First, I need to say this. The author has achieved with this book something I have been dreaming of ever since I learned how to read and write - writing a meticulously descriptive essay, with an unwittingly hilarious sense of humor, that is so personal and yet universal that it sounds like an experience that everyone has kept secret and forgot about (even ever having it) along the way. Let's call it the universality of privacy. I don't know. I just made that up.
Anyway, I am just ten pages through and I fell in love with this book right from the prologue.
I think the author might be in her early to mid thirties given the timeline she described in the first piece titled "the I in the Internet." She captures the very first encounter of a teenage herself with the "ever-expanding village of curiosities" named the Internet. She then goes on about how everyone back then was clueless about where this new technology will lead us and how it would transform us and the world - for better and for worse.
Her retrospective carries a certain amount of hesitance, or suspicion about the naive optimism we all had with the advent of the web.
'I mean, did we really not see this coming? The ugly part of ourselves that was hidden deep inside and waiting to be exposed once it seizes a chance?'
Naivete. I think this is a word that can best describe us a little more than two decades ago.
And Jia Tolentino is the best when it comes to defining the word without directly pointing her finger at it.
Can't wait to finish this book!
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