UNPLUGGED

In Schulze’s novella, a new parent decides to raise his son in an analog-only household and imagines a future revolution.

One night, two weeks after finalizing the adoption of his 4-year-old son Quentin, an unnamed man in Danvers, Massachusetts, is suddenly struck by the enormity of his new responsibilities as a parent. The narrator, who describes himself as a “Zillennial”—someone who’s “too young to remember the 90s but old enough to remember a world before the Internet”—decides that he and his much-older husband, who was born in 1964, will raise Quentin without any modern digital technology. Instead of relying on smartphones and tablets to entertain and educate his son, like other parents, he plans instead to replicate a pre-internet lifestyle to nurture Quentin’s developing mind. As he tucks Quentin into bed, he vows that his son will be “raised right. With love of this world. The real world. IRL.” Invigorated and inspired, the narrator loses himself in an elaborately constructed vision of the future, in which Quentin graduates college with no friends and no career prospects, due to his lack of a digital footprint; after a failed suicide attempt, he creates a web-based manifesto condemning the internet’s infiltration of every aspect of society, and the millennials who encourage such an environment for their children, ending with a call to “#Unplug” that goes very viral. Schulze’s novella is a biting and viciously funny satire about online radicalization, hypocrisy in politics, capitalism, and faux nostalgia. The book is written almost entirely in the future tense, which has the effect of elevating the dry humor to a high level. All the characters (including figments of the narrator’s imagination whom Quentin will allegedly meet) are well developed, and the story flows at a nice pace throughout. Readers may especially enjoy the story’s exploration of intergenerational conflict, as well as the sincerity of the depiction of the existential anxiety of parenthood: “How am I supposed to do this?” the narrator despairs at one point. “How does anybody do this?”

A wickedly funny satire about unscrupulous activism, shady politics, and unhinged parenting.