Women Who Want Out
Three recent novels expose the stories startups have been telling us—that they’re solving the world’s biggest problems, boosting our brain power, optimizing our creativity, enhancing our efficiency, and enriching our work—as rank fictions. High-tech know-how seeds Doree Shafrir’s Startup, Catherine Lacey’s The Answers, and Alissa Nutting’s Made for Love. Startup trades in the insider-gossip that butters the bread at Buzzfeed where Shafrir is a senior writer; Lacey’s The Answers hacks the perfect girlfriend out of visionary biotech; Nutting’s Made for Love builds the sex doll single AI engineers must dream about.
Shafrir, Lacey, and Nutting have done more, however, than merely point out that the daily grind of disruptive innovations that never deliver on their promises has started to grind us down. These three writers suspect that startup culture has been selling vaporware for long time, but not only because it’s been catfishing for free labor—it’s been catfishing for women.
In the 2.0
