His view derives from a lifetime as a fascinated observer and commentator on technology, post-modernism and social dynamics, leading to the conclusion that human nature is essentially immutable, and humor is the best defense against it when reason fails.

So how did he get to this point? He was born in New Zealand, and joined the navy at the age of 16, jumping ship into journalism in Australia, and writing ‘penny dreadful’ mysteries and advertising copy to earn a ticket to the beckoning world of London and Paris at the age of 21. Copywriting and brand promotion led him to start his own agency in London and then New York, all the while writing plays and novellas.

After three decades of procrastination – including making the world’s best Syrah wine in 2006 (yes, really!), and running two successful billion-dollar property IPOs – he decided to take himself seriously in 2013 and get down to the business of writing full time.

Since then, he’s won several screenwriting awards, including a Drama Award at the Cannes Screenwriters Competition, and the Empire Drama Award at the New York Screenwriters Competition. His published works draw on his Renaissance man years in advertising and journalism, corporate finance and the making of award-winning wines, in a life spread across Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand, providing him with a rich lode of experiences and locations to mine for his characters and their stories.

His new releases in 2022/23 include "Agenda 2060 Book Two"; and "The Seed of Corruption", a mystery/thriller set in Vietnam during the 2004 SARS epidemic; and "A Song for Leonard", a New York seventies noir mystery/thriller.

Agenda 2060 Questions and Answers

        Q:  What sparked the idea for your provocative, controversial book?

While at a creative retreat in Italy I got into conversation with some California college academics on sabbatical and was alarmed to find how many subjects they held positions on in ways that effectively stymied open discussion. They were intelligent people who had dug themselves into entrenched positions, regarding alternative views as hand grenades. I had often used comedy of the absurd in my writing to defuse difficult subjects and I wrote some skits for their benefit about minority groups goings to extremes to outpoint each other in their claims for victim status. The way my characters’ behavior quickly spiraled into the realms of insanity freed these woke academics from their conscription to political correctness, enabling them to laugh. The lesson was obvious: some subjects are so serious that they can only be treated as comedy.

        Q:  What is it about?

It takes the hot button topics of today’s woke agenda -- such as gender and racial identity, cancel culture, free speech and climate change -- and enshrines them as ideals pursued by the One World government 40 years in the future. The unintended consequences of those ideals are portrayed as sometimes farcical, outrageous, absurd and, sadly, harmful. Not because the ideals aren’t desirable, but because of the behavior of the people manipulating those ideals for their own ends.

        Q:  So, are you for people speaking out against racism and sexism, destroying the environment, and weakening free speech?

We have a duty to speak out about things we believe require improvement. We may not agree about the causes and solutions, but if our speech is so derogatory and antagonistic that it doesn’t warrant response, then we’ll end with an absence of dialogue in society. But the killing of conversation is not the winning of it. A view doesn’t carry more weight when we scream it out loud so that it drowns out all other views. And it’s not a triumph of opinion when people are made too afraid to express a contrary one.

        Q:  Can the masses agree on anything?

Yes, if you think about it calmly, there is little disagreement that we want a clean environment, equal respect and opportunities for all people, an end to poverty and disease, safeguards against political and corporate corruption and mendacity: the list is enormous. We may come at it from different angles, and with different degrees of urgency, but most people’s instincts are on the side of fairness and justice. The noise is made by intolerant extremists. Make fun of them. Show how petulant and immature they are. Tyrants can’t stand to be laughed at.

        Q:  It seems your book, with wit and sarcasm leaving their fingerprints on every page, seeks to tackle serious issues but also entertain us. Can such a book really do both?

While laughing in disbelief and/or outrage, the reader is thinking about the subject in a new way and hopefully reexamining the bias she brought to it. I was determined not to write a polemic about woke culture (there are too many of them) and you may struggle to decide which side of an issue I favor. These are big social topics you’re reading about in Agenda 2060, but the idea is that you should have fun while getting your head around them.

        Q:  You are also ruthlessly frank about privacy. Are we simply embracing the loss of our own privacy and freedoms by surrendering to the Amazons, Facebooks and Googles of the AI world? Do we overly allow them to surveil -- and even manipulate and dictate -- our lives?

They have as much moral credibility as drug pushers. Their aim is to make their products so addictive that the lives of their subscribers are theirs to manipulate and steal from without limit. There is no personal privacy now and I’m not sure that it is retrievable. Nor is there freedom of action. The manipulation of opinion and so-called truth has reached the level of brain washing. What to do about it? Unplug the internet (but not until after everyone has bought my book).

        Q:  You end your book with a question that should deeply concern us. You write: “Does it mean that quantum computing has finally allowed an algorithm to be fully humanized? Is that what humans want?” What is the answer?

At the time of writing, algorithms were designed as servants of their creators, though self-supervised A.I. learning now casts a shadow over that assumption. We already have software that enables A.I. to review its own work, analyze its shortcomings and rewrite its own code. A.I.s are creative without human input, so who’s to say who wrote what we’re reading? Step into the metaverse in 2021 and imagine yourself still there in 2060. You’ll be living in a computer simulation, and maybe you always have been. This area is developing at warp speed and may already be beyond our control.

        Q:  As a former journalist, did you call upon an objective view that allowed you to put everything under the microscope for examination?

Journalists of my generation regard cynicism and distrust as the two most important virtues. Don’t be misled by the words, look for their true meaning. Don’t believe the meaning, find the motive for its expression. Post-modernism has deliberately deconstructed language in order to de-power those who use it to tie down truth and rationality. It suits their purpose that language should mean whatever they want it to mean, making their ideas elusive to all except those who start from their position of belief. This neuters their opponents who are reduced to shouting abuse in return. The great mass of people in the middle are merely dumbfounded. The best asset for getting through this mess is a faultless BS detector.

        Q:  As an award-winning screenwriter, did you pen this book for one who enjoys theatrical entertainment or the seeking individual who wants to better understand not just the issues of the day but how both sides of any debate are destroying each other in the process of seeking to make the world better?

Both those things. Screenwriting teaches that every scene needs to deliver while inviting you forward to the next scene. There are cinematic elements in the Agenda 2060 story, but they are mostly vignettes. I did not start with any lofty ambitions other than emancipating readers from the grip of whatever group psychosis has captured them, and doing it while providing something that is fun to read.

        Q:  Wokeism. How do you tackle this in your book?

The western world is divided into three camps. There is The Woke, The Anti-Woke and The Dumbfounded. Each camp is driven by fear. The Woke are afraid of being found to be not woke enough. In their tribe, impurity of wokeness will have them ostracized. The Anti-Woke are afraid of contagion. They fear that weak people, particularly the young, will catch the woke virus. And the Dumbfounded are afraid because they don’t understand anything that The Woke and Anti-Woke are saying. This book is for all of them.

        Q:  Why is there such a disconnect amongst people when discussing politics, social issues, and economic matters?

I could theorize (and many very erudite people have) but I am not sure we would come away with a clear and definite answer. Clarity of thought relies on clarity of language, as I touched on above. If a child can’t express itself clearly it starts shouting and stamping its foot. There’s a lot of that going on. Also, the civilizing influence of shared community has been progressively lost, starting with the nuclear family, church and secular institutions, which gave the individual a sense of belonging. Now the individual must join a tribe to gain identity. Why are they taking such aggressive and polarizing stances on issues of common concern? Perhaps because the tribes are competing for membership and loyalty.

        Q:  You have lived and worked in Europe and the Asia/Pacific Region for decades, as well as spent time in the United States. Is the entire world having the same type of discourse the way Americans are – or is there some sanity overseas?

This is a First World problem. The Third World is too busy trying to feed itself. The Woke Agenda grew in the Petri dish of progressivism, which grew in turn out of the post-modernism incubated in academia. Over the last 70 years it has spread out through the elite bureaucracies, the media and now into the corporate world. It is a world view held by people who have a higher education and income. The UK, Canada, Australia, Germany and Scandinavia have followed the US. Ironically, France, whose intellectuals spawned modernist ideas, is comparatively less infected.

        Q:  You say that intelligent people seem to have dug themselves into entrenched positions, regarding alternative views as hand grenades. Why?

Returning to my categorization of the three tribes, we can define them even further. The Woke believe in conformity and One World authority. The Anti-Woke believe in individualism and anti-authoritarianism. Those views are polar opposites, and polarizing leads to aggression towards opposing views. The Woke believe the Anti-Woke should be cancelled. The Anti-Woke believe that the Woke should be certified insane. And the Dumbfounded are reluctant to express a view in case they are inadvertently judged to be Woke or Anti-Woke. Meanwhile there are politicians with dog whistles trying to round them up into their parties.

        Q:  Are there some subjects so serious that they can NOT be treated as comedy?

Ask Dave Chappelle. People’s personal hurt and tragedies should definitely be treated with sensitivity. Isn’t that where transgender awareness began? We can laugh at our own personal hurts and tragedies (sometimes that’s the best cure for them) but we are not entitled to take liberties with those of others. However, in the abstract, issues can benefit from the clarity which the light of comedy bestows. Everything in life becomes absurd if you take it to its fullest extreme. Even Hitler. Avoiding ad hominem attacks is a good general rule, although in the case of Hitler they are perfectly acceptable. I guess that suggests that you need to exercise judgment. Personal judgment is something we are being bullied out of trusting. Group think is now the arbiter. Well, group think is a fertile area for dissection BY comedy, I say.

        Q:  Will people of the world ever end their ‘isms’ wars with one another?

There is hope. Bad times pass if you wait long enough. (Unfortunately, so too do good times, says the cynic in me). My personal belief is that the instincts for common good that have created our society in the past will not be destroyed by ideology long term, despite these periods when we are led to believe otherwise. This has all happened before, if not in the same form.

Theme and Treatment

A.I. Fabler’s Insights: Why He Created Agenda 2060

The fictional agenda at the heart of my futuristic novel contains 12 Articles, or principles, that form the guidelines for society in the year 2060. They cover familiar territory like identity and victimhood, hate speech, climate change, and environmentalism, an economic “Great Reset” and a “One World” government, and they are couched in a language that is familiar enough to suggest they’ve already been proposed by a UN body or World Economic Forum in similar terms today.

My intent is not to dismiss the ideals they express, but to show some of the unintended consequences if they are taken to an extreme. The result is sometimes deliberately over-the-top satire. But not all the time. Sometimes the subject can be serious, such as the dilemma we face in trying to control artificial intelligence.

But what is surprising is that the characters that I use as the medium for examining these 12 Articles do not at any stage completely reject the broad intentions behind them. Quite the contrary. I believe supporters and opponents are not that far apart. It’s politics and self-interest that need to be cleaned up.

When I expressed those starting ideals in writing, they sounded remarkably similar to the United Nations and World Economic Forum ideals contained in such documents as Agenda 21 and Agenda 2030. That’s what gave me the structure for a book-length treatment.

Setting it in the future allowed me to take liberties with the absurdist elements and to claim the title of Agenda 2060. The characters would carry the story dramatically and emotionally by struggling with the unforeseen consequences of the ideals expressed in Agenda 2060, and thereby become surrogates for the reader.

Of the two characters, Jordan is a victim of cancel culture, and Alexa is a beneficiary of the woke State policies, yet neither of them expresses an outright rejection of the idealistic aims contained in the 12 Articles of Agenda 2060. Their criticisms are focused on the behavior of the people manipulating those ideals for their own ends. My intention was to open up difficult subjects for examination by the reader through the simple device of absurdist comedy.

For me, the result is that we are not far apart in what we want for the world, we have just lost the ability to talk about it good naturedly. A view doesn’t carry more weight when we scream it out loud so that it drowns out all other views. It is not a triumph of opinion when other people are made too afraid to express a contrary one. What happens to the freedom of the individual when that individual is forced to hide his or her identity under the protective blanket of a group?

The 12 Articles of Agenda 2060

Inspired by bold initiatives and declarations put out by major bodies such as the United Nations, New Zealand-based author A.I. Fabler created a dystopian novel that puts forth an ambitious agenda that may define Utopia in the year 2060 – or it may lead to the end of the world as we know it. Decide for yourself.

1. Eliminate all discrimination on grounds of gender, ethnicity, culture and mental or physical ability and provide positive empowerment to womyn and minority groups to ensure equality of outcome for all.
2. Protect all persons from being harmed by Hate Speech in circumstances where insensitive speech is used, deliberately or otherwise, without the consent of the persons being offended.
3. End poverty in all its forms by controlling income distribution, limiting private asset accumulation and ensuring equality of safety, security and well-being for all regardless of work input or ability.
4. Provide planned pastime pursuit programs for people exiting employment sectors made redundant by AI and technology innovation and allocate productive employment by ballot or other non-discriminatory systems.
5. Reduce man-made carbon emissions and greenhouse gasses to zero and commit to converting all energy consumption to the use of renewable supply sources only.
6. Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and biodiversity loss.
7. Incentivize the elimination of all toxic and non-biodegradable elements from product manufacturing and packaging supply chains and replace with organic, biodegradable alternatives.
8. Achieve equal living standards for all peoples within and among countries and eliminate all borders between states and territories to allow free movement of people one to the other without penalty or hindrance.
9. Provide equal education for all with the aim of achieving cohesion and harmony of thought and eliminating antagonism and disagreement by the promotion of Social Justice as the cornerstone of all curriculums.
10. Place essential food, energy, raw material, water and technology resources under the protection of United Nations approved suppliers to eliminate supply risks.
11. Work to achieve, by all peaceful and humanitarian means possible, a sustainable world population limit of 5 billion people within 100 years.
12. Commit to embracing One World, One People and One Government as the pathway to peace, harmony and a sustainable future for all and work tirelessly for the full implementation of this Agenda by 2060.