A Review of David Yoon’s Version Zero (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2021)
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ccape
Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Corinna Cape
Well, David Yoon’s Version Zero (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2021) sort of surprised me in terms of the tagline that appeared on the cover, which refers to saving the future. I expected a time travel narrative, which is not what we got. The story actually explores the problematics of the internet in a time of increasing virtual surveillance. The story is primarily told through the perspective of Max Portillo, a Salvadoran American, whose parents are undocumented. He works at a place called Wren but is later fired and blacklisted when he expresses concerns over Wren’s data acquisition policies, which certainly infringe upon the privacy rights of netizens. Of course, as many of us well know, the internet is a largely unregulated location, so Yoon’s novel strikes more as a counterfactual than anything speculative. Indeed, Max enlists the help of his longtime crush, Akiko Hosokawa, and her boyfriend Shane, in order to generate a series of hacks that will start to fight back against the digital monopoly of the major companies that appear in this novel, which are fictionalized amalgams of all the places we already know: Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Uber, Lyft, etc. Their grassroots hacks get the attention of a very powerful individual, Pilot Markham, who bankrolls them, so that they can get involved with even more expansive hacks. Their crew also adds a millennial, Braydeen Turnipseed, who brings more youthful gravitas to their ventures and adventures. Yoon’s storyline is very fast-paced: the sentences are short, the chapters are short, and the action moves along quite quickly. The concluding arc—and here, I will provide my requisite spoilers, so if you’re reading this line and don’t want to find out a little bit of what happens, I would turn away now—involves a radical reconsideration of what life might be without the internet as we know it today, and it gets to that question that Yoon seems to be most interested in: what would we do if we had a reset of the internet itself? Though the novel doesn’t fully answer this question, it does push us to confront what we decide to share and how we might move forward more consciously, especially as our every virtual move is tracked and digitized. A chilling but superbly entertaining novel.
Buy the Book Here
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ccape
Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Corinna Cape
Well, David Yoon’s Version Zero (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2021) sort of surprised me in terms of the tagline that appeared on the cover, which refers to saving the future. I expected a time travel narrative, which is not what we got. The story actually explores the problematics of the internet in a time of increasing virtual surveillance. The story is primarily told through the perspective of Max Portillo, a Salvadoran American, whose parents are undocumented. He works at a place called Wren but is later fired and blacklisted when he expresses concerns over Wren’s data acquisition policies, which certainly infringe upon the privacy rights of netizens. Of course, as many of us well know, the internet is a largely unregulated location, so Yoon’s novel strikes more as a counterfactual than anything speculative. Indeed, Max enlists the help of his longtime crush, Akiko Hosokawa, and her boyfriend Shane, in order to generate a series of hacks that will start to fight back against the digital monopoly of the major companies that appear in this novel, which are fictionalized amalgams of all the places we already know: Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Uber, Lyft, etc. Their grassroots hacks get the attention of a very powerful individual, Pilot Markham, who bankrolls them, so that they can get involved with even more expansive hacks. Their crew also adds a millennial, Braydeen Turnipseed, who brings more youthful gravitas to their ventures and adventures. Yoon’s storyline is very fast-paced: the sentences are short, the chapters are short, and the action moves along quite quickly. The concluding arc—and here, I will provide my requisite spoilers, so if you’re reading this line and don’t want to find out a little bit of what happens, I would turn away now—involves a radical reconsideration of what life might be without the internet as we know it today, and it gets to that question that Yoon seems to be most interested in: what would we do if we had a reset of the internet itself? Though the novel doesn’t fully answer this question, it does push us to confront what we decide to share and how we might move forward more consciously, especially as our every virtual move is tracked and digitized. A chilling but superbly entertaining novel.
Buy the Book Here
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