45. Eggers’s novel is only the latest in a long line of imaginative critiques of corporate life, starting perhaps with Kafk a, but it gains a particular force by having been written in San Francisco, close to the physical location of the power appropriations and work cultures that Eggers dissects. China’s data platforms have yet to attract a novelistic treatment.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 1122