1. Changing Human Communication Standards: Present or Future Dystopia?

Reviewers and academics were quick to praise the book’s disturbing dystopia for signaling the risks digitalism and voyeurism present to human connections and empathy. After all, who would want to live in a world in which individuals are hooked digitally to someone else through a toy and thus cannot wait for their “real” day to end so they can satisfy their addiction? Such a choice appears, arguably, even more aberrant and barren once we examine the fundamental constraints that Kentukis erect regarding human communication and interaction. While the world described in the novel is one we recognize, the rules of Kentuki communication make the world of “Little Eyes” much simpler than ours.

First, users cannot choose with whom to be connected across the world. They know nothing about the kind of user on the other end, her features, habits, and location.

Second, Kentukis do not enable direct voice or written communication between both users and the camera does not record sound, in the same way it cannot take pictures or record videos (though that does not prevent recordings of the screen where the Kentuki video feed appears). This creates a setting of simplified communication in which users must convoke imagination in order to be able to communicate through words, as when a Ouija table is produced so that the Kentuki can move around and use it as a dynamic alphabet, something similar to Valentine’s form of communication with Count Noirtier in Alexander Dumas’ Le Comte de Monte Cristo. The important point is that for this kind of communication to emerge, the holder of the Kentuki needs to be interested.

Third, Kentukis engender a prima facie asymmetric relationship between both users. The one that has a Kentuki moving around is largely the apparent master of the relationship since she can decide to move outside of the camera’s reach, destroy the Kentuki, stuck it inside a wardrobe, or merely fail to recharge it. This power is expanded because each Kentuki merely offers one connection which once severed deactivates the relationship subjecting the user that is the Kentuki to the whims of the user that has it. The latter, indeed, consubstantiates the social media-induced addiction identified long ago by Zygmunt Bauman: we wish to both “be connected” at all times and conserve the power to disappear or remain invisible whenever we want.Footnote ⁴

So the world of Little Eyes would be one in which humans appear less human because they are trapped in impoverished acts of human communication held within the highly simplistic Kentuki world-time. Point taken, but this throws away the chance of looking at it from another angle, one that is less narcissistic about how received ideas of actual human communication are constitutive of “being human.”

For instance, one could look at the characters in the novel and pause to consider that maybe these new simplified forms of communication and interaction mirror those many persons would already endorse if it were not for the strength of existing norms on sociality. While there is empirical evidence on the benefits of deep human interaction, a long-standing perfectionist discourse on the content of meaningful friendships and social intercourse is well entrenched.Footnote ⁵ Little Eyes, I believe, powerfully plants the seed of thinking that perhaps such perfectionism also harms us, and that technology can be employed to tailor, and make available, less demanding forms of social exchange.

That the novel could be about the present and not the future, prompting a new gaze via technology into what we believe we are, rather than fear regarding what we can become, is magisterially achieved by the author’s traversing of genres. On the one hand, the novel’s somber and bleak world of private lives leads the reader at first toward the experience of a future social dystopia. But the more it progresses, the novel makes us revisit what we believe we know about the world we live in and, undoubtedly, to the consternation and dismay of many, readers are bound to realize that nothing in Kentukis is clearly futuristic. Characters, social roles, technology, hooked digital users, human suffering and joy, crime and illegal behavior, digital voyeurism, activism, alienation, and so forth. All of this is already around us, and everything becomes visible through the human-technology interface Schweblin builds via the Kentukis.

It is the merit of Schweblin that genres, for example, science fiction, drama, documentary, and diary writing, themselves—as “horizons of expectations” in the words of Tzvetan Todorov—are tossed in and become an integral part of Kentukis’ worldmaking as perceived by the reader.Footnote ⁶

2. Private Lives, Toys, and Games: The Disappearance of Common Good?

If personal effects and simplistic Kentukis-driven social intercourse did not make me bat an eye, I was instead enraptured by how the novel so powerfully conveys the replacement of privates lives for public ones. And that indeed touched a nerve, for apart from the Free Kentukis activist movement, nothing in the book suggests characters’ worries toward the collective management of our “common world” or “res publica.”Footnote ⁷ In other words, where Little Eyes does pack a punch is in showcasing technology’s growing possibilities to enable entirely private and privatized forms of existence.

Indeed, if all of us wish to spend our lives hooked to and immersed into worlds of, primarily, two users that can only communicate in a very rudimentary fashion, what will “the political” become?Footnote ⁸ And to whose detriment and benefit? This will remain an obvious problem until we can develop something akin to Evangelion’s Magi System, the supercomputers whose formidable decision-making and probabilistic powers are based on the values and makeup of three highly distinctive individuals.Footnote ⁹ A device that, in the cult Hideaki Anno’s anime series, dispensed altogether ordinary citizen participation in collective life.

Other cultural media, such as Do Not Worry Darling (2022) or Matrix (1999), have portrayed that possibility, imagining full-fledged worlds in which humans go about their lives in apparently perfect, even if computer-generated, worlds. I suspect that the choice between inhabiting what we are used to call “the real world” or instead experiencing a “virtual existence” in a world designed according to our desires will become a real one sometime soon. And this will not be an easy moral choice, as the second scenario is but an update of Robert Nozick’s famous “pleasure machine” thought experiment: it is morally desirable to live in the world in which we have more pleasure.Footnote ¹⁰ And let us not forget that while Nozick’s construct only provides physical pleasure, Matrix and Do not Worry Darling scenarios offer comprehensive human worlds catering to a much wider set of goods deemed desirable in human lives.

Schweblin’s Little Eyes offers a less black and white scenario and because of that (and something else I shall mention in a minute), the aesthetic experience it provides turns out to be more nuanced and poignant. On the one hand, this is because the private world in the novel is a limited one, a private social world nested within the broader world. On the other hand, in the world of Kentukis’ connections, communication is limited thus making it impossible for the individual to live and interact “normally.” Together, these differences make it blatant that, in contrast to the aesthetic sources mentioned above, there is a world “outside” of Kentuki network connections that goes on, and in which Kentuki users live too. It is simply that they become too engrossed with their new digital life.

What delivers home the distinctiveness of Samantha Schweblin’s novel’s predicament is, I submit, that the element of choice and world-crossing, and the key to the private-public lives substitution, is a toy. Footnote ¹¹

Toys evoke the ideas of “game” and “play,” but Kentukis are neither. Games are typically defined as practices in which heteronomously defined goals (i.e., winning by scoring points) are to be achieved by having players following a set of rules and constraints.Footnote ¹² Games’ interest, entertainment, and challenge lies precisely in the fact that players are not free to pursue the game’s ultimate goal however they want but must instead master and follow the rules of the game. In setting up rules and goals, games create separate worlds that exist and go on in the world. It is certain that Kentukis create a separate world in between users subjecting them to certain but minimal rules, most of them the direct consequence of the basic hardware setup limiting direct communication as we are used to. On the other hand, Kentukis do not establish any heteronomous goal, there is no winning and losing and there is no scorekeeping. Users simply spend time interacting as they wish. Life in the Kentuki medium does not eclipse life “out there,” despite the fact that the toy-produced sense of gamification seems to make us think and feel otherwise.

This is revealing because, seduced by the aura of what looks like a toy and game, triggering our sense of “play”—the disinterested investment in a given practice—we may forget that we are replacing an impoverished life for our usual social and public life, enabling us to sink deep in a private bilateral life while letting go of the shared commitments and action needed to maintain and fight for the collective world’s vision.Footnote ¹³ A return of “contract” as the metaphor for how to order society and life.

This substitution effect—private life for public life—is the source, in my opinion, of the deep dreariness of Kentukis. Rather than living toward the broad outside, we accept to enter a private outside renouncing the tools of collective dialogue and exchange that mark our public and political existence. All this, while our brain and heart are torn, attempting to discern reality and fantasy, toy play or real serious life. Simply put, this is the threat that gamification brings about in all domains of life.

3. Desire, Social Life, and Being Human

Decades ago, in the acclaimed book The Fall of the Public Man, Richard Sennett announced the corruption of the public space and world by private concerns.Footnote ¹⁴ The book was premised upon the republican assumption that the public space used to be (and ought to be) the realm in which shared concerns were discussed and managed collectively. Much has been written on whether the problem lies with the private, the public, or their reciprocal relationship. And much depends on how much desire we citizens experience toward transcending ourselves and our inertia, something that, according to the psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati, is the new crisis of subjects.Footnote ¹⁵

Samantha Schweblin’s novel skillfully devises a world in which the public collective life is mostly absent; a world in which toys may mediate the ever extension of the manifold private worlds and their rules of engagement to be decided by their users and for their users only.

But are private desires we attach to toys, as Charles Baudelaire put it in La Morale du joujou, an adequate scheme for social life?Footnote ¹⁶ Ultimately, I take the defining interrogation of Little Eyes, “To be or to have a Kentuki?,” to be as much about the private as the public dimensions of “being human.”