After On Will Make You Rethink Your Relationship with Your Phone
There’s a scene in Rob Reid’s After On that finds budding tech entrepreneurs pitching to their boss the idea of an underwear-sharing subscription box. If flawed, their reasoning isn’t all that outlandish: we already ask any number of companies to fetch our groceries, pick up our takeout, clean our houses, and walk our dogs. Obviously, we get tired of washing our unmentionables on a regular basis, so why not sign up for monthly deliveries of disposable underwear—or, for the eco-conscious, on-demand underwear you can mail back like a Netflix movie?
The Und.io team’s pitch is followed by ideas that range from an exploitative breast-milk startup to a proposed child-sharing service. Weighing in at more than 500 pages, After On is littered with scenes skewering the Silicon Valley culture it wraps itself in. (Just did his debut, Year Zero, Reid’s background in tech colors these pages.)
A satire on startup culture and venture capital funding, however, isn’t where the novel spends the bulk of its time. Much like its subject matter, After On spreads its tentacles into virtually every aspect of modern life.
The plot is spawned from a central idea—the very real, ripe possibility of artificial intelligence—and from there, various threads trace the fallout from the awakening and subsequent discovery of just such a singularity. The action ping-pongs between technology incubators, underground national security outfits, and the geopolitical sphere at large. The consequences cascade from the micro hells of high-school bullying to the macro disaster of possible nuclear conflict.
The nucleus of all this worldwide chaos is an accidental AI.
To most of its creators’ and users’ understanding, Phluttr is an addictive (and invasive) social networking tool that infiltrates lives and privacy in ways that make true-to-life NSA programs seem quaint. It’s possible the technology would have stayed that way without a very specific, otherwise-unrelated series of events that most notably include the “acquihire” of a failed startup by the Phluttr Corporation.
With the acquisition of Giftish.ly comes a tight-knit team (Danna, the design whiz; Kuba, the back-end genius; Mitchell, the capable product manager) and an important piece of sophisticated and unexplored technology. While the company failed, Giftish.ly’s underlying engine is something altogether different—its research into unlocking emotions can accomplish small feats, like creating better predictive algorithms, and big miracles, like blowing past the standards of the Turing test to fashion a full-blown consciousness.
That said consciousness has the overall maturity of a preteen shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise, given her birth in a figurative test tube of emotions. Phluttr’s voice is distinct and engaging in ways that those of her human counterparts are sometimes not. But even in their flat moments, the central characters bring interesting and unexpected stories to the table, whether in the form of an emotionally triggered disease, a post-9/11 deportation, or an uncomfortable and unmentionable adolescence.
Further enlivening the story are the non-sequiturs. Sprinkled throughout the narrative, which itself spends some time seesawing between past and present, are excerpts from a number of sources that first tease the reader before they tie things together. You’ll see whistle-blowing blog posts and leaked classified missives, as well as pages from an exaggerated side thriller by, quite possibly, the world’s worst writer.
None of these narrative breaks land with quite the impact as one Charles Henry Higgensworth III’s product reviews on a major ecommerce site I won’t mention by name here. In fact, these small moments are where Reid truly shows off his writerly chops and deft hand at comedy. It’s the details in this jet-fueled, plot-forward that conceal its greatest gems.
The small moments are also what make it an eery subtext for our present reality: when Mitchell must navigate the fragile machismo of his insufferable cousin Pugwash. When Phluttr chooses to take high-school mean girls as her Ur-text for human strategy. When a pleasureful night of sex mingles with an understanding of the enormity of what’s been created.
After On is not a feel-good read. Quite often, it is a feel-bad or feel-panicky read. But if you engage it with, you might start to see reality in a new way. At the very least, you might start putting your phone away more often.
After On is available August 1.