My quest to find the great tech novel — something sprawling and social and occurring inside the Teach-Up and outside the restaurant and around the home of the displaced shopowner and the H1B-visa programmer — is in itself a kind of solutionism. Novels are captured social data. You want a snapshot of nineteenth century French provincial bourgeois life? There’s an app for that: it’s called Flaubert. And that’s before we consider the novel as an aggregator of human data of the biggest, most nebulous kind. You want a map of the human heart? Whose heart? What century? There’s an app for that too.
Lydia Kiesling, “Paucity of Art in the Age of Big Data: A Dispatch From San Francisco.”
“If you’re looking for a link to this GIF, you won’t find it here. That’s because, mid-laugh, I considered this [person] as an actual human being, moving through the world somewhere, possibly embarrassed that documentation of [their] genuine enjoyment had been repurposed into a nutty-looking punch line. I felt clammy.” - When laughing at an epic fail is no laughing matter by Rob Walker
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“If you’re looking for a link to this GIF, you won’t find it here. That’s because, mid-laugh, I considered this [person] as an actual human being, moving through the world somewhere, possibly embarrassed that documentation of [their] genuine enjoyment had been repurposed into a nutty-looking punch line. I felt clammy.”

- When laughing at an epic fail is no laughing matter by Rob Walker

I want to conduct an experiment.

We often think of written fiction as timeless, crafted for history. I want to write extremely timely fiction, nearly ephemeral. I want to write a story not just set in the present, but set in this very week. Almost real-time. A serialized narrative that keeps up with the events of our world and weaves them into its tale as it goes.

But also, I want to conduct an experiment with you.
“A March Story,” by Andrew Fitzgerald (and you!)