The Great Wave by Michiko Kakutani review – overcoming ‘permacrisis’

Kakutani put down her literary scalpel in 2017 and turned her attention instead to that alternative arena of outlandish plotlines and overbearing egos, American public life. Existential crisis in democracy was no longer only of academic interest in the books pages.

Six years on, with little evidence that the corrosive habits and trends she described are in retreat, she has expanded that thesis in this book, to take in global currents of fake news and technological disruption, the forces that seem to fuel our increasingly polarised and unstable world.

Though a veteran deconstructer of tall tales, Kakutani suggests that the current “permacrisis” of “life in the third decade of the third millennium” feels like “a preposterous mashup of political satire, disaster movie, reality show and horror film tropes all at once”. The contours of previous comparable periods – the disruptive “hinge years” that followed the Great Depression or the emergence of the printing press – have been rolled into one.

Kakutani looks hard at the cultural effects of that daily avalanche of “news” – the ways in which “the edges replaced the centre”. She identifies how the radical anti-authoritarianism of the 1960s evolved into a “hacker ethic” supported by theof Silicon Valley. Decentralised systems were envisaged in the cold war as a means of creating “a communications network that could survive nuclear attack”.

The trillion-dollar question is how to harness these unleashed forces for cooperation and innovation rather than division and conflict. One of Kakutani’s solutions lies in the need to embrace outsiders, to “optimise marginality”. While the complication of our world invites simplistic nostalgia and narrow nationalism, Kakutani makes the case that the opportunities for renewal lie where they always have done: in embracing risk, welcoming otherness, opening dialogue rather than building walls.

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