Gary Shteyngart

It came out in 2010.

As I was writing, I was thinking, yeah, this future might be possible in, I don't know, 30 years.

Usually when people are writing speculative fiction, they give themselves that 30-year corridor.

But it happened, I don't know, 10 years later, 14, 15 years later.

Yeah.

There's an invasion of Venezuela in this book.

Oh, yeah, there is an invasion of Venezuela in the book.

There is an invasion of Venezuela.

Israel is controlled by a Smotrich-like party.

It's called Security State Israel.

Security State Israel.

It's this kind of Jewish Iran, if you will, which I think is where we're headed.

But the main thing I was kind of thinking was, well, one of the main things was the way young people, including myself when I got into, you know, social media, was the way we were into being ranked, right?

And this was something very new to me.

I mean, I guess it's always been a thing, you know, people apply to college and then they're ranked to get in or, you know, athletes are ranked, blah, blah, blah.

We're in a very competitive society.

And in this book, there's a thing called rate me plus technology, which constantly ranks people over and over, not just by their looks, but also on their finances or every single aspect of their being.

And at one point, the Internet of the future goes out and the rate me plus technology disappears and young people start killing themselves because they just can't understand how they can live without knowing where they fit into the grander scheme of things.

Yeah, I thought that was a very, actually that quote here, I found it very moving.

You talk about these young people who committed suicide in the building complex and you write, one wrote quite eloquently about how he reached out to life, but found there only walls and thoughts and faces, which weren't enough.