You're reading on a computer, therefore you need this book:
Title: The Agency--DDD Inc.
Author: Hunter Chadwick
Date: 2024
Quote: "Did you ever feel like what you and your company were trying to do was actually bad for your customers?"
Is there a whole agency, a government contractor even, spying on our every move, using censored and filtered social media to keep people from doing what they want to do to improve their lives? Chadwick says he doesn't think there is one, yet, but there might be some day.
Fair disclosure: I read this book under circumstances that fed any paranoid tendencies I felt while reading it. It was an advance reader's copy, with copy-editing help requested. The copy that reached me needed a good deal of editing; it was generally a well written book, terse (though long) and plotty, every word advancing the slow-building and mostly nonviolent story, but it contained boring little typos, misplaced punctuation, numerals instead of number words. As a good copy editor, I read with my hands, literally typing a samizdat copy to make sure I catch every one of those boring little typos--things the eye automatically corrects and ignores. So I was typing a copy of this novel into my good, Net-free, desktop computer, it was a warm afternoon, and my desktop computer crashed and died. Around the same time, my Internet connection, which had been weak since it was restored in January, became so feeble it wouldn't even open this web site. It would open a few very low-memory, text-only sites, like Book Funnel, on which I happened to be reading this book. Book Funnel would hold most, not necessarily all, of a book in working memory when I was in the office, not on the screen porch with the Internet. So I could read The Agency--DDD Inc. but could not check e-mail or make a list of corrections. Was somebody Out There trying to suppress me? Trying to suppress Glyphosate Awareness?
Maybe not. Mountainet sent out a young man who found storm damage in a small piece of hardware and replaced it in less than ten minutes. Weather conditions could account for the damage to both computer and connection. When I was growing up, everyone knew that computers had to be kept in climate-controlled, smokeproof, insect-proof, food-free, mostly locked rooms. The first computers on which I worked were kept in such rooms; they had their own offices, at the core of the suite where the programmer(s) and data entry person(s) worked in outer offices. Everyone knew it'd be insane to try to operate a computer on a screen porch. Especially in a mild but humid summer. Humidity killed computers. You didn't want to take a computer course if you were one of those people who don't thrive on really dry air. So it's entirely possible that all the hardware problems that are part of my memory of reading this book were merely functions of weather conditions; that what's really extraordinary is that either of the desktop computers ever worked in the office at all. For years everyone knew that you just don't set up a computer in a room that's not fully climate-controlled!
And then again...I e-mailed, a few summers ago, about a glyphosate article for the Audubon Society 'zine. Their e-mails just kept disappearing. They'd e-mail to say they'd said they were interested, but no such e-mail would be in Outlook. I'd send them what I'd done, and they wouldn't get it. Somebody was doing that. Intentionally. All that wasn't obvious was whether the interference was pre-programmed into an algorithm, or whether someone was actually taking the trouble to read all of my e-mail. That sort of tampering never happened with the daily spam and bacon, nor did it happen (thank goodness) with more mundane e-mails to private individuals. So who knows.
The Agency--DDD Inc. will make you think twice about what you see on social media sites, if you ever visit them any more. Are you seeing more corporate, or corporate-supportive, content than content from people with whom you socialize? Are you seeing all posts by the people with whom you socialize, in real time? Probably not. For me, that killed the social media sites. But many people have just formed the habit of "doing" their social media and don't even seem to notice how many commercial messages are crowding out the messages they're looking for. The Agency postulates that people might be paid to spend whole days just taking automated referrals from computers that determine that you're exchanging too many political or religious or just plain personal messages. Entry-level workers would be in charge of sending you more tempting ads to distract your attention in the direction of more mindless hanging out on social media and shopping sites. More advanced workers would be in charge of "dividing" you from e-friends who influenced you in a more serious direction...
It's still (mostly) speculative fiction--but, although there's not known to be a firm dedicated specifically to these practices, they are known to be what the greedheads want Internet censorship, or "filtering," to do.
Mixed in with the satirical and speculative plot, there's also character development. At the beginning of the novel roommates Kerry, who gets tapped to work for DDD Inc. after being fired for wasting time on a boring entry-level job, and Jackson, who is still waiting tables, are slacker-boys who don't respect themselves enough to think about their work as vocations. By the end they're serious men who are thinking, not in specifically religious terms, about what they're meant to do with their lives. This level of emotional maturity is only beginning, within the time frame of a rather fast-moving story, to lead to money and serious romance. The author is young, and knows what today's young people are up against.
It is a long read. At first it may seem to be moving slowly. Kerry gets fired, then hired by DDD Inc. Jackson quits one restaurant and goes to another. First one little thing and then another seems wrong or at least tiresome about DDD Inc. It takes a few chapters--there are over 200 chapters, but in this book a chapter is generally what will make a scene in the movie version--for readers, as for Kerry, to get an idea of where the story is going. However, even those slow early chapters move briskly into what soon becomes a tense, fast-breaking plot. Most of the action is grown-up and "reasonable," involving cerebral more than physical action. Burglars' tools, firearms, and fast cars will eventually appear., though, in a climax in which men who don't like violence and have liked each other reach a final impasse.
And once again, as a celebration of the new novel, Chadwick is giving away free copies of his first novel. I'm not sure that this giveaway of After It's Over makes as much sense as the giveaway of After It's Over to celebrate its sequels did, but readers don't even have to buy The Agency--DDD Inc. itself to enter the author's other series, free of charge with Kindle-in-the-cloud:
At the top of the screen you'll see that the book is free for subscribers to Kindle Unlimited, or you can order printed copies at today's standard high prices. On a smaller screen you may have to scroll down to find the button to buy the Kindle copy for $0.00. People have complained of this with other Amazon giveaways. When authors want to do a giveaway Amazon honors their agreement to do one; Amazon even encourages authors to do occasional giveaways, but not without trying to make a sale. This giveaway lasts through Wednesday. If you're up for post-apocalyptic survival adventures, and don't already have After It's Over, you'll want it.
Oh, and there's a PS: Chadwick says The Agency--DDD Inc. was inspired by The Screwtape Letters' idea of a bureaucracy of devils. I didn't think of Screwtape while reading it but I did think of the classic speculative satirical movie Brazil. For those who don't remember, that's high praise.
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