Josh Riedel

Josh Riedel, also known as Employee Number One at Instagram, certainly has the chops to do a book set in the strange world of social media startups. His hero in Please Report Your Bug Here is an early employee in a dating app startup called—wait for it—DateDate. His mind-killing job is to agree with the Founder and scan pictures flagged for violating company policies. If Riedel’s experience at Instagram was anything like this, it is no wonder he left to get an MFA and become a writer. As long as Riedel sticks to the day-to-day world of DateDate, he has a satirical edge reminiscent of latter-day William Gibson. But then the plot starts. Some flagged pictures seem to induce madness or, depending on how you look at it, port you to another timeline. It is all Jungian, I guess. Sigh. One spoiler: DateDate is bought out by the Corporation, where even the Founder gets lost in the shuffle. It is fun to play the roman-a-clef game here.… (mais)

I received a copy of this book through LibraryThing's Early Reviewer program.

I was delighted with the early chapters of this book as “Ethan” chronicles his life at tech startup DateDate. Most importantly, it was set in the part of San Francisco that I worked in for much of my life, and the local references registered in my memory. I know, this isn't going to be relevant for most readers, but it does bias my review. The daily routine of Ethan's work at DateDate was quite believable and engaging, and his personal life was relatable. Ethan has to sort through and resolve the inappropriate uploads to DateDate and serve as the liaison to the user base. That's where things get weird. He discovers the portal.

The entrance to another dimension introduces a plot device that I found confusing and not very believable. The other dimension seems to morph as the novel progresses, depending on who is using it and how it is used. It seemed like more of a hallucination than an alternate world. It never seemed to have any concrete rules or principles.

Ethan doesn't seem to know anyone who will tell him the complete truth about the portal and how it works. Or about the other people involved in the project and their interconnections. And he shares only some of what he knows with others. It doesn't seem like a healthy dynamic, and doesn't come to a satisfying conclusion.

It's probably unfair to speculate about the author's past experiences and this book, but it wasn't possible for me to divorce myself from the idea that the non-portal parts of this book were semi-autobiographical. Those parts were enjoyable. The speculative fiction, not so much. “Write what you know.”… (mais)

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Please Report Your Bug Here is about a tech worker at a dating app who discovers a bug that transports him to another world very unlike his own. The book is set in and around San Francisco, and pretty much every tech personality makes an appearance, from tech bros to continually entrepreneurial founders to devs in hoodies working for days on end.

I’m a software engineer so the premise was intriguing to me. We encounter bugs all the time that do unexpected things and I loved the idea of a bug doing the impossible. It was easy to feel connected to the characters because they all felt so real, and the tech scene in the Valley was described perfectly. I had several LOL moments because some of the scenes were just so relatable to my everyday life.

I ended up really liking the book even though I didn’t trust some of the characters. And the narrator, Ethan, would sometimes annoy me with how naïve he was, but I suspect that was the point. At times I did find the story hard to follow and felt it jumped around a bit, especially in the beginning, but again, that could be by design of Ethan’s character and an illustration of how he grows in his thinking throughout the book.

I’ve read The Circle and The Every, both about big tech companies that become all-consuming, and they both felt like you only got the surface of the company, just enough to make it plausible but not quite believable. The Corporation in PRYBH is very believable and feels like an actual monopolistic company I could be reading about in the news tomorrow. Having that kind of reality in the book made the mystery of the bug even more intriguing and a bit scary, because I can see the plausibility of big tech taking some of the measures the Corporation did.

Overall, I really liked it. I’ll be thinking about this one for a while.
… (mais)