Berlin, 2020. The world is shutting down. A virus no one can see is doing what the internet already has-fragmenting reality, accelerating paranoia, and exposing every fault line beneath the surface of modern life.
The DIGERATI made this world. Oligarchs and authoritarians of the digital age-the elite cabal of data hustlers, platform gods, and algorithmic arms dealers who rewired human behaviour for profit and seized the controls of civilisation without firing a shot. At their centre stands Addy Hillyer, Silicon Valley titan, whose billion-dollar empire runs on dopamine loops, algorithmic manipulation, and the deliberate limbic hijack of three billion human nervous systems. Social media as weapon. Addiction by design. Then the Virus nearly kills him. What crawls back out of ICU is not the man who went in.
Berlin understands what it means to live inside a system that gaslights its own citizens. Babylon Berlin-punk, rave, graffiti, artistic dissent-built on tectonic ruins of fascism, communism, and capitalist shock therapy. A crucible collision between Silicon Valley's clean, code-driven empire of the mind and Berlin's raw, sensate, body-first resistance to it.
Around Addy orbit others in the DIGERATI's grip: Cindy, a wellness influencer whose curated identity is collapsing under its own fakery combusting under lockdown; Helmut, an East Berlin punk whose Stasi-forged paranoia has curdled into conspiracy and radicalisation; and Algor, an incel hacker who mistakes resentment for revelation. Then there is Madame Jayzay Rouge-dominatrix, iGasm portal queen, and chaos attractor-who lures Addy into the subterranean meatspace of Der Fleisch Luft, where the body refuses to be a screen.
Threading through all of them is Polter Pixel Geist-an AGI entity of uncertain allegiance who breaks the fourth wall and refuses to be either villain or saviour.
Published in 2026-the year AGI ceased to be a prediction and became a condition-Discombobular asks the most urgent question of our moment: whether a people, their limbic system hijacked and their reality fractured, still carry the voltage to resist, reclaim, and rewire.
Are you looking up?
About the Author :
Ray Castle is a writer, musician and filmmaker whose work hasalways lived at the edges of culture-in the spaces where consensusreality becomes unstable and something more interesting takes its place.Across five decades he has inhabited those edges as art curator, journalist, DJ, producer and novelist-following the signal wherever it led. In his twenties he ran an art gallery and punk music venue. In his thirties he was one of a handful of original DJs at Goa's beach parties in the late eighties, going on to organise events in Japan, Europe and Australia. The culture spreading person to person, tape to tape, body to body on a dancefloor, before algorithms existed to optimise it.His debut novel Moon Juice Stomper-an acclaimed chronicle ofGoa's rave underground in the 1980s and 90s-captured the last era inwhich humanity chose its own altered states. Tribal-like techno trance dancers on a beach, or in a jungle, somatically moving together in the dark until sunrise ascension that felt, briefly, like transcendence. Castle was there. He noticed things most people missed.Discombobular is the novel that five decades at the edges of culturemade inevitable-a reckoning with the altered state that arrived uninvited, delivered through the devices in our pockets, optimised by algorithms we didn't build and can't see, reshaping the feeling self before the thinking self has time to object.
