Long, entertaining rant about the impact of the Internet on our daily lives, disguised as a novel. The blurb describes this bloke as "Kurt Vonnegut for the Twitter Age" and that's pretty accurate. His prose style mimics Vonnegut in every way: the layering, the short sentences, the little asides explaining some aspect of politics or everyday life. His voice comes across as a bit more cynical though, not as warm, more smartarsey. At times it became a little annoying, like when he spends more time than is really necessary explaining the tech companies' impact on the San Francisco housing market, but it never becomes insufferable, and on the whole he manages to hold the Vonnegut impression together throughout 280 pages (another difference - Vonnegut would've brought it in under 200).
At times it manages to be laugh-out-loud funny, and at other times it makes you think about things in unexpected ways - both excellent qualities in a book. The pop-culture references are a few years old but that's good in a way because it's pre-2016, so retains a sort of wide-eyed pre-Trumpian innocence. OTOH, there are lots of typos (bad) and... Well, I might be missing something but some passages are blanked out. This is explained in the intro with references to Jimmy Savile and British libel law, and it made me want to go and read the US version. But I suspect if I read the US version the same crossings-out would be there, just with a different justification because they're part of the joke and I'm just too thick to realise it.

easy to read and clever in the quick way that tweets can be clever

"The only solution was to write bad novels that mimicked the computer network in its irrelevant and jagged presentation of content."

"Despite being aimed at a teenaged audience, Cory Doctorow's books were read by adults. Typically, these adults were UNIX systems administrators, network engineers, and Ruby developers who'd been rendered functionally illiterate by their collegiate computer science programs."

"The necessity of being a unique individual who cared about living in the city while working for a faceless multibillion dollar corporation was one of the legacies of the Bay Area's intolerable bullshit. The bullshit had been generated during the 1960s and early 1970s by young people who mistook participatory capitalism for enlightenment."

"Thomas Jefferson was the rare slave holder who enjoyed raping his property while writing declarations and essays and letters about the dignity of man.
He was enslaving people at home while crafting a philosophical system that advocated the spread of liberty throughout the world."

"Steve Jobs sucked it in and shit it out and transformed himself into Hades. The one god that can't be escaped. His promise was simple: you have a choice. You can die ugly and unloved, or you can buy an overpriced computer or iPod and listen to early Bob Dylan and spin yourself off the wheel of Samsara. Your fundamental uncreativity will be masked by group membership. People will think you are interesting and beautiful and enlightened. One of us, one of us, one of us. Gooble gobble, gooble gobble. Nothing says like individuality like 500 milion consumer electronics built by slaves. Welcome to Hell."

"Like Sheryl Sandberg, the billionaire who worked for Facebook and thought that the way women who weren't billionaires could get respect in the workplace was to act more like the men that disrespected them in the workplace."

"There was no way you could be Marissa Mayer without hope...No one understood why Yahoo! still existed or what Marissa Mayer did at Yahoo! Yet there she was, making terrible billion dollar acquisitions and redesigning logos. There was no way you could be Marissa Mayer and not have any hope."

"Yes, please, mansplain why astrology is bullshit. No, darling, I've not heard this before."

"The curious thing was that Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr and Blogspot, a media platform owned by Google, were the stomping grounds of self-styled intellectual and social radicals. It was where they were talking. It was where, they believed, the conversation was shifting.
They were typing morality lectures into devices built by slaves on platforms of expression owned by the Patriarchy, and they were making money for the Patriarchy. Somehow this was destroying the Patriarchy."

A relevant criticism mired by snarky, overly-pessimistic commentary.

This book was terrible. Literally no plot. It tried to hard to be funny and about once every hundred pages was. It was basically a list of random facts and the reasons why the author hates everything. Complete waste of time reading it. Occasionally the facts were interesting which is why it is 1 star and not 0

I haven't read a book like this before, and I thought it was great! It's almost as if he's writing a guidebook to living in the 21st century while also telling a fictional story. I wonder if the section breaks were intentionally added to help with those who have short attention spans caused by today's technology..just a thought. I look forward to reading more of Kobek's writing in the future.

As a cynical and searing takedown of the internet, the people who built it and so much of the culture around it that many of us have been born into, this is a hilarious 5 star book.

There were so many times when this book made references to things I wasn’t expecting and took them down and I loved every second of it. Those things include: comic books, Lady Gaga, Disney, cosplay, LOTR, gentrification, George Bush, twinks, Doctor Who fans, Apple, Miley Cyrus, Star Wars, Jonathan Franzen, BuzzFeed, Cory Doctorow, elite universities, Edward Snowden, the CIA, Jimmy Saville, and much much more. No target too big or too small, and often, what he was saying is right.

So there were plenty times I stopped and laughed and had a good ole time.

However, there’s no real plot here and no real point. Well, I guess the point is to leave us feeling ultra aware of our own hypocrisies and left with a loathing for the internet. So, it does achieve that, and makes that point well.

But ykno, the characters are all quite self-serving, and nothing in particular happens to them, and nothing is really resolved in the end.

The Old Man and The Sea was a book about how a senior citizen demonstrates the continued potency of his testosterone reserves by killing a dumb animal before being outwitted by other dumb animals.

Kobek does make a number of good observations in this book, but has a lot of garbage ones as well. Apparently anyone who argues for improving society is a complete hypocrite just because they participate in society. Primarily social media, I mean yeah social media is shit but that doesn't automatically invalidate everything shared online in the process.

At one point he goes on at some length characterizing tech executives as Greek and Roman gods and goddesses which was one of the more painful parts in the book. Even if he was doing so under many layers of irony it still felt like an embarrassing to go into let alone day dream about.

He goes way out of his way to find reasons to completely discredit everything, if anything has any negative impact or roots then the baby gets automatically thrown out with the bath water. If anything is impure or imperfect then it is completely awful by default. If that was not his intention though then there was no attempt to show otherwise. Go ahead and hate everything though if hating everything is what is the cool thing to do for you.

Again, he does make worthwhile observations and that gives it worth a read I guess. Don't think he is as funny as he thinks he is, and if he doesn't think he is funny he still made quite the effort.

I think it has some stories with important messages but mostly it was quite repetitive and at some point, too soon, it just became annoying. Enjoyed it at times, but to be honest, I just wanted it to be over. It's a nice critique to Internet and social media and technology, but it's so chaotic and confusing that the bad definitely outweighted the good for me.