Characters are tethered to a virtual world of surveillance and misinformation in an exhausting satire on technology
This novel starts off annoying in one way, becomes annoying in a whole other way, and ends up as probably the most annoying book of 2020. But what did you expect? Booker winner DBC Pierre has always been a literary brat – explosive, funny, exhausting, hurling the stuff of the universe together and daring the reader to make sense of it all. And if in the end the book is too obvious in its sloganeering and too opaque in its storytelling, well, you can’t say Pierre hasn’t gone all out in trying to give you a good time.
Meanwhile in Dopamine City is set in the imminent future, in an unnamed company town that functions as a kind of city state. The characters are tethered via their phones and devices to a virtual world of judgment, surveillance and misinformation – so far, so Facebook. This parallel plane of gamification and punishment is the Dopamine City that gives the book its title. “Every second an arm like a blade combs the surface of the earth for dopamine, yours and mine, our whims and arguments, our relationships with others, our attempts at love, our anger, our caring, to embezzle it as revenue for a dozen male college dropouts,” warns Dr Cornelia Roos, a sceptical technologist hired by the company to figleaf its activities.
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