Since the launch of John Lanchester’s Capital in March 2012 its online companion, PepysRd.com, has been asking its users, where will you be in ten years time?
Six months ago, as John Lanchester published Capital – his epic tale of post-crash London published by Faber and Faber, media storyteller Storythings launched its online companion PepysRd.com, an interactive website to find out what Capital’s readers and the public at large, feel about the future. The data so far is beginning to offer an insight into people’s thoughts on the major questions of our time, from the economy, to healthcare, education and the upcoming lost decade of uncertainty.
“We were asked by Faber and Faber to come up with a way to engage the public in Lanchester’s Capital beyond the traditional book launch,” said Matt Locke, Director, Storythings. “We’re fascinated by attention patterns and how they’re changing, and so together with writer, publisher and technologist, James Bridle, – the idea for PepysRd.com was born.”
PepysRd.com helps the reader consider the future of their society exploring key issues such as housing, education and the economy, and then gives them the platform through which to express their vision of the future as a binary choice. This choice is then fed back to the site to help form the bigger picture of where the reader will be in ten years time.
Pepys Road allows people to choose a time of day to receive the email so it becomes part of someone’s daily routine. This regular system of repetition lets people reflect on their choices encouraged by the mini data-stories they receive sent personally and written by Lanchester himself.
Silvia Novak, Consumer Marketing Manager, Faber and Faber said, ”As a state-of-the-nation narrative, John Lanchester’s Capital is a novel that very much encourages introspection, inviting its readers to examine their own choices, concerns and priorities. By drawing together the views of these individual readers in response to John Lanchester’s teasing scenarios, and aggregating those views to project a vision of the next ten years, Pepysrd.com has become a living, evolving counterpart to the novel. It’s been a fascinating thing to observe.”
From the responses to questions emailed via PepysRoad.com so far, a picture of Britain in 2022 is beginning to emerge. 59% are positive about the future, 90% believe that there should be no cuts to a universal free healthcare system and 70% think that people share too much of themselves online. Want to know what will your life be like in 2022? Find out at www.pepysrd.com.
About Pepys Road | www.pepysrd.com
Pepys Road is the first live project from Storythings – an online project to support the book Capital, by John Lanchester, an epic tale of post-crash London chronicled through the residents of a single street, Pepys Road. Capital is published by Faber & Faber and launched back in March 2012. Over ten days, ten emails are sent to those that sign up asking questions about health policy, immigration, travel and culture, ten new mini-stories written by John Lanchester, are then sent to the user influenced by the responses to the questions, one for every year of the coming decade. Along the way, data illustrations by James Bridle position the ‘player’ within the flows of live data that increasingly organise our lives.
About Storythings | www.storythings.com
Storythings is a company established to experiment with new ways of telling stories, through consultancy and production on major projects with new and established talent; through events and annual conferences looking at storytelling in a wide range of contexts and media; and through a series of objects and publications produced with some of the most innovative storytellers around. Storythings was established by Matt Locke in April 2011.
About John Lanchester’s Capital
Pepys Road: an ordinary street in the Capital. Each house has seen its fair share of first steps and last breaths, and plenty of laughter in between. Today, through each letterbox along this ordinary street drops a card with a simple message: We Want What You Have.
At forty, Roger Yount is blessed with an expensively groomed wife, two small sons and a powerful job in the City. An annual bonus of a million might seem excessive, but with second homes and nannies to maintain, he’s not sure he can get by without it. Elsewhere in the Capital, Zbigniew has come from Warsaw to indulge the super-rich in their interior decoration whims. Freddy Kano, teenage football sensation, has left a two-room shack in Senegal to follow his dream. Traffic warden Quentina has exchanged the violence of the police in Zimbabwe for the violence of the enraged middle classes. For them all, this city offers the chance of a different kind of life.
Capital is a post-crash state-of-the nation novel told with compassion and humour, featuring a cast of characters that you will be sad to leave behind.
