Are you Prepared? Do you Conceal carry at all times? Not only do you conceal carry, but do you practice with your gun? How many rounds do you fire per week? Do you undergo crisis training? Do you always wear shoes that you can run in? Do you have a go bag? Because if you don't, you won't get the five million dollar prize in America great game show, thee absolute greatest game show that, at it's very lowest ratings, brings in 64% of ALL the television viewing audience.
You won't get that prize, because you will be dead. And. It's. Your. Own. Fault. Because. You. Weren't. Prepared.
“Vigilance” is a game show with a very simple premise. Three active shooters are introduced into a semi-random environment, a school, a train station, a mall—selected based on population density, police presence, and demographics—and they...do what mass shooters do. Kill everyone they can. If the shooters are the last men standing, literally, they get twenty million dollars, if a civilian takes them down, they get five million dollars.
Vigilance's producer, John McDean, is a man who specializes in breaking down analytical data and demographics, leads a team of other analytical and tech geeks who knows EXACTLY what their target audience wants, bombarding their audience with specifically targeted ads, usually of products that are both being used by the victims of Vigilance's Active Shooters, and the products being used by McDeans target audience, that target audience being the median age of the average American in 2030 someone around 72, white, upper lower to upper middle class, and thoroughly terrified of their neighbors.
Robert Jackson Bennett novella, it's only 192 pages in its physical form, grand in concept suffers from its own format and the logic of the real world. At first read I thought this was possibly the best satire of all time, rivaling “American Pycho”, “Babbit”, and even “1984”. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it wasn't.
The problem that I'm having is that Satire, by its very nature, must be connected to the real world. Even though the purpose of satire is to outrageously askew a given subject, there still has to have some grounding in reality. (unless it's satire of a genre of fiction or other entertainment, then reality becomes an active stumbling block or something that the characters are constantly bringing up...just read any of the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett) This book was written in the wake of the Parkland Massacre, an event that spurred a massive youth moment for gun control. What happened in the near future in Bennett's book that completely squished March For our Lives? How did things get so absurdly out of control that there where 512 mass shooting events in 2026 and why did advertisers and Congress not pull the plug on AI marking algorithms that pepper the news feeds of the coverage with everything from athletic apparel to medical insurance?
It less of satire on Gun Control and more of a satire on Weaponize Advertising (possibly even the 2016 Election). Most of the book is focus on McDean and his team of sociopathic market analysts discussing Marking Activation, demographics, and correcting their AI Algorithms whenever they stray from the script and don't appeal to McDean's target audience.
It's mildly frustrating because Bennett periodically adds the lingo of many of the Gun Rights crowd. McDeans AI TV hosts used the Civilian Sheepdog concept of “Being Prepared” and turns it into a dog whistle, pumping up fear in their audience by showing the white, senior citizen males ads featuring criminal people of color and encouraging them to buy more guns. If this book was more like 400 or even 500 pages instead of barely just 200, Bennett could of spent more time to flesh out in a more convincing matter just how utterly screwy Gun politics are today and what they could be in ten years time.
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Top reviews from other countries
orkydd
A cry against the worship of weapons
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 1, 2021
mr se black
Disappointing from a favourite author
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 1, 2021
FeydRautha
Un thriller politique dans un avenir proche
Reviewed in France 🇫🇷 on January 29, 2019
Kristel Vergara
This was terrifying in the most realistic and dystopian way
Reviewed in Italy 🇮🇹 on March 3, 2019
