"When we are alone we are weaker and we consume more."

Barcelona"The author opposes this novel being used to train any type of artificial intelligence, whether now or in the future," reads the credits page of May you be (Random House, 2025), the new novel by Belén Gopegui Durán (Madrid, 1963). The warning fits perfectly with one of the main themes of the book: how the surveillance society in which we live – a concept popularized by sociologist Shoshana Zuboff – erodes our rights, whether through the collection of personal data, the bias spread by certain social networks or the algorithms that guide programs.

"The large language models used by artificial intelligence do not know how to interpret; they are based on statistics and predictions," comments the author of The scale of the maps (Anagrama, 1993) and Desire to be punk (Anagrama, 2009)–. What we can know thanks to these models are quantifiable data, but, in contrast, we don't have access to what they mean. Fortunately, for humans, meaning has an extra charge that a machine can't measure. It can tell you how much you should be willing to pay for a specific refrigerator model, but it can't tell you how important it is to you if you have a date with someone and they don't show up that evening. Unauthorized access (Random House Literature, 2011) and Stay with me this day and this night (LRH, 2017). The starting point of May you be It is a double espionage: at the behest of the company where he works, León investigates the private lives of two young people in their late twenties, Casilda and Jonás, without knowing that he is being watched by Minerva, the director of a company larger than his own. "Writing consists of allowing yourself the luxury of observing small symptoms of things that could happen," says Gopegui. "My novel has ended up dialoguing, without intending to, with A Tale of Two Cities. Charles Dickens offers a reading of the French Revolution that I sometimes disagree with. I explore our present through four characters who find themselves in different places and who end up constructing a possibility of escaping the system they are part of."

Abolish Private Life

In Gopegui's novels, the characters' reflections are as important as, or more so than, the narrative twists. The first page explains how "private life has been abolished" and "voices, files, languages, and pixels, like in a whirlpool, spin amid the refrigeration hum of the centers that process them." "One of the elements of current events that worries me most is the corruption of language," he says. "For some time now, I haven't been able to hear words like... resilience without wanting to throw myself out the window. The word has lost all meaning when you feel on the news that a politician is asking someone who has been kicked out of their home to be more resilient."

Another central point in May you be It's loneliness. "When we're alone, we're weaker and we consume more," he says. "The system wants us to be increasingly alone. If we don't have anyone by our side, the temptation to order dinner through an app is too great. meals."

The characters in Gopegui's novels earn less than they deserve, but they know how to find loopholes to complicate the system. "There are means that prevent certain ends," he says. "If we accept a parliamentary democracy that renews the government every four years, we will never be able to aspire to a reasonable healthcare system." Why? "It's too little time to get it up and running before the next government can dismantle it. Furthermore, in a country like ours, we have a culture of fighting each other; we are incapable of carrying out collective construction projects."