Interesting New Sci-Fi Book Tangle’s Game By Stewart Hotston Explores Technology of The Future, published 2019

Interview with Stewart Hotston, Author of the book Tangle’s Game.

What is your background briefly?

I currently work for an investment bank and head the building of a particular business within it across the UK and Europe. Before the current role I’ve worked in just about every part of the structured products world – you know, what has sometimes been referred to as weapons of financial mass destruction. I lived through the financial crash and have the dubious honour of having worked for some of the largest failed financial institutions in history. I got into finance after completing my PhD in Theoretical Physics where I spent a few years programming the math of molecular motion on high-performance computing facilities.

What inspired you to write this book?

I’m a massive nerd. I also love Sci-Fi. Tangle’s Game is low-level sci-fi book – there are no spaceships, no aliens or telepathy. The book is based on where we are today but looking at some of the (hopefully) logical developments of cutting edge tech in ten or twenty years from now.

In the book, I wanted to explore how blockchain could be part of the infrastructure of our lives, how the internet of things would change how we live and what would happen to people like me who love these things when it all falls apart on us. The book is necessarily political because, for me at least, these new technologies exist in society and everyone I know has an opinion on what they should be used for. Given that, all the characters have views on the way the world treats them and in particular how technology plays into that…well they do when they’re not dodging secret service agents, gangsters, fraudsters and AI.

Why do you think blockchain/crypto is such a powerful idea?

The idea behind it is pretty simple, right? It’s an elegant solution to the Byzantine General’s problem. I don’t think this is what grabs people’s imagination though, well not many of us anyway. For most of us, I think it’s an idea rooted in concepts of freedom, of agency and of being able to transcend national borders and truly connect with people anywhere they might be.

We can separate this from the mania and greed which has periodically gripped the crypto-market as volatility has created bubbles (and burst them). For me the immense power of blockchains are about being able to create a system which feels quite democratic in the sense that everyone involved in the chain has a stake, everyone is involved in its being what it is. It’s not that we help keep information secure – it’s more fundamental than that. Literally, by being involved we become part of this distributed ledger.

The main character has her social score manipulated by the state – as China has already brought in something like this, do you think it is inevitable similar misuses will happen?

Short answer: yes.

Long answer: China’s social credit score is deeply troubling. It posits the untrustworthy shouldn’t be allowed to travel or get healthcare or they shouldn’t be able to access the best schools etc. Who decides on trustworthiness? The government defines what is morally acceptable.

It’s a system which is deeply subjective, without a right of reply and with no recourse to those who decide what is good one day and not the next. For an average person, it provides extraordinary incentives to behave as someone else determines is ‘right’ and crushes an impetus you might feel to protest.

We may think that couldn’t happen here. We’re probably right…except at the risk of creating a firestorm…ok. Look at Alabama. It is a state where a collection of men have decided how women may access healthcare. These men, representing a specific thread of a single religion, have decided what is ‘good’ for all. If that sounds frightening, political or likely to get me hate mail…well it’s because the power of this technology allows just that but on a complete basis across all aspects of our lives.

I think if it happens in free societies, liberal democracies, whatever you want to call us, then it comes via corporations. Now, given the choice between a government deciding what’s good and a profit-making corporation? I think we’ve seen that movie and it didn’t end well. I think we could end up accepting it because we’d get mundane benefits such as free meals, cheaper gym membership, lower car insurance and privileged access to the theatre.

Sorry, this is a bit bleak!

How soon, if at all, do you think we will see widespread adoption of cryptocurrencies instead of fiat ones?

What I write in the novel is close to what I believe about this. I don’t think the widespread adoption of crypto is likely soon. For a whole bunch of reasons. Firstly, if they really took off when the powers that be will resist that rigorously. Like hard. Tax, power and representation all being strong reasons for sovereigns to push back.

Second, until people have solved the cost/scaling problem of how to manage small transactions efficiently and smoothly then there is no incentive to make these what we use every day.

Third, if we look at financial systems and the trillions which move around the system EVERY DAY, crypto doesn’t have the scale or capacity right now to access those systems. Until they do there’s little dent they can make on fiat money globally. I have strong thoughts on how they could do that.

Finally – there’s a big energy cost to these systems. They don’t exist in a vacuum and even if we set aside some of the more alarmist stories about the energy they use, these systems aren’t free.

Not part of the above, but the current construction of these currencies isn’t as systems of ‘crystallised desire’, or a mechanism for allowing goods to move between people without those people actually needing the goods they’re exchanging if you want to be less pretentious about it. They’re really trying to be systems for storing value, akin to but less idealised than gold. At least if the power goes off I can carry my gold with me.

I think a second generation will have to address some of these concerns and, not least, be designed to be exchanged in the normal course of business for anyone who wants to access them.

Do you plan to write more books / about what?

Absolutely. I’d like to think Tatsu’s story isn’t finished and I have plans on that front. However, stuff that’s actually done and in the system? A first contact novel but where it’s all about information space/theory rather than spaceships…so the major location is another datacentre.

I’ve also got a big fantasy novel in the works – but it’s very much concerned with more contemporary issues. The basic premise is ‘what if man enslaved the gods?’

If things pan out well, what would a ‘good’ future look like for your characters & the rest of the world too?

Chaotic, messy but free to choose who and what they wanted to be. Without giving too much away a white hat hacker friend of mine who talked me through some of the technical aspects I’m not familiar with said they thought the book is about what price we’ll pay to choose our own destiny. I like to think the main characters walk away from the end of the story with a better idea of what you and I can do to change the world if we so want.

How can people find out more about you & your work?

I’m on Twitter as @stewhotston, on instagram as ‘thestewhotston’ and can be found talking about anything which takes my fancy at stewarthotston.com

Anything else you’d like to add / we should have asked?

One thing: there’s a lot of discussion around a whole bunch of disruptive tech right now about how and who gets to control its deployment. This is, for me, a critical subject. I want us to have a much broader discussion on how we develop and then deploy systems such as facial recognition, how we build crypto-currencies for everyday use (can homeless people access them for instance?

If not, and we stop using cash, as they simply going to starve?), who decides what purposes are legitimate and how do we control for technologies which can so easily be used to constrain our liberties as easily as they can be used to help us be freer? The use of the internet by dictatorial regimes should be salutary, as should fake news. Those of us involved in their development, their implementation and advocacy – we can do more than assume they’re politically neutral. If we don’t other people will fill that void for us.

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