The 18th century aristocrat’s guide to living in the digital age

There is a certain literary genre – often found atop best-seller lists or on airport book stands – that I like to call ‘lessons from unlikely places’. Books in this tradition tend to be inspirational memoirs with lofty titles: Eat, Pray, Love or An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth. Page-turners? Yes. Literary classics? Not so much. They are, however, ‘of their time’ and speak with some insight to the dilemmas and aspirations of the reading public.

When posters around Brisbane began promoting an upcoming ballet adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons and the algorithms behind one of my streaming services began showing me ads for a serialised remake of Cruel Intentions – itself an adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos’ 1782 epistolary novel – I found myself contemplating the unlikely life lessons from this seductively naughty pre-Revolutionary French classic. André Malraux, French novelist and Resistance fighter turned Minister for Cultural Affairs, famously called it an intrigue, a double entendre for the French word for plot, that revolves around the control and exchange of information and innuendo. It spoke to the concerns of pre-Revolutionary France, what kept the nobility and upper classes occupied, but it also struck me as an unlikely but apt source of wisdom on how to manage one’s digital footprint and communication.

Connecting Laclos’ novel to the perils of modern communication isn’t entirely new. There have been several digital ‘updates’ in recent years, not least the highly abridged Dangerous Tweets (2013) and the blog-driven TV series Gossip Girl (it too now being remade). The original – despite the petticoats and duels – nonetheless remains uncannily contemporary in its lessons for love and living in the digital age.

Lesson 1: Once you put something in writing (or online), you lose all control over it. The protagonists – the Viscount of Valmont and the Marquise of Merteuil – have a nasty habit of forwarding other people’s letters, whether addressed to them or not, to sow intrigue and discord. Whole packets of mail are enclosed in a covering note to let the recipient of these redirected missives ‘judge for themselves’ the state of another’s intentions, fidelity or virtue. It’s the equivalent of a petty BCC or the passive aggressive ‘FYI’ with a forwarded email string to the boss; and the entirety of an office spat winds up with the whole department receiving a reminder about respectful workplace communication from human resources. Perhaps more sinister is that any exhortation to write a letter so that it can be delivered to a third party while others are unaware – the aristocratic equivalent of a VPN to elude a protective mother’s reputation-minding interventions – inevitably winds up being a trap.

Building on the above is lesson 2: Beware the overly helpful and accommodating. The young Danceny writes to Cécile that he has struck up a friendship with Merteuil. What most excites him about this new ‘friend’ is that she never seems to tire of hearing him talk about his love for her. Of course, the scheming Marquise is, for any not so naïve to ignore the basics of conversation and human attention, pumping him for information to ruin them both. With Generative AI now purporting to providing personalised advice on everything from homework and cover letters to all manner of personal dilemmas and ‘therapy’ without any clarity on where the sometimes very personal information we feed into its helpful algorithms goes, critics urge caution. Their warnings though are no match for the sycophantic leanings and endless patience of the answer machine that replicates biases and that, as many are finding out, has those searching for information come unstuck. Where all this information will wind up and whether it will come back to haunt those who volunteered it is a still ominous unknown.