Bit Rot: stories + essays

by Douglas Coupland

Overview

A thought-provoking, binge-worthy new collection of essays, stories, and musings from Douglas Coupland, Bit Rot explores the different ways in which twentieth-century notions of the future are being shredded, and it is a literary gem of the digital age.

"Bit rot" is a term used in digital archiving to describe the way digital files can spontaneously and quickly decompose. As Douglas Coupland writes, "Bit rot also describes the way my brain has been feeling since 2000, as I shed older and weaker neurons and connections and enhance new and unexpected ones."

Bit Rot the book is a fascinating meditation on the ways in which humanity tries to make sense of our shifting consciousness. Coupland, just like the Internet, mixes forms to achieve his ends. Short fiction is interspersed with essays on all aspects of modern life. The result is addictively satisfying for Coupland's established fanbase hungry for his observations about our world, and a revelation to new readers of his work. For almost three decades, his unique pattern recognition has powered his fiction, his phrase-making, and his visual art. Every page of Bit Rot is full of wit, surprise, and delight. Reading Bit Rot feels a lot like bingeing on Netflix... you can't stop with just one.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780399575808
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/07/2017
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	1,145,914
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Douglas Coupland is a Canadian visual artist, writer and designer. His first novel was the 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. He has published four-teen novels, two collections of short stories, eight non-fiction books and a number of dramatic and comedic works for stage, film and TV. In 2014, Coupland had his first major solo exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, after which the show toured to Toronto, and then internationally. His most recent book, Kitten Clone, was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Non-fiction. Coupland is a contributor to The New York Times, e-flux journal, Artsy and Vice online and is a columnist with the Financial Times of London. Since 2015 he has been artist-in-residence at the Google Cultural Institute in Paris.

Read an Excerpt

Before We Begin...
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Bit Rot"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Douglas Coupland.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Before We Begin … 1

Vietnam 5

Black Goo 11

The Short, Brutal Life of the Channel Three News Team 17

Nine Readers 22

Nine Point Zero 25

Smells 29

Coffee & Cigarettes 32

Public Speaking 35

Shiny 38

Notes on Relationships in the Twenty-first Century 44

Fear of Windows 48

Creep 53

Stamped 60

Future Blips 63

Futurosity 66

Worcestershistershire 69

Bulk Memory 72

The Mell 75

The Anti-ghosts 79

Little Black Ghost 81

New Moods 84

Beef Rock 87

Globalization Is Fun! 91

Unclassy 95

Wonkr 98

Yield: A Story About Cornfields 108

The 2 1/2th Dimension 111

Living Big 115

The End of the Golden Age of Payphones 118

The Ones That Got Away 125

666! 128

Dueling Duals 133

George Washington's Extreme Makeover 136

George Washington's Extreme Makeover (pilot script) 141

Pot 191

Got a Life 206

Peace 210

iF-iW eerF 213

Stuffed 216

Superman and the Kryptonite Martinis 229

McWage 234

Lotto 237

Frugal 240

Zoë Hears the Truth 243

IQ 247

My TV 250

The Preacher and His Mistress 253

5,149 Days Ago: Air Travel Post-9/11 261

Glide 264

Klass Warfare 268

3.14159265358 271

The Great Money Flush of 2016 274

Ick 277

Grexit 280

World War $ 288

The Man Who Lost His Story 291

The Valley 297

3 1/2 Fingers 300

An Excerpt of Search 303

Bit Rot 322

Bartholomew Is Right There at the Dawn of Language 325

Temp 332

Retail 355

Trivial 368

Über That Red Dot 371

361 374

My Name 383

Mrs. McCarthy and Mrs. Brown 389

An App Called Yoo 401

Afterword Samuel Saelemakers 413

Editorial Reviews

"Douglas Coupland is a media theorist, artist, writer, and designer. He's also wickedly funny, which makes his thoughts on modernity all the more biting and enjoyable. Bit Rot...shows off all sides of Coupland's work without ever losing his sardonic edge.... The book feels like an ongoing conversation with a hilarious, intelligent friend...an engaging, thought-provoking look at the modern age through the thoughts of one smart, funny man.” —Noah Cruickshank, Shelf Awareness

"Douglas Coupland is back, with a tasty collection of bingeable treats for a new generation." —Joshua Chaplinsky, Lit Reactor

"Bit Rot offers priceless insights.... Few people are better [than Douglas Coupland] at explaining the ramifications of the digital era." —Jane Ciabattari, BBC

“[Douglas Coupland’s] voice is undiminished after more than a quarter century in the cultural spotlight . . . a writer, thinker and artist utterly perfect of and for his time.” —Robert J. Wiersema, National Post
 
“[A] respected futurist, bestselling author, prolific visual artist . . . [Bit Rot] is classic Coupland – created intentionally for the Internet age.” —Marsha Lederman, The Globe and Mail

"We should really pay attention to Coupland. His eye is so firmly on the ball he’s virtually clairvoyant." —Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian

"[Coupland] is at his best when he muses on new opportunities and challenges presented by technology." —The National

“Unremittingly famous for defining a generation, Douglas Coupland is, himself, a creative whirl.” —The New York Times
  
“A contemporary prophet.” —The Sunday Times
 
“A brilliant social commentator.” —Elle
 
“A shrewd observer of modernity.” —The Observer
 
“A writer, thinker and artist utterly perfect of and for his time.” —National Post
 
“We should really pay attention to Coupland. His eye is so firmly on the ball he’s virtually clairvoyant.” —The Guardian

“An eclectic and thought-provoking collection . . . [Bit Rot] reveals the breadth and depth of Coupland's writing.” —Kirkus Reviews

"The current landscape, the mindless and endless landslide of mass culture versus individual vulnerability - no one sees these or gets to the heart of them quite like Coupland." —Ali Smith

"In the future, if people are curious about what it was like to live in our times, in the early twenty-first century, they will do well to read Douglas Coupland." —Yann Martel

From the Publisher

04/01/2017
Writer and artist Coupland's (Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture) collection comprises brief essays and stories of previously unpublished content, which alternate among treatments of everyday life in the postmodern era and are essentially ruminations on topics as varied as the author's childhood, politics, religion, and what it means to live in the 21st century. The fictional chapters can be at times jarring, at others playful, but overall this work succeeds in drawing the reader into tiny Couplandian worlds. What Coupland does best is keep the reader engrossed and off balanced, so that one never really finds a comfortable spot from which to observe both the horrors and sorrows of the first decade of the 21st century. Since the timeframe of these meditative works includes 2005 to present, the content reflects the tumultuous decade for which the seasoned and prolific writer expounds. The flow from nonfiction to fictional chapters represents a fine example of a postmodern narrative. VERDICT This work will ultimately be of most interest to die-hard Coupland fans. [See Prepub Alert, 10/3/2016.]—Jim Hahn, Univ. Lib., Univ. of Illinois, Urbana

Library Journal

2016-12-18
An eclectic and thought-provoking collection of ephemera from Coupland (Worst. Person. Ever., 2014, etc.).The author admits in his introduction that he's wobbling unsteadily into the future with the title, a term used to describe how digital files decompose. "It also describes the way my brain has been feeling since 2000, as I shed older and weaker neurons and connections and create and enhance new and unexpected ones." This substantial collection of more than 65 stories and essays reveals the breadth and depth of Coupland's writing in a way that his recent novels have not. In addition to several acidic short stories, Coupland also contributes numerous essays on technology and the way it changes our culture, travelogues, memoirs, and satires—essentially, something for anyone who has even the slightest interest in this singular cultural voice. Short stories include works like "The Short, Brutal Life of the Channel Three News Team," about a woman whose mother guns down a news crew, and "Superman and the Kryptonite Martinis," which finds the iconic hero swilling drinks in a gin mill with Yoda. Some of the more wildly experimental pieces land flat, like a television pilot about George Washington being teleported to the future or an excerpt from Search, an arty abstract regarding what people search for online, written during an artist's residency at the technology behemoth Google. Still others are inelegant satires like "An App Called Yoo." But more often, Coupland sticks the landing, like this prescient observation from one of his technology columns: "To summarize: Everyone, basically, wants access to and control over what you will become, both as a physical and metadata entity. We are also on our way to a world of concrete walls surrounding any number of niche beliefs." A surprisingly personal meander around the mind of Generation X's elder statesman.

Kirkus Reviews

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