selenicseas

This is a fairly short novel (around 60,000 words, I believe) and took me around two weeks to finish, reading 1-3 chapters per day. It's pretty easy to read, except for the parts that are deliberately designed to be confusing. I'm not sure I fully grasped exactly which events were caused by Babel-17 and which weren't.

While I do like that the reader is largely dropped into the world with minimal explanation, I do wish there had been a bit more focus on things like the Transport culture and the discorporate people. The novel introduces a bunch of interesting things, but it's too short to really explore anything other than Babel-17 in depth.

When I saw that Facebook/Meta was trying to suppress this book, I knew I had to read it. After all, that wouldn't be happening if this book didn't have some good, juicy stuff in it, right?

Some personal background: I "deleted" my own Facebook account in 2015, as I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with allowing corporations to have my data. Every couple of years, I get an email from Facebook saying that someone tried to log into my account, which clearly wouldn't be happening if they'd actually deleted my account, rather than made it inactive.

It's pretty obvious why Meta didn't want the author to be able to promote this book. It makes the entire leadership look awful, and it's entirely because of their own behavior. Meta harbors sexual predators, does nothing to discourage predatory behavior from their own leadership, encourages calls to violence and genocide (most obvious in Myanmar) – and it's all for engagement. It's to keep people coming back to Facebook so they can be served advertisements and Meta makes more money.

Over the past few years, I've increasingly thought that it would be a net benefit to the world if tech bros were rounded up and shot. This book has done nothing to change that opinion – if anything, it's strengthened it. I don't believe there's a way for these people to redeem themselves.