Book Review: Several People are Typing by Calvin Kasulke

 

I am fascinated by books set in new e-environments, trying to feature out now working and daily habits, including in communication, shaped by the technologies used on a daily basis. 

Several People are Typing by Calvin Kasulke is set in a Slack-driven environment, regularly used - for all the possible reasons - by the employees of a PR company based in NYC. I am currently using Slack on a daily basis for one of my main projects therefore was interested to explore a bit how far imagination can navigate in this space.

The idea of Slack is to create a kind of digital office, a function which serves very well the work from home new post-Covid generation. I am mostly home based but permanently in touch with clients from all over the world long before the new trends became predominant therefore there are not so many surprising details about those systems. Was only waiting for the literary rendition of it.

The employees in Several People are Typing are average before becoming extemely weird. The system itself, and its bots, it´s taking over too. In this punk chaos we hardly know which is real and which is a functionality of the system. Workers in virtual realities do look like words without bodies. Do behave like ones. I don´t remember when was the last time when I had a normal office, working and talking together with real people during my work. 

The more we advance in the book the more chaotic the emoticon-heavy conversation turns. There is nothing necessarily of importance in those conversations, only an escalation of an already artificious mindset. 

I would have expected a much more creativity in dealing with this topic. There is so much to explore in this direction and although there is a kind of sex-romance taking place in the private chats created within the Slack system, there is nothing really interesting in terms of intellectual challenges. It looks like the author just left everything go in the direction of his creative impulse without trying to create more tension and expand the action. This is the curse and the blessing of being the first of approaching a specific new topic.

I had too many expectations from this book and as usual, I was highly disappointed, but I am sure the day will come when Slack or any other virtual office will inspire a great story to be told and re-told.

Rating: 2 stars