BIT FLIP: A NOVEL

In Trigg’s novel, a tech executive disillusioned by life in the Silicon Valley uncovers financial fraud at his company.

Sam Hughes is the COO at Ainetu, a company that designed an AI analytics platform that detects digital security threats. While the company is successful, Sam is increasingly discontent with the avarice and hypocrisy of the industry, and he’s unhappy with his own shallow motivations—all the elements of a familiar midlife crisis somewhat formulaically presented here by Trigg. Sam says, “I just feel like everything I’ve told myself for the last twenty years has been a lie. I pretend to have this higher purpose, but really what motivates me is envy of other people who have more success, more esteem, more money.” While appearing on a panel at a major tech conference, Sam freely shares his gathering cynicism and is fired for his candor by the company’s CEO, Rohan Sharma, a self-styled visionary who is too managerially incompetent to run the company without Sam. The timing couldn’t be worse for the COO. He has a wife, three kids, plenty of debt, and a father in financial trouble. Sam inadvertently discovers that Rohan is far from a commendable leader. Much of Trigg’s tale is achingly unoriginal, and the writing is competent but not noteworthy. The author’s insights into the artificiality of Silicon Valley culture won’t strike anyone as surprising. Nonetheless, this is a genuinely funny novel, and the second half of it redeems the first when a shopworn morality lesson takes an unexpected turn. The daring, authentic conclusion makes this otherwise humdrum work worth the labor.

Slow to start but a worthwhile, humorous take on the moral infirmities of the tech industry.