Picture it: a crumbling world in the wake of a great collapse, filled with pornographic inequality and quotidian violence. A world where the uttermost limit of respectable politics seems to be presiding over—sometimes slowing, sometimes hastening, never reversing—a process of inexorable decline.
What am I talking about? Oh, you read the headline? That’s cheating. Yes, I’m talking about Deus Ex: Invisible War. Again. Hey, I get it—PC Gamer has been bafflingly heavy on the Invisible War chat recently. Blame a recent feature in Edge magazine, which got several of us—including our Jody, who made the powerful and correct case that the game is good, actually—thinking hard about the sad black sheep in the Deus Ex series. It also got one of us (me) replaying it all the way through the end. Still a banger, by the way.
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Alex D, for Delphic
As I said all those paragraphs ago, Invisible War takes place in the aftermath of a collapse. The Great Collapse, actually: the unstoppable domino line of catastrophes that JC Denton kicked off at the end of Deus Ex 1. Ion Storm ordered the entire menu when it came to choosing a canon conclusion for DX1—JC became a dissociative robo-god, global communications retreated to the level of the carrier pigeon, and in the tumult, the Illuminati—it’s always the Illuminati—swept back into power. Nice going, Denton.
This is, of course, pretty much 1:1 what has happened in the real world since the turn of the millennium. No need to explain myself here.
Okay, fine. Over here in reality, we live in our own Great Collapse: each morning we wake anew and pick over the ruins left by the 2008 Great Financial Crisis. Our collapse was not, alas, precipitated by a man with a nano-sword and a 30-foot vertical leap—no matter what rumours you’ve heard about Alan Greenspan—but rather by the greed and myopia of all the worst people on Earth. Bummer.
The 2008 Panic did not reduce us to the level of hi-tech feudalism, but take a look at some real GDP per capita graphs sometime and tell me we’re not still limping from that blow.
But stay with me. My point is not that Invisible War said, nebulously, “something bad is going to happen and then something bad happened, so please clap.” That’s just prelude. It’s how it depicts the aftermath of it all that really smacks of modernity.
The Chad Dumier vs the [redacted] Denton
After Deus Ex, what was left of old society accumulated like ash in the hands of those best-placed to catch it: Chad Dumier and Nicolette DuClare, JC Denton’s allies-by-circumstance in 2052 but, when Invisible War rolls around, both fully subsumed into and steering the all-new corrupt order. They are the new Illuminati with a human face. The Nu-luminati.
Dumier, the former radical turned head of the World Trade Organisation, is a kind of anticipation of Disco Elysium’s Sunday Friend. Ze price stabilité (he’s even French! How delightful) concerns him above all else, certainly above petty mortal concerns like providing housing or curing disease or doing anything that might upset the not-great-not-terrible, 0.4%-GDP-growth-per-year, sensible-shoes-and-the-Sunday-Times status quo he’s worked so hard to establish and maintain in the WTO’s small but wealthy enclave zones.
Outside those zones is DuClare’s domain. Or rather, the domain of Her Holiness, the guru stage name she adopted when she founded The Order, a syncretic hodgepodge of all the world’s religions that comports itself like a militarised astrology YouTube channel.
DuClare looms from the holo-projectors in all the world’s slums, speaking her own mishmash argot of religious concepts. “Fard bi al-Kifayah”, “Kundalini”, “pandita”—these terms and others, all deployed without any genuine respect for their origins in order to lend a mystical, ecumenical gloss to a baser message: be happy with your poverty for you are spiritually rich.
She says: would you look outside yourself and criticise the world for making you poor before you have achieved inner perfection? She says: that would be ego and folly.
She’s essentially Jordan Peterson for 2072.
My pre-vision is augmented
It’s spooky, if you ask me. Sure, you’re always going to interpret any work of art through the lens of the time in which you live, but I’m still impressed at how well Invisible War managed to see all this coming, man. DuClare, sitting pretty at her end of the woo-to-fascism pipeline, and Dumier, the EU or DNC technocrat looking on impotently—sometimes writing a strong letter—while the far-right marshals its forces.
In Invisible War, the fascists are the Templars, anti-augmentation fanatics who developed as an offshoot of the Order Church and whose recruits hail almost universally from those who feel excluded from the air-conditioned world of the WTO enclaves.
Though you have to wonder if one enclave-ite, a guy named Bud Puckett who is very much convinced the AI pop star chatbot likes him especially (no, really, that happens), maybe signed up in a fit of aimless loneliness.
Like our fascists, they emerged from contradictions that our sensible leaders fought hard to maintain. Like our fascists, they’re tedious dorks who pose as the new and stink of the old, larping as crusaders and communicating in thees and thous. Their leader, Luminon Saman, is a guy who has read one (1) book—The Pilgrim’s Progress, if you’re wondering—and is desperate to tell you about it, like a less punchable Curtis Yarvin.
This is really what I mean when I say Invisible War felt surprisingly prophetic on my last playthrough. You can slot its individual characters into particular, recognisable roles, sure (Dumier is an unholy chimera of Barack Obama and Emmanuel Macron), but it’s more that the general shape of its world maps so neatly onto ours, if you’re inclined to see it.
Which is worrying, because Deus Ex: Invisible War is a work of post-and-pre-apocalyptic fiction, and the only way out of its troubles that the game presents is to literally engineer Jesus by combining JC Denton with an AI called Helios and handing over the keys to the planet. I’m not sure we could pull that off, not even if we plugged someone into Claude.