Zed: A Novel - BookWyrm

352 pages

English language

Published May 18, 2020 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

ISBN:: 978-0-385-54547-1
ASIN:: 0385545479

(4 reviews)

From the winner of the Orange Award for New Writing comes a blistering, satirical novel about life under a global media and tech corporation that knows exactly what we think, what we want, and what we do--before we do.

One corporation has made a perfect world based on a perfect algorithm . . . now what to do with all these messy people? Lionel Bigman is dead. Murdered by a robot. Guy Matthias, the philandering founder and CEO of the mega-corporation Beetle, insists it was human error. But was it? Either the predictive algorithms of Beetle's supposedly omniscient 'lifechain' don't work, or, they've been hacked. Both scenarios are impossible to imagine and signal the end of Beetle's technotopia and life as we know it. Dazzlingly original and darkly comic, Zed asks profound questions about who we are, what we owe to one another, and what makes us human. It describes …

From the winner of the Orange Award for New Writing comes a blistering, satirical novel about life under a global media and tech corporation that knows exactly what we think, what we want, and what we do--before we do.

One corporation has made a perfect world based on a perfect algorithm . . . now what to do with all these messy people? Lionel Bigman is dead. Murdered by a robot. Guy Matthias, the philandering founder and CEO of the mega-corporation Beetle, insists it was human error. But was it? Either the predictive algorithms of Beetle's supposedly omniscient 'lifechain' don't work, or, they've been hacked. Both scenarios are impossible to imagine and signal the end of Beetle's technotopia and life as we know it. Dazzlingly original and darkly comic, Zed asks profound questions about who we are, what we owe to one another, and what makes us human. It describes our moment--the ugliness and the beauty--perfectly. Kavenna is a prophet who has seen deeply into the present--and thrown back her head and laughed.

5 editions

gregorgross reviewed Zed by Joanna Kavenna

Funny but also terrifying look into our immediate future

4 stars

This book is indeed funny. Yet overall, it's terrifying, because it shows we're just a little away from total destruction of our society in the name of technology. This book does not bother with climate change, for it focusses on our insistence on technology to basically surveil and observe us individuals in the name of bettering us and our choices, which means, in the name of making us consume more and dumbing us down. It's funny how we make ourselves transparent, but the providers of these technologies of course never make their own lifestyle, mistakes etc. transparent. In this story, they do this in the name of national security.

There is an antagonist by the name of Guy Matthias, who is an amalgam of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, I think. It's fun to see him go down, yet of course the billionaires never go down, and so Guy stays …

This book is indeed funny. Yet overall, it's terrifying, because it shows we're just a little away from total destruction of our society in the name of technology. This book does not bother with climate change, for it focusses on our insistence on technology to basically surveil and observe us individuals in the name of bettering us and our choices, which means, in the name of making us consume more and dumbing us down. It's funny how we make ourselves transparent, but the providers of these technologies of course never make their own lifestyle, mistakes etc. transparent. In this story, they do this in the name of national security.

There is an antagonist by the name of Guy Matthias, who is an amalgam of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, I think. It's fun to see him go down, yet of course the billionaires never go down, and so Guy stays where he is.

The overall tone of explaining in this book reminds me of Jarett Kobek's novel "I hate the internet".

I thinjk Joanna Kavenna is a name I should remember henceforth.