Book Review: Jpod

Reading Douglas Coupland's new novel Jpod is like hearing a voice you know and trust, and slowly coming to realize that's it's describing terrifying horrors. Superficially, Jpod reads a lot like Microserfs. It describes a similar group of tightly-knit tech industry geeks struggling with life, family, work, and culture, discussing their obsessions and struggling to understand their place in the world. But where Microserfs describes a world full of change and growth where people become closer to one another and technology has the power to inspire and redeem, the characters in Jpod inhabit an amoral realm where technology is background noise and a software job invites comparison with being sold into heroin slavery making fake Nikes in China. Jpod is black comedy delivered with perfect deadpan. For many tech industry people of my generation,

Microserfsdefined the dream, a dream that we're still living or trying to live. Jpod depicts it as a nightmare. Jpod gave me nightmares. We're living in a time where we're growing more and more aware of the dark side of technology (I humbly submit). Jpod is an appropriate book for this time - Microserfs' evil twin.

Microserfs is a book that has been mentioned on this blog before. Yes, that's my first post in February 2001. That was a time of many beginnings for me. Microserfs was an appropriate book to be reading then. It's also the book I read on the plane the day I left graduate school behind and flew out to Seattle to start my first real tech job. I read Microserfs last year around the time I got laid off from my job and my Dad died. It's a book I read to remind myself why I came out to Seattle and why I decided to stay. I'm kind of glad it has an evil twin. It kind of gives the whole thing a little focus. I'm not sure I'll read it again, the way I have Microserfs. On the other hand, I'm not sure I'll read Microserfs again either. I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do next, but maybe that's a good thing.