Note: This has more to do with the context of the story in terms of my own experiences than the story itself. Most of the musings are tangential. This review assumes prior knowledge of the plot – spoilers of course.

  • kindles and googlers … im very familiar with both of those (i say, reading on an e-reader)
  • penumbra despairs how people like the “smell of books” and that is all – what is my relationship w/ physical books?
    • limited home space so i don’t hoard, also parents were reluctant to buy non-textbooks for me
    • I only keep books that are an “aspect of my personality”. things that have a significant impact on my worldview, that inspire me, are attached to a memory, etc.
    • for the experience of just reading books, i don’t really care about ebook or physical. Actually ebook is preferable when borrowing from a library bc less germs / crumbs
    • bookstores have a nice ambiance but that is mostly “shopping about something i actually care about” and their relatively uniform shapes and organized genres are nice to look at in ways other trinket places can’t achieve. Idk. Also a physical manifestation of knowledge.
    • so I guess it’s not really the smell… not completely.
    • For artbooks (not really what this book is about i guess) it’s of course better to view in print / flip around.
  • how many of the SF references actually exist? I would believe them.
  • what year is this set in again? after reading another SF book I think about how they interact. other book being where homeless ppl (SF natives) get displaced by techies
  • the things they say about Google are totally untrue (mostly) and I am going to treat it as some alternate universe
  • @ this point i just want to know what happens next and I’m not paying too much attention to the writing craft. I think about fantasy long books where the writing craft is not the best but people still read it for the story. (eg when I was reading Sanderson)
    • in contrast, see Chanel Miller’s Know My Name. i like the figurative language so so much there; every page has something beautiful I want to write down or highlight
    • but many times, writing is not about the art of language but conveying ideas, and the method of delivery isn’t the first thought. not everything is perfect
    • all in all i think this book has indeed put thought in the wordings and everything – the sanderson/miller thing is a tangent
    • (some lament about page-turners vs slowing down and thinking about the art. Like a manga binge & not spending enough time on each panel.)
  • the things they say about Google’s internal workings are VERY untrue
  • finished the book
  • the characters don’t really have backgrounds. they are more of a vehicle than something interesting in their own right
  • There are some important questions about tech (that I’m interested in) that were raised and not explored
    • a GoodReads review mentioned that even though the characters are adults, it feels like a YA. I can agree with that.
    • I really can’t fault a story for having a limited scope. focus is a good thing, right? write about what you have experience in.
    • but anyway here are some things
    • Topic 1: Outsourcing menial labor from low paid workers abroad
      • Reminds me of the “make money while barely working” books and guides online. In summary, post a remote gig job and get paid at US rates. Then hire people from 3rd world countries to actually do the job. There were some comments in those “life hack” youtube videos such as, “I’m a filipino worker looking to earn money and it is discouraging that what is a business strategy for you is labor exploitation on us.” I think about it sometimes.
      • Of course the characters in the story weren’t doing this for a morally ambiguous purpose. But this reference about tech will be dated as these 3rd world countries progress.
    • Topic 2: A focus of what tech can do with little thought of its social implications
      • The Google PM idea
        • I mean Google has X and 20% projects for incubating moonshot ideas but anyone in tech knows one quarter is rarely enough to make anything of importance.
        • Also ideas need to go through privacy, ethics, & legal review boards for many rounds
        • the googlers in this story would totally take peoples personal data and run analytics on it for finding patterns lol
      • Google Forever … & various mentioned made-up projects
        • reminds me of healthcare. it is an advancement in science but also an exacerbation of class. You get to live better if you have money.
        • Tbh corporate overlord dystopia vibes, where nerdy people drive the future and they mean well but just do not think enough about what exactly they are doing. Or for executives, they know but they just don’t care enough.
      • not a criticism of the book but a criticism of tech in general
    • Topic 3: the soul of a city
      • Not many references to the history of SF or its landmarks.
      • What is not said is telling. The contents here exacerbate fact that people really ignore the parts of SF that are not so shiny. which is on point with what I read in the previously mentioned Violet Blue’s A Fish Has No Word For Water, about the willfully ignored homeless and displaced SF natives during the tech boom. Which btw the author herself called a “love letter to SF”, with references to many of its districts and specialties. I suppose Sloan was writing a love letter to tech instead.
    • fantastical and imaginative and missing the core of what is needed to meld tech with humanity, I think.
  • incompatibility with my personal knowledge of technical details in computer science
    • Why could the power of every computer of Google not solve a simple substitution cipher? This is brute-forceable even with multiple levels of substitution. Albeit inefficient
    • “We have tried everything” => highly doubtful due to many problems’ NP-completeness. Unless this is an AU that proved P=NP with an efficient polynomial mapping. but that would make the entire world drastically different in terms of crypto or whatever right? (been a few years since i took theory)
    • the depictions of parallelism: time required to move jobs and resources and start jobs is way more than a few seconds. Also some jobs / algorithms are just not parallelizable so good luck. And parallelism comes with overhead, etc etc.
    • I need to suspend my disbelief / “it’s not that deep”. This is difficult because things like Hadoop, OCR archiving, & data viz are real today, yet “leveraging all of Google to do every algorithm ever” is very far-fetched
    • Tbh I should judge it from the perspective of “tech user writes tech things” and not “tech worker writes tech things”. It’s like if I wrote fiction about people excavating for secrets, I would make up plausible things as I went and it would be probably offensive to an archaeologist.
  • immortality of ideas vs immortality of consciousness: it’s different, right?
  • In 2012 we were a lot more excited about the possibilities than cynical. This was written before the privacy breaches, the anti-trust lawsuits, the regulatory failures. I guess with all the tech that gets quickly dated, this tech-adjacent book has also gone the same way. If we look at it in the sense of a time capsule of how people thought of tech a decade ago, it’s better.
  • as a normal mystery sci-fi book minus all the tech grievances, it was honestly fine and charming. besides those “huh?” moments above, I overall still enjoyed the ride.
  • hopefully this review doesn’t come across as pretentious
  • i think this would have been mega cool if i read it in high school. rn my personal life is more dealing with things the way they are, less of imagining how things could be, so it’s reflected in my thought patterns. (incidentally I feel the same way about hunter x hunter)