Version Zero
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3.8 • 11 Ratings
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
From the brilliant mind of New York Times bestselling author David Yoon comes a lightning-fast and scorchingly observant thriller about how we can save ourselves from the very real perils of a virtual world.
Max, a data whiz at the social media company Wren, has gotten a firsthand glimpse of the dark side of big tech. When he questions what his company does with the data they collect, he's fired...then black-balled across Silicon Valley.
With time on his hands and revenge on his mind, Max and his longtime friend (and secretly the love of his life) Akiko, decide to get even by rebooting the internet. After all, in order to fix things, sometimes you have to break them. But when Max and Akiko join forces with a reclusive tech baron, they learn that breaking things can have unintended--and catastrophic--consequences.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
YA author Yoon (Super Fake Love Song) makes his adult debut with a clever if uneven near-future thriller. Max Portillo, a 26-year-old tech genius at Wren, "the world's largest social network," has a crisis of conscience after discovering that a new company project is designed to extract even more data from its billions of users that will be sold not just to advertisers but to intelligence agencies around the world. When Max starts writing a "vision statement" to bring Wren back on course, he's promptly fired and blackballed. He then joins forces with his best friend and former coworker, Akiko Hosokawa, to hack Wren. Max and Akiko's efforts attract the attention of a reclusive billionaire who has his own reasons for taking down Wren and the internet culture it personifies. The novel is at its best when satirizing the high-tech business world and internet culture, but loses steam when it shifts into high-octane thriller mode. And the insights into the Faustian bargain between social media users and data harvesters aren't particularly surprising. Still, fans of dystopian fiction will want to check this one out.
Customer Reviews
Was 4 Stars Until...
It turned into a horror novel.
But I do appreciate the dire warnings about capitalism and technology.