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unplugged

a novella

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

ONE OF KIRKUS REVIEWS' BEST INDIE BOOKS OF 2024

America, 2046. The youngest of Millennials will be middle-aged. Their children, Generation Alpha (disparagingly referred to as the "Children of COVID"), will be just getting out of college. Twenty-two years of perpetual cynicism and emotional numbness will create a generation of timid, antisocial brainiacs. There'll be ten billion people in the world and not nearly enough work to go around.

Quentin will only know a world enshrouded by the Internet, an algorithmic world, a hindered world. A botched suicide attempt in his late twenties will inspire a revelation, an impulsive declaration online urging fellow young folk to boycott the Internet in the hopes of reverting society back to its pre-digital existence. Quentin's manifesto will strike a chord with Gen A and the Unplug Movement will be born. But as America's greedy present finds itself in conflict with America's neglected future, #Unplug will explode into a generational culture war that cannot be stopped, cannot be tamed, and cannot be won.

David Schulze's unplugged imagines a world just around the corner, a satire on nostalgia, fickle capitalism and emotional activism that's just as relevant today as it will be when it's all too late.

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    • Kirkus

      Starred review from September 15, 2024
      In Schulze's novella, a new parent decides to raise his son in an analog-only household and imagines a future revolution. One night, two weeks after finalizing the adoption of his 4-year-old son Quentin, an unnamed man in Danvers, Massachusetts, is suddenly struck by the enormity of his new responsibilities as a parent. The narrator, who describes himself as a "Zillennial"--someone who's "too young to remember the 90s but old enough to remember a world before the Internet"--decides that he and his much-older husband, who was born in 1964, will raise Quentin without any modern digital technology. Instead of relying on smartphones and tablets to entertain and educate his son, like other parents, he plans instead to replicate a pre-Internet lifestyle to nurture Quentin's developing mind. As he tucks Quentin into bed, he vows that his son will be "raised right. With love of this world. The real world. IRL." Invigorated and inspired, the narrator loses himself in an elaborately constructed vision of the future, in which Quentin graduates college with no friends and no career prospects, due to his lack of a digital footprint; after a failed suicide attempt, he creates a web-based manifesto condemning the internet's infiltration of every aspect of society, and the millennials who encourage such an environment for their children, ending with a call to "#Unplug" that goes very viral. Schulze's novella is a biting and viciously funny satire about online radicalization, hypocrisy in politics, capitalism, and faux nostalgia. The book is written almost entirely in the future tense, which has the effect of elevating the dry humor to a high level. All the characters (including figments of the narrator's imagination whom Quentin will allegedly meet) are well-developed and the story flows at a nice pace throughout. Readers may especially enjoy the story's exploration of intergenerational conflict, as well as the sincerity of the depiction of the existential anxiety of parenthood: "How am I supposed to do this?" the narrator despairs at one point. "How doesanybody do this?" A wickedly funny satire about unscrupulous activism, shady politics, and unhinged parenting.

      COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. (Online Review)

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  • English

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