This is a super-fun mashup: part satire of Silicon Valley start-up culture and Internet culture; part thriller; part think piece about the pluses and minuses of a greater-than-human-level artificial intelligence (don't let that put you off). All wrapped up in witty text and delightful characters. I've shelved this as "planning to re-read", so it will likely be upgraded to 5 stars when that happens.
[Audiobook note: I SUPER-HIGHLY recommend getting the audio book version. It is read primarily by two first-rate voices and backed up by a whos-who of Internet celebs.] ( )

There is a decent-ish AI plot hiding in there somewhere, but it is almost completely hidden by a thousand extremely annoying asides and digressions. ( )

This could have been a 5 star book but fell apart in a few ways. It's more like 3.5/5 but I'm rounding up to 4 because I liked the concept.

1) There's a in-world shitty novel interspersed throughout the novel. It's over the top bad, but for justified reasons within the book. However, it's not revealed as an in-world novel, vs. just extra parts of the main book, until partway through. It was bad enough that this was going to be a 2/5 until it was explained.

2) There's a lot of great Silicon Valley in-jokes/references/etc. from 2010-2013. They don't really age well. Somewhat nostalgic if one lived there at the time, though.

3) The core plot was solid, but it tried too hard in a lot of places, and was long, there weren't really great characters, and after a certain point, it became monotonous. ( )

3 stars - with some qualifications. This is a good story, very geeky, and also very funny. Rob Reid is the guy who wrote Year Zero, so it has that same kind of humor. However, and this however may be relevant only to me, but it is relevant to me: in spite of the good story, and the incredible cast of narrators on the Audible version (who read like a list of the best geeks of all time), there are waaaaaaay too many F bombs in the story, and also far to much sex for me to enjoy the story. I'm not a prude, but the story seemed overwhelmed with both. If that kind of thing doesn't bother you, then i suspect you will truly enjoy this very quirky and fun story. The characters are all very unusual, their interactions are strange, but compelling. In essence, the story is about what the future will be like when companies/apps like google (who knows way too much about all of us), twitter, tinder and instagram all combine into one incredibly all-knowing, intelligent and intrusive intelligence. It's a wild ride, and so very plausible that it is scary. ( )

I just couldn't.

This book is not even close to what I imagined from the synopsis and reviews I've read. The dare at the beginning is silly and it won't justify the fact that this book is unnecessarily long.
Dialogue is overly artificial, vague and stupid. The author treats the reader as someone dumb. The wording's somewhat annoying and I noticed there's kind of a pattern of word usage.
I honestly don't know what the target audience is supposed to be after reading both synopsis and roughly the first fifty pages from this. I really wished that this book was great, but it was an utter frustration. From my point of view, the Jedi are evil and the ending, however great it may be, is not worth the effort of toiling through all this wall text.
If you've read until here, I'm really sorry for the grammar xd ( )