FURTL

In a dumbed-down, dystopic near-future America, high-tech tycoon Manny Kahn fights to save the nation from political pathologies brought about by his own creation, a ubiquitous online search engine.

Any resemblance to Google or Facebook is very likely intentional in Witherspoon’s satirical, near-future look at the political swamps into which info-tech pathologies are taking America. Manny Kahn was once an idealistic hacktavist who created a breakthrough search-engine algorithm called furtl, primarily to hype his parents’ floral business. Now furtl is everywhere as a tech device/multimedia platform. But after a grim long-range business projection due to unexpected killer-app competition from China, Manny gets ousted from his company (and failing marriage) via a fraudulent sex-harassment charge. After six years spent in an off-the-grid rustic retreat in Bhutan, Manny gets a glimpse of the isolationist, corrupt Red State nightmare that America has become thanks to his unscrupulous successors at furtl. A senile, Reagan-like president presides over 25 percent unemployment following calamitous privatization of most social services, which left a few powerful Washington, D.C.–connected corporations in charge. The rich dwell in gated communities with private militias, while dissent (or belief in evolution) among the poor and angry is quashed by a powerful Homeland Security–type department empowered by furtl’s data-mining surveillance. Obesity has hit 80 percent; potato chips are the standard diet. Manny returns to take down the establishment he unwittingly created, but even the Occupy-like terrorists (the “Leftea Party”) he joins seem to be the cretins of tomorrow from Mike Judge’s film Idiocracy. Tech-talk sometimes comes in massive doses, intimidating for noobs, but Witherspoon keeps the narrative as lean as an iPad and resists the gimmick of writing the thing in text-message shorthand. Though characterizations are often tweet-deep, the nonstop invention and wit spare neither the left nor the right. Such is the author’s Swiftian persuasion that the upbeat denouement rings rather hollow; a society gone this far down the anti-intellectual pipeline will have a hard time booting back up.

Sharp-toothed and Bluetoothed—gigabyte-size political and social satire for the wired generation.