In fiction and in fact, these books trace how in less than 15 years, billions of people have given up a good deal of their waking life to Web 2.0Has anything ever caused a faster transformation in our practices of living than social media? Fifteen years ago, it barely existed; today, it occupies a large portion of the waking consciousness of a few billion people. It has touched all aspects of life: for many people, their most intimate conceptions of themselves, their relations to other people, their political commitments, and their sexuality – as well as their basic livelihoods – are now tangled up in the loose cluster of phenomena known as Web 2.0.“In the destructive element immerse,” urged Joseph Conrad in 1900. My new novel, Viral, plunges into the world of social media’s makers, at a decadent mid-stage in its short history: the moment in the mid-2010s when the

Continue reading