Scan barcode
hilaryreadsbooks's review
3.0
For Miles, a lead creative at a virtual reality company, it begins with death threats, perfectly printed on beautiful card stock. Anxiety and paranoia parallel with the sense that his life is falling apart. His wife wants to leave him. His children are becoming strangers. He’s on the verge of being fired amid a workplace controversy. To save everything, he pitches a new idea to revolutionize and change the VR landscape.
The prose in USERS holds a lot of the spare sterility like many other literary books on tech that I’ve read; this is not a book about emotion or empathy, but rather a curious descent down to self-entrapment. USERS takes broad, general strokes to problems in the tech world—exploitation of user data, the dangers of always looking for “the next big thing,” corporate greed, deprioritization of diversity and inclusion initiatives—I wasn’t as interested in these. Rather, I found how these strokes applied to Miles’ life interesting; the degree of anonymity of his users applied in part to his wife and daughters (most of the time simply referred to as “the wife” and “the ten-year-old,” etc.), all befuddlements stark in their molded interpretations of what Miles thinks he knows about them and what he could never understand (like virtual creations themselves). USERS circles back to itself, metaphysical in its last moments and wins out, ultimately, less on what it has to say about destructive tech and more in its emphasis on the unknowability of the mind, ourselves eluding ourselves.
[Thanks to the publisher for the gifted copy]
The prose in USERS holds a lot of the spare sterility like many other literary books on tech that I’ve read; this is not a book about emotion or empathy, but rather a curious descent down to self-entrapment. USERS takes broad, general strokes to problems in the tech world—exploitation of user data, the dangers of always looking for “the next big thing,” corporate greed, deprioritization of diversity and inclusion initiatives—I wasn’t as interested in these. Rather, I found how these strokes applied to Miles’ life interesting; the degree of anonymity of his users applied in part to his wife and daughters (most of the time simply referred to as “the wife” and “the ten-year-old,” etc.), all befuddlements stark in their molded interpretations of what Miles thinks he knows about them and what he could never understand (like virtual creations themselves). USERS circles back to itself, metaphysical in its last moments and wins out, ultimately, less on what it has to say about destructive tech and more in its emphasis on the unknowability of the mind, ourselves eluding ourselves.
[Thanks to the publisher for the gifted copy]
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racism
More...