This week’s Substack Live at the Sustainable Media Center brought together SMC Executive Director Steven Rosenbaum, Director of GenZ Advocacy Emma Lembke, and one of America’s sharpest cultural observers, Kurt Andersen. Andersen is the best-selling author of Fantasyland and Evil Geniuses, co-founder of Spy, and longtime host of Studio 360. The focus of the conversation was his new novel, The Breakup.
The book is set about 20 years from now, in an America that has survived a two-year civil war and a “mutual secession” Andersen calls disunion. Its heart is Natalie and Asher, a separated couple divided by politics and by their feelings about an AI-saturated world, who reunite to take their 17-year-old daughter on a college tour across a fractured country.
Why fiction, and why now
After two big nonfiction books that Andersen half-jokingly described as his “unified theory of American history,” he considered a third in the series. He decided against it. He did not want to write a nonfiction prediction of the future, weighing what one expert says against another.
“The future, I’m not interested in saying, this is what the future holds,” he said. “Except in fiction, because it effectively is fiction.” The result is what he calls speculative fiction: a plausible scenario worked out in detail, as if it were nonfiction, but seen through the eyes of imaginary people. He noted that Random House is positioning the novel as the third book in a trilogy with Fantasyland and Evil Geniuses.
Timing played a role too. Andersen started writing about a month before ChatGPT became publicly available, so the chatbots in the book were largely invented. Setting the story decades out gave him room. When real events turned darker during the current administration, he did not need to rebuild the plot, but he did go back and darken the backstory.
A 200-year-old tortoise
Steve asked whether Andersen had ever written in the voice of a tortoise. He had not. The idea of a 200-year-old giant tortoise narrator came early, and his wife insisted he use it. When his editors asked whether he really needed the tortoise, his answer was simple: “If I’m going to keep my marriage happy, I definitely do.”
The solution was to let AI assist the tortoise’s memories and speech, which opens the door to questions about consciousness, AI, and who counts as a person. It is a small part of the book, and one of its most memorable.
AI is everywhere, but it is not the villain
Emma pointed out that AI saturates The Breakup without being cast as its villain, and asked whether our focus on existential risk distracts from harms happening now.
Andersen said his concern has long been the social, political, and economic consequences: disappearing jobs, and “a few trillionaires running this incredibly powerful thing that perhaps ought to be a public utility.” He is glad the alarms about catastrophic risk are finally being heard, and expects AI to become a major political issue. But he remains more worried about the near-term, definite consequences than the non-zero chance that AI destroys us.
He also sees AI deepening the problem he described in Fantasyland. “You thought Fantasyland was bad? Here’s the second volume with deepfakes.” Digital life, he argued, is not like television. TV never let anyone live inside their own alternative reality all the time.
In the novel, AI is simply there, like electricity or the internet. Natalie thinks it is tyrannizing humanity. Asher, who runs a neuroscience institute where much of the research is done with AI collaborators, reminds her that it has not annihilated us yet.
Writing young people without getting “okay, boomer’d”
Steve called the bravest choice in the book the decision to write young characters. Andersen admitted it made him anxious. He consulted many young people about slang, manner, and mindset, and asked which expressions might survive two decades.
His broader view is that generations differ less than they think. “My grandparents are not that different from my children,” he said, in what they want and how they live. Every young generation believes it is different, and in some ways it is. “Talk to me in 10 or 15 years.”
Staying just over 50% hopeful
Andersen has long described himself as a 51% optimist. That is his temperament, he said, but the last decade has brought him closer to despair than ever before, and for the first time he can imagine giving that number up.
Still, he finds reasons for hope. Appearing on Steve Bannon’s podcast, he was surprised to find common ground with the far right on oligarchs and the dangers of AI. The federal courts, for all his disagreements with them, have remained a bulwark. Renewable energy is advancing. And if this year’s elections are held fairly and freely, that will give him hope too.
He also had a message for the “yes, but” reflex of social media: “Take the win occasionally.”
The novel itself leaves open whether the national breakup is a tragedy or, like some divorces, a painful necessity. Its tone, as Steve put it, is that “the future’s gonna be messy, but it’s not apocalyptic.” Or, as Natalie’s father puts it in the book: could be worse, could be much worse.
One more thing: the audiobook
Steve listened to The Breakup as an audiobook, which features an unusual cast of seven actors. Andersen helped choose them, listening to finalists with his wife and recognizing instantly who was, and was not, Asher. He noted that audiobooks now make up about a quarter of his sales, and that publishers are investing in production because they are competing with podcasts.
The Breakup is out now. Pick up a copy, in print or in your ears, and see this version of America for yourself.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/594494/the-breakup-by-kurt-andersen/
