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If Douglas Coupland’s JPod seems familiar, it’s because the author wrote about computer programmers in his 1995 novel Microserfs. The six Lego people on this dust jacket mirror the earlier book’s cover, featuring a geek rendered in toy construction bricks. Even the characters recognize the similarity. Not counting the pages of computer code, disconnected words, and spam messages that begin JPod, the book’s second line has a character remark, “I feel like a refugee from a Douglas Coupland novel.”
After a few books spent examining spiritual matters in modern life, Coupland returns to the tech sector years after the Internet bubble burst. Venture capital is no longer ripe for the picking, but the workers haven’t changed. They slave away for three-quarters of the day at their desks and have little going on beyond their monitors and hard drives.
Set at a Vancouver software developer, the book focuses on Ethan Jarlewski and his five co-workers in jPod, a cubicle farm in which all of the employees have last names beginning with J. Their current project is a skateboarding video game, which none of them has much enthusiasm for. Steve, the reviled new head of marketing, has decided that the game needs extra sizzle in the form of a turtle character patterned after the personality of Survivor host Jeff Probst.
Early in JPod Coupland establishes an absurdist tone reminiscent of his novel All Families are Psychotic. The quirkiness verges on excess. The jPod group includes John Doe, who changes his all-lowercase, hippy-dippy name and aims to be statistically average in every way as rebellion against his upbringing by a militant lesbian, and Evil Mark, who purchases edible furniture and office items, such as a stapler made of marzipan, because of an incident when he was accidentally locked in a storage facility for a weekend. Ethan’s mother grows and deals pot, and his real-estate broker brother is entangled with a human trafficker. Character development has never been Coupland’s strength, but the exaggerated people and scenarios in the author’s Sims universe work toward his larger purpose of exploring the ridiculousness of our times.
Coupland’s debut, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, signaled that his cachet is capturing the Zeitgeist. JPod again finds him looking at how technological developments improve life and may prove to bring about its destruction. Everything we might ever want to know is potentially at our fingertips with a Google search, but the characters seek pop culture minutiae and gore sites rather than enlightenment. The signal-to-noise ratio with the information available has also reached a saturation point. Coupland demonstrates this overload by breaking up the book’s flow with pages of randomly generated words and having those in jPod compete in contests, such as seeing who can find the one wrong number in the first one hundred thousand digits of pi, all of which are conveniently reproduced over twenty-plus pages.
The author sees the irony of technology’s distancing effect. Devices intended to facilitate instant and constant communication reduce the necessity of face-to-face interaction, not to mention that they’re often used for the most banal and inconsequential conversations. (Anyone who’s overheard a moviegoer talk on a cell phone during a film knows that the exchange is rarely of an urgent nature.) JPod’s central group of mid-to-late twentysomethings is mostly detached from people and experiences outside their small circle or, in the case of Casper a.k.a. “Cancer Cowboy,” breach that wall through anonymous hook-ups.
Fear of the apocalypse recurs in Coupland’s writing, whether Generation X’s Cold War nuclear nightmares or JPod’s sense of metaphorical obliteration via international outsourcing and knowledge-based obsolescence. The more we try to get ahead, the farther behind it seems we become. Unlike computer processors, Moore’s law doesn’t apply to the human brain, leaving the contemporary work force in a perpetual state of worrying about its possible irrelevance.
All of this may sound dire, but JPod is often humorous in skewering the seriousness we devote to our jobs and the importance we place in them. Coupland doesn’t dismiss them but points out that we allow them to distract us from what is important. Lest the reader think he takes himself too seriously, the author inserts himself in his book as a minor character—and not a very agreeable one at that. Coupland recognizes that while technology has made the world smaller, it’s also made it more overwhelming. The solution is to find a space for friends and family, our own jPods, and do what we love.
