Please Report Your Bug Here

October 10, 2022
Riedel debuts with a smart exposé of the tech boom imbued with a touch of weird fantastical elements. App developer Ethan Block looks back on his time in 2010–2011 with a startup called DateDate in San Francisco. As a new hire, Ethan, 24 and single, believes DateDate can change the world. Users post pictures and answer over a thousand questions about themselves to find their top match, and Ethan’s job entails responding to customer emails, reviewing photos for content violations, and fixing bugs, working 16-hour days as the platform swells to a million users. One day, while checking out the profile of the user with whom he’s best matched, Ethan is physically transplanted to a mysterious location through his phone. Later, back in the office, he obsessively tries to replicate the bug but can’t. After the startup is acquired by a large Google-esque company, Ethan learns he’s being manipulated. Riedel makes the most of his removed narrator, who has enough distance from the events to offer sharp insights on gentrification, workplace ennui, and the uncanny ways that tech has blurred his sense of reality, such as with the innocuous photos he removes from people’s profiles, mistaking them for violations, or the hardware store he confuses for a new antique shop. It’s impressive how much Riedel packs into this. Agent: Ellen Levine and Martha Wydysh, Trident Media Group.

November 15, 2022
A Silicon Valley roman � 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.

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November 1, 2022
Ethan Block is the first employee at hot tech startup DateDate, an app which uses innovative new methods to match users with their most compatible mate. As neither the company's visionary founder nor its technical engineer, Ethan covers pretty much everything else, especially clearing out the photos queue, which is sometimes innocent, sometimes softcore, sometimes a twisted dump of depravity. While doing this work, Ethan finds a bug in the app that has psychological and physical consequences for users who encounter it. The bug leads to the discovery of a mess of Silicon Valley secrets which reveal the limits of how insidious giant corporations and personal data collection can be. Riedel's bio states that he was the first employee at Instagram and now holds an MFA, which explains his exquisite technical rendering of startup/app culture as well as his deeply romantic portrayal of contemporary San Francisco. The book is a great addition to the growing canon of literature examining the role and reach of Silicon Valley.

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