Users, Colin Winnette
Users, Colin Winnette
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Users

Author: Colin Winnette

Narrator: Justin Price

Unabridged: 6 hr 7 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/21/2023


Synopsis

Miles, a lead creative at a midsize virtual reality company known for its "original experiences," has engineered a new product called The Ghost Lover. Wildly popular from the outset, the "game" is simple: a user's simulated life is almost identical to their reality, except they're haunted by the ghost of an ex-lover. However, when a shift in the company's strategic vision puts The Ghost Lover at the center of a platform-wide controversy, Miles becomes the target of user outrage, and starts receiving a series of anonymous death threats. Typed notes sealed in envelopes with no postage or return address, these persistent threats push Miles into a paranoid panic, blurring his own sense of reality, catalyzing the collapse of his career, his marriage, and his relationship with his children.

The once-promising road to success becomes a narrow set of choices for Miles, who, in a last ditch effort to save his job, pitches his masterpiece, a revolutionary device code-named the Egg, which will transform the company.

In a world rife with the unchecked power and ambition of tech, Users investigates—with both humor and creeping dread—how interpersonal experiences and private decisions influence the hasty developments that have the power to permanently alter the landscape of human experience.

About Colin Winnette

Colin Winnette's books include Coyote, Haints Stay, and The Job of the Wasp, which was an American Booksellers Association's Indie Next Pick. Winnette's writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Playboy, McSweeney's, the Believer, and the Paris Review Daily. A former bookseller in Texas, Vermont, New York, and California, he is now a writer living in San Francisco.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Will

…plugged in, navigating their vast library of original experiences and user – generated contact, his company could now map the reactions, decisions, even lingering, emotional responses of anyone who stuck around long enough to let their imagination build on the pre-existing foundation of an origi......more

Goodreads review by Ryan

Like listening to a coworker describe his really fucked up dream......more

This book had been on my radar for a while and see how the reviews weren’t great sort of scared me - and maybe lowered my expectations? - but, regardless, I thought it was a fun read. I read it in one seating and was not bored at any point, I could not put it down. I picked it up looking for some so......more

This idea here is interesting and the book starts out in an engaging way. Unfortunately, it quickly derails and just becomes both weird and slow-paced. There is a lot of content about a marriage, mostly in name only and for financial security for both parties involved. The eldest daughter is possibly......more