Can pure merit dictate the world?
The Ten Percent Thief, shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award 2024, a brutal meritocracy rules the world—one based on productivity and conformity A. former game designer, the 35-year-old author, who lives in Bengaluru, has had several short stories published in anthologies like The Best of World SF (Vol 2) and The Big Book of Cyberpunk.
In this, her first novel (published in Asia as Analog/Virtual), Lakshminarayan takes corporate practices such as assessing human labour and contribution on a two-dimensional scale to its logical conclusion: a future where society itself is plotted on the notoriously problematic bell curve. The technology-led dystopia, brought to life through a series of interconnected stories, feels urgent and real.
In an interview with Lounge ahead of the announcement of the Arthur C Clarke Award on 24 July, the author talks about meritocracy, cultural conformism, and creating a richly imagined world. Edited excerpts: Meritocracy is an outright terrible idea, but it’s a dangerously popular one, emerging as a driving force in any system shaped by technocapitalism.
The idea of merit evokes the notion of a “fair" system, and it’s based on the assumption that reality is a level playing field. Nothing could be further from the truth; look at the blatant economic and social disparity in our country and across the world.
Well, let’s imagine that we miraculously manage to level the playing field, implement social reparations until no disparities exist, and then implement a meritocracy to evaluate the worth of a human being based on their successes and failures. We come to a fundamental question: What counts as success? To define this is to give rise to a dominant ideology, and the worth of a human being to
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