A Lament at How Our Brave Revolution Has Become Another Bureaucracy

Cory Doctorow on Jpod by Douglas Coupland: “The prose is peppered with long pastebombs of Internet prose, from the banal to the sublime. eBay UI chrome. Penis enlargement spams. Acronym expansions, humorous and serious. All the valid three-letter Scrabble words. Where this kind of pastebomb appeared in earlier Coupland works, it was ironic, or cool, or funny. In JPod, it's a cross between reverent prose-poetry and a lament at how our brave revolution has become another bureaucracy.”

Peter Merholz: “unlike Generation X or Microserfs, jPod already feels dated. The internet world in the book is stuck on eBay and Google and totally misses the social networking and community aspects of the Web that are what people like his characters would truly engage in. Satirizing video game development mindlessness also feels subtly dated. I guess what I'm saying is that his book probably won't capture the Zeitgeist of those earlier works, because it didn't attempt to forecast Zeitgeist, and things simply move too fast.”