For someone who literally wrote the book on the state-sponsored surveillance of citizens, Anna Funder is surprisingly optimistic about the perils of artificial intelligence.
“My calculator is more intelligent than I am, but it doesn’t pose an existential threat to my humanity,” says the acclaimed author of Stasiland, about the secret police of communist East Germany, and resistance to that regime.
“I think AI will settle and find a place in our world.”
Funder, who has just been appointed as a Professor of Practice in Creative Writing at Sydney University, is certainly alive to the threats of AI models and social media, and the tech companies that use them to harvest our personal data.
Her new role will constitute a small act of resistance against the dehumanising influence of those technologies.
“I think I have, sadly, a shorter attention span than I would like to have now,” she admits.
“But I have a suspicion that in the age of AI, real writing, and particularly creative writing made by humans and read by humans, as an act of human connection, is going to become more important, not less.”
Sydney University poached Funder from the University of Technology, where she has studied and worked part-time for about 20 years, and where she conceived and wrote much of her second book, 2012 Miles Franklin-winning novel All That I Am, about Jewish resistance to the Nazis.
Funder’s appointment is a huge coup for Sydney University, and represents a vote of confidence in the humanistic power of liberal arts education in the age of technology.
“This appointment reflects the University’s commitment to the humanities and to writing as a vital public practice,” says Vice Chancellor Mark Scott.
“Anna has a rare ability to take complex historical and political material and render it deeply human. That combination of intellectual seriousness and creative brilliance is exactly what we want students to encounter as they learn to think, write and engage with the world.”
The newly created role could also be interpreted as a riposte to the Trump-inspired demonisation, by some, of the humanities as a discipline.
“You can see in the reverse view, how Trump and other fascists I have studied have gone for universities because they are the places where the new, important and challenging thinking is happening,” Funder says.
“We are lucky to have extremely good universities in this country … I am so buoyed by the academics I know in all kinds of areas, that it blinds me to any sense of doom.”
Funder’s job will encompass some supervision of higher-degree creative writing students, and some representation of the university at major national and international events.
She will also contribute to the curriculum and speaker programs.
Since publishing Stasiland, her first book, in 2003, Funder has written two further books dealing with the subjects of fascism and authoritarianism.
‘I am so buoyed by the academics I know in all kinds of areas, that it blinds me to any sense of doom.’
Anna Funder
Her most recent book, 2023’s prize-winning Wifedom, was a genre-breaking account of the life of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, wife of the great anti-fascist George Orwell.
There is debate about whether it is appropriate to use the “f” word – fascist – to describe the US president, but for Funder the evidence is too strong to ignore.
“This is a version of fascism, and you have to call it by its name,” she says of the Trump administration. “That doesn’t mean you can’t examine its particularities.”
Drawing on the work of American philosopher Jason Stanley and the Russian political exile and journalist M. Gessen, Funder says history shows fascist movements begin with asserting an extreme version of patriarchy.
“The first move is against women, to make men central and powerful, and put women back behind a white picket fence, imaginary 1950s life,” she says.
Then there is a centralisation of power, through co-opting the legal system, control of the media and book bannings, she says, followed by the strip-back of legal protections and the state-sponsored violence of militia groups.
Funder points to the brutality of US ICE agents policing immigrants, and detention of people without habeas corpus.
“Trump is a lot more personally corrupt than many other fascist leaders,” she says.
“It is capitalism with fascistic characteristics.”
A feature of authoritarianism is the state-sponsored, Stasi-like watching of ordinary people.
But in the contemporary age, this is done by tech companies, with the consent of the people being watched. “It is very interesting and a very dangerous time,” Funder says.
“Governments are entering into contracts with these companies, as well as being raided by them. They need to work with them, but they also need to regulate them.”
As part of her professorship, Funder will also continue work on a new novel.
It is set in contemporary Sydney, but beyond that, she can’t say what it’s about.
“If I say what it’s about, I’ll hold myself to that, and my subconscious will think, ‘You said that is what it’s about, you have to do that’, and then I will rebel against that,” she explains, with the impeccable logic of a mid-draft novelist.
Funder worries about AI models breaching copyright and destroying artists’ income streams.
But she doesn’t believe that AI will ever replace the novel, or that it will become an irrelevant form in the fast-twitch age of social media.
“People read a novel because they want to feel something deeply about someone else’s life, and also their own life,” she says.
“That depends on that work being made by a human.”
When Funder was herself an undergraduate, she read a lot from the post-structuralist French theorist Roland Barthes, who declared the (metaphorical) death of the author.
“But the author is very much alive,” she says.
“We understand the ‘I’ on the page is not the same as the author, but we want the two to be in communication with each other.
“That’s the human in humanities.”
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