A review by broro117
Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke

4.0

Very fun, super quick read that anyone who's ever used Slack for work will get a kick out of. Feels like it could be a sister novel to No One Is Talking About This.

Quotes that spoke to me: 

• It's not just the light
  quotidian beauty like [that of a sunset] defies comprehension
  it frustrates the eye.
  Majesty that predictable is impossible to grasp, I think
  so it's impossible to focus your vision on it for too long.
  It's why when you go to the Grand Canyon you wind up spending more time ogling the alien foliage and monitoring the aggressively panhandling squirrels than actually admiring the canyon
  because at a certain point it's too difficult to look at.
• I get completely absorbed in… a minor northeastern city's Facebook group dedicated to the town's "fallen soldiers" (they don't explain what qualifies someone as a fallen soldier but I get the sense it's maybe overdoses) populated with a steady stream of cellphone pictures and snapshots of photographs, actual Polaroid photographs of the recently dead posing in Slavic squats beside the recently mourning with "I miss you" scrawled across them in marker and "never thought I'd have to bury you" in the comments, a dirge scrawled across the bathroom stall of human consciousness right there for me to gaze upon until I just can't anymore, I just can't it's too much it hurts or worse it doesn't hurt but it should, somehow, I mean that kind of pain should hurt a person, it should cause physical pain in their body so I flinch at where the pain isn't and I click away from the fallen soldiers and check my email and turn up Spotify by one, two bars.
• We love to say the digital is fleeting
  like a sunset
  but these scraps of ourselves we fling into the ether will outlive most of us, like the sun.
• It’s overwhelming for a species that was basically content with an oral tradition of a handful of long-ass stories about the same six shitty gods for millennia
  now we can do all this knowing and empathizing and not-empathizing around innumerable tiny human stories and we can never fully succeed reprogramming our minds to get good at it.
• We keep forgetting to preserve things
  because it's just there every day and why would anyone want to remember last week's internet -- and we don't, but we want to remember the fifteen-years-ago internet and that was last week's internet, once.