A thoroughly modern dystopia, which brings out shades of both Orwell’s and Huxley’s visions of omniscient, totalitarian, nightmare world’s. This is the novel that might persuade you to delete some accounts while you still can, or at least ensure you are not bound in to only one ecosystem.
Eggers skilfully weaves a story of how one social media/computing company (a kind of mash-up of Facebook, Google, Twitter et al) over a period of a year or two finally brings everything together and puts everyone online on one account, including all public services and puts it all in the public domain. Privacy becomes a thing of the past, any desire to be alone or to keep any information about anything to yourself a sin.
We don’t yet have the technology to do the things that happen here, but I bet they’re working on stuff just like it somewhere in the Googleplex. And the lead character, Mae Holland, was just a bit too stupid and impressionable to be true.
But it was plausible enough to make me think twice about tweeting this book review.
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