Meatspace

Meatspace by Nikesh Shukla

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


“The First and last thing I do every day is see what strangers are saying about me.”

I said to someone recently that between social media and a number of other factors, I feel like I have lost most of my ability to communicate with people on any normal level. It is with this thought that I approached Nikesh Shukla’s Meatspace.

Meatspace is the name that people who spend their lives online give to the world outside—as in, the opposite of Cyberspace. It is the story of Kitab, author of Indian descent living in London who has been fired from his job for writing a book on company time. The book did not turn out to be as successful as he hoped. He is lonely, his girlfriend has left him, and he spends nearly all his time online. When someone from the online world with the same name as him shows up in the real world, he threatens to ruin the life that he has built, the reputation that he has cultivated. No matter how fragile and unreal it is, he values it. And the man he refers to as Kitab 2 stretches Kitab’s ability to handle what the real world throws at him.

Kitab has a brother, Aziz, who is obsessed with a guy who got a bow-tie as a neck tattoo. Aziz gets his own bow-tie neck tattoo and then he writes a blog in which he goes to New York to find this person, his neck-tattoo twin. This narrative runs counter to Kitab’s own as he stays in London dealing with his same name twin. Kitab misses his brother. And missing Aziz factors into Kitab’s loneliness and contributes to the free fall that he takes while Kitab 2 unwittingly tarnishes his life.

Meatspace is an exploration of the role of technology and social media in our society, along the lines of Jonathan Coe’s The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, Dave Eggers The Circle, or Wayne Gladstone’s Notes from the Internet Apocalypse. But it is the heartfelt way in which it ties together that won me over in the end. Kitab’s humanity as it is lived out on a phone or on a computer screen is a shield for his pain. A lot of it rings true. Because sometimes it’s tough out there in meatspace. But you gotta come out sometime.




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