The stories ring familiar without feeling true. I can’t tell if it’s because this humanity living across screens and its images is so different than mine, or if it is because the characters are more animated memes than attempts at human portrayals. Or rather than animated memes, cultural archetypes for Internet columnists.

The short stories are funny and pathetic, but shameless - there is very little empathy for the characters (the porn brained, the internet-feminism brained, the linkedin-stoic-FIRE brained... you get the idea), which is either another clue that they have no basis in reality, and/or an artifact of a Internet-brained author, used to mock those who have fallen for It.

The point is, all these stories talk about other people, not me, not us, but the people we are convinced exist somewhere, although we only meet them as objects of some tweets or massively upvoted reddit threads showing off freaks crushed by hyperreality, riddled with all kinds of Internet transmitted diseases. It affects to be documentary, but it reads like Herodotus describing Cannibals and Amazons.

Somewhere between these layers of what we think is true, what we and the Zeitgeist are ready to believe is true, what some people and some things want and or need to be true, here we are, reading. Does it matter if it’s true? Not really, the world is ready for it anyway.

I am sure I haven't learned anything about me and my fellow humans; I have only deepened my knowledge of some varieties of soyjack/pepe/etc. Maybe we will all become some types of meme in the end (because there is no doubt the current layer will become the substrate of another layer, which will regard the previous one as realer if not truer), so this book might eventually become literature.