Please Report Your Bug Here
A Novel
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
“An unexpected, inventive, heartfelt riff on the workplace novel—startup realism with a multiverse twist.” —Anna Wiener, author of Uncanny Valley
Introducing Josh Riedel's adrenaline-packed debut novel about a dating app employee who discovers a glitch that transports him to other worlds
Once you sign an NDA it's good for life. Meaning legally, I shouldn't tell you this story. But I have to.
A college grad with the six-figure debt to prove it, Ethan Block views San Francisco as the place to be. Yet his job at hot new dating app DateDate is a far cry from what he envisioned. Instead of making the world a better place, he reviews flagged photo queues, overworked and stressed out. But that's about to change.
Reeling from a breakup, Ethan decides to view his algorithmically matched soulmate on DateDate. He overrides the system and clicks on the profile. Then, he disappears. One minute, he’s in a windowless office, and the next, he’s in a field of endless grass, gasping for air. When Ethan snaps back to DateDate HQ, he’s convinced a coding issue caused the blip. Except for anyone to believe him, he’ll need evidence. As Ethan embarks on a wild goose chase, moving from dingy startup think tanks to Silicon Valley’s dominant tech conglomerate, it becomes clear that there’s more to DateDate than meets the eye. With the stakes rising, and a new world at risk, Ethan must choose who—and what—he believes in.
Adventurous and hypertimely, Please Report Your Bug Here is an inventive millennial coming-of-age story, a dark exploration of the corruption now synonymous with Big Tech, and, above all, a testament to the power of human connection in our digital era.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Riedel debuts with a smart exposé of the tech boom imbued with a touch of weird fantastical elements. App developer Ethan Block looks back on his time in 2010–2011 with a startup called DateDate in San Francisco. As a new hire, Ethan, 24 and single, believes DateDate can change the world. Users post pictures and answer over a thousand questions about themselves to find their top match, and Ethan's job entails responding to customer emails, reviewing photos for content violations, and fixing bugs, working 16-hour days as the platform swells to a million users. One day, while checking out the profile of the user with whom he's best matched, Ethan is physically transplanted to a mysterious location through his phone. Later, back in the office, he obsessively tries to replicate the bug but can't. After the startup is acquired by a large Google-esque company, Ethan learns he's being manipulated. Riedel makes the most of his removed narrator, who has enough distance from the events to offer sharp insights on gentrification, workplace ennui, and the uncanny ways that tech has blurred his sense of reality, such as with the innocuous photos he removes from people's profiles, mistaking them for violations, or the hardware store he confuses for a new antique shop. It's impressive how much Riedel packs into this.
