I think Ill give Northern Lights a try.

Ursula K. LeGuin is one of my favourite authors. I’m dipping into the Hainish Cycle a bit at a time.

In its time, circa 2012‐2013, I enjoyed the book. It was a relief from other things I was reading at the time, the world as it was then. A guilty pleasure.

Now, it does strike as trite, consumer-centred, fan-serving, intertextuality. I may have only thought of the branding and YA-crowd focus at the time. But, then again, I had just finished the Hunger Games the year before. I was primed for it then.

The escapist, pseudo-dystopia that is Ready Player One hits different when you’re living inside of a naked escapist pseudo-dystopia in real life. The journey as a pop-culture “gunter” navigating 80s video games and movies is, essentially, a contemporary subculture. The reward now is a YouTube following, not a multi-billion dollar corporate empire. Even the end prize seems small today.

$240B? Pfft. That’s not a world-dominating tech company. That doesnt even crack the top 100 today.

Funny, I enjoyed this series. Though, I admit, not at first. The prospect of an incoming alien species colonizing the Earth by frustrating any ability to continue our advance in technology, then figuring out a way to defeat them anyway was compelling.

Further, it helped me to think of it as my first novel told by a Chinese author. Cixin Liu’s sci-fi voice is very different to what I am used to. All of the motivations and norms are different. So, I tried to keep an open mind.

Finally, I thought that the Dark Forest made the biggest difference in my understanding of the 2hole story. The reveal in that book stopped me in my tracks. It caught me as hard as the one in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. No spoilers.

Sorry, what was the book?

Do you recommend another in its place?

The Tech Exit: A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens from Smartphones by Clare Morell

The cloying moralizing didn’t really become clear until chapter 10. I should’ve known back in chapter 2 that the strident, clutching-at-pearls, “won’t anyone think of the children?” point of view was a tad hyperbolic.

She’s right in one regard: the Internet is a casino in a strip club in a strip mall designed to keep you gaming for the next dopamine rush. Social media apps are the fentanyl to the heroin that is the Internet. Tiktok is carfentanyl. That doesn’t mean we all must abstain from technology. That Purityrannical view is a different problem.

Instead, as she so briefly mentions, there is the original intent of creating a community of linked people, machines, and commerce: problem solving. People, because children are people too, can be trained to build new solutions. To be creators instead of consumers.

Were it not for the disposable, single use, capitalist version of morality she supports, she might see that the plethora of distractions and traps the current media environment offers is the obstacle — a characteristically American obstruction. Seeing beyond the bright lights, the flashy colours, and all the porn, there is an infinity of forms. The tech exit forecloses on that creative potential, relegating it to the same tech lords her preferred President serves.

This book is only moderately useful. Sure, I agree, delay smart phones and social media until your kids can smoke, drink, do drugs, and join the military. But that’s a pamphlet that does the job of this book.

Go read Johnathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation” instead.