Mack Reynolds
The Computer Conspiracy

"The Computer Conspiracy" (1969) by Mack Reynolds, published in Italy with the title "Chi vuole distruggere l'America?" is perhaps not a particularly original novel. It probably wasn't even when it was published. The story is simple: after the end of the Cold War, the world finds a new balance and apparent peace by splitting into three blocks: the United States of America, old Europe, and the former Soviet Union. However, things regarding these international balances remain very difficult, but there have been great changes in society, and things have changed mostly right in the United States of America. The widespread storage and management of all data in gigantic computerized archives, a revolution that also involved the other two "blocks", in the USA has reached extreme levels, annihilating individual freedoms and modifying the life of the entire country's population, giving up every libertarian principle in exchange for "well-being." Only the few who did not want to conform to this way of life have cut themselves off and retreated to live among the ruins of the old great cities, rendered obsolete after the great changes that virtually disrupted the entire structure of the country. These places are practically no man's land and outside the control of institutions, and if all this makes you think of "Escape From New York" you're not far off the mark, because essentially those United States of America and that Manhattan are precisely those recounted in Reynolds' novel. However, it tells a different story: that of a language professor named Paul Kosloff who finds himself unwittingly involved in investigating a case of international espionage that will take him to the heart of old Europe to discover who, infiltrating and manipulating the computer's data, is indeed conspiring against the United States of America.

Revealing the rest of the plot at this point would mean sabotaging the reader's pleasure, but it must be said that the developments of the plot and its conclusion are not unpredictable, especially in an era like the contemporary one where "conspiracies" have become daily bread and a topic of discussion at the bar. If this could perhaps have been an element of innovation at that time, let's say that it doesn't particularly impress now, just as (as already announced in the introduction of this brief review) the manipulation of a "mainframe" containing all the most confidential and strictly confidential information is not an unprecedented theme. Thus perhaps the more interesting considerations should instead be made on the theme of freedom and individual freedoms, an issue necessarily dear to an author like Reynolds, openly socialist and historically critical towards the USA, subsequently a deep analyst even of the limits of the Soviet system. It is so in the representation of his United States of America where individual freedoms are denied and one bends to the renouncement of privacy and uniformity of thought, Reynolds not only denies the libertarian and false nature of the capitalist system but captures its most authoritarian folds, which then correspond in the themes mentioned to that maximalist vision of sacrifice in the name of the great ideal and which was then the main contradiction where the great dream of the Soviet Union later floundered.

The mediocrity of the lifestyle, the total cultural flattening sold as pure gold for the maintenance of the status quo in a society actually decadent, where the marginalised are relegated to live in real macroscale ghettos with no rights, are themes of current relevance that invite reflections on what is happening today in the same USA as in Europe. When the Swedish minister declares that the cause of the crisis is not immigrants but the maintenance of the welfare state for elderly people which has reached unsustainable costs, it clearly does not deny the priority of this right (which, thank God, in Italy in many situations has always existed and continues to exist) but means that thinking of giving a country a closed and self-sufficient system in well-being, while around you everything falls into poverty, is not only unethical behavior and what today would be called "sovereignist", but is also counterproductive for all parties involved as well as for the people who are cut out of it. The "game" works, but then all the contradictions eventually emerge. Some statistical data and economic indicators say that the USA at this moment enjoy a growing economy. I speak of "some" because we know well that each data is always subject to various types of interpretations. Keeping in mind that the economic aspect does not seem to me the only parameter to judge a political action, history and simple reason have always taught us how building walls is counterproductive. Once you are barricaded between your walls, the day will come when a virulent epidemic (even if just a simple computer virus...) will break out and flourish without you having any antibodies to cure yourself, and then the only thing that can prevail remains hatred and violence.