io:
Sometime in high school Jeremy accidentally ate the red pill instead of the more harmless blue one, and has been an activist ever since.
In 2003, Jeremy spent six months in prison for civil disobedience while working to close the School of the Americas: a US training grounds for Latin American military that fueled the excesses of the anti-communist dirty wars.
Coming out of the Occupy movement in Washington DC, Jeremy created an program at the Quixote Center organizing Fresh Stops: farm-to-table initiatives for low-income families built through community organizations. When he moved to Ecuador to pursue half-time writing, he continued the work, raising ten-thousand dollars through a Kickstarter campaign (startsomegood.com/freshstops) to build an online platform that lets anyone, anywhere organize a Fresh Stop.
Jeremy has a wife and two kids, and between activist excursions and writing binges, sustains his family via software development and technical project management. He blogs as a faith-based progressive radical at glassdimly.com, contributing to HuffPo, Sojourners, Geeze, ReadWriteWeb, Good Men Project, and Justice Unbound. He is primarily an autodidact but holds a degree in Cognitive Science: Logic.
Tagline:
In a dark near-future, a young man becomes obsessed with finding freedom from the oppressive collective intelligence that lives in his mind.
Summary, 300-400 words
In a dark near-future, Isaac is a member of the elite operator class, on the cusp of his Choosing and obsessed with finding autonomy from the AI implanted in him since birth. He can choose to submit himself to the neural machinations of the AI and step into his “privilege,” or he can choose to discover who he really is without it, risking insanity and a life of near-slavery as a member of the underclass, his body remote-controlled for factory labor by the operator class to which he once belonged. But in a world where nearly everyone has fused their brain to the AI, it would seem autonomy is the one thing universally denied.
In his parents’ basement, Isaac finds a book. But writing has been forgotten, replaced by a dream-language that has subsumed and altered all human knowledge. As he presses to understand the book, the AI manipulates his emotions in ways that feel alien, allowing him to differentiate himself from it. And so he keeps pressing, questing out into the world for anything that would help him learn to read and sharpen his sense of self. In exploring the underclass, Isaac is robbed and left unconscious. Hitchhiking back, Isaac meets Sol, a brilliant teenage girl whose mother left to become an operator and whose rage-stricken father is lost to revolutionary struggle. As she teaches Isaac to read in order to learn secrets that could free her mother, they begin to fall in love. But their love is doomed.
bigMind is an 80,000-word neuroscience dystopia novel that fuses literary and hard science fiction; its world development and sociological ideas do not overshadow plot, character, and pacing. It is written for adults, but could be marketed as a coming-of-age novel because it features a YA protagonist.
The novel extrapolates upon today’s technologies for reading and writing to the human brain, always with an eye to limitations rather than technological omnipotence. Throughout the book, QR codes link to a soundtrack created by the electronic musician Spearfisher.