PLEASE REPORT YOUR BUG HERE

A Silicon Valley roman à clef with a twist, written by the first employee at Instagram.

Ethan Block is a 24-year-old living in San Francisco circa early 2010, working for a dating app called DateDate. He scrutinizes flagged user photos, manually assessing whether the images violate platform guidelines. Ethan is so immersed in the startup hustle that he basically ignores the rest of his life. “I had tremendous responsibility. Every support email I answered brought us closer to changing the world. And if DateDate changed the world, I changed the world.” When he isn’t reviewing content for The Founder—a nameless, mercurial yuppie—Ethan is brooding over Isabel, a recent ex, or Noma, DateDate’s latest hire. One day at work, while viewing his top DateDate match, Ethan briefly feels himself falling into “a field, with tall, wet grass,” before snapping back to reality, believing his hallucinatory state to be the result of a “bug” in the app. Shortly thereafter, DateDate is acquired by the Corporation, a monolithic tech outfit suffused with faceless executives and preposterously advanced technology. Ethan spends the remainder of the novel pendulously obsessing over his encounter with the “bug” in DateDate. Framed as a retrospective of Ethan’s “existence as a corporate tech worker,” the novel’s intriguing premise of a fictionalized Silicon Valley insider tell-all invites urgent questions about how technology operates in our lives. Unfortunately, Riedel glosses over key leaps in story logic and is light on memorable descriptive language. Riedel evokes the bougie Silicon Valley ecosystem by peppering scenes with cultural references, regional markers, and New Age business-speak but leaves his characters frustratingly underdeveloped. The neutral affect of Ethan’s first-person narration flattens the personal and societal stakes of the story.

A diffuse homily on technology and identity that is easy to read and easy to forget.