of the head, of the num­bers tat­tooed on the arms of all the pris­on­ers in the Nazi death camps — they were part of a spread sheet punch-card sys­tem designed by IBM, with the tech also sup­plied and main­tained by IBM.

‘Peo­ple are machines.’ To live or die is a ​‘per­for­mance outcome’.

When peo­ple are reduced to num­bers in sys­tems, we’re in the land of dehu­man­i­sa­tion. For all their talk of sav­ing human­i­ty and immor­tal­i­ty this is where the tran­shu­man­ists are lead­ing us, and at a hell of a speed. And what can we do about it? How can we fight back against the run­away accel­er­a­tion of tech­nol­o­gy? How do we stop our­selves from becom­ing just algo­rithms con­trolled by the algo­rithm writers?

There’s not real­ly a plan or soci­ety opt-out on the cards, oth­er than some kind of anti-tech lud­dism – smash the machines – so I think we will see an increas­ing num­ber of irra­tional and vio­lent erup­tions against the tech­nol­o­gists and the tech­no-state. I have to say, I can feel where that’s com­ing from and I sym­pa­thise. When I was writ­ing the book I did want Josh to be suc­cess­ful in the revenge-killing of the big tech CEO. I was root­ing for him and I felt his vio­lence was jus­ti­fied. Peo­ple tell me that it alarms them too how much they sym­pa­thise with a man who is plan­ning a mur­der. But, at the same time I under­stand that these kinds of erup­tions of anti-tech rage can make things worse.

IW: Ter­ror­ism and state con­trol have long been a sym­bi­ot­ic rela­tion­ship with each oth­er in terms of a feed­back loop of atroc­i­ty and con­trol. Are both inevitable?

EM: I’ve been think­ing about this a lot because the act of Josh, the father in the book, is framed by his ene­mies as an act of ter­ror­ism, and so peo­ple ask me ​‘are you advo­cat­ing terrorism?

Your ques­tion is bet­ter as it’s not based on the assump­tion that if peo­ple want­ed ter­ror­ism to go away it could be made to van­ish. You’re right, there is a mutu­al­ly depen­dent rela­tion­ship between the state and ter­ror­ism. Like they say, if ter­ror­ism didn’t exist then the state would have to invent it to jus­ti­fy cit­i­zen sur­veil­lance and vast spend­ing on new high tech secu­ri­ty pro­grammes. Ask Edward Snow­don. So, yes, ter­ror­ism and the sur­veil­lance state are inevitably caught togeth­er in a self-rein­forc­ing feed­back loop.

I recall years ago read­ing this excel­lent essay by Umber­to Eco (the Name of the Rose) and he was talk­ing, as a social­ist about how the Brigade Rosso – the Ital­ian red brigades – Marx­ist Lenin­ist armed ter­ror­ist groups in the 70s and 80s — had made things worse because in kid­nap­ping and killing heads of state and indus­tri­al­ists, in the attempt to ​“strike at the heart of the state” they had ensured that the state dis­persed itself, so there would be no longer any one cen­tre to attack. The same was real­ly true of the Baad­er Mien­hoff in Ger­many and the Weath­er Under­ground in the USA. We under­stand why they arose and can sym­pa­thise (in fact my peer group ide­alised them like they were pop stars back in the ​’90s). Both ter­ror­ist groups emerged at times when the left was in retreat and the caus­es of inter­na­tion­al social­ism seemed help­less, so vio­lence seemed to be the only option, but they did ush­er in through their kid­nap­pings and bomb­ings, even more author­i­tar­i­an states in Ger­many and the US. They hadn’t just ​“exposed the vio­lence of state pow­er” as per their plan, the ter­ror­ist groups pro­vid­ed the ali­bi from the growth of new sur­veil­lance tech­nolo­gies and new snoop­ing and arrest laws which made life for every­one in those coun­tries more oppressive.

We like to think that the sur­veil­lance by the state is remote from us, and only affects peo­ple involved in sub­ver­sion, but it’s sur­pris­ing just how close some of us every­day peo­ple are to gov­ern­ment spy­ing oper­a­tions and even to ter­ror­ist sus­pects. There was an exposé in Jan­u­ary 2025 (in Bel­la Cale­do­nia) about the his­to­ry that M15 in the UK had or has, of spy­ing on Scot­tish rad­i­cals and Scot­tish writ­ers — there was some spec­u­la­tion that you, Irvine, were on one of those sur­veil­lance lists along with Scot­tish writ­ers as benign as the great poet Noman McCaig.

I know for a fact that my father, who was a Scot­tish poet back in the ​’70s-’80s, had ​‘a file’. We found this out after the Blair gov­ern­ment came to pow­er and a friend of a friend of the fam­i­ly who worked in the new govt had to go through secu­ri­ty clear­ance, and he told us that my father’s para­noid anx­i­ety that we used to laugh at – this belief that his phone had been tapped by the British secret ser­vices and was in fact true. A huge file on my father, appar­ent­ly, lots of tran­scribed phone calls, prob­a­bly about real­ly non-ter­ror­ist things like the World Cup and the weather.

It was told to us in a jok­ing man­ner, because my father couldn’t have hurt a fly and pre­ferred a drink and rant to any kind of action, but he had made one huge mis­take in his past and that was what got him on a Govt. ter­ror­ist watch-list. He had writ­ten a patri­ot­ic poem in sup­port of Major Booth­by, a Scot­tish nation­al­ist mil­i­tary and para­mil­i­tary leader, the founder of the ​“Tar­tan Army”, and as the sto­ry goes the poem was found among the pos­ses­sions of Booth­by in a raid after his arrest.

I don’t know if my father was aware that the Tar­tan Army was involved in hoax bomb threats and throw­ing bricks through win­dows, or that in 1975 it con­duct­ed bomb­ings at elec­tric­i­ty pylons and oil pipelines in the UK and even attempt­ed a bank rob­bery, but my father’s poem made him ​‘a ter­ror­ist’. And in the ​’80s the Scot­tish Nation­al Lib­er­a­tion Army took over where Booth­by left off and things accel­er­at­ed and they con­duct­ed 27 let­ter bomb attacks – against Mar­garet Thatch­er and Diana, the princess of Wales among oth­er fig­ures of the UK estab­lish­ment, so they were a gen­uine threat. They also sent a func­tion­ing let­ter bomb to Doun­reay Nuclear Pow­er sta­tion which was only twen­ty miles from where I grew up and so no doubt there was rea­son to keep my father under sur­veil­lance for even longer.

I’ve been want­i­ng to write about aver­age peo­ple, total nobod­ies who get pulled into ter­ror­ism, for a long time. And the ques­tion plagues me, what do they achieve by going over the edge into actu­al planned attacks. So often the vent­ing of rage leads to an even big­ger clampdown.

I think about Ted Kaczyn­s­ki – the Unabomber – and his vague and ran­dom, but lethal attacks on peo­ple asso­ci­at­ed with tech­nol­o­gy in the USA. A ter­ror­ist, yes, unhinged, yes, but it is a strange and alarm­ing fact that some of the pio­neers in Big Tech and AI respect the anti-tech man­i­festo Ted K wrote. You have Elon Musk say­ing of the Unabomber that ​“he might not have been wrong” about the rise of tech cre­at­ing too many prob­lems for human­i­ty. You have tran­shu­man­ist guru Ray Kurzweil, quot­ing the Unabomber man­i­festo from the sec­tion where it says that our depen­dence on tech­nol­o­gy will increase over decades with­out us real­is­ing it until we are entire­ly con­trolled by AI sys­tems. Kurzweil is say­ing this is true and unstop­pable and a good thing. And, here’s the co-depen­dence of the ter­ror­ist and his ene­mies again. They’re assist­ing each oth­er in push­ing soci­ety into accel­er­a­tion and the tech­nol­o­gists are all accelerationists.

This is real­ly the night­mare in the nov­el, that it’s pos­si­ble that what the tech­nol­o­gists need to grow their pow­er and influ­ence and to har­ness invest­ment from the big state is a vio­lent attack against them. And so, what does the des­per­ate per­son who has no oth­er choice but to fight back against the tech­no-sys­tem do? That’s the ques­tion Josh grap­ples with in the book and that I want to leave us with. We can see the high-tech, total-con­trol sur­veil­lance state grow­ing around us, so what the hell are we going to do to stop it? I think it’s some­thing we have to answer togeth­er and not be tempt­ed by soli­tary des­per­ate acts.

Ewan Morrison’s new nov­el For Emma is pub­lished by Leam­ing­ton Books on 25^th March, 2025.

Irvine Welsh’s new nov­el Men in Love is pub­lished by Jonathan Cape on 3^rd July, 2025.

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