Douglas Coupland - JPod

Trying to catch up on my Coupland...almost there. Anyway this was an obvious ploy to re-connect to some of his old readers who liked Microserfs. But it for those of us who have kept up with him you'll see that this is really just a response to the ever changing computer landscape. Where 10 years ago it was Microsoft today it is Google, tomorrow...someone else. A crafty little story about a design team with Coupland hilarious dry humor and far fetched plot devices (I mean wouldn't we all like to send our bosses to China to become addicted to heroin while they make imitation tennis shoes?). Anyway a great read and some choice quotes below:

"You feel chilled because you have no character. You're a depressing assemblage of pop culture influences and cancelled emotions, driven by the sputtering engine of only the most banal form of capitalism. You spend your life feeling as if you're perpetually on the brink of being obsolete - whether it's labour market obsolescence or cultural unhipness. And it's all catching up with you. You live and die by the development cycle. You're glamorized drosophilia flies, with the company regulating your life cycles at whim. If it isn't a budget-driven eighteen-month game production schedule, it's a five-year hardware obsolescence schedule. Every five years you have to throw away everything you know and learn a whole new set of hardware and software specs, relegating what was once critical to our lives to the cosmic slag heap.

"Don't talk to me about IKEA furniture. Your fater tried assembling an IKEA shelf last year, and it nearly nearly ended our marriage..."

"...I hoped that God would shake my Etch-a-Sketch clean overnight..."

"Comics day came and went. And another comics day followed that - the typical production and consumption cycles that help us survive our dismal, meaningless little lives."

"I was wondering what electrons are actually doing when they sit in your hand drive in an old laptop at the back of your closet. I mean, how does an electron sit still - is it like a cartoon M&M leaning back in a folding beach chair? Is it like an angry little steel ball bearing hovering there, just waiting to go nuts on protons? What's the mechanism that starts and stops the electron? Who's dungeon master? And if an electron has only a negative electrical charge, how can it possibly even exist?"