The Algorithm Wars have ended, and the world has been optimized. Thanks to the System, everyone is connected to everyone else, through nearly invisible wearable devices that they never remove and through which they interact with the world. Everything that happens is recorded, liked, shared and analyzed at scale in order to produce nonstop and ever-improving recommendations about what kind of job you should have, what kind of food you might enjoy, what kind of music you might like, what kind of exercise you need, and what kind of person you might want to sleep with. It is a world of total information and total freedom... although things tend to go more smoothly when you follow the System's recommendations. In this hyper-networked society, Stanton Lime did the one thing that should have been impossible: He disappeared. Now the System has selected Jack, a seemingly ordinary citizen, to find out why. From author J.M. Berger, an expert on the toxic real-world effects of a globally networked society, comes a unique dystopian vision of a total information society built by Silicon Valley, where today's trends have become tomorrow's reality.
The Algorithm Wars have ended, and the world has been optimized. Thanks to the System, everyone is connected to everyone else, through nearly invisible wearable devices that they never remove and through which they interact with the world. Everything that happens is recorded, liked, shared and analyzed at scale in order to produce nonstop and ever-improving recommendations about what kind of job you should have, what kind of food you might enjoy, what kind of music you might like, what kind of exercise you need, and what kind of person you might want to sleep with. It is a world of total information and total freedom... although things tend to go more smoothly when you follow the System's recommendations. In this hyper-networked society, Stanton Lime did the one thing that should have been impossible: He disappeared. Now the System has selected Jack, a seemingly ordinary citizen, to find out why. From author J.M. Berger, an expert on the toxic real-world effects of a globally networked society, comes a unique dystopian vision of a total information society built by Silicon Valley, where today's trends have become tomorrow's reality.
