User Profile

The upside, in theory, was that nobody possibly could take this work so seriously that they would expect her to dedicate every fiber of her being to it; except the unbelievable reality was that they did. Even worse, these consumer-facing start-ups had a much higher proportion of smooth, well- adjusted people than a company like Antichain, and one big thing about the socially normal was that they loved their social norms. Whereas Resaint couldn’t stand the politics, the niceties, the meetings where she had to spangle her expression and tone of voice with false enthusiasm just so people didn’t think she was a bitch.

— Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman (Page 40 - 41)

Instead she ended up in Berlin, working at a series of shortlived product development jobs. Here, too, she observed an almost libidinal desire to relinquish autonomy, except this time in the context of various silly, infantilizing “innovations,” each product solving some non-problem—“No more browsing for hours while your dinner gets cold: let us decide what movie you’d enjoy tonight, based on your hormonal and metabolic indicators!”—like a prosthesis fitted over a perfectly healthy limb so it could shrivel from disuse inside the plastic casing. When she’d done her masters, she’d believed that artificial intelligence was about computer minds ascending into person-hood, but this was more about human minds decaying out of it.

— Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman (Page 40 - 41)